Politics and the Cultural Landscape: The Case of Aboriginal Land Rights

In this paper Aboriginal land rights are analysed from the perspective of a disadvantaged group seeking access to a scarce resource controlled by external agents. The Aboriginal participants in land rights politics are found to be actively seeking ways in which their interest in the land can most effectively be communicated to external groups which have constructed well-formed, but often distorted images of what constitutes a genuine Aboriginal interest in the land These externally constructed notions of Aboriginality and what constitutes a valid land claim are influencing the concepts used by Aboriginal groups in the public political arena to demonstrate their unique interest in the land In this paper three examples of this process are explored- the emphasis of a specific gender model, the emphasis on spatially discrete sacred sites and the emphasis on the bounded tribal territory.     

INTERRELATIONAL INCOME-DISTRIBUTION MULTIPLIERS FOR THE WEST VIRGINIA ECONOMY*

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a set of Miyazawa interrelational multipliers, which measure how direct changes in the income of each income bracket result in indirect and induced income changes in all other brackets. The multipliers have been calculated for a 9-by-9 pairing of income brackets for West Virginia in 1982. Their estimation is based on a combination of survey and nonsurvey data in three forms: a 1982 West Virginia input-output table, a multisector income-distribution matrix, and an income disaggregated consumption matrix. The paper illustrates the usefulness of the multipliers by showing how they provide insight into the viability of trickle-down theory and the incidence of regional development policy.     

PARALLELS AND DIVERGENCES BETWEEN WARLPIRI SIGN LANGUAGE AND SPOKEN WARLPIRI: ANALYSES OF SIGNED AND SPOKEN DISCOURSES

Among the Warlpiri, as among other central Australian Aborigines, older women use a complex sign language as an alternative to speech when, for ritual reasons, as in mourning, silence must be observed. As part of a study of the relationship between this sign language and spoken Warlpiri, a comparison is undertaken between a signed version and a spoken version of two traditional narratives, each told by the same woman out recorded on separate occasions. It is found that signs are ordered in the same way within signed discourse as are words in spoken discourse and a comparison between discourse units in the two versions dealing with the same content shows a close correspondence between the words and signs used; complex lexical items, such as preverb-verb formations in the spoken language are commonly matched by compound signs that correspond to the morphological structure of the spoken form. However, only lexical morphemes are represented in sign. Markers of case relations, tense, and cliticized pronouns are not signed. The findings are interpreted as supporting the view that these alternate sign languages, unlike sign language of the deaf, are not fully autonomous systems but are built up as gestural representations of the semantic units provided by the spoken language.