Publication: Oceania
Publication Date: 01-MAR-05
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Holcombe, Sarah
Article Excerpt
This paper is ethnographically situated in Central Australia at a place called Amunturrngu (Mt. Liebig), where Lufitja is spoken. This settlement is neither a closed unit, nor merely an artefact of colonisation. Rather, it is a socio-political entity that is to be understood 'as an ongoing articulation between global and local processes' (Friedman 1994:12). It may be remote - 320 km west of Alice Springs - but the local articulation with the structures and representatives of the State occurs within an intimate and negotiated space. Certain modalities within this post-settlement space have been reformulated to structure a complex locality, where an Indigenous polity is emergent and contested. This polity, as an achievement in constant process, is possible because of the specific kind of place that Mt. Liebig has become, it is more than a settlement, as the dynamic relationship of long-term residents to the land on which the settlement lies has structured a shared sentimental attachment, developing it as an embodied place. (1) The aspect of this place at issue here is the realm of what is often referred to as the 'intercultural', specifically in this context the space of engagement, and conversely disengagement, with the administrative apparatus of the State including its agents.
Gary Robinson, in a paper delivered in the same session as this paper at the Australian Anthropological Society conference in 2002, uses the term 'dynamic mismatch' to stress the incompatibility of the processes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous engagement with issues of governance. This term, as it emphasises agency on both sides of the engagement, highlights the core of the issues under discussion here. In this paper I provide a brief case study of this mismatch in terms that begin to explore the logic of Indigenous reaction to the locally contested issues of administration and autonomy. The theoretical tools that I use to decipher this interaction will be discussed shortly. Although at this stage these tools appear to me as foundational, this paper ultimately poses the larger question, 'how can we move beyond the focus on the reactive and ironic aspects of this Indigenous engagement and from the structuralist positioning that this entails?'
SITUATING THE PLACE AND THE ANALYSIS
The community, in terms of administrative apparatus, municipal services and co-residence, is the medium through and within which the Luritja management of the State is enacted. Elected members of the local government council, as those most active in administrative matters, have only known such installations. The pattern of movement for the majority of middle aged and elderly residents has been from Haasts Bluff (in the 1940s and 1950s) to Papunya (in the 1960s and 1970s) and finally Mt. Liebig or surrounding outstations (in the 1980s). (2) The shared language of Luritja developed as a lingua franca, or communilect (Heffernan 1984), in Haasts Bluff and spread to these other settlements. The development of this new Western Desert dialect, as it derives principally from Pintupi, though influenced by Warlpiri, Western Arrernte and other neighbouring languages (Heffernan 1984, 2000), also holds within it a shared socio-political identity. This identity emerged with the language as its speakers, many of whom are polyglots, actively began to identify as Luritja as they likewise chose to remain on what is now Luritja land and make the place of Mt. Liebig, and surrounding outstations, their home. (3)
Even though settlement has instigated rapid social reproduction, effectively transforming social relations amongst unprecedented numbers of co-residents, as many anthropologists and political scientists have examined this has not led to the seamless development of 'community' as the delivery vehicle for the 'self-determination' policy that emerged in the early 1970s (see Crough and Pritchard 1990; Myers 1986a; Smith 1989; Sullivan 1996; Wolfe 1989). Delivery of services to this 'community', through the newly instituted local councils, (4) assumed bonds of reciprocal responsibility across a broad range of members, cohesive behaviour (Sullivan 1996:11) and legitimacy and representation in corporate based decision-making founded on the pre-modern (utopian) ideals of egalitarianism, kinship and cooperation. Ironically, however, the tension inherent in this policy usage of the term community is that these pre-modern ideals are inevitably supposed to 'retreat and give way before the onslaught of the modern if modernity is to be realised' (Gusfield 1975:19) as community is, still, enmeshed in evolutionary theories of social change and becomes the bureaucratic catchword for managing diversity. This underlying ambiguity in the translation of theories of community into policy has inevitably led to tensions in policy enactment and unanticipated outcomes (see Holcombe 1998). As this paper will attempt to explicate, such tensions are realised in the negotiable quality of some aspects of this remote administration and in the realisation that 'state policies have always helped create and nurture the political forces with which the state has then to contend' (Piven and Cloward 1985:184-5, cited in Beckett 1988).
In this respect this paper is a brief consideration of Mt. Liebig as a 'society against the state'. In his 1974 seminal work of this title, Clastres examined 'non-stratified stateless societies in which cultural practices are not only not submissive to the State model, but actively subvert it, rendering impossible the very conditions in which coercive power and the State could arise' (Clastres 1987). In analysing the source of power in stateless societies Clastres realised that '[hunting and gathering] society is the place where separate power is refused, because the society itself, and not the chief, is the real locus of power' (1987:154). He also, importantly, historicised the evolutionary discourse that is inherent in Western culture, emerging as it does from our conception of political power in terms of hierarchised and authoritarian relations of command and obedience. Clastres illustrated the ethnocentricity embedded in this discourse, whereby the governing State assumes that Indigenous communities do not respond in a manner deemed appropriate, to the capitalist political economy and representative democracy because they are less advanced.
The most strongly articulated theoretical tool to emerge from the ethnographic discourse in the 1970s and 1980s in relation to administering the cultural interface, in the desert region, is structuralist in nature. This is based on the dichotomy of 'Whitefella business' versus the 'Aboriginal domain' and is perhaps best exemplified in the work of Tonkinson (1982, 1991) and Wallace (1977a, 1977b, 1990). Tonkinson, for instance, conceptualises the dichotomy between the Mardu (of the Western Desert) and 'Whitefellas' as the early Mardu response to maintaining their autonomy. The dichotomy worked to 'situate the newcomers outside their moral universe and thus separate the two groups into distinct domains of power, whose boundary was so much clearer and less permeable than any they had hitherto known' (Tonkinson 1991:160). However, this conception of dichotomous cultural domains has tended to remain static throughout the various policy shifts, as Tonkinson traces these from the 1900s through to the 1990s. As a result, the notion of what constitutes Indigenous autonomy in the 1990s/2000s has not altered from first contact. Thus, Tonkinson indicates that today 'the battle between the two domains has been steadily crumbling' (1991:173) and 'the Mardu have lost their battle to keep the White world at bay' (1991:179)....
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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