‘It shocks me,the place of women’: intersectionality and mining companies’ retrogradation of indigenous women in New Caledonia

Indigenous women’s social positionings are complex and dynamic, informed by culture and post-colonial politics; gender and ethnicity intersect with age, socio-economic status, and social hierarchies. This article uses an ethnographic study of Kanak women’s engagements with mining in New Caledonia, to examine three questions. First, how do indigenous women’s dynamic social positionings shape their possibilities for negotiation with and resistance to industry? Secondly, how do women’s possibilities for engagement in turn shape the wider community’s possibilities for negotiation with or resistance to industry? Finally, what is the companies’ role in shaping women’s possibilities for such engagement? I draw on the critical feminist concept of intersectionality, bringing this into conversation with concepts of symbolic and cultural violence and hegemony. Over time, women began to actively negotiate with and resist industrial projects, in line with growing gender equity in New Caledonia, but the mining companies referenced – and thus reinforced – women’s dominated social position as an excuse to sideline their concerns, a type of cultural violence I term ‘retrogradation.’ Thus, this article recognizes indigenous women’s increasing agency in engaging with external actors, such as industrial projects, yet also shows how outsiders can commit retrogradation to further marginalize young, rural, poor community women. I discuss how such marginalization limits options for the larger group. Finally, I point to a way out of oppression, through transformation of hegemonic ideologies.     

Pluralising political legitimacy

Does the Australian state exercise legitimate power over the indigenous peoples within its borders? To say that the state’s political decisions are legitimate is to say that it has the right to impose those decisions on indigenous peoples and that they have a (at least a prima facie) duty to obey. In this paper, I consider the general normative frameworks within which these questions are often grasped in contemporary political theory. Two dominant modes of dealing with political legitimacy are through the politics of ‘recognition’ and ‘justification’. I argue that in order to address the fundamental challenges posed by indigenous peoples to liberal settler states today we need to pluralise our conceptions of political legitimacy.     

Trade agreements and the myth of policy constraint in Australia

In this paper, I challenge the conventional view that trade agreements act as a major constraint on Australia’s industry policy options. Through a comparison with South Korea – a country with similar trade obligations to Australia – I find that the Australian government retains significant room to move in the industry policy sphere. However, Australian policy-makers appear far less willing than their foreign counterparts to use that space. To explain Australia’s comparative industry policy in-activism, I move beyond broad-brush explanations centred on ‘liberal ideology’ to explore the ideational, institutional and structural obstacles to the pursuit of a more proactive industry policy approach on the part of Australian policy-makers.     

The technical is political: settler colonialism and the Australian Indigenous policy system

Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver its stated aims. Additionally, political and social relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state remain complex and contested. This article draws on critical Indigenous theory, alongside the increasingly influential scholarly paradigm of settler colonialism, to draw these two elements together. It highlights the ongoing nature of colonial conflict, and the partisan nature of state institutions and processes. While policy is usually framed as a depoliticised, technical practice of public management for Indigenous wellbeing, I suggest that it also seeks to ‘domesticate’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perform their dysfunction and demonstrate state legitimacy. This is especially the case in Australia, which has a long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy – rather than legal agreements – as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflict.     

An Experimental Act: Formations of Wildness and Indigeneity in Far North Queensland

In this article, I focus upon the recent Wild Rivers Act controversy in Queensland, Australia, as an ‘experimental event’ that drew together a diverse cast of actors – including Indigenous traditional owners, state politicians, bureaucrats, environmentalists, mining companies, the late Steve Irwin, and waterways – to contest the future of a region historically (over)coded as ‘wild’. In attending to these actors, and the discourses and arguments mobilised, I argue that this controversy reveals emergent trends in the imaginaries of wildness and indigeneity surrounding indigenous lands and waters in contemporary settler colonial nations. Critical insight into such issues, I show, requires reconceptualising the static ‘matters of being’ through which indigenous territory is often captured – such as tradition and development – as contingent and contested ‘matters of becoming’. It is precisely in events such as the Act controversy that the contemporary politics of indigenous territory, and its contingent and contested foundations, becomes visible.     

Bleached broilers and divine fowls: The ritual economy of chickens in a South Indian city

Commercial poultry operations are booming as demand for chicken soars in 21st-century India. The industry relies on the models familiar from industrial countries: birds pumped with growth hormones and antibiotics designed to ensure rapid, standardized egg production and broiler meat. Nevertheless, during my fieldwork in India, locals insisted that broiler chickens were rarely used for ritual purposes. They explained that the gods were far more discerning and should only be offered the ‘country chicken’ (Natu kodi). The distinctive appearance of these ‘rural’ birds was seen to make them appropriate for ritual sacrifices, with transformative potential. Even urban dwellers seemed to prefer these much costlier indigenous birds – untouched by the homogenizing logic of industrial livestock production – especially for rituals. As I show in this essay, the ritual economy of chickens illustrates the process of ‘metabolic’ transformations, toxic entanglements and more-than-human encounters, as much as it reveals that of mutualism, with its vital and varied meanings tied to social relations and ecological sensibilities.     

Whatever Happened to the Mother? A New Look at the Old Problem of the Mother's Brother in Three New Guinea Societies: Gimi,Daribi, and Iatmul

Kinship systems cannot be analysed as straightforward translations of the ‘facts of nature’ when those facts are limited to the production of a child by a heterosexual couple. Based upon analyses of three New Guinea societies (Gimi, Daribi, and Iatmul), I suggest that kinship systems take account – often by denying – certain ‘facts’ of human reproduction when those facts are extended beyond coitus and parturition to include both the very long period of infantile dependence upon one significant caregiver (always the mother in the societies in question and nearly universally) and the subsequent requirement for the child to be extracted from a dyadic maternal universe. Separation from mother is as critical to the survival and development of the individual as is the original prolonged and intense attachment to her. The question, then, is not whether indigenous peoples accurately understand coitus and conception – they do – but rather the ways in which they manipulate that knowledge in rules and rites of kinship in order to manage the growth and development of a child long after parturition. Rules of kinship and social relations neither ignore nor exist apart from theories of procreation as many anthropologists now claim. Rather, it is precisely because theories of procreation indicate and idealise the flow of bodily substance during coitus and pregnancy that they serve as organisational premises for social relations. The fact that kinship is a symbolic construction does not mean that it is wholly ideological nor, like a language, free to vary in ways that are arbitrary and unconnected to the ‘facts of life’ as Westerners understand them. Even when interlocutors openly deny such understanding and knowledge, especially of the male role in coitus and conception, evidence to the contrary is abundantly provided in myth, ritual, and indigenous theories of procreation. What kinship systems often do show, however, is a strategic denial of the role of the mother who, upon deeper understanding of indigenous concepts of procreation, turns out to be a ‘sterile vessel’ or without substantial contribution to her child. I illustrate this premise by extending earlier analyses of Gimi kinship and reexamining certain materials on neighbouring Daribi provided by Roy Wagner and on Iatmul peoples of the Sepik River as originally described in Naven by Gregory Bateson eighty years ago.     

Welcome to Country … Not.

ABSTRACT It seems that every public function I attend includes a ‘welcome to country’ speech presented by a representative of a local Aboriginal group claiming traditional ownership of the land where the gathering is conducted. Indeed, while it was already becoming customary for white officials to acknowledge traditional Aboriginal ownership prior to introducing any kind of its own business in recent years, it seems to have become de rigueur since the 42nd Federal Parliament was opened with a ‘Welcome to Country’ speech from a Ngunnawal representative in February, 2008. As this paper demonstrates, welcome to country might be understood by whites as a ‘safe’ kind of inclusive gesture of recognition all the time knowing that such claims are not legally enforceable. But, as the two ethnographic examples I present in this article demonstrate, Indigenous agency, once acknowledged in performance, cannot be fully directed by the nation state to serve its own ends.     

Of Human Bondage: The Breaking In of Stockmen in Northern Australia

This article examines the cultural forms through which the young European‐Australian stockmen who work on the cattle stations of north Queensland are socialised. Exploring their interactions with a social and physical landscape and their rites of passage, as manifested in everyday actions, performance and material culture, it reveals how – and why – they are given little choice in acquiring values which are intensely adversarial to the land and to the indigenous people of Australia. It also explores the relationship between the transmission of particular values to these young men and the wider political and hegemonic role of the pastoral sub‐culture in defining Australian national identity. 1 1 It has take me a while to lasso and subdue this ethnographic beast, and in the course of the struggle I have benefited greatly from the advice of colleagues at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Oxford, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the University of Wales, Lampeter and fellow Australianists at the Centre for Australian Studies in Wales and at the Menzies Centre in London. I am also most grateful to Neil Maclean and his anonymous referees for their many helpful suggestions and comments. I would like to pay an affectionate tribute to the young stockmen on the cattle properties of Cape York's western coast: at Rutland Plains, Koolatah, Highbury, Drumduff, Sefton and the other stations where I was invited to ‘sling my swag’. Behind the sabre‐rattling that I have quoted, most of these young men were good folk: they were largely tolerant of have a female (and a bloody pom too!) in their midst, generously sharing stories, explaining their lives, making hat‐catchers and belts for me, and showing me how to break horses and the occasional bone. I have had a little feminist fun in considering their performances of Masculinity, but I haven't forgotten that what they do often requires real courage and determination. Though I have tried here to point to the political hegemony of their role and its potentially bleak consequences, I hope that an understanding of their sub‐culture and its pressures will assist the resolution of some of the conflicts in which they find themselves entangled.
     

COMMUNITY AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF SOCIAL ORDER ON THE CANADIAN FRONTIER IN THE 1840s AND 1850s: AN ENGLISH IMMIGRANT’S ACCOUNT

Abstract

This article draws on the letters of a young immigrant doctor, Francis Codd, who arrived in British Canada in the I84os. Many of the one million migrants, mainly of British and Irish origin, who arrived in Canada in the mid-I9th century, benefited from the availability of land and absence of social barriers to mobility. This enabled them to think and feel like citizens of the new country,in a way denied them at home. Francis Codd’s account throws light on the part played by the appreciation of nature and ‘wilderness’ in this process, as well as describing the beginnings of a new civil society and the development of ‘community’ institutions. However, at the same time as a ‘Canadian’ identity was being constructed for the white settler population, that of the indigenous population was accorded little recognition or respect.     

Who's indigenous? Whose archaeology?

Abstract

The International Labour Organisation, the United Nations and various indigenous Organisations have raised and/or objected to diverse criteria through which indigenous groups have been defined and the rights that should be accorded to them. This paper discusses the implications of these issues in relation to archaeological research and heritage management and uses this to position the other papers in this volume. Specific themes that are addressed include: the impact of colonialism and nation-forming on indigenous groups; the continuing influence of 19th and early 20th century social evolutionary concepts on the representation of indigenous groups and the role of archival material from this period today; the contrasting processes of cultural continuity and assimilation within ‘dominant’ societies in which indigenous communities have participated, and the effects that this has had on more recent claims over land rights; the cultural differences that surround the concepts of individual and community ownership, particularly in relation to copyright; the role of academia, museums and the media in the representation of indigenous people in the past and the present.     

Modern Őmie Women: Virtual Indigeneity and Intimations of Empowerment

The women of ?mie Artists, a cooperative that produces original bark cloth paintings for the global indigenous art market, are described in contemporary ethnographic publications as ranked into a hierarchy of chiefs on the basis of their ‘wisdom’ which is expressed in their paintings. This depiction of the ?mie, who comprise a marginalized population of less than 2000 in Oro Province of Papua New Guinea, is dramatically different from what was known of their culture several decades ago. An assessment of the likelihood of this virtual depiction reflecting the social empowerment of ?mie women is undertaken. Although the impact of missionization and entry into capitalist markets is recognized, it is the interpellation of the art market of the ‘indigenous artist’, working within a traditional mystical tie with the land and the ancestors, which must be seen as precipitating what appears in virtual form an amplification and cultural embellishment of women’s traditional knowledge and practices. This process is foregrounded against the historical change in valuation of women’s cultural contributions by the discipline and the art world.     

Redefining ‘sub‐culture’: a new lens for understanding hybrid cultural identities in East‐Central Europe with a case study from early 20th century L'viv‐Lwów‐Lemberg

This paper proposes a new definition of the term ‘subculture’, as a way of better understanding hybrid identities specific to East‐Central Europe, before applying this definition to a case study from the now‐Ukrainian city of L'viv from around 1900. The first section outlines the theory, arguing that the continued focus on the nation state – either from the ‘top down’, or else the ‘bottom up’ as a source of contestation, by historians and anthropologists, has limited the ability to study groups in the interstices of the national projects that typically remain defined in monolithic ethno‐linguistic terms. It examines the theoretical term ‘subcultures’ to propose a new definition that accounts for such hybridity, by having particular sensitivity to context (historical, social, geographical) and cultural practice, in addition to any prevailing national narratives at a given time. The case study in the second section focuses on linguistic hybridity in the city then known more commonly as Lemberg (German) or Lwów (Polish). It argues that Lemberg/Lwów/L'viv produced an urban dialect that blended Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish and German elements. This dialect should be reassessed as a mixed, hybrid or transitional code, rather than as a linguistic variant of a titular nation. Archival evidence – in particular, court records – is quoted to show that at the lower end of L'viv society, people routinely mixed and transcended linguistic and, thereby, ethnic and religious boundaries. This offers direct evidence of a specific subsection, or subculture, in urban life where people interacted and intermingled intensely. As such, the paper offers new possibilities for investigating ‘hybrid’ identities, as well as proposing a counterpoint to recent research focusing on deliberate indifference or opposition to national segregation for various socio‐political, economic and cultural reasons (Judson 2006: 19–65; King 2002; Zahra 2008).     

The social life of ruins: sites of memory and the politics of a Zimbabwean periphery

This article explores conflicts over a series of ruins located within Zimbabwe's flagship National Park. The relics have long been regarded as sacred places by local African communities evicted from their vicinity, and have come to be seen as their ethnic heritage. Local intellectuals' promotion of this heritage was an important aspect of a defensive mobilization of cultural difference on the part of a marginalized minority group. I explore both indigenous and colonial ideas about the ruins, the different social movements with which they have been associated and the changing social life they have given the stone relics. Although African and European ideas sometimes came into violent confrontation – as in the context of colonial era evictions – there were also mutual influences in emergent ideas about tribe, heritage and history. The article engages with Pierre Nora's notion of ‘sites of memory’, which has usefully drawn attention to the way in which ideas of the past are rooted and reproduced in representations of particular places. But it criticizes Nora's tendency to romanticize pre-modern ‘memory’, suppress narrative and depoliticize traditional connections with the past. Thus, the article highlights the historicity of traditional means of relating to the past, highlighting the often bitter and divisive politics of traditional ritual, myth, kinship, descent and ‘being first’. It also emphasizes the entanglement of modern and traditional ideas, inadequately captured by Nora's implied opposition between history and memory.     

Towards Decolonisation of Australia's Protected Area Management: the Nantawarrina Indigenous Protected Area Experience

Management of Australia's National Parks and Protected Areas originally developed according to the United State's ‘Yellowstone’ model. Aimed primarily at preserving ‘wilderness’ areas, this form of protected area management has excluded indigenous habitation and land management, effectively colonising these landscapes. Since the 1980s indigenous exclusion from protected area management has been contested in the public sphere. Indigenous peoples have become involved in protected area management in various ways, such as the joint management of national parks. However, greater indigenous control is necessary to truly decolonise protected area landscapes and fully recognise the importance of indigenous Australians in land management. This paper explores a new initiative in protected area management: the Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) program. IPAs are established through voluntary declaration of indigenous land with the aim of enhancing indigenous control of protected area landscapes. Nantawarrina, the first declared IPA, is considered as a case study. Although some manifestations of colonialism are still evident in the Nantawarrina IPA, the program has made some significant contributions to the decolonisation of protected area management in Australia.     

How ‘creative’ is remembering? Culture-led regeneration and the politics of memory in Bogota,Colombia

ABSTRACT

Recently, Colombia’s post-conflict transition has experienced strong international attention. In Bogota, commemorative politics of the conflict insert themselves in complex processes of place branding: employing culture to rescale the city image from unsafe and violent to culturally vibrant. However, how to reckon with the country’s violent past in the culture-led renaissance of Bogota? Based on the author’s four-month of in-depth qualitative fieldwork on the main street Avenida 26 – at the center of both branding strategies and politics of memory – this paper shows the failure of institutional efforts to promote a brand of Bogota as a ‘City of Memory’. Socio-political divisions over the interpretations of the country’s past result in multi-scalar conflictive negotiations between politics and practices on the street: they reveal the tight link between memory, social justice, and urban segregation while denouncing the exclusionary visions of citizenship bared in political efforts to display memory as a territorial mark.     

Kimberley Friction: Complex Attachments to Water‐Places in Northern Australia

ABSTRACT Water, in all its physical, symbolic and metaphorical guises, has an obvious interconnection with people. Without water, human and other life forms cannot (and do not) exist. Less obvious is water's potential as a site of anthropological investigation to explore attachments to place. Such attachments, as Arturo Escobar observes, facilitate a multiplicity of place‐based cultures, and emerge when ‘connectivity, interactivity and positionality’ are present. His observation makes epistemological room for what Anna Tsing conceptualises as the ‘friction’ that permeates environmental and indigenous projects. Via Australian‐based Kimberley ethnographic insights, this article examines people's attachments to place‐based cultures when they become meaningful through multi‐layered tensions about water.     

Wrathful Ancestors,Corporate Sorcerers: Rituals gone Rogue in Merauke,West Papua

Anthropological studies of ritual ‘failure’ challenge the assumed efficacy of ritual in affirming the social order. Drawing from fieldwork in West Papua, I examine the ‘failure’ and ‘success’ of two rain‐making ceremonies – one hosted by an indigenous Marind expert, the other by an Indonesian oil palm corporation. Participants conceived the failure of the first ritual as a punishment meted by ancestral spirits against Marind who support agribusiness expansion. Meanwhile, the success of the corporate ceremony confirmed rumours that corporations wield foreign and powerful forms of sorcery. Drawing on Gregory Bateson's notion of the double bind, I suggest that the ritual outcomes dramatize the irreconcilable demands placed on Marind by custom and capitalism. Attempts to endorse agribusiness incur ancestral punishment, while efforts to oppose it are thwarted by the superior power of corporate sorcerers. In this context, I argue, the moral implications of the corporate ritual's unexpected ‘success’ prove just as problematic as those of the customary ritual's dramatic ‘failure’. Co‐opted yet efficacious, corporate rituals point to a new social order in which both Marind and their ancestral spirits find themselves subjected to foreign sources of supernatural control.     

Strange powers: Conservation,science, and transparency in an indigenous political project (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The Cofán people of Amazonian Ecuador are important players within global movements for indigenous rights and biodiversity conservation. Scholars, non‐governmental organizations, and donor agencies laud their efforts to protect more than 430,000 hectares of forestland from an expanding colonization front, the transnational petroleum industry, and the spillover of violence from the Colombian civil war and drug trade. In this article, I examine how a set of discourses surrounding indigenous politics enable and constrain Cofán projects. In the context of an ethnographic account of Cofán political practice, I differentiate between the ‘expressive’, ‘instrumental’, and ‘obstructive’ nature of ‘conservation’, ‘science’, and ‘transparency’, respectively. More specifically, I develop three arguments: first, that the discourse of conservation serves to express deeply held conceptions of the ties between Cofán culture, Cofán territory, and Cofán politics; second, that the discourse of science functions as an instrument that Cofán activists use to ground a political‐economic exchange with outside powers; and third, that the discourse of transparency stymies Cofán collective action and is neither locally meaningful nor politically useful. By analyzing the social life of these terms and concepts in Cofán activism, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of discursive power, which always exists in tension with the cultural sensibilities and political perspectives that it supposedly transforms.