Becoming the State in Northern Australia: Urbanisation,Intra‐Indigenous Relatedness,and the State Effect

In Australia's Northern Territory, the Larrakia have been involved in a decades‐long effort to gain recognition as traditional owners through Land Rights and Native Title legislation. From one perspective, their claims have failed to achieve the entitlement and recognition grounded in these governmental regimes (Scambary 2007; Povinelli 2002). However, over the past decade the Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation (LNAC) and the Larrakia Development Corporation (LDC) have emerged as locally powerful corporate bodies that pursue programs and exercise forms of power on behalf of the Larrakia that can be understood in terms of state and governmental practice. Through suburban development, a night patrol, educational and vocational training, a radio station, and through forms of policy research and statistical enumeration, the Larrakia nation have emerged in the eyes of many as a de facto Aboriginal ‘state’ in the Darwin region. This paper explores the intra‐Indigenous relations through which these practices have emerged, and analyses the extent to which the LNAC might be understood as a kind of ‘state’ within a state, responsible for world‐shaping activities of knowledge production, housing and health outreach, vocational training and education, and policing. Focussing on the forms of ‘stateness’ that accrue to the Larrakia Nation in Darwin through its policing, knowledge production, and outreach programs for Aboriginal campers, the article explores the differential articulation of Aboriginal groups with the state. It concludes by asking how such differences matter in contexts of planned urbanisation in the Northern Territory.     

Sámi Reindeer Pastoralism as an Indigenous Resource Management System in Northern Norway: A Contribution to the Common Property Debate

Pastoralism is defined here as a system in which humanity mediates the relation between land and animals. The paper argues that the conventional idea of pastoralism as a pure relation between animals and land obscures indigenous resource management systems such as that of the Sámi, with its seasonal variations in both labour and pasture. This management is exercised through flexible social groupings which mediate the relation between the size of the herd and the capacity of the pasture. The fact that there is no historical evidence of overgrazing in a general sense in Sámi areas must be seen in connection with this management system.     

How best to drain the alchemist's cauldron: A study of the problem of marine pollution in Australia

There exists a significant problem of marine pollution in the Commonwealth of Australia. The present paper attempts to explore three aspects of this problem: the scientific, legislative, and probative. With respect to the scientific, the kinds (eg hydrocarbons, toxic metals, and viruses and bacteria) and sources (eg ship‐source and dumping) of marine pollution are examined. With respect to the legislative, the Offshore Constitutional Settlement 1979, as well as relevant‐ Commonwealth and state (Victoria and New South Wales) legislation are studied. Finally with respect to the probative, three solutions including cooperative, bottom‐up and top‐down ones are proposed and, at least in the case of the first of these, evaluated. The paper finds that the problem of marine pollution is rooted more in the federal nature of the Australian constitution than in the concurrent (as distinguished from coordinate) nature of the powers of the Commonwealth and states under this same constitution.     

Ethnoarchaeological study of phytolith assemblages from an agro-pastoral village in Northern Greece (Sarakini): development and application of a Phytolith Difference Index

Phytolith assemblages are analysed in an ethnographic agro-pastoral community in Northern Greece. A new method for analyzing the data, combined with the concentrations of phytoliths per gram sediment, helps to differentiate diverse uses of space in the village. The Phytolith Difference Index (PDI) contrasts the phytolith assemblages in sediment samples from the region around the village least affected by human activities with those in the village and its immediate surroundings. The PDI reveals that many of the samples are dominated by the input of the stalks of the domestic cereal, rye, which is used for food, animal fodder and roof thatching. The PDI also differentiates between dung from mules or donkeys with dung from free ranging cows and goats. Activity areas analysed include storage areas, stabling areas, animal enclosures, floors from living areas that were repeatedly swept, hearths and open areas between structures. The combined use of the PDI, together with phytolith concentrations and phytolith morphotype analyses, may prove to be useful for deciphering activity areas in archaeological sites of not only agro-pastoralists, but also pastoralists and hunter–gatherers.     

Mary Malone's Lessons: A Narrative of Citizenship in Federation Australia

Between 1886 and 1896 Mary Malone, a young Australian woman of Irish Catholic background, selected eighty‐two articles and fifty‐nine poems to preserve in an old school exercise book. This article argues that the clippings Mary assembled in her exercise book formed a narrative designed to secure a sense of social identity as the Australian colonies moved towards Federation in 1901. The exercise book reflects Mary's meditation on the stories of the colonial public sphere, a meditation that in turn faciliated her participation in community, work and as a citizen. Mary's exercise book reveals the mutual dependence of public and private realms of knowledge and experience, and the subjective assimilation of public discourse required to take a place in the social world.     

北方有江南:一项景观史的研究

隋唐以降,"江南"不仅是地域概称,亦作为一种美称在北方地区广泛流行。根据各地被称为"江南"的缘由,可大致分为水利型、稻作型、文化型、富足象征型以及景观型。各种类型的"江南"并非泾渭分明,北方各地之"江南"多是几个类型的集合体,是为复合型"江南"。北方"江南"多位于自然条件优越之地,多数"江南"指代地域为一县之隅。"江南"本是对某地社会之赞美,但美称亦会转化为"实累",明代宁夏即为此例。综合来看,传统时代北方民众对"江南"美誉的认可,缘于江南地区的繁荣兴盛,其本质上体现的是对于富足美好生活的向往与追求,亦是传统时代北方民众对于"何谓江南"的理解。     

Missionary Masculinities,the Homoerotic Gaze and the Politics of Race: Gilbert White in Northern Australia, 1885–1915

The considerable international literature on Christian missions and gender has rarely focused on missionary masculinity, or on the relationship between missionary homoeroticism and the defence of the rights of the colonised. This paper argues that homoeroticism played a part in the humanitarianism of Gilbert White who, from 1900 to 1915, was Anglican Bishop of Carpentaria in northern Australia, a heavily male frontier where inter‐racial tension and violence were common. White's attraction to the Aboriginal male body indirectly assisted all Aborigines by drawing attention to the ill effects of colonisation but his ambivalence to the female body left him uninterested in the plight of Aboriginal women, who suffered ‘extraordinary brutality’ on the frontier.     

A Blaze in the Northern Sky: Black Metal and Crimes Against Culture

Abstract

This paper focuses on an act that can be seen to typify what heritage organizations might con?dently describe as a ‘crime against culture’: the deliberate destruction by ?re of a twelfth-century wooden stave church at Fantoft in Norway in 1992. This paper uses the case study of Fantoft to challenge the ways in which heritage organizations (in this case Norway’s Directorate of Cultural Heritage) establish and protect mono-cultural narratives and push interpretative agendas predicated on an uncritical concept of universal ‘value’ and its equation with material authenticity. It also examines how distinct minority communities construct new meanings, values, and traditions without reference to institutional narratives, a process that, whilst arguably initiating a more meaningful dialogue with the past, brings in train a new set of problems.     

A Context for Concealment: The Historical Archaeology of Folk Ritual and Superstition in Australia

Are there traditions of folk ritual practice in Australian historical contexts, and are they observable in the archaeological record? Studies from the US and UK have documented a range of practices suggesting the persistence of British and European traditions of folk magic well into the twentieth century and previous historical work has identified numerous examples of ritual concealments in Australian buildings. In examining over 4,500 Australian historical archaeological sources, however, we found very few examples of possible folk ritual practices. This raises the question of why such practices are not being captured by current archaeological recording methods. As counterpoint, a general model is constructed from US, UK and Australian work that raises intriguing possibilities for the situating of superstitious behavior in Australian historical archaeology, including the contexts in which people might be more prone to practise such behaviors and how they might be materially identifiable.     

A Long History of Faith‐Based Welfare in Australia: Origins and Impact

In a nation where governments and churches have collaborated in the delivery of welfare services since 1788, such faith‐based welfare was seen as normative rather than problematic. Indeed most Australians would struggle to imagine a welfare system that was not built on such an arrangement. However, by the late twentieth century, the world views and ideologies of church leaders and politicians were no longer in alignment, creating tensions in the relationship. This article explores the origins and development of church–state collaboration in the delivery of welfare, and examines the impact this has had on both the shape of charity and the mission of the churches as faith‐based agencies are increasingly challenged in an environment in which government funding is tied to policies that potentially transgress the principles of the gospels, and victims of past welfare practices demand reparation.     

Rise and fall of Kantu: A historical study of an ancient Tibeto-Burmese speaking group

On the basis of Chinese records and previous academic achievements in and outside China, the author makes a deeper study on the history of Kantu. As an ancient Tibeto-Burmese speaking group, Kantu was likely to have developed from the Qiongdu (Kontu) of Xinan yi (ancient ethnic groups in southwestern China). During the 12^th–13^th centuries, the Kantu group resided in an extensive area expanding from the border area between present Sichuan and Yunnan provinces of China to Burma. In the late 13^th century, the Yuan troops occupied the area of Kantu. Since then, there have been no more record about Kantu in Chinese annals, and they were likely merged into the groups of “Luoluo” (Lolo). In Burma, most of the Kantu people had been merged into the local peoples, with only a few remaining in remote mountain forests of northern Burma and still keeping their own name and customs. Thus, these people are just the living sources for our studies on ancient Kantu. __________ Translated from Minzu yanjiu (Ethno National Studies), 2004: 1