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.     

Embodying modernity: reading narratives of Indian women's sexual autonomy and violation

References are often made in contemporary Indian discourse, both popular and academic, to the ‘new Indian woman’, a subject position that is seen as coterminous with the emerging identity of the Indian nation as modern – the ‘new India’. This article unpacks key discourses that construct the ‘new woman’ in the public imagination and suggests that the modernity of this imagined figure is founded upon a notion of autonomy that is deeply embodied. While the characteristics of this embodied modernity challenge influential feminist arguments as to the ‘shallow’ modernity of the ‘new Indian woman’, it nonetheless has problematic implications from a feminist perspective. The narrative shaped by these discourses around the question of what it means to be modern not only perpetuates an historically pervasive reductionism in which woman is seen to be defined and determined by the corporeal but also, and more problematically, constructs a boundary around the notion of modern womanhood that excludes women whose bodily autonomy has been compromised, for example through sexual assault. This narrative exclusion is perpetrated in at least three ways: through a discursive rendering of the woman as passive, the objectification of the woman, and a narrative structure that mimics the act of violation. Such erasure of the autonomy of sexually violated women is not inevitable, however, and an analysis of two ‘counter-narratives’ demonstrates how discourses of rape may both reinscribe the autonomy of such women and re-orient the reader to a position of empathy rather than opposition.     

Beyond convention: reimagining indigenous tourism

As a knowledge domain, contemporary indigenous tourism is framed in reference to cultures conventionally recognized as ‘indigenous,’ and engages this almost exclusively from a supply-side perspective. This paper reimagines indigeneity and indigenous tourism as embracing also the other 94% of global population. From a utilitarian perspective, this inclusion of ‘nonconventional indigenous people’ harbors opportunities to advance the sustainability agenda by reconnecting modern mainstream cultures, through personal exposure in dispersed settings, with ancestral roots and associated sustainable livelihoods. Such reconnections are framed as a form of re-indigenization that may be especially attractive to ‘travel promiscuous’ diasporic populations such as those found in the ‘settler’ countries of Canada, United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Articulation of this concept could be facilitated by existing knowledge domains and products in heritage tourism, rural tourism, and urban tourism, as well as sustainable tourism. Rather than usurping conventional indigenous efforts to re-indigenize and re-empower, it is contended that the nonconventional dimension can coexist with and even reinforce the latter, while enriching the dimensions of indigenous tourism as a dynamic knowledge domain.     

(RE)MAPPING INDIGENOUS ‘RACE’/PLACE IN POSTCOLONIAL PENINSULAR MALAYSIA1

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on how indigeneity has been constructed, deployed and ruptured in postcolonial Malay(si)a. Prior to the independence of Malaya in 1957, British colonial administrators designated certain groups of inhabitants as being ‘indigenous’ to the land through European imaginings of ‘race’. The majority, politically dominant Malays were deemed the definitive peoples of this geographical territory, and the terrain was naturalized as ‘the Malay Peninsula’. Under the postcolonial government, British conceptions of the peninsula were retained; the Malays were given political power and recognition of their ‘special (indigenous) position’ in ways that Orang Asli minorities—also considered indigenous ‐ were not. This uneven recognition is evident in current postcolonial political, economic, administrative and legal arrangements for Malays and Orang Asli. In recent years, Orang Asli advocates have been articulating their struggles over land rights by drawing upon transnational discourses concerning indigenous peoples. Recent judicial decisions concerning native title for the Orang Asli potentially disrupt ethno‐nationalist assertions of the peninsula as belonging to the ‘native’ Malays. These contemporary contests in postcolonial identity formations unsettle hegemonic geopolitical ‘race’/place narratives of Peninsular Malaysia.     

Mapping reflexive communities: visualizing the geographies of emotion

Whereas ‘simple modernity’ was characterized by objective space, the grid of the map, and a removal of all subjective symbols or signs, ‘reflexive modernity’ is characterized by a re‐subjectivization of space. Within this space ‘reflexive communities’ emerge to make sense of emotions and experiences, reflecting particular ways of behaving, thinking and being. As geographers one task facing us now is to visualize and map the spaces of reflexive modernization. This paper presents a means of visualizing the text of emotions uncovered in the research encounter—a way of ‘mapping’ reflexive communities—and shows how we can articulate, negotiate and represent, complex emotional landscapes. The ‘maps’—which draw on spatial metaphors that permeate everyday emotions—such as ‘distancing’ ourselves, ‘engaging’, ‘joining’, ‘feeling detached’, ‘embracing’—were developed initially through analysis of in‐depth interviews with long‐term sufferers of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). Although the key focus of the paper is the experience of long‐term illness, the method of visualizing emotional geographies of everyday life could be applied in any number of fields. As such, it adds to the search across the social sciences for understanding the reflexive nature of contemporary space.     

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.     

The experience of time in long-term travel

Travellers’ understanding and experience of the flow, pace of time and distinctions between past, present and future are culturally specific with many from advanced urbanised societies immersed in a life-style characterised as time-pressured. Leisure travel can provide opportunities for those from such ‘harried’ societies to escape these pressures of home. This paper explores the experience of ‘time’ of long-term, self-drive travellers in Australia. The findings demonstrate the change in perception of time flow and pace as the travellers took control of time to slow down. Their sense of time was also informed by the spatial and temporal narrative of the Australian landscape through which they were travelling. The further they moved inland and away from Western cities, the closer they came to experience the exotic, temporal otherness that has been constructed in relation to the Outback and Australian indigenous culture. The study confirmed that just as spaces, places and landscape are animated and co-produced through the practice of mobility so too is sense of time. There were physical and psychological benefits for the travellers in controlling their own sense of time by travelling slowly and living in the moment. The Australian landscape, especially in remote areas, provides a suitable backdrop, with its isolation, quietness, ancientness, ‘timelessness’ and indigenous living culture, to contemplate one's life and place in the universe. While these findings can assist destination managers in their promotion of regional Australia and self-drive, long-term travel, caution is required to avoid privileging an exotic temporal narrative at the expense of contemporary, political, indigenous and environmental concerns.     

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.     

Eating,serving, and self-realisation: food and modern identities in contemporary Indian women's writing

The ‘new Indian woman’ is often invoked in popular and academic discourse as the embodiment of a modern nation—the ‘new India’. Feminist studies of this figure typically focus on the body of the imagined ‘new woman’ as a site upon which modernity is inscribed, allowing little room for the agency of women who actively contest imposed identities and roles in the quintessentially modern project of self-determination. In this article I argue that narratives of food in contemporary fiction and fictionalised autobiographical writing by Indian women challenge both dominant feminist critiques of the ‘new woman’, and influential accounts of modernity as ‘rupture’ in masculinist theoretical literature. In these texts food, and particularly the practice of serving food to others, is used by women as a tool for gaining independence, as a weapon to combat oppression, and as a means of negotiating migrant identities, among other things. The texts thus demonstrate the importance of appreciating the gendered nature of modernity, recognising women's modernities to be genuinely transformative of the individual, as well as continuous with traditional and conventionally feminine practices rather than necessarily opposed to them.     

Nationalising indigenous peoples,legalising indigenous lands: a (post)colonial critique of the land demarcation process in Brazil by the analysis of the Guarani-Mbyá case

The Brazilian 1988 constitution recognises indigenous peoples as ‘first and natural owners of Brazilians land’ and the 231st Article ensures their right to special territories where they could live their culture and traditions without colonising presence. The authentication of these territories, however, requires Public Power promotion, which lies on colonising, juridical accounts and depends on anthropological, scientifically historical research. Our argument here is that the bureaucratisation of the land demarcation process is only possible within a context of epistemological advantage of science, i.e. modernity, which ignores indigenous territory and time conceptions. We will also argue that this bureaucratisation has been contributing to the (neo)colonisation of the territory by retarding the recognition and protection of indigenous rights.     

‘Being in Being’: Contesting the Ontopolitics of Indigeneity

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the “ontological turn” in anthropology. Rather than seeing indigenous peoples as having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the ontological turn suggests that their importance lies in the fact that they constitute different worlds and “world” in a performatively different way. The radical promise this view holds is that a different world already exists in potentia, the access to which is a question of ontology—of being differently: ‘being in being’ rather than thinking, acting and world-making as if we were transcendent or “possessive” modern subjects. We argue that the ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or colonial epistemological and ontological legacies but rather as a new form of neoliberal governmentality, cynically manipulating critical, postcolonial and ecological sensibilities for its own ends. Thus, rather than “provincializing” dominant western hegemonic practices, such discourses of indigeneity extend them, instituting new forms of governing through calls for adaptation and resilience.     

Rethinking ‘the Human’ in Memory of Fay Gale (AO)

In 1972, the late Fay Gale (AO) published a characteristically self‐styled book titled Urban Aborigines. It launched a richly diverse career that delivered an exceptional legacy to the academic discipline of geography, aboriginal justice, university administration, and women's professional advancement. This article, based on a 2010 lecture in her honour, takes up Fay's intellectual contribution to one of these fields. It pursues her critical interest in the clash of indigenous/settler cultures in Australia through a novel account of the notorious head‐measuring practices of 19th century racial craniometry. Probing the Western premise that ‘mind’ is the assured marker of human distinction from nature, the article explores a question of fundamental contemporary relevance for Australian audiences and others across the globe: are there fresh prospects for reconciling settler and indigenous, as well as ‘green’ and ‘growth’, values if the conceit of this distinction can be overcome? This question is provoked from a peculiarly southern perspective in the spirit of the insistently geographic project that was Urban Aborigines.     

Tropes of fear and the crisis of the west: Trumpism as a discourse of post-territorial coloniality*

We examine ‘Trumpism’ as a contemporary form of colonial domination, showing how this discourse represents both a crisis of coloniality and a stimulus for a movement of ‘decoloniality’. A critical discourse analysis is applied to seven speeches delivered by Donald Trump between his announcement of his presidential candidacy in June 2015 and his inauguration in January 2017. In assessing Trump's arguments, we focus mainly on those concerning national security, illegal immigration, and the threats posed by various foreign countries. Although these arguments sit within a long colonial tradition, they also indicate a crisis of modernity, as witnessed in the growing challenges to colonial masculinity, nationalism, and rationality. We conclude that Trumpism articulates a reaction to these challenges, and that Trump's rise to power is a symptom of the crisis of post-territorial coloniality in contemporary global society.     

Abstract homes: deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation in the work of Colm Tóibín

Now that Ireland has well and truly set out on the modern journey, and come to a historical moment which requires the re-evaluation of its particular forms of modernity, what alternatives might be gleaned from contemporary Irish novels, especially those presenting a post-or anti-national position? In the journey from the ‘ex-isle of Erin’, what if homesickness strikes? What form would it take? In the present globalising moment, is home/land now merely a memory? In this essay an analysis of a selection of Colm Tóibín's novels provide one path into the problem of ‘home’ in contemporary Irish culture.     

Mare Nullius: Indigenous Rights in Saltwater Environments

This article uses two case studies to illustrate the subjection of indigenous peoples’ marine territories to a ‘double jeopardy’ of exclusion — jurisdictional and proprietary — through the legal and administrative practices of European ‘settler’ states in Australia and Canada. While the fiction of terra nullius as a legal rationale for refuting indigenous rights of property and governance has steadily eroded in recent decades, its counterpart mare nullius has proven, so far, more resistant. The authors examine how state conceptions of jurisdiction, property and boundary‐making in coastal areas accomplish the distortion and fragmentation of the coastal and marine spaces of Torres Strait Islanders in northern Queensland, Australia, and of the Cree and Inuit peoples of James and Hudson Bays in northern Que´bec, Canada. Assumptions of land–sea continuity underlie these peoples’ cultural constructions of coastal and marine environments. In examining the progress that each has made in reasserting ownership and control of coast and sea, it seems that recognition and reinforcement of their institutions for managing marine spaces and resources offer the best prospect for reconnecting fractured jurisdictional domains, and for bringing about social equity, environmental protection, and self‐determined regional development.     

On Disciplinary History and Textbooks: or Where Has Spatial Analysis Gone?

Change within the academic discipline of geography comes about as a result of internal struggles for disciplinary hegemony, for its ‘heart and soul’ and for resources. One approach to the study of these struggles is through examination of textbooks, authoritative statements of the discipline's contemporary condition. Analysis of a small number of recent texts shows that they reflect a current contest within human geography between two groups, stereotyped as ‘spatial analysts’ and ‘social theorists’. The former are being ‘written out’ of disciplinary history, despite their continued vitality. Reasons for the continued presence of, and investment in, spatial analysis within human geography are rehearsed.     

Out of the dark but not out of the cage: women's empowerment and gender relations in the Dangme West district of Ghana

In Ghana, strategies to address poverty among rural women have often been linked to women's empowerment programmes with credit as a core component of these. Yet, many programmes focus on the economic benefit to women without necessarily looking at the impact on gender relations at the household level and its implications on women. Using quantitative and qualitative data from the Dangme West district of Ghana, this article shows how poverty reduction programmes with credit components can reduce women's vulnerability to poverty and empower them. But much more needs to be done to complement these efforts. The study shows that women beneficiaries as against women non-beneficiaries have significantly improved their socio-economic status through access to financial and non-financial resources. This has in certain instances improved gender relations at the household level, with women being recognized as earners of income and contributors to household budget. However, some women still regard their spouses as ‘heads’ and require their consent in decisions even in issues that have to do with their own personal lives. Moreover, the improved economic status of women has resulted in a ‘power conflict’, creating confrontation between spouses. The article recommends that, as part of their programmes, assisting organizations and institutions must address ‘power relations’, the basis of gender subordination at the household level, otherwise socio-cultural norms and practices, underpinned by patriarchal structures, will remain ‘cages’ for rural women.     

Diversifying Australia’s Indo-Pacific infrastructure diplomacy

Infrastructure is an emerging component of Australian diplomacy. In recent years, many infrastructure and connectivity (I&C) programs have been launched in the Indo-Pacific, designed to close the ‘infrastructure gaps’ that plague the region. Competition amongst these, particularly between US and Chinese offerings, has posed a dilemma for Australian foreign policy. Australia has struggled to articulate a policy on China’s Belt and Road Initiative that balances strategic concerns against economic opportunities; while enthusiastic engagement with US alternatives risks perceptions of ‘choosing’ sides between the region’s two main powers. Yet the contemporary marketplace for Indo-Pacific I&C is much broader, with programs recently launched by many governments and regional organisations. These presents an opportunity for Australia to diversify its infrastructure diplomacy, particularly through engagement with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, cooperation with Japan and new avenues for commercial diplomacy. By engaging with a wider range of I&C partners and institutions, Australia can better integrate itself with the emerging infrastructure systems of the Indo-Pacific.     

Establishing Development Orthodoxy: Negotiating Masculinities in the Water Sector

Despite important work in development studies on the ‘male bias in the development process’, it is generally recognized that gender and development analyses have been slow to engage with masculinities. Focusing attention on the nexus between identity and globalizing development discourses, this article explores the relationship between masculinities and development through an analysis of the gendering of water paradigms. By analysing the example of the recent Cochabamba water wars in Bolivia, and placing them in historical context, the author explores how gendered representations and language are used to downplay and upgrade particular understandings of modernity as they relate to water management, and examines the mechanisms through which specific gendered identities become associated with the most successful versions of ‘modern’ development.     

Topographies of citizenship: Purhépechan Mexican women claiming political subjectivities

A variety of politics are waged through recourse to the language of ‘citizenship’ and ‘democracy’: from George W. Bush's selling of free trade for the Americas by invoking freedom and democracy, to the calls for citizenship and equality by popular movements throughout Latin America and other regions. This article links these paradoxical and transnational constructions of ‘citizenship’ to the daily economic and political struggles of indigenous women in rural Mexico. A transnational and what Cindi Katz calls a ‘topographical’ analysis of local processes deepens and complicates our understanding of local changes as they articulate with global dynamics, and it transforms how we conceptualize the global. Drawing on an ethnography of local gendered political transformation in Cherán, Mexico, I map processes visible locally onto spatialities of power and meaning across scales, weaving together various symbolic and material processes—the intentional actions and negotiations of individual women; the history of Cherán as a place and community; neoliberal economic globalization; and the effects of profoundly gendered and racialized nationalisms—in order to produce a situated knowledge of global citizenship politics. This approach highlights how women in Cherán, situated within global political economic relations and the symbolic horizons of ‘modernity’, transform the meaning and practice of citizenship and political subjectivity.