This essay proposes that a fundamental arbitrariness and absurdity at the heart of culture becomes visible in times of radical social change. As the Australian nation attempts to celebrate and revive Aboriginal Culture, and institutions call upon culture to remedy Aboriginal ills, Aboriginal traditions are also being held responsible for present distress and social disorder. However, some Aboriginal people are also developing new relationships with ‘their culture’, taking up opportunities to refashion or construct identities that are free of ancestral power, and encouraging new forms of subjective identification, social recognition, and self‐assertion. Equivalent processes are explored in remote and suburban Australia at semiotic, political, and social levels. Résumé Le présent essai postule que les périodes de changements sociaux radicaux dévoilent l'arbitraire et l'absurdité fondamentaux qui se nichent au cœur de la culture. À l'heure où la nation australienne tente de mettre en lumière et de ranimer la Culture Aborigène et où les institutions en appellent à la culture pour remédier aux maux des Aborigènes, les traditions aborigènes sont aussi tenues responsables de la détresse et des désordres sociaux actuels. Certains peuples aborigènes sont cependant en train de tisser de nouveaux liens avec « leur culture » en profitant des occasions de remodeler des identités dégagées du pouvoir des ancêtres et en favorisant de nouvelles formes d'identification collective, de reconnaissance sociale et d'affirmation de soi. L'auteure explore des processus équivalents, au niveau sémiotique, politique et social, dans les zones isolées et suburbaines d'Australie.

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This paper seeks to show why there is a need to theorise race relations as a feature of white Australia's culture and as the context of Aboriginal lives. The violent drama of racial politics as glimpsed on the public media and as experienced by black communities all over the country, demands analytic attention. Anthropologists were once the experts on race, before the field lost its legitimacy. If we turn our attention to exposing the forms of colonial power that saturate Aboriginal social life, Australian anthropology may be saved from becoming an anachronism. The shuffling drunk the street derides, God staggers by in drunken rage.Mudrooroo Narogin (1990p.l), I.The contributors to this collection are all interested in the politics of representation and how this impinges on the politics of identity. Some of the work reflects a fruitful dialogue between anthropology and cultural studies. The concern is not merely with representations in the sense of describing or defining some Other people, but rather with situating acts of knowledge about these Others. As anthropologists we also interpret and represent events, the past, violence and ourselves. Those things which wedo not name are rendered passive, indeterminant, irrelevant. The knowledge produced by the practice of field-work is premised on a number of such exclusions. The absence of white Australians from many accounts of the social world of black Australians is one example. The erasure of racism as a lived structure of domination is another and reversals, appropriations and subversions of power relations are also rendered invisible. When the slaves in southern U.S.A. ate the master's pig it tasted especially good. Genovese's rendering of such events includes the slaves' impeccable logic that, in eating the master's hog, they had only transformed his property from one form into another, much as they did when they fed the master's com to the master's chickens (1976:602). In doing so they turned the logic of slavery, that a certain category of people are no more than chattels, back on itself. The ideological reversal produced a delicious sauce. It also presented a more irksome challenge to the plantation regime than the mere threat to