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Article Excerpt
Both the colonial encapsulation and post-colonial recognition of North Queensland's Aboriginal population have been achieved through legislative demarcation. Under the auspices of the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 ('the Act'), Queensland's Aboriginal population became state wards, (1) although they were not recognised as Australian citizens for another seventy years (Chesterman and Galligan 1997:31-57; Ganter and Kidd 1993; Kidd 1996). More recently, the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993 and Queensland's own Aboriginal Land Act 1991 have provided instruments for the legal recognition of groups of 'traditional owners' understood to hold conjoint interests in land. (2)
This paper explores the ongoing effects of legal demarcation on Aboriginal North Queenslanders, drawing on my own ethnographic and applied research in Central Cape York Peninsula. (3) These effects stem, in part, from the manner in which 'the Act' provided for the localization of the state in places like the Central Peninsula. In these places, the state effected huge transformations in Aboriginal lives through the control of local authorities and through the state's support of settler 'bosses'. This control included the creation of an indentured labour force and the state removals that produced the 'stolen generations' (HREOC 1997; Read 1999). The early period of authoritarian control also laid the grounds for the transformation of the 'Aboriginal domain' (von Sturmer 1984)--those aspects of the local that are marked by specifically Aboriginal forms of social action, and which are presumed to exist in disjunction from the state projects and the local settler population. The effects of these transformations continue to shape Aboriginal lives.
The tone of the state's relationship with Aborigines apparently shifted from control to facilitation during the 'self-determination' era that followed the repeal of the Act's remaining provisions in 1971. (4) During this period, new legislation provided for Aboriginal land rights and for the establishment of local, regional and national Aboriginal organizations. This legislation has been widely presumed to be beneficial, not least in terms of the state's recognition of distinct Aboriginal 'rights'. But while attempts to achieve social justice may have underlain the development of such legislation, many Aboriginal people are less sure of its benefits. During fieldwork in the Central Peninsula, including substantial work on claims made under the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993 and Queensland's Aboriginal Land Act 1991, Aboriginal claimants have repeatedly made two related complaints to me: that 'Native Title causes arguments between our families', and--with regard to the Native Title process--that 'we are still under the Act'.
In what follows, I consider these complaints, taking them as a starting point to explore the ongoing effects of state demarcation of Aboriginal identities. The assertion that Aboriginal people remain 'under the Act' implies that the state continues to cause detrimental effects through its treatment of Aboriginal people. It also implies that these effects stem from a state understood as fundamentally disconnected from Aboriginal life-worlds. I do not consider such perceptions of ongoing disempowerment in relation to the state to be inaccurate. But conceptions of Aboriginal life-worlds existing in opposition to the state fail to grasp the growing imbrication of the state within these life-worlds. Moreover, conceptions of the state's externality not only obscure, but also effect the state's reshaping of Aboriginal lives. In order to properly understand the contemporary relationship between the state and Aboriginal people--as well as the historical foundations of this relationship--it is necessary to build on recent anthropological insights into the social life of the state (Aretxaga 2003: Linke 2006; Trouillot 2003). This work argues persuasively that the state not only exists as an aspect of local life-worlds, but that it is also internalized as an aspect of local personhood or subjectivity.
In this article I offer a conception of the changing relationship between Aboriginal people and the state. I argue that the state's relationship with Aborigines now extends beyond forceful interventions into local social organization and the limitation of the capacity for self-determination, despite these being what many Aboriginal North Queenslanders have in mind when they claim that they remain 'under the Act'. In order to understand the state-Aboriginal relationship, I suggest that it is necessary to come to grips with the ways in which the state has transformed Aboriginal subjectivities.
SUBJECTIVITY AND THE STATE
Following recent anthropological accounts (Biehl et. al. 2007; Luhrmann 2006; Ortner 2005; Sokefeld 1999), I understand 'subjectivity' to designate the shifting series of perceptions, thoughts and affects and actions that give shape to human existence. Ortner (2005: 31) encapsulates the complex character of subjectivity, formed in the interplay between personal experience and social and cultural configurations, defining it as
the ensemble of modes of perception, affect, thought, desire, fear, and so forth that animate social subjects ... as well as the cultural and social formations that shape, organize, and provoke these modes of affect, thought and so on (Ortner 2005: 31).
Understood in this way, subjectivity neither precedes nor exists separately from social organization. And although it depends on a general human 'egoity', it always involves particular, embodied experiences of personhood (Jackson 1998:7-8). (5) This is not to say that subjectivity is fundamentally individual. Rather, individuality itself marks a particular, socio-culturally inflected form of personhood, generative of particular kinds of subjectivity. Subjectivity, then, is deeply tied--in a constitutive manner--with the formal and informal sociopolitical configurations that shape the conduct of persons and groups (Butler 1997: Foucault 1982). These include the socio-political configurations that constitute the state.
Given this interweaving of subjectivity and social organization, examining conceptions of personhood and self-experience can shed light on the relationship between the state and Aboriginal people. I find Trouillot's (2003) recent discussion of 'state effects' to be particularly useful for understanding this relationship. For Trouillot, 'state effects' represent the manner in which the state is constituted through particular forms of social action. With regard to North Queensland, paying careful attention to the operation of state effects within local life-worlds can not only reveal the manner in which Aboriginal people are affected by the state, but also the ways that these changes have reshaped Aboriginal subjectivities.
Viewed in this way, the Queensland Government's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993 can be understood as marking the transformation of Aboriginal subjectivity within a state-oriented socio-cultural field. From the moment that Aboriginal people came 'under the Act'--when they found themselves 'outside the nation, [but] inside the state' (Beckett 1988:6)--they became subject to the state. This subjection occurred not only through the application of coercive force, but also through a re-orientation of Aboriginal social and cultural life. This has led not only to a situation in which there is no autonomous Aboriginal community, independent of the state (Cowlishaw 2004:313), but also one in which the state and 'Indigenous life projects' are now deeply interwoven (Peterson 2006:7).
While Aboriginal complaints about continuing state control recognize the ongoing coercive force of the state in Aboriginal lives, they fail to recognize the extent to which a re-orientation of Aboriginal subjectivity has become a key aspect of contemporary Aboriginal-state relations. Indeed, such a realization is made difficult partly because both popular and academic understandings of the state typically revolve around a distinction between the state, on one hand, and society on the other (Mitchell 1991). This distinction, internalized by those subject to the state's authority, lies at the heart of the state's constitution in particular human life-worlds (Linke 2006:217). It appears to take a particularly strong form among Aboriginal North Queenslanders, who commonly conceive of a radical distinction between 'Aboriginal society' and the 'mainstream' state. (6)
Making a distinction between Aboriginal life-worlds and the state is a form of what Austin-Broos (1996:2) calls 'two-laws talk'. Like other talk of this kind, it posits a fundamental disjuncture between settler or 'mainstream' society and 'Aboriginal societ(ies)'. The claim that Aboriginal North Queenslanders are 'still under the Act' thus acknowledges the inevitability of participation in wider Australian society, whilst simultaneously obfuscating the radical influence of state bureaucracy (and other aspects of the 'mainstream') on Aboriginal cultural production, identity and self-experience.
Austin-Broos' analysis hints at this obfuscation in noting the way in which 'progressive European cultural encompassment proceeds by stealth' (Austin-Broos 1996:2, fn.1). But her approach to two-laws talk as a basis for the contestation of assimilation is not without problems. In Far North Queensland, talk of being 'still under the Act' disguises the character of encompassment as much as it exposes it. Such talk is itself--in part at least--a form of 'ideology as lived experience' (Austin-Broos 1996:2, fn.1). With regard to Central Cape York Peninsula, Austin-Broos is both simultaneously close to the mark and wide of it when she writes that:
The two-laws formulation ... becomes a construction of Aboriginality as much as it is also a construction of European law ... The larger process involves, however, a certain cultural hegemony to the extent that this process is inexorably shaped by the context of white society (Austin-Broos 1996:3, emphasis added).
In understanding the relationships between the state and Aboriginal Australians, we can usefully expand an anthropological conception of the contemporary state to include forms of organization, social fields and subjectivities outside the state's formal limits (Aretxaga 2003; Kapferer 1995; Linke 2006; Trouillot 2003; see also Foucault 1982; Mitchell 1991). This conceptual move reveals that the 'cultural hegemony' identified by Austin-Broos operates through auto-constructions of Aboriginality. Such auto-constructions are shaped by past and present societal contexts. Notions of identity and autonomy may thus draw their cultural logic from originally exogenous modes of thinking. This may be particularly true of those notions tied to contemporary articulations of 'indigeneity' (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000; Kapferer 1995; Kuper 2003; Meyer and Geschiere 1999; Povinelli 2002). The fact that Aborigines continue to identify as members of a particular culture distinct from settler society (Austin-Broos 1996:4) cannot simply be taken as a successful resistance to assimilation in either cultural or social terms. Rather, in the current context, identity lies at the heart of the existence of the state in relation to Aboriginal subjects, not least through the way identity is configured within 'the practised constitution of experience' (Austin-Broos 1996:6, fn.3)--that is, through the interweaving of identity and subjectivity.
On the other hand, it is clear that Aboriginal life-worlds involve social and cultural forms quite different to those associated with the 'mainstream' and the state, and that these forms generate distinct aspects of Aboriginal subjectivity....
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