Introduction: Representing Racial Issues

Abstract

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

Anthropology, Self‐determination and Aboriginal Belief in the Christian God

“…According to Cowlishaw (1993), the logic of Aboriginal cultural forms, such as Yolngu belief in the Christian God, can be understood in part through their dialectical relationship with more powerful cultural forms. It is necessary therefore to look at Christianity not just in terms of the 'universal truth' that all people are one in the body and blood of Christ but in the ways in which the Elcho Island Aborigines are confronting powerlessness and mystification via this belief.…”

“…The report is also relevant in terms of the current debate on the representation of racial issues (see Cowlishaw 1993;Lattas 1993;Morris 1989). I suggest that the sensitivity some Aborigines feel towards anthropological inquiry is not merely a matter of Aborigines having little or no say in setting the anthropologist's agenda or that some Aborigines unquestionably accept the Freire model as an explanation of their powerlessness.…”

“…In this paper, what Elcho Islanders say on the subject of their belief will be viewed in the light of Cowlishaw's (1993) argument about oppositional culture. Cowlishaw suggests that the logic of Aboriginal cultural forms can be understood in part through their dialectical relationship with more powerful cultural forms.…”

The Aboriginal Franchise and Its Consequences

“…255 Some who look to Aboriginal representation as a means of having Aboriginal voices "heard", Aborigines made "politically minded", or Aborigines become ministers, think the franchise has made a difference 256 -that having Aboriginal people involved "in the institutions of the state" necessarily inserts "an oppositional culture", 257 or that having a conservative in parliament is better than having no Aboriginal representation at all. 258 Others, however, think that Aboriginal parliamentarians have produced no tangible results; 259 some considered Bonner "unrepresentative" of Aboriginal people, a "Black Judas", a "government stooge", or an "Uncle Tom".…”

Sickening Bodies: How Racism and Essentialism Feature in Aboriginal Women's Discourse about Health1

“…To illustrate this he describes how interaction with a dominating force alienates the discredited self from the marginalised and devalued body. The following account vividly depicts the sense of dispossession and disempowerment that is characteristic of racism as 'a lived structure of domination' (Cowlishaw 1993) in Aboriginal communities:…”