‘Mother's Blood,Father's Land’: Native Title and Comparative Land Tenure Modelling for Claims in ‘Settled’ Australia

Anthropologists working in the field of Australian native title are required to piece together the early laws and customs of claimant groups and assess the degree to which these have continued since the assumption of British sovereignty. The former task is often difficult in south‐eastern Australia because of a lack of good quality early records. I suggest here that there are general principles of Aboriginal land tenure that can be recovered from elsewhere in Aboriginal Australia, where the ethnography is of a better standard, and these can be used as a guide for working with the patchier materials characteristic of the south‐east. The principles mainly cohere around the organic relationship between patrilineal descent and complementary filiation, and are shown to be relevant to the modelling of contemporary south‐eastern tenure, where people speak of ‘bloodlines’ identified with ancestral lands.     

URBANIZATION IN THE USSR: PROBLEMS OF SPATIAL DIFFERENTIATION

The process of formation of settlement systems “in the USSR is conceptualized as proceeding at eight levels of a hierarchy corresponding to the system of economic regions, from a national system down to rayon-level systems. An important element in the present process of urbanization is the formation of urban agglomerations. The fact that these urban entities still lack juridical or even statistical status deprives urban and economic planners of a valuable data base for planning purposes so that the agglomerations often evolve in undesirable, uncoordinated ways. Greater attention needs to be given to the study of the internal structure of urban entities, a field neglected by Soviet population geographers. An undesirable tendency in Soviet agglomerations is to aim at continuously built-up territory, thus converting agglomerations into traditional compact cities, instead of making provision for open spaces for use in agriculture and forestry, recreation and communications.     

Frontiers,Borders, Edges: Liminal Challenges to the Hegemony of Exclusion

Spatial metaphors that presuppose exclusion and separation rather than interaction and co‐existence dominated in representations of landscape on Australian frontiers prior to the 1990s legal, parliamentary and social recognition of native title. Metaphors of co‐existence have emerged from the public debate about native title. This constitutes a major challenge to previously hegemonic ideas that indigenous Australians were marginal to the Australian national identity. This paper reviews the implications of metaphors used to represent frontiers, borders, boundaries, edges and complex relations within and between indigenous and non‐indigenous territories in Australia. It argues that the liminal notion of co‐existence unsettles many of the hidden legacies of colonial exploitation infecting Australian geographical imaginations to the detriment of reconciliation and sustainability. This opens avenues for geographers to address the burdens the discipline carries from its roles in creating geographies of exclusion.     

Está listo (Are you ready)? Gender,race and land registration in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve

Geographers and political ecologists are paying increased attention to the ways in which conservation policies disrupt indigenous customary tenure arrangements. However, much less attention is given to the particular ways protected area management shapes natural resource access for indigenous women. With this in mind, this article examines how a recently proposed state land project in Honduras, Catastro y Regularización, requires that Miskito residents individuate collective family lands in the interests of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘biodiversity protection’. In the debates that followed the project's announcement, Miskito women feared that such measures would erase their customary access to family lands. As the state's project seeks to re-order Reserve land, intra-Miskito struggles intensified among villagers. Such struggles are not only gendered but are shaped by longstanding processes of racialization in Honduras and the Mosquitia region. Drawing upon ethnographic research, I argue that Miskito women's subjectivity and rights to customary family holdings are informed by their ability to make ‘patriarchal bargains’ with Miskito men inside the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. Such findings suggest that scholars and policy makers continue to reflect on the ways global conservation and sustainable development practices may undermine indigenous customary tenure securities, whether intentionally or not.     

Still Under the Act? Subjectivity and the State in Aboriginal North Queensland

ABSTRACT Both the colonial encapsulation and post‐colonial recognition of North Queensland's Aboriginal population have been achieved through legislative demarcation. This paper explores the way such demarcation has extended the influence of the state within local Aboriginal life‐worlds, focusing on the State of Queensland's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993. Drawing on ethnographic and historical material from Central Cape York Peninsula, and recent anthropological theorization of the state, I argue that anthropologists need to seriously consider Aboriginal claims about what Michel‐Rolph Trouillot calls ‘state effects’. But careful examination of these claims suggests that the state no longer simply imposes its projects on fundamentally distinct Aboriginal life‐worlds. Not only is the state now deeply engaged within these life‐worlds, it is also deeply interwoven into post‐colonial Aboriginal subjectivities.     

Kurangara in Queensland?: A Critique of Duncan-Kemp's Account

A particular historical travelling religious complex in northern Western Australia, usually known as Kurangara, has been the subject of anthropological attention since the late 1930s. Overlooked in all the literature is a similar account assigned to 1912–1918, in the distant Channel Country of southwest Queensland. This is in Alice Duncan-Kemp's last book, published in 1968. My examination shows that a good deal of Duncan-Kemp's account repeated parts of a 1954 popular magazine about Kurangara in the Pilbara. In other respects Duncan-Kemp may have drawn on her own childhood experiences, but in the absence of corroboration her account has to be considered unreliable.     

近代天津会馆房地契约与诉讼习惯研究

近代天津各会馆因房地产交易而订立的种类多样的契约较具典型意义,显示了不同区域会馆土地买卖的状况。清代至民国,天津会馆房地交易的契约形式相对稳定,使得民间契约、习惯和国家法律之间并未产生很大的冲突。在近代天津解纷机制的实践中,官方与商民形成了一个相互配合支持的多层次的调解模式。尽管民间习惯具有极为重要的地位和作用,但在国家立法中,周密的法律规定和严格的执法方式,使国家法规与民间习惯的距离愈来愈大。这种状况直至民国终结都没有得到根本性的改变。     

Law and the Ruining of the Land

Abstract

In his monograph God, Justice, and Society (Oxford University Press, 2011)response to his work uses examples from Deuteronomy, Jeremiah and other prophetic texts to explore the relationship between obedience to God’s law and the wellbeing of the natural world. It concludes that given the complexity and diversity of natural law within the Western philosophical tradition, it seems unwise to draw too direct a comparison with the biblical material, which reflects a very different world view. The close study of the texts suggests that, for the biblical authors, divine law was both commanded at Sinai and written into the fabric of the universe.     

Looking at Interethnic Relations in the Southern Border Through Glass Remains: The NineteenthCentury Pampa Region,Argentina

Arroyo Nieves 2 is an open-air site located in a ravine of a small stream in the Pampa region. Its stratigraphy and archaeological remains assigned it to an aboriginal occupation dated in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. At the time, some indigenous groups were settled in strategic borderline areas by the government, on the basis of reciprocal rights and duties. Food and other supplies were given to the Indians to avoid cattle and women raids, thereby keeping the peace. The findings at Arroyo Nieves 2 include bones, from both domestic and wild species, lithic instruments and debris, fragments of stoneware bottles, refined earthenware sherds, buttons, small pieces of metal and numerous glass remains from wine, beer, bitter, and gin bottles, flasks, glasses, and food containers. This paper presents a study of the glass remains, data that have proven to provide evidence on a wide range of themes, including chronology, trade networks and activities, consumption behaviors, and discard patterns.