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...papers collected here were presented the 2002 meeting of the Australian Anthropological Society at the Australian National University in Canberra, in a session titled 'Articulating Cultures? Understanding Engagements between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Lifeworlds'. (1) The session's call for papers noted the increasing entanglement of Indigenous and non-Indigenous lifeworlds, and anthropology's apparent difficulty in making these 'intercultural' circumstances analytically tractable. Our hope was that the papers presented in this session would contribute to debates which have been unfolding in anthropology over several decades--but with renewed intensity since the late 1980s--over the applicability of the concepts of distinct domains, cultures and societies in the face of increasingly complex articulations within and across particular social groups.
The ethnographic focus of the present collection is confined to northern, north-western and central Australia. In this sense the collection attempts to bring analytic focus to bear on a particular quandary: on the one hand 'remote Australia' continues to be conceived as a context marked by cultural difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous lifeworlds. At the same time this 'remote' context, and the 'different' life-ways apparent within it, have become increasingly enmeshed both with wider Australian society and a globalised world. The question of how to conceptualise such difference-yet relatedness within an increasingly expanding social field is as crucial a challenge for accounts of 'Indigenous Australia' as it is for anthropological studies located elsewhere.
Recent debate around the continuing utility of the culture concept has been critical of earlier approaches to situations of 'difference-yet-relatedness' (see inter alia Abu-Lughod 1991; Barofsky 1994; Brumann 1999; Keesing 1974; Trouillot 2003; Yengoyan 1986). Yet such critiques often overlook the fact that conceptualisation of difference-yet-relatedness was a concern (albeit a marginal one) in early anthropological accounts (see Brightman 1995). In this sense it seems that the history of anthropology can be read as a process, a series of incremental moves towards an intercultural analysis. (2) The intention of this collection is to contribute to this ongoing development of the intercultural analysis of Indigenous Australia. The authors do not share a clearly demarcated conceptual approach. Rather, they draw upon a diversity of theoretical perspectives and speak to a range of issues. They are, however, broadly united in an attempt to shift analysis of the 'intercultural' away from an emphasis on an 'interface' between separately conceived domains, (3) and towards an approach that considers Indigenous and non-Indigenous social forms to be necessarily relational, and to occupy a single sociocultural field. In this introduction we attempt a necessarily partial treatment of the historical context for the papers that follow.
PERCEPTIONS OF CULTURE
Despite the radical promise of early twentieth century social and cultural anthropology to record the beliefs, customs, practices of the peoples of the world 'as they are in the present', a continuing orientation to an imagined original, or 'pre-contact' culture for the grounding of its descriptions left both anthropologists and our respondents with a legacy with which we continue to struggle. The salvage approach that shaped much anthropological practice into the 1960s (Barnes 1988:269) reflected the persistent view that Aboriginal people were members of a 'dying race'--if not physically then culturally; indeed, such an understanding remains lodged in contemporary imaginaries of 'culture loss', and the political and social implications which draw on this understanding.
It was not until the 1960s that such a salvage approach began to be explicitly rejected in Australianist anthropology in favour of accounts of change and the elucidation of aspects of contemporary Aboriginal society (see)or example Berndt 1962, 1977; Gale 1972; Reay 1964). (4) From the late 1960s, the discursive frame of 'continuity and change' became increasingly pervasive, and the description and analysis of colonial and state practices began to feature prominently within the growing body of ethnographic work. At this time, anthropologists generally employed an antithetical opposition between continuity and change, in which the two terms were posited as logical and ontological contraries, a paradigmatically Western conception as Sahlins (1985:144) has observed. Although Aboriginal relations with the mainstream became a topic within many ethnographic accounts, the emphasis remained primarily on the documentation of persistent aspects of Aboriginal cultural production, albeit with such persistence now understood to occur, in part, through articulation with exogenous cultural forms and artefacts.
During the 1970s and 1980s, a series of parallel developments saw major transformations in the lives of Aboriginal people in remote regions. Developments in transport and communications saw the further expansion of the sociocultural parameters of small-scale communities, meaning that remote places were increasingly intruded upon by the state and a range of other outsiders. Encountering this milieu of sociocultural transformation, and the increasing articulation of local Indigenous lifeworlds with the state, welfare and other aspects of mainstream society, many anthropologists tended to write about the resilience and efflorescence of ceremonial practice, 'traditional' Aboriginal ways of life, and the reinvigoration of customary relations to country (see for example Altman 1987; Anderson 1984; Peterson 1975, 1977; von Sturmer 1978). This continuing analytic emphasis on cultural continuity was partly influenced by the political climate in which anthropologists were working. In the Northern Territory, newly implemented land rights legislation required Aborigines to demonstrate the existence of clearly-articulated descent groups tied to the land in question by traditional 'spiritual responsibility' and rights to forage (Rumsey 1989:69). More recently, the emphasis on...
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