Australia’s anthropologists under fire, because of their support for Aboriginal Land Rights
Throughout the two centuries of colonisation, Aboriginal people, though vastly outnumbered, have done their best to resist European dominance: they fought to defend their land and, even under the enforced control of settlers, missionaries and the state, continued to lead subversive ‘double lives’ in which they tried to maintain their own cultural practices. They have struggled for greater social, economic and political equality, and they have tried desperately to reclaim their land.
Australia is one part of the world in which anthropologists have been able to make themselves genuinely useful to indigenous groups. For many decades now, they have been instrumental in assisting Aboriginal people in recording cultural knowledge and using this to support their claims to land and resources and their efforts to regain self-determination.
The latest development in Australia is for those opposed to land claims to spend very large sums of money suing anthropologists for millions of dollars,
Snippet #40: AUSTRALIA’S ABORIGINAL MINORITY – DISPOSSESSION AND LAND RIGHTS http://snippetysnippet.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/aboriginal-minority-snippet/ 26 Sept 13, “The Aboriginal minority in Australia represents about 2 per cent of the population as a whole. Colonisation of the country by Europeans has taken place over 200 years, with the major dispossession of the indigenous people occurring primarily in the first century of colonisation, but with some areas not fully ‘settled’ until early in the twentieth century. In some regions well into that century, the colonisation of land was accompanied by considerable violence and sometimes by outright genocide.
Aboriginal groups largely had to choose between working for the European pastoralists who appropriated their land – which often entailed enforced concubinage for the women, and unpaid labour for the men and women alike – or fleeing to the protection of mission reserves, in which children were routinely separated from their families and traditional practices were firmly suppressed. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the paternalistic dominance of the church was replaced by that of the state, with indigenous people in many parts of the country receiving neither wages for their work, nor the vote, until the 1960s…
Indigenous communities are beset by social problems well beyond those experienced by the rest of the population. Aboriginal incomes are less than two-thirds of the national average; unemployment is three times the national average; rates of arrest, conviction and incarceration are also significantly higher…and deaths in custody are about 26 times the rate than for other Australians. Suicide rates in Aboriginal communities, particularly by teenage males, are soaring, infant deaths are twice as common as in the wider population, and Aboriginal life expectancies are 20 years less than the national average… Many people live in what journalists call ‘third world conditions’, wherein even so basic a need as clean water cannot be guaranteed…
The Federal Government promptly produced the 1993 Native Title Bill, enabling further land claims. This was greeted with hope by some as a significant step towards justice and reconciliation, and with dismay by others as a national disaster which threatened the tenure – and thus the economic survival – of other non-Aboriginal land-holding groups. The hysteria grew, encouraged by the pastoralist and mining industries, and there was a sharp upsurge in support for extreme right-wing parties such as One Nation, led by the notorious Pauline Hanson… and, in a violent backlash, a conservative-dominated Coalition government was elected in 1996, with a mandate to dismantle, or at least ameliorate the reformist efforts of the previous liberal regime…
The imagery used to portray Aboriginal interests is at times extreme: for example, a few years ago the mining association of Western Australia commissioned a television advertisement showing a black hand coming down the grab the land… Overt racism is largely tolerated – indeed normalised – in many parts of Australia, most particularly in Western Australia and Queensland, which have had particularly conservative state governments and the areas most dependent on primary industries [such as mining]
Australia is one part of the world in which anthropologists have been able to make themselves genuinely useful to indigenous groups. For many decades now, they have been instrumental in assisting Aboriginal people in recording cultural knowledge and using this to support their claims to land and resources and their efforts to regain self-determination. They have acted as advocates and expert witnesses in every land claim, they have advised at every stage of legislative development, they have provided insights into Aboriginal culture for policy makers…
However, what this has meant for anthropologists is that they are commonly described by the extreme elements in group opposed to these interests as ‘traitors’, ‘troublemakers’ or ‘blooding interfering do-gooders’. Seen as being aligned with Aboriginal interests, they are co-recipients of the same racist hostilities, and are regularly subjected, in the field and in the media, to attacks upon their professional competence, their integrity and their supposed objectivity… One has, quite routinely, to deal with hostile responses to involvement with Aboriginal communities along the lines of ‘Why on earth do you want to work with those people?’ – though not always framed in such polite terms.
The latest development in Australia is for those opposed to land claims to spend very large sums of money suing anthropologists for millions of dollars, as in the Hindmarsh case [1994], in which anthropologist Deane Fergie was forced to defend her evidence to the land tribunal, and her professional reputation.
In the Australian political arena a large proportion of the work that anthropologists do is applied: people are either professionally involved in the land claim process, assisting Aboriginal groups in their efforts to regain traditional land, or working as advisers in the development of policies aimed at dealing with economic and social inequities. It is extremely rare for anthropologists to act for the groups opposed to Aboriginal interests…
‘The question as to whether or not anthropology is a science has crucial political implications. If it has no ability to offer ‘objective’ analysis or specialist ‘expertise’ its potential to carry legal weight is seriously undermined. In effect, a successful land claim depends upon the court’s acceptance of the empirical ethnographic data as evidence – i.e. as proof – of land tenure. Thus, the opponents of Aboriginal rights, as I mentioned previously, have gone to considerable lengths to foreground the subjective, interpretative nature of anthropology, and its ‘unreliable narration’…”
– Strang, Veronica 2003 ‘An Appropriate Question? The Propriety of Anthropological Analysis in the Australian Political Arena’, from P. Caplan (ed.) The Ethics of Anthropology: Debates and Dilemmas, pp. 173-183.
For full, original text visit: http://books.google.com.au/books?id=UzsAbcamdf4C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
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