Dichotomous identities? Indigenous and non‐Indigenous people and the intercultural in Australia

Abstract

The terms Indigenous and non-Indigenous are commonplace in Australia yet remain undertheorised as categories which differentiate identities. In this introductory article, we overview developments in the intercultural over the last decade, focusing on the ways in which identities of Indigenous and non-Indigenous, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, Black and White are relationally constructed. We also consider intersections between the intercultural and the Intervention, a major turning point in Indigenous affairs policy with related impacts in anthropology over this period. In particular we draw attention to the need for ethnographies that show equal attention to non-Indigenous residents and propose the themes of intimacies and temporalities as key avenues for addressing this relationality. Articles contained in this special issue go some way to addressing this need, illustrating the complex ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous lives are lived together, or alongside each other, around Australia today.

Place, Indigeneity, and Identity in Australia's Gulf Country

“…However, as Tess Lea (:191) has cautioned, scholars have arguably developed an “obligatory nod to interculturality” in Australian anthropology, while “in most instances the institutions of white Australia are not themselves approached ethnographically.” Nor, we might add, are the experiences and worldviews of Australians with diverse non‐Aboriginal ancestries documented with the kind of research empathy that is focused on indigenous lives (Dalley and Martin :3). There is no shortage of critiques of “the state” and “neoliberal policy” (Lea :191), but the study of Whitefellas as critical to intercultural social action has continued over a number of decades to remain marginal to—if not completely absent from—otherwise rich ethnographic accounts of Aboriginal life.…”

“…There is no shortage of critiques of “the state” and “neoliberal policy” (Lea :191), but the study of Whitefellas as critical to intercultural social action has continued over a number of decades to remain marginal to—if not completely absent from—otherwise rich ethnographic accounts of Aboriginal life. Findings that stress the importance of not leaving “whites” to be “condemned unheard” (Cowlishaw :2) are the exception in Australian Aboriginal studies (Dalley and Martin ; Henry ; Kowal ).…”

“…But as the reference to the “White man's world” suggests, what is also being articulated is the assumption that Aboriginal people in the Gulf exist in a separate and partly incommensurate Blackfella world, different from the lives of other Australians. This vernacular sense of separate Blackfella and Whitefella domains—complicating academic analyses that stress the intercultural bases of contemporary Australian identities (Dalley and Martin ; Hinkson and Smith ; Merlan )—foregrounds the way in which Aboriginal people understand their sense of place as different to that of Whitefellas, even as this “racialized” identity is used to position some Blackfellas against others as possessed of superior rights and interests.…”

“…Nevertheless, while distinct, relationships with the land are not “dichotomous” in any one‐dimensional way (Dalley and Martin ). Aboriginal people and other Australians share and give meaning to landscapes that are imbued with common affects arising from often interrelated histories, biographies, and collaborative experiences of physical work, particularly on the cattle properties that have historically constituted the main industry of the region.…”

Unstable relations: a critical appraisal of indigeneity and environmentalism in contemporary Australia

“…In certain scenarios, these terms are mutually constituting, so that the Aboriginal and ‘green’ realms can be seen as interdependent, in terms of resourcing, political legitimacy and identities. In the anthropological literature of contemporary Aboriginal Australia, Merlan's term ‘intercultural’ has become a ubiquitous descriptor to acknowledge, adjectivally, that Aboriginal people live in shared or ‘overlapping’ (Tonkinson, ) worlds, shaped by either the presence, or hegemony, of non‐indigenous people, ideas, ideologies, economic and cultural forms (Hinkson and Smith, ; Ottosson, ; Ottosson, ; Dalley and Martin, ). Merlan seems compelled to distance herself from its increasingly routine use to describe shared spaces, suggesting instead that she was oriented originally to modes of action and processes and focused upon the inter , seeing subjectivity ‘as always fundamentally under construction, and always fundamentally relational’ (2005: 169; 2013).…”