The Refusal of Holy Engagement: How Man‐making Can Fail

ABSTRACT Among Aboriginal Countrymen of the Darwin hinterland, a youth can be ceremonially circumcised only to emerge from the ceremony physically altered but unchanged in himself. Man‐making can thus fail. To explain both the possibility and the consequences of crashing failure, the analyst attends to: (1) politics attendant on the maturation of males, (2) the relationship between the failed rite and the total structure for the performance of all ‘Men's Business’; and (most importantly) (3) the relationships between Dreamings and humans as players in the socio‐religious formation (a concept derived from application of the Thomas theorem) in which there is human engagement with the holy. Argument establishes that (in logic) ontology precedes structure because the structure for holy engagement is built to accommodate prior constructions of both the human person and the personified Power that is a Dreaming.     

Queensland Aborigines,Multiple Realities and the Social Sources of Suffering: Psychiatry and Moral Regions of Being: Part 1

ABSTRACT This two part paper considers the experience of a range of magico‐religious experiences (such as visions and voices) and spirit beliefs in a rural Aboriginal town. The papers challenge the tendency of institutionalised psychiatry to medicalise the experiences and critiques the way in which its individualistic practice is intensified in the face of an incomprehensible Aboriginal ‘other’ to become part of the power imbalance that characterises the relationship between Indigenous and white domains. The work reveals the internal differentiation and politics of the Aboriginal domain, as the meanings of these experiences and actions are contested and negotiated by the residents and in so doing they decentre the concerns of the white domain and attempt to control their relationship with it. Thus the plausibility structure that sustains these multiple realities reflects both accommodation and resistance to the material and historical conditions imposed and enacted by mainstream society on the residents, and to current socio‐political realities. I conclude that the residents' narratives chart the grounds of moral adjudication as the experiences were rarely conceptualised by local people as signs of individual pathology but as reflections of social reality. Psychiatric drug therapy and the behaviourist assumptions underlying its practice posit atomised individuals as the appropriate site of intervention as against the multiple realities revealed by the phenomenology of the experiences. The papers thus call into question Australian mainstream ‘commonsense’ that circulates about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which justifies representations of them as sickly outcasts in Australian society.     

Fishing Lifestyles: ‘Territorians’, Traditional Owners and the Management of Recreational Fishing in Kakadu National Park

The relationships between traditional Aboriginal land owners and other Park users in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory are characterised by competing agendas and competing ideas about appropriate ways of relating to the environment. Similarly, the management of recreational fishing in the Park is permeated by the tensions and opposition of contested ideas and perspectives from non‐Aboriginal fishers and Aboriginal traditional owners. The local know‐ledge and rights of ‘Territorians’[non‐Aboriginal Northern Territory residents] are continually pitted against the local knowledge and rights of Aboriginal traditional owners. Under these circumstances, debates between non‐Aboriginal fishers and Aboriginal traditional owners are overwhelmingly dominated by the unequal power relationships created through an alliance between science and the State. The complex and multi‐dimensional nature of Aboriginal traditional owners’ concerns for country renders these concerns invisible or incomprehensible to government, science and non‐Aboriginal fishers who are each guided by very different epistemic commitments. It is a state of affairs that leaves the situated knowledge of Aboriginal traditional owners with a limited authority in the non‐Aboriginal domain and detracts from their ability to manage and care for their homelands.

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Deliberative democracy and the Tasmanian forest peace process

Decades of contention regarding Tasmania's forests have been accompanied by several attempts for peace. Most recently the ‘forest peace process’ culminated in the 2012 Tasmanian Forest Agreement (TFA). We evaluate the peace process that led to the TFA, and its subsequent dismantling, from the perspective of deliberative democracy, which promises to achieve democratically legitimate outcomes in the toughest conflicts. Using normative criteria to evaluate the deliberative democratic quality of the process, our analysis shows that trades-offs were needed, and not all normative criteria could be achieved equally and simultaneously. Despite its shortcomings, and short-lived life, the peace process illustrates the possibility of achieving meta-consensus in deep value conflicts, and the crucial role of this consensus for sustaining deliberation.     

The Clanking of Medieval Chains: Extra-Judicial Banishment in the British Empire

Banishment in English law was circumscribed by the Magna Carta and habeas corpus and prohibited except by legal procedure. The Transportation Act of 1718 legalised exile and enshrined convictism in law. The case of Bancoult (No.2), 2008, which considered the banishment of the Ilois of Chagos Island in the 1960s, brought consideration of banishment into the twentieth century and opened the royal prerogative to modern scrutiny. What becomes clear from this case is that banishment relied on royal prerogative without resort to legal process and was surprisingly routine throughout the British Empire. This article considers the implications of this case and some of the wider history of banishment in the empire.     

Global Intersections: US Whalers and Voyagers and Australasia

The focus of this article is the way in which United States (US) whalers, and other Pacific voyagers, helped to consolidate an increasingly globalized understanding of the world ? with implications for both the US itself and Australasia. The US globalizing enterprises also resulted in greater contact between Europeans and a diverse range of peoples within the Pacific, which encompassed Australian Aborigines and Polynesians. Linking the US and Australia and their globalizing enterprises was a sense of a common culture and origins, along with a shared justification for Pacific expansionism based on Enlightenment conceptions of the promotion of progress.     

Bushwalking in Kakadu: a study of cultural borderlands

This paper examines the relationship between the contested domains of Aboriginal traditional owners and non‐Aboriginal Park users, specifically bushwalkers, in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. It argues that Kakadu remains a cultural borderland where a negotiated relationship between local Aboriginal traditional owners and non‐Aboriginal Park users is struggling to emerge. It finds that the rhetoric of Aboriginal/non‐Aboriginal co‐existence, which pervades the Park, is infused by the legacy of a colonial settler state, which has presumed access to territory, marginalized Indigenous people and obviated their social and cultural landscape in favour of an expansionist aesthetic of wilderness preservation and appreciation. This paper finds that the activities of bushwalkers and the concerns that these activities generate in the local Aboriginal domain produce a novel space where place is contested and transformed, a space of negotiation and resistance where people's cherished values both compete with and influence one another.     

Queensland Aborigines,Multiple Realities and the Social Sources of Suffering Part 2 Suicide,Spirits and Symbolism

ABSTRACT This is the second part of a paper that explores a range of magico‐religious experiences such as immaterial voices and visions, in terms of local cultural, moral and socio‐political circumstances in an Aboriginal town in rural Queensland. This part of the paper explores the political and cultural symbolism and meaning of suicide. It charts the saliency of suicide amongst two groups of kin and cohorts and the social meaningfulness and problematic of the voices and visions in relation to suicide, to identity and family forms and to funerals and a heavily drinking lifestyle. I argue that voices and visions are used to reinterpret social experience and to establish meaning and that tragically suicide evokes connectivity rather than anomie and here cannot be understood merely as an individualistic act or evidence of individual pathology. Rather it is about transformation and crossing a threshold to join an enduring domain of Aboriginality. In this life world, where family is the highest social value and where a relational view of persons holds sway, the individualistic practice of psychiatric and other helping professions, is a considerable problem.     

‘By the facts we add to our store’: Lorimer Fison,Lewis Henry Morgan and the Spread of Kinship Studies in Australia

ABSTRACT The formal study of kinship was introduced to the South Pacific Islands and the Australian colonies by Methodist missionary Lorimer Fison who distributed schedules and collected kinship data from around the region in collaboration with the founder of Anthropology in America, Lewis Henry Morgan. This article is a sequel to H. Gardner, 2008 ‘The origins of kinship in Oceania’, Oceania, 78:2, 137–150. It traces Lorimer Fison's return to the Australian colonies from his mission post in Fiji and the subsequent spread of kinship schedules to settlers, missionaries and administrators around Australia. Based on unpublished correspondence, the article investigates Fison's gradual disillusionment with Morgan's evolutionist hypothesis of the development of the human family and his disdain for the speculation of much metropolitan anthropology in the 1870s.     

A Mona effect: How place discourse constitutes culture‐led change

The arrival of the Museum and Old and New Art (Mona) in the disadvantaged municipality of Glenorchy was heralded as the beginning of significant social change in Australia's island state of Tasmania. These expectations were premised on a local place discourse known as the “Tasmanian gothic,” and, in this article, our aim is to illustrate the importance of place specifications in culture‐led change, including in relation to how place discourse constitutes such change. To do this work, we illustrate a Mona effect that comprises a critical account of the Tasmanian gothic informed by an empiric of tourist movement to and from Mona. We demonstrate that tourist movements follow existing socio‐spatial patterns, with tourists from higher socio‐economic backgrounds bypassing Glenorchy and those from lower socio‐economic backgrounds more likely to stop in this disadvantaged municipality. This socio‐spatial account unsettles the characterisation of Tasmania and Tasmanians provided by the Tasmanian gothic and we conclude by observing (1) a lack of significant social change resulting from Mona, in part explained by well‐established socio‐economic patterns; (2) signs of more subtle change that warrant further investigation; and (3) how local place discourse can act to curtail culture‐led change by reinforcing existing socio‐economic patterns.