Dalley, C. and R. J. Martin (2015) Dichotomous identities? Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and...

Dichotomous identities? Indigenous andnon-Indigenous people and the interculturalin Australia

Cameo Dalley1 and Richard J. Martin2

1The Australian National University; 2The University of Queensland

The terms Indigenous and non-Indigenous are commonplace in Australia yet remain under-

theorised as categories which differentiate identities. In this introductory article, we overview

developments in the intercultural over the last decade, focusing on the ways in which identities

of Indigenous and non-Indigenous, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, Black and White are rela-

tionally constructed. We also consider intersections between the intercultural and the Interven-

tion, a major turning point in Indigenous affairs policy with related impacts in anthropology

over this period. In particular we draw attention to the need for ethnographies that show equal

attention to non-Indigenous residents and propose the themes of intimacies and temporalities

as key avenues for addressing this relationality. Articles contained in this special issue go some

way to addressing this need, illustrating the complex ways in which Indigenous and non-Indige-

nous lives are lived together, or alongside each other, around Australia today.

Keywords: Intercultural, identity, Indigenous, non-Indigenous, Intervention

INTRODUCTION

This collection brings together case studies which develop anthropological under-standings of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ identities in Australia. These identitycategories are ubiquitous in Australia, albeit with particular regional iterations, forexample, between ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘non-Aboriginal’ people in some regions, and‘Blackfellas’ and ‘Whitefellas’ in others, or in a plethora of sub-categorisations whichfurther differentiate between people. For Indigenous people, these sub-categorisationsinclude landed and linguistic affiliations, those derived from shared histories on pasto-ral stations, in mission settlements, or in towns. They might also include other ele-ments of everyday life such as playing together on a sporting team, attending schoolor working together. For non-Indigenous people around Australia, such sub-categori-sations may be similarly varied. However, those who live or work with Indigenouspeople are often denoted by the character of their employment or their assumed posi-tion on topical Indigenous issues: they may be differentiated as ‘bleeding hearts’,‘bureaucrats’, ‘mercenaries’, ‘missionaries’ and ‘misfits’ (Townley 2001; Lea 2008:vi–vii; Kowal 2011: 11), or in similarly morally-loaded terms. While diverse, each of

The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2015) doi:10.1111/taja.12120

© 2015 Australian Anthropological Society 1

these categorisations and sub-categorisations rests on a foundational dichotomybetween Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia; a local manifestation ofthe emergent Indigenous rights movement, with its attendant primordialism (Merlan2009) and essentialism (B!et!eille 1998; Kuper 2003). Seen collectively, the papers hereattempt to move beyond simplified or dichotomised constructions by presentingrelationships which draw heavily on the intimate and temporal frames in which theyare situated.

Papers appearing in this collection were first presented at the 2011 conference ofthe Australian Anthropological Society in Perth as part of the session titled ‘Dichoto-mous identities? Indigenous people and variously racialised others’. The questionmark sought engagement with relationships between those commonly construed asbelonging to different identity categories. The starting point for this investigation wasthat while providing a useful gloss for descriptive purposes, such terms collapse nuan-ces within and between people, thus restricting analysis in pre-defined ways. Com-pounding this restriction, Indigenous and non-Indigenous people around Australia attimes insist on the categorical separation of their identities and act in ways whichreproduce boundaries rather than dissolve them. Hence, the key issue under discus-sion was whether Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people indeed have ‘dichot-omous identities’ or whether there might be alternate ways of understanding andcategorising their interrelationships than is generally accomplished by anthropologicalanalysis.

In the papers introduced here, authors have further engaged with this questionmark through a combination of ethnographic case studies and conceptual explora-tions of identities in Australia. Though not doing away with the utility of categories,each of the papers bring them into greater dialogue with one another, drawing out thedegree to which the boundaries between each might be understood as contextual, con-tested, and configured. Together the papers reinforce the conclusion that de la Cadenaand Starn (2007: 12) arrived at internationally, ‘that any attempt to define what isindigenous and what is not is necessarily relational and historical—and therefore pro-visional and context related’. In the main this is achieved through attentiveness to thecharacter of interaction in specific circumstances, particularly in remote northern andcentral Australia where the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peo-ple are often held to be the most pronounced. This enterprise, the interpretation ofculture and cultures as (relatively) hermetically sealed, or alternatively fluid and trans-formed through dialogic encounters, is one which sits at the heart of anthropology incontemporary Australia.

Exemplars of this anthropological discourse have been concepts like ‘cross-cultural’ and the ‘intercultural’, there being some evidence for analytical accounts ofeach of these identities, their interface and interrelationship. However, some fifteenyears after Merlan’s (1998) key text describing the ‘intercultural’ and a decade since anOceania special edition (Hinkson and Smith 2005) dedicated to the topic, thereremains an ongoing need for ethnography of this kind. Indeed, notwithstanding whatLea (2012a: 188) referred to as its ‘de rigueur’ citation in Australian anthropology,

© 2015 Australian Anthropological Society2

C. Dalley and R. J. Martin

there is little to suggest that a collectively held or agreed upon understanding of the‘intercultural’ has emerged over recent years. For example, some authors have inter-preted it in terms of the crossing of cultures rather than their ontological blurring,thereby manifesting a return to ‘categorical terms of representation that to someextent suppress or by-pass history and the theorization of change and continuity’(Merlan 1998: 231) that was originally intended in Merlan’s formulation. At the sametime, as Lea also notes (2012a: 188), too often only one side of the relationship isunderstood as intercultural in Australianist anthropology, with non-Indigenous orWhite Australian culture frequently presented as homogenous in contrast to richlyvariegated representations of Indigenous people. A decade along, the collection heretherefore takes up where the 2005 issue left off, further pursuing understandings ofrelationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, Aboriginal and non-Aborigi-nal, Black and White people in Australia.

The time lag between the 2005 edition and the publication of this collectionreflects something of a diversion in the conceptualisation of Indigenous identities inAustralia, and one which may be reflected upon as having had a profound impact onthe development of analytical frames. In 2007, the Australian Federal Governmentannounced an ‘Emergency Intervention’ into 73 Aboriginal communities in theNorthern Territory. As a turning point in government policy and in the prominenceof ‘Indigenous issues’ in mainstream media and political debate, these developmentshave led to contemplation of the role of anthropological research in informing policydiscourse (e.g. Trigger 2011). At the same time they have brought to the fore the inter-section between government policy, as exemplified by the Intervention, but alsowithin the myriad smaller ‘i’ interventions that characterise everyday life for manyAboriginal people, and the ways in which distinct or interrelated identities are con-structed in Australia. In this introductory article we provide an overview of the rela-tionship between the Intervention and the intercultural, developments which haveoccurred in Australia since 2005, before teasing out what we view as key thematicdirections in the field.

THE INTERVENTION AND THE INTERCULTURAL

With the advent of the ‘Intervention’ in the Northern Territory, many anthropologistswere galvanised into publication by the introduction of policies affecting the provisionof services in remote communities that were ostensibly aimed at reducing disadvan-tage and dysfunction for Aboriginal people (see a range of papers in Altman andHinkson 2007, 2010). The controversy surrounding the Intervention lay predomi-nantly in its encompassing of a suite of policies aimed at the transformation ofAboriginal people’s contemporary lives, overtly embodying what Peterson (2010: 249)described as the ‘contemplation of policies that will affect people’s private lives andtransform everyday practices, values and beliefs’ (see also Kowal 2008: 345–46;Tonkinson and Tonkinson 2010: 68; Eickelkamp 2011). In order to achieve this, theIntervention involved the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act (1975, Cth),


Indigenous and non-Indigenous people

thereby problematising Aboriginality as the key locus of concern, and asserting itsimplication in issues such as health, violence against women, alcoholism and druguse, and the often cited ‘trigger’ for the Intervention, child sexual abuse and neglect(Sutton 2009: 37; Merlan 2010).1 The specificity of the policies targeting Aboriginalpeople and not others in the broader society manifesting similar issues meant that theIntervention was interpreted by some as a state-mandated attack on the ongoingmaintenance of Aboriginal places and communities as distinct from the ‘mainstream’.

Ultimately, many anthropologists viewed the amelioration of dysfunction in theNorthern Territory as problematic in that it sought to impose idealised notions of per-sonhood that were crafted by the state, rather than by Aboriginal people themselves(cf. Peterson 2010). Idealised notions of personhood involved progression along desir-able life pathways based on participation in the ‘real’ economy through involvementin work as opposed to welfare, and the achievement of education outcomes throughcompletion of mainstream schooling. As part of its instruments, the Interventionincluded specific means of directing an individual’s ability to make decisions abouttheir everyday lives with a view to eventually changing the normative values which un-derpinned behaviour. The most noteworthy was the ‘quarantining’ of Aboriginalrecipients’ social security payments, directing half their income to items such as cloth-ing and food thus reducing the discretionary income which could be spent on alcohol,cigarettes, gambling and pornography (Clark 2011: 98). The individuation of thesemeasures corresponded to a re-attentiveness in anthropological literature to ‘person-hood’ (e.g. Glaskin 2012; Macdonald 2013; Peterson 2013) as the trope through whichto analyse the state’s impact on Aboriginal lives.2 Coterminous with the announce-ment of the Intervention, this turn to personhood was an important development inthe study of identity as it facilitated engagement with an alternate scale through whichto understand change, that is, against the person rather than the group.

The exploration of the levels or scales of identification in Australia has come somethirty years after Myers’ (1986a) adoption of the term ‘personhood’ in his ethnogra-phy Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, which he further elaborated in a range of relatedpublications (Myers 1979, 1988). Whereas anthropologists had in previous decadesbeen intently concerned with defining and describing units of group identity relatingto classical territorial organisation (hordes, clans, bands and the like), in Myers’ esti-mation the sense of self for Pintupi was particularly borne out in the distinctionbetween self and other, or the autonomy of the individual in concert with their relat-edness to others (see also Martin 1993). Following Myers, the primary anthropologicalinterest in Aboriginal personhood has been in the facets of life subjectively expressedin the person as an embedded social being; embodiment and corporeality coupledwith phenomenological and emotional experiences such as stress, envy, love, boredomand grief (Burbank 2011, 2014; Dalley this issue; Glaskin 2012; Musharbash 2007,2008; Povinelli 2006; papers in Glaskin et al. 2008). This usage follows and drawsheavily on a similar trajectory in Melanesian anthropology where studies of the bodyand personhood (e.g. Strathern 1994; Strathern and Stewart 1998) were a progressionfrom those by Strathern (1988), Wagner (1991) and others which stressed the iterative



and constitutive relationship between conceptions of the individual and the group,highlighting the indivisibility of one from the other.

Considering personhood has also enabled new ways of engaging with the notionof the ‘state’, sometimes designated as ‘Western’ or ‘settler colonial’, generally beingforms of State and Federal Government and other bureaucracies. For example, Mac-donald (2013), who has conducted long-term research with Wiradjari Aboriginal peo-ple of western New South Wales, argues that:

bureacratic practices frequently make demands of all Australians which may conflict

momentarily with their sense of personhood but to expect [Aboriginal] people to recon-

stitute themselves in terms of such values is to deny them their personhood. (Macdonald

2013: 408–9; emphasis in original)

The ‘state’ and the power relations associated with it have long provided grist forthe mill of anthropological inquiry in Australia, where the ‘state’ as a concept stood infor non-Indigenous people in ethnographies of cross-cultural interactions (e.g. Morris1989; Lattas 1993; Kapferer 1995; Kapferer and Morris 2003). These studies high-lighted how what was described as the ‘uncontested and totalistic character of thecolonial state in Australia’ had facilitated a situation ‘whereby it was able to determineeffectively unchallenged the social and political conditions of its existence’ (Kapfererand Morris 2003: 86). However, critiques of the bureacratisation and entification ofIndigenous personhood assume a particular starting point, one of fundamental differ-ence and autonomy to that bureacratic framework, which further reifies Indigenousdifference (Morton 1998). This sits against what is increasingly apparent: that Indige-nous Australians are not only active players in an efflorescence of organisations andrepresentative structures, a point well-made by Merlan (2013: 638) and richly illus-trated in ethnographies by Babidge (2010) and Christen (2009), but also reshape andreform such structures via their involvement, as Holcombe (2005: 225) and Smith(2008a: 200) have shown.

While earlier scholars focused on the imposition of the state and Indigenous peo-ple’s resistance to it as formative in the generation of identities and interpersonal rela-tions, analyses of a different kind, such as those by Eickelkamp (2011), Lea (2012b),Martin (2011), and Tonkinson and Tonkinson (2010), have emerged. Lea’s (2012b)study of policy makers involved in administering the Intervention in the NorthernTerritory questioned the intentionality of the state in changing Aboriginal people’slives. Rather than a unidirectional and coherent organisation, Lea instead posited thestate as an anarchic collection of individuals who held a shared but fetishised desirefor change, taking pleasure in their involvement in the ‘headiness’ and ‘emotion-filled’pursuit of the amelioration of dysfunction (2012b: 111). In a similar vein but recallingthe very remote community of Aurukun in western Cape York, Martin (2011)described the ‘quasi-magical’ means by which ‘policy alchemy’ was sought to beenacted on Aboriginal subjects. Using the framework of economic development to sit-uate and channel his analysis, Martin’s focus was not so much on the internal anarchyof the state, but on the ‘distinctive repertoires of values, world views and practices’



that Aboriginal people bring to their engagement (2011: 201). The mismatch or disar-ticulation between policy and Aboriginal values meant that, in Martin’s reading, anywould-be policy alchemist is tasked with transforming a substance, being ‘Aboriginalidentity’, whose properties are neither reliably fixed nor foreseeable. Peterson (2010)and Tonkinson and Tonkinson (2010) reached similar conculsions about the state’s‘unmet expectations’ and of ‘incompatibilities’ which result in ‘unpredictible results’(Tonkinson and Tonkinson 2010: 73). Rather than focusing on whether policy makersshould attempt to change or influence Indigenous people’s lives, these authors focusedon existing mundane interventions of policy makers to analyse whether they could.This emphasis differentiated their contributions from those writing about the Inter-vention, particularly in the immediate aftermath of its announcement.

Though the response from anthropologists to the Intervention appeared weightyin one sense: it produced two volumes of edited papers (Altman and Hinkson 2007,2010), books (Sutton 2009; Austin-Broos 2011) and journal articles (Kowal 2008;Cowlishaw 2010; Lattas and Morris 2010; Morphy and Morphy 2013a), much of thediscussion has involved the progression of editorialised understandings of issues,thereby entrenching politicised positions rather than presenting the kinds of fine-grained ethnography for which anthropology is best known. If this was anthropolo-gists’ attempt to meaningfully engage with the impacts of public policy on Aboriginalpeople, then it did so largely by reflecting on the political positions of particular per-sonalities within the discipline. Perhaps the most commonly mobilised critique in thepost-Intervention discourse, especially on the Australian anthropology email list serve‘AASNet’, which has approximately 1000 members, was of the supposed ‘neoliberal-ism’ and ‘conservatism’ of particular anthropologists.3 Relying on little or no analysis,these were pejorative ascriptions used as short-hand for the dismissal of views andopinions. As Cowlishaw (2006: 431) described in a pre-Intervention paper, discussionabout Indigenous issues ‘thrives on moral and political binaries, creating a fac!ade ofunified positions, a series of left/right orthodoxies that caricature the complexity ofracialized relationships being lived out across the nation’. Allegations of being ‘neolib-eral’ or ‘conservative’ fit comfortably within such caricatures, which were arguablystrengthened by anthropological responses to the Intervention.4

Of course, intense politicking is not only found in the discipline of anthropologyor the broader academy but is germane to Indigenous issues more generally, wheresensitivities and fears of accusations of paternalism or (at worst) racism stifle engage-ment with difficult questions. Over the same period in which broader Australia wasengaging in debates about the preservation of distinct Indigenous ways of life stimu-lated by the Intervention, the concept of the intercultural was accomplishing impor-tant work by positioning research outside the dialectic of tradition and modernity,where the dynamic experience of daily life could be elucidated without becoming way-laid by conceptual debates about the dominance of either continuity or change. Thereare those, however, who have rebuffed an axiomatic acceptance of the interculturalbecause of the threat they see it poses to the recognition of internally reproducingforms of Indigenous culture and knowledge.



For example, based on their research with remote living Yolngu Aboriginal peoplein East Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, Howard and Frances Morphy (2013a:177) interpret the intercultural as a ‘liminal’, ‘nonagentive space’. Drawing on Turner(1987), the Morphys utilise ‘liminality’ to invoke two conceptual but alternate arche-typal states with the liminal space being only a transitionary phase between the two.Hence, for the Morphys, the intercultural catches Aboriginal people within the in-between, neither as sovereign traditional peoples nor as fully realised moderns. TheMorphy’s argument echoes one made by Sullivan (2005) a decade ago and also byEickelkamp more recently (2011: 134), where interculturality is critiqued as an enter-prise that ‘effectively abandons the idea of “natural” social settings’ by substituting animposed schema of cultural hybridity. But it was precisely this positionality vis-!a-visliminality that Merlan saw as the strength of the intercultural, that is, being located‘between persistence and change; to assume neither as more fundamental than theother, and to begin in the middle where both are relevant’ (Merlan 1998: 233).

A fundamental tension here relates to the role of agency in the intercultural. Forthe Morphy and Morphy (2013a: 177), the intercultural ‘de-emphasises the agency ofAboriginal people’, being their capacity to continually reproduce their difference overtime (cf. Eickelkamp 2011). On this point the Morphy and Morphy (2013a: 177) areunequivocal: ‘rather than becoming “intercultural”’, they say, ‘Yolngu systems andsubsystems remain relatively autonomous’. This viewpoint strongly endorses and ech-oes Yolngu people’s frequently stated aspirations to remain politically autonomous, orat least relatively so, and of their desire to be self-determining.5 The question whichpresents itself here and arguably remains unanswered is: relative in reference to what?In a follow-up to their original article, the Morphy and Morphy (2013b: 640) set outthat their intention has been ‘to examine the consequences of people’s thoughts andactions in the present for their interaction with others and to develop models thatreflect these dynamics’. It would seem that the conflation of cultural change withpolitical agency here is problematic as it assumes that change can largely be accountedfor by a set of intentional decision-making practices based on a pre-determined capac-ity to act: it over-attributes intentionality by over-emphasising choice.6

To put it another way, at some level all people have agency but do they always (oreven usually) act in ways which are intentional? Are the effects that they producealways intended? Or is it possible, for example, to construe Yolngu people’s articula-tion of a transformed system of traditional law and custom as at least partly relatingto engagements with the broader society: an adjustment thereto, as Ronald Berndtargued long ago (1962; see also Hamilton 2004). In a reply to the Morphys, Merlan(2013: 638) wrote: ‘[c]rucial anthropological issues are at stake—such as that culturalreproduction may involve repositioning and transformation—and important ques-tions of relationship to and control of conditions of social reproduction’. When prop-erly construed therefore, the intercultural creates the necessary space inanthropological analysis to not only bring others into the analytical frame, but also toreflect the complexity of intentionality and agency by making the relationality of dif-ference as important as its ontological grounds.



CATEGORIES AND RELATIONALITY

Despite the frequent citation of the concept, the intercultural arguably has furtherpotential to destabilise identity categories and, in particular, to bring non-Indigenouspeople into focus in the relative space. It remains the case that most ethnographies oftowns and remote communities, even those with equal numbers of Indigenous andnon-Indigenous people, continue to pay scant, if any, attention to the non-Indigenouspeople in residence, as Cowlishaw (2003: 11) argued more than a decade ago. So whileon the one hand, many scholars provide richly illustrated and engaging material abouttheir Indigenous research participants, non-Indigenous people tend to be glossed asthe ‘wider’ or ‘broader Australian society’. It is a product of this denuding that theautonomy of Indigenous people can be maintained from those others with whom theyshare physical, emotional and (frequently) intimate space. This autonomy also con-tributes to the tendency to produce ‘wildly overdrawn’ accounts of the differentiationbetween Indigenous and non-Indigenous personhood, to use Spiro’s phrase (Spirocited in Glaskin 2012: 298). Further anthropological analysis of the contexts in whichcategories and relationality are being discussed is necessary.

Among recent research there are noteworthy exceptions to this trend, such as theethnographies of non-Indigenous health workers in the Northern Territory by EmmaKowal (2015), Tess Lea (2008) and Eirik Saethre (2009). These studies and a smallnumber of others (e.g., Gerritsen 1982; Townley 2001; Musharbash 2010; Mahood2012) provide ethnographic substance to the multitudes of categories used to denotenon-Indigenous people: in English variously as ‘whitefellas’, ‘wayfarers’, ‘combos’, ‘mer-cenaries, missionaries and misfits’ and ‘bureaucrats and bleeding hearts’; and in regio-nal use as ‘balanda’, ‘kartiya’, ‘munthagi’ and ‘migalu’, among other terms. Perhapsunbridled by the convention of maintaining discreet analytical separation between theanthropologist and his or her ‘informant’, accounts by non-anthropologists have pro-vided further insight into the experiences of non-Aboriginal people living in predomi-nantly Aboriginal contexts.7 Mary-Ellen Jordan’s (2005) Balanda: My Year in ArnhemLand, Kim Mahood’s (2000) Craft for a Dry Lake, Rod Moss’ (2010) The Hard Light ofDay and Paula Shaw’s (2009) Seven Seasons in Aurukun, exemplify this sub-genre ofAustralian memoir. The narratives of personal transformation shared by those writingin this space demand consideration of a very basic premise: that if it can be acceptedthat Indigenous people are changed through their interaction with non-Indigenouspeople, then it stands to reason that non-Indigenous people might also be transformedand come to incorporate aspects of Indigenous ways of being into their own lives. Weposit this relationality as a key yet hereto under-studied aspect of the intercultural.

As Merlan explained (2013: 637), the relationality of categories is a key premise ofthe intercultural, in that it ‘sought to focus attention on forms of indigenous-nonin-digenous relationality, a notion that includes but is not limited to direct interaction(or conscious avoidance of it)’. As Merlan’s usage suggests and articles in this specialissue further demonstrate, the intercultural has not done away with categories, thougheach of the authors here arrive at varying conclusions about the salience of these terms



to their diverse research settings. Partly this reflects the vernacular utility of the Indig-enous/non-Indigenous or Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal binary in contemporary Austra-lia. One example of its pervasiveness is that across a variety of health, educational andother settings, Australians are routinely asked to tick a box which would identify themas being ‘Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander’ or ‘Indigenous’, or, conversely, as‘non-Indigenous’. The limited nature of these options represents only one of a smallnumber of ways in which Indigenous people conceive of themselves, that is, more thansolely in terms of a presence or absence of a kind of pan-Indigenousness or pan-Australian Aboriginality.

The recognition of various types of identities, based on shared traits such as lin-guistic group, land affiliations, kinship relationships, and social relations centred onco-residence in particular locales, have been defining features of anthropological stud-ies of Indigenous people across Australia (e.g. Merlan 1981; Trigger 1987; Tonkinson1990a; Martin 1993; Sutton 1998; Musharbash 2008; Austin-Broos 2009). One of therepeat considerations in these studies has been the degree to which particular scales orlevels of categorisation have salience for Indigenous people. This has included, forexample, individual, small group and large group identities (Tonkinson 1990a: 193).As is the case elsewhere, for the Mardu Aboriginal people of the Western Desert thatTonkinson (1990a: 195) researched, Aboriginality was part of a ‘political process’ usedto mobilise particular rights and interests, as much a social project as a ‘self-consciousidentity’. Local identities, however, were drawn more particularly from languagegroup affiliations, including at regional levels, as well as connections to ‘country’.Increasingly, though, the emphasis on landed identities has been questioned, includ-ing by Myers (1986b: 432) and Merlan (2007: 125) who described ‘the extent of thisemphasis in Australia as extraordinary’. The most recent National Aboriginal and Tor-res Strait Island Social Survey found that almost 30% of Indigenous people aged15 years and over did not recognise ‘homelands’ and almost 40% did not ‘identifywith a specific clan, tribal or language group’ (ABS 2008): Table 01). This is especiallythe case in more settled and urbanised contexts where, through a variety of historicalprocesses, Indigenous people’s affiliations become less particularised. Contemporaryethnographies about Indigenous people living in such places, including those by Bab-idge (2010), Cowlishaw (2009) and Henry (2012), go some way to redressing this bal-ance, though without disavowing the importance of place or country attachment.

That identities are socially-mediated by others and at times self-reflexively per-formed for particular audiences is unsurprising given that authenticity remains adominant currency in identity politics. Just as some are celebrated for their traditionalknowledge, it is not uncommon to hear prominent Indigenous people dismissed onthe basis of their supposed inauthenticity, a salient form of critique across Australia.An example of this politics was a court case in 2011 involving the Australian journalistand conservative commentator Andrew Bolt, who in 2009 authored a series of news-paper articles that questioned the legitimacy of a number of successful professionals ofmixed descent. Provocatively titled ‘It’s so hip to be black’ (2009a) and ‘White fellasin the black’ (2009b) Bolt referred to a number of prominent Australian Aboriginal



artists, writers, academics and politicians with light coloured skin as ‘white Aborigi-nes’ (2009a: 22, 2009b: 38). Bolt was subsequently sued by some of the group undersection 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which can relate to insulting, humiliatingor intimidating a group of people (Crook 2011). In his columns and the subsequentcourt case, Bolt questioned the ‘almost arbitrary and intensely political’ motivationsof people asserting an Aboriginal identity when they ‘could in truth join any one ofseveral ethnic groups’ (Bolt 2009a: 22).

One member of the group who testified in discrimination proceedings was thelawyer and academic Larissa Behrendt, singled out by Bolt (2009a: 22) for her Aborigi-nal and German ancestry: ‘But which people are “yours,” exactly, mein liebchen [mydarling]?’ Bolt’s commentary was an inflammatory attempt to delimit the field‘Aboriginal’ to exclude those who did not conform sufficiently to his reified notion ofIndigenous-ness, naming a group of people whom he accused of having benefited ille-gitimately from identifying as Aboriginal. In the event, the Judge hearing the casefound in favour of the applicants, holding that Bolt had contravened section 18C ofthe Act. In his decision, Judge Bromberg noted of the plaintiffs that:

Each of them genuinely identifies as an Aboriginal person and has done so since their

childhood. Each was raised to identify as an Aboriginal person and was enculturated as

an Aboriginal person. None of them ‘chose’ to be Aboriginal. Nor have they used their

Aboriginal identity inappropriately to advance their careers. Each is entitled to regard

themselves and be regarded by others as an Aboriginal person within the conventional

understanding of that description. (Bromberg 2011, para. 10)

While doubtlessly welcomed by the plaintiffs and their supporters, Judge Brom-berg’s account of the grounds on which people hold identities as Aboriginal or other-wise in Australian society oversimplifies the matter, much as Bolt’s original articlesdid. That is, identities are held neither solely on the basis of a cynically self-interestedchoice, as Bolt alleged, nor a zero-sum game, as Bromberg implies, where one is eitherAboriginal or non-Aboriginal (or Indigenous or non-Indigenous).

What emerges through more conceptually sophisticated analysis, are relationshipsbetween persons variously positioned within categories, where identities are multiple,layered, shifting, emergent, and unstable as well as being strategic and purposive.Aboriginality, in this view, does not exist as a conceretised affiliation outside politicsany more than its corollaries exist as such. Rather, identities arise as social facts withinracialised formations, which remain conjunctural despite their categorisation asinnate, primordial and essentialised. In seeking to bring the relational nature of theseidentities to the fore, we propose intimacies and temporalities as key conceptual toolsto facilitate analysis within this contested space.

INTIMACIES AND TEMPORALITIES

To take a relational approach to categories which are thoroughly institutionalised andsocially embedded poses interpretive challenges for each of the authors in this



collection. As a means of opening up debates, each author engages variously with theidea of intimacies in relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, oftenusing kinds of interlocutors. At times such intimacies arise from kinds of emotions,most obviously love and desire while at other times, intimacies involve objects whichtransform and also sustain relations between individuals. Hence Redmond’s examina-tion of the interpretive meaning of meat at native title meetings, Dalley’s discussion ofinterracial relationships and children of mixed-descent, McGrath’s focus on a cameraand the resulting photographs of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, as well as theplethora of gifts exchanged between persons in R. Martin’s article each explore inti-macy through shared spaces of interaction (Giddens 1992: 46). At its ‘heart’ such inti-macy involves a questioning of the meaning of identity and the individual as therelevant focus of analytical attention, demonstrating instead, to use Berlant’s (1998:281) phrasing, ‘an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story aboutboth oneself and others’. As Povinelli (1995: 45) similarly points out, intimacy poses afoundation question: ‘[w]ith whom do I wish to share not merely my worldly posses-sions but the narratives of who I think I am and who I desire to be?’ Answers to thisquestion are different in the various settings described in this collection; in meetings,towns, regions or the nation. However, each of the examples presented in this specialissue concern such intimate space.

First, a word of caution: as Berlant (2011) argued for love, intimacy must involvea ‘properly political’ consideration of difference where power and social exclusion areat the forefront. While attractive as a conceptual device, the sentimental allure of ‘inti-macy’ may obfuscate the meaning and experience of difference in lieu of a na€ıve unifi-cation between self and other, or as between groups of people (Rowse 2007: 90; Hardt2011: 677). Certainly it seems the case that in socially dense contexts, the constructionof a multitude of kinds of intimacy between select individuals, often those deemedkin, can also be used productively to exclude others, including though not limited tothose conceived of as ‘strangers’. In a range of contexts, anthropologists have shownhow Aboriginal people have become highly adept at mobilising discourses of whatCorrey et al. (2011) described as ‘the narcissism of minor differences’ (a phrase bor-rowed from Freud), such as in the composition of Indigenous claim groups for nativetitle purposes (see also Povinelli 2002; Sutton 2003: 85; Correy 2006; Babidge 2010).The generation of divisions and the heuristic device of ‘the stranger’, used to interpretthe cohesiveness of a group, point to the significance of scales of individuation withinintimate situations. At issue is how people come to understand themselves within rela-tions of similarity and difference and how these understandings transform over time.Hence, a second theme to emerge from papers in this collection is the temporalities ofcontemporary Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal identities in Australia, as well as the sig-nificance of time in relation to conceptualisations of indigeneity more broadly. AsRabinow (2008: 1) points out, the word ‘contemporary’ means both living in the sametime as something or someone else (that is, being contemporaries), and being modern,up-to-date (being contemporary). It is here, as Lea (2012a: 187) argued, that



Australianist anthropology has most spectacularly failed, having ‘not shifted, but per-haps held affirm, the West’s sense of being the apex of modernity’.

Reflecting on particular kinds of subject matter which might ‘show signs of waysforward’ for anthropology into the contemporary, Lea (2012a: 187) identifies theanalysis of technology use and forms of multimedia as realms where anthropologistsare locating fruitful avenues of enquiry. However, while noting the work of Christen(2006), Dalley (2012), Deger (2006), Fisher (2009), Hinkson (2004) and Kral (2012)in this area, to restrict the focus of analytical attention to the use of the technologicallynew offers a no less perilous means of interpreting the binary between tradition andmodernity or, indeed, in the construction of relationships with those comprising thebroader society.8 While the modernity seemingly captured in digital radio, laptops,mobile phones and social networking sites offers a seductive contemporaneousness, itis important to emphasise that less technologically new things are similarly contempo-rary. As Aug!e (1999: 50–1) argues, the development of a ‘contemporaneous anthro-pology’ begins instead with the acknowledgement that ‘the other changes’ along withus: that the anthropologist and their informants or ‘interlocutors’ are not just existingor occurring in the same time as coevals (as Fabian 1983 famously argued) but actu-ally becoming together, being ‘intimate’.

Developing concepts of personhood, Anthony Redmond’s article leads this collec-tion with a study of corporeality among Ngarinyin Aboriginal people and their non-Ngarinyin associates in the Kimberley region of north-western Australia (see also Red-mond 2001, 2005). While blood and skin are commonly applied concepts in theexploration of racial and stratified hierarchies in Australia (e.g. Carter 1988; Tonkin-son 1990a, 1994), bodies continue to be under-theorised by anthropologists despitetheir obvious centrality to the construct of relationships (Austin-Broos 2006: 58; Gla-skin 2012: 302–3). Redmond’s (2001) work more generally pays attention to theschema of the body and how Ngarinyin people correlate relationships with kin ontohuman body parts and movements. In his article in this collection, however, he inge-niously theorises the social processes involved in the co-consumption of another spe-cies, namely cattle (understood as ‘an assortment of bodily parts’, rather than simplybeef) as an analogy to relationships between Aboriginal people and the non-Aborigi-nal people who seek to engage them in native title meetings. Redmond’s conclusionthat a not inconsiderable factor in the perceived efficacy of meetings was the presenceor absence of fresh meat shows how objects (in this case flesh and bones) as well asthe processes of their procurement, preparation and consumption can come to standfor more than their constituent parts.

Following on from Redmond, the most overt investigation of intimacy in this spe-cial issue comes in Cameo Dalley’s article on an interracial relationship. Drawing onrecent ethnography from Mornington Island in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, Dal-ley examines the tropes commonly used to theorise non-Aboriginal residents ofremote locations as ‘strangers’, ‘outsiders’ and ‘misfits’. Taking the case study of‘Andrew’, a non-Aboriginal partner of an Aboriginal woman on the island, Dalleyconsiders the applicability of Simmel’s (1950) characterisation of the ‘stranger’. Here,



attachment and intimacy are discussed in a similar way to that of Berlant (1998, 2011)and Jankowiak (1995), who suggest that differences do not in reality, and should notin analysis, exclude the potential for individuals to conceive of one another as lovers,partners and companions. Following on from the tendency of anthropologists toapproach unions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in terms of thedynamics of reciprocity and exchange (Hamilton 1972; Tonkinson 1990b; Redmond2005), intimate attachment and the begetting of children of mixed-descent are positedas the motivation that might explain an individual’s ‘impulse to throw it all overthrough the leap of coordinating oneself with virtual strangers’ (Berlant 2011: 684).Based primarily on a single couple, this individualised experience nevertheless has sal-ience to the conceptualisation of other sets of interracial relationships on MorningtonIsland, as well as elsewhere, where such couples are part of a demographically growingsegment of the Australian population (Biddle 2013).9 In contexts where the meaningof Indigenous people’s lives is often measured by the deployment of numbers, per-centages and ‘gaps’ to be ameliorated (Clark 2011; Kowal 2015), the anthropologicaldescription and analysis of an intensely intimate relationship presented here offers analternate contribution towards the study of contemporary identities.

From Redmond and Dalley’s consideration of kinds of intimacy generated overrelatively short time frames, papers by Richard J. Martin and Pamela McGrath focuson the history of interactions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people inremote settings. McGrath’s article illustrates how cameras were used to great effect bythe ethnographer Norman B. Tindale and others as a way of engendering familiaritywith the subjects of their study, Ngaanyatjarra families in the Warburton Ranges ofWestern Australia in 1935. However, as McGrath describes, the ‘intimate acts of look-ing’ facilitated by the camera captured Aboriginal people in time in such a way as toobscure the moments of intersubjectivity that were fundamental to the photographs’creation. McGrath’s reinterpretation of the process of eliciting these images refiguresphotography as an intimate means of knowing another which also brings the photog-rapher behind the lens into the frame, revealing dynamic relationships between colo-nial photographers and Aboriginal people hidden within the archive (see also Lydon2005: 5). At the same time, the contemporary significance of the resultant photo-graphs to living Aboriginal people (as has been reported in a range of other contexts,such as by Smith 2008b) is canvassed here as illustrative of the enduring nature ofthreads of connection linking living and deceased generations of Aboriginal people,not just with each other but also with non-Aboriginal people in the past.

Like McGrath, Richard Martin examines connections between Aboriginal andnon-Aboriginal people extending back over several generations. R. Martin describeshow violent colonial encounters in the Gulf of Carpentaria become subject to amimetic exchange of meanings across times. The violence of colonialism shocks withits brutality, but R. Martin shows how the descendants of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal parties to this violence recall violent events along with the exchanges ofcompensatory gifts that sometimes followed them in a way which surprisingly em-phasises connections between people and even continuing obligations. As R. Martin



documents, these gifts culminated in the marriage of a non-Aboriginal pastoralist’smixed-descent son to the daughter of one of his would-be Aboriginal victims. In thisinstance Aboriginal people’s desire to remain emplaced in the local landscape andmaintain connections with the station property might be seen as a motivation to cre-ate bonds with the pastoralist which, while seeming to have such potential for rupture,endured across generations. But here such explanations are interpreted as only par-tially significant; instead, R. Martin identifies the impact of ‘slippage, excess and dif-ference’ within colonialism, which troubles static conceptions of diversity in the socialfield today. Though explications which interpret land as an interlocutor between pas-toralists and Aboriginal people are not new in the Australian context (notably Red-mond 2005; see also Smith 2003, 2008a), the complexities alluded to here againillustrate the need for more wholesome explorations of categories and their conceptualbasis.

While implicit in Redmond, Dalley, McGrath and R. Martin’s papers, the mostpronounced analyses of temporality in this collection come from Emma Kowal andDavid Martin. Kowal’s contribution focuses on what she calls ‘cultural Lamarckian-ism’. As Kowal has previously argued (2010), popular understandings of Aboriginalityoften construe Aboriginal people as the living embodiment of the oldest continuingculture on earth, statements commonly heard in ‘Welcome to Country’ and‘Acknowledgement of Country’ ceremonies performed at cultural events around Aus-tralia. For Kowal, referencing the now-discredited pre-Darwinian biologist Jean-Bap-tiste Lamarck (who posited the inheritance of acquired characteristics by organismsascending a ladder of complexity), statements like these reinforce perceptions ofAboriginal people as culturally frozen in time, as though present generations of livingpeople somehow embody the accumulated wisdom of their ancestors.

Drawing on ethnography about non-Aboriginal people working in the field ofAboriginal health delivery in the Northern Territory, Kowal identifies an invidiousdichotomy between tradition and modernity, whereby modernity is construed as anenduring point of difference between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. For thenon-Aboriginal health professionals who Kowal studies, Aboriginal people are held toneed more time to acquire modernity in order to adopt strategies in health whichwould facilitate enhanced outcomes and help to remediate the statistical ‘gap’ betweenAboriginal and non-Aboriginal people (see also Kowal 2015). As Kowal argues tren-chantly in a transcribed interview with one of these health professionals, how muchtime is enough time to develop sufficient cultural knowledge to restrict consumptionof substances like alcohol or petrol? The limitations of this kind of thinking are clear,but for Kowal’s interviewee, Aboriginal people’s evolutionary time lag is important:like the colonists who classically needed savages to define themselves and their owncivilization (see papers by McGrath and R. Martin, this volume), Kowal argues con-troversially that ‘anti-racists’ need culturally—and in some respects temporally—dis-tinct Aboriginal people in order to perpetuate their own sense of self. Kowal ends herpaper by outlining alternative possibilities opened up by an end to such‘allochronism’.



As Kowal explores in her contribution here, Australia’s engagement with Aborigi-nal difference has been challenged over recent years by reporting associated withAboriginal disadvantage, as predominantly Aboriginal communities are increasinglyclassified as requiring urgent development. In the policy work of prominent advocates,such development is commonly presented as unilinear: Noel Pearson (cited in Neale2013: 186), for example, arguing that ‘[it] is natural for peoples to advance from hunt-ing and gathering to agriculture and industrialism’ (emphasis in original). Like thecultural Lamarkianism exhibited by Kowal’s health professionals, this represents astrikingly simplistic approach to contemporary situations; indeed, such approachesmore-or-less explicitly disavow the possibility that alternative ways of life will con-tinue to sustain themselves in any recognisable form. But as D. Martin points out, thenotion of a straightforward advance towards modernity or postmodernity is pro-foundly mistaken. Diverse and even competing ontologies demonstrably continue toexist in Australia, necessitating more sophisticated accounts of what contemporaryAboriginal and non-Aboriginal identities are within the intercultural—not in order todistinguish them as radically different, but to locate their difference in relationalterms.

Concluding this collection, D. Martin’s paper therefore focuses on how state-sponsored recognition of Aboriginal tradition affects the (re)construction of contem-porary identities, concentrating on the design and implementation of the Native TitleAct 1993 (Cth) and what D. Martin calls the ‘Indigenous development arena’. Titledprovocatively, D. Martin asks ‘does native title merely provide the entitlement to benative?’ as a critique of overtly traditionalist representations of contemporary Aborigi-nal identities. For D. Martin, the biography of Eddie Koiki Mabo (the Meriam appli-cant in the eventually successful Mabo v Queensland [No. 2] (Mabo) case in the HighCourt of Australia 1992) provides an incitement that challenges the pervasive dichot-omy between tradition and modernity. While Mabo was demonstrably dedicated tothe recognition of Islander rights in land and waters, Martin shows how complexMabo’s biography truly was, as both a proud Meriam Islander and someone who fullyembraced the opportunities presented outside the relatively insular island world. Likethis example from the Torres Strait, D. Martin argues that contemporary Aboriginaland other Indigenous identities are best conceived of as ‘hybrid’, in that they combineinfluences from multiple sources beyond the Indigenous domain. Significantly, by dig-ging deeper into the provisions of the Native Title Act, D. Martin finds in the Indige-nous Land Use Agreement (ILUA) provisions a potential avenue in whichentitlements and some legal rights can be granted without the need for the laboriousexamination of traditionalist identities under native title. Offering a suggestive conclu-sion to the collection, D. Martin’s paper forms a critical part of the nascent anthropol-ogy of contemporary identities under native title (see, for example, Babidge 2010;Correy 2006; and a range of papers in Smith and Morphy 2007), that link the distinc-tively Australian debates canvassed here with developments in international literaturearound the impact of cultural ‘lawfare’ in contexts involving those claiming



recognition (de la Cadena and Starn 2007; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Trigger andDalley 2010).

CONCLUSION

As all of the papers in this special issue argue in different ways, identities are lived inparticular spaces, involving real bodies becoming alongside each other at particulartimes: hence our focus in this introduction on intimacies and temporalities. As McG-rath argues in her contribution to this collection:

A person’s identity—the significant characteristics by which he or she is defined against

others, either by themselves or by others—is a dynamic, performative, accumulative

social fact that responds to the multiple and shifting social contexts through which they

move.

As contributors to this collection document, such social contexts involve bothIndigenous and non-Indigenous people, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, Black andWhite; hence papers here provide ethnography wherein, as Cowlishaw (2010: 54) putsit, ‘the lifeworlds of all residents are elements of one set of social relations, dealt withon equivalent terms’. These interactions are not those in which the state figures heav-ily and nor are they overly determined by relations with the state of the kind describedby Kapferer (1995), Kapferer and Morris (2003) and Lattas (1993) as domination—what Kapferer (1995: 74) described ‘the domination of whites [i.e. non-Aboriginalpeople] over blacks [i.e. Aboriginal people]’ in the north Queensland town of Moss-man. Rather, they describe the experiences of diverse people involved in local interac-tions, and focus on the intersections between various kinds of identities whereincategories are conceptually and practically blurred, and therefore represent a signifi-cant development within current debates.

Of course, the blurring of such categories remains an incomplete task. There are,for most authors in this collection, enduring barriers to the overcoming of dichoto-mies and, indeed, deliberate justifications for the continuing construction of such bar-riers between people. This is particularly the case in examples such as state-mandatedprocesses of land rights and native title in which distinctive privileges are tied to asser-tions of Indigenous identity. The use of ‘equivalent’ or equal-powered terms todescribe these experiences, as Cowlishaw suggests (2010: 54), may therefore provesomewhat problematic by suggesting a false utopianism. As multiple papers here dis-cuss, the political stakes of this problem are high, and the future is unclear. In diverseways, contributions to this collection therefore exhibit productive tensions betweenconceptual and theoretical commitments and practical effects; tensions which haveparticular signatures of intimacy and temporality, where intimacy means more thanthe obliteration of boundaries, and being modern or postmodern involves more thanmultiple temporalities. The ‘timeliness’ of anthropology’s attention to these problemsis important.



D. Martin’s paper, which concludes this collection, makes the observation thatIndigenous and, indeed, non-Indigenous identities and their development do notoccur along a single axis between tradition on the one hand and modernity on theother. Rather, Indigenous people draw on a range of experiences to articulate identi-ties that may be naturalised and essentialised but which remain connected to non-Indigenous identities. It is in this way that their interculturality is most intimately rea-lised and expressed. It is also in the diversity of these connections that present policymakers, such as those involved in the Northern Territory Intervention, presented withsuch an unlikely task as engineering or manufacturing desirable change, most clearlyflounder. What remains, as Fortun et al. argue (2011: 230, following Derrida) is thecategory and, indeed, the necessity of ‘the indigenous’: ‘work within double binds,rather than efforts to resolve them’.

Hence each of the papers here seeks to avoid authorising Wolfe’s (1994) notion of‘repressive authenticity’ or Sutton’s (2010: 80) critique of the ‘Disneyisation’ of cul-ture via a ‘crude sentimentalising’ of tradition’ (see also Cowlishaw 2012). Rather,their engagements with the concepts of intimacy and temporality suggest accord withPovinelli’s call for more sophisticated accounts of ‘present-tense indigenousness’based on the ‘passage’ through ‘the geography of the state and topography of othersocial identities’ (2002: 48–9), where tensions are held in continuing suspension.Importantly, the ‘passage’ Povinelli describes, one of time and also of change, draws inthose ‘other social identities’, implicating them in the process, and changing themtoo. Articles in this special issue provide a range of case studies for this journey intoand through the present, where Indigenous and non-Indigenous identities emergeanew.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Emma Kowal, Nicolas Peterson and David Trigger for suggestions on ver-sions of this paper.

Please send correspondence to Cameo Dalley: [email protected]

NOTES

1 A report titled the ‘Little Children Are Sacred’ which detailed child sexual abuse in the Northern

Territory was one of the ‘triggers’ cited for the Intervention (Merlan 2010).

2 Also see abstracts for papers presented in the panel ‘Re-thinking Personhood: In Anthropology,

and in Indigenous Australia’, chaired by Francesca Merlan and Diane Austin-Broos at the 2013

Australian Anthropological Society Conference at the Australian National University, Canberra.

The session included contributions from key scholars in this area including Jeremy Beckett, Gay-

nor Macdonald, Yasmine Musharbash and Nicolas Peterson with the discussant Ian Keen.

3 We find it noteworthy that corollaries of ‘neoliberal’ and ‘conservative’, such as ‘liberal’, ‘progres-

sive’ and ‘radical’ are used less often in such debates, perhaps reflecting the tendency for such

positioning to disappear within analyses.



4 The prevalence of the use of the term ‘neoliberalism’ as a frame for debate has had a similar trajec-

tory internationally, including a 2013 conference of the Portuguese Anthropology Association

titled ‘Anthropology’s Obsession with Neo-liberalism’. In our view, ‘neoliberalism’ and reference

to the ‘neoliberal state’ are deployed too loosely in Australia, with few authors explaining their

intended meaning.

5 In a follow up piece, the Morphy and Morphy (2013b: 640) seek to clarify that relative autonomy

does not ‘quarantine change nor do we consider that autonomy in action implies separation’.

6 It strikes us that the Morphys’ argument is more generally related to the Weberian concept of

‘social closure’. Social closure was adapted into Australian contexts in the form of ‘domains’ dur-

ing the 1980s by those writing of spatially demarcated towns and missions (e.g. Tonkinson 1982;

von Sturmer 1984; Trigger 1986).

7 While numerous anthropologists have undertaken forms of writing which explore the anthropol-

ogist/informant interrelationship (e.g., Jackson 1995), their maintenance as conceptually discreet

categories is, at times, vitally important. This is particularly the case in applied contexts, such as

when an anthropologist appears as an ‘expert witness’ in native title trial proceedings and is

required to demonstrate their capacity to undertake objective analysis.

8 See the work of Gunkel (2003), McCallum and Papandrea (2009) and Selwyn (2004) for useful

critiques which question the notion of the ‘digital divide’ and the use of communications technol-

ogies to promote social inclusion and to ameliorate social and economic disadvantage between

groups co-existing in nation states.

9 We note, though, that according to Biddle’s (2013) analysis of the 2011 Census data, partnerships

(marriage and de facto) between Indigenous and non-Indigenous persons in Australia are

unevenly geographically distributed. Such partnerships were much more likely to be found in

urban and regional centres than remote or very remote Indigenous communities. In fact, almost

80% of Indigenous persons living in Australia’s 11 major cities are partnered with a non-Indige-

nous person (Biddle 2013: 4).

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