Governing sex: removing the right to take responsibility

The Commonwealth Intervention of 2007 in the Northern Territory largely missed its ostensible aim of protecting sexually abused children, argues this essay which examines the relevant social, cultural and historical factors based on specific ethnographic work. Abstract The exposure in 2006 of horrific cases of sexual violence that allegedly characterised Northern Territory Aboriginal communities, evoked responses dominated by a predictable moral panic. Thus the Commonwealth Intervention of 2007 largely missed its ostensible aim of protecting sexually abused children. This essay moves beyond a moralising analysis to consider relevant social, cultural and historical factors based on specific ethnographic work. First I present a sense of some profound historically established differences and common themes in traditional Aboriginal and mainstream law in relation to the regulation of sexuality. Then I draw on evidence that Aboriginal people embraced the notion of ‘two laws’, even as the new era created profound difficulties in relation to sexual norms. Their ‘right to take responsibility’ (Pearson 2000) was further undermined by ‘Interventions’ that unashamedly diminished the ability of NT Aborigines to govern their own communities. Finally, mainstream institutions that are deeply engaged with Aboriginal communities need to consider the ways they may be perpetuating entrenched difficulties

Who's Upsetting Who? Strangeness, Morality, Nostalgia, Pleasure

What is the relationship between negative sentiments towards different kinds of people and the actual difficulties posed by people with different habits and practices living close by one another? Such difficulties are a space of fear and silence because, in this multicultural postmodernworld, we are supposed to celebrate difference in all its manifestations. It is this orthodoxy I want to examine. Let me first note that difficult differences of social practices and preferences are experienced within cultural or racial groups, even within families, as those with teenaged children may be the first to admit. As an anthropologist I begin by taking up a cultural studies practice, turning the analytic eye onto ourselves. Where better to begin than at the dinner party, that quintessential ceremony of white middle-class urban social life, and as good a place as any to glimpse the role played by Aborigines in our tribe’s imagination

Australian Aboriginal Studies: The Anthropologists Accounts

Of all the groups in Australia designated in terms of race or culture none has had their authenticity questioned as much as Aborigines. Popular con-ceptions as well as academic writings make an implicit or explicit division of Aborigines into two kinds. They may be termed traditional and non-traditional, part-Aborigines and full-bloods or those in the north and those in the south (cf. Langton, 1981). One category is commonly seen as more legitimately Aboriginal. The popular view that the 'non-traditional' or 'half-castes' are not 'true' Aborigines is widely recognised, but an-thropologists' complicity in such judgements is less obvious. There could be two reasons for such divisions. They could indicate that Aboriginal groups occupy such different structural positions in the wider society that they are not easily analysed within the same theoretical framework or by using identical research strategies. Alternatively, the Aborigines themselves could be perceived as so different racially or culturally as to preclude any analysis that encompasses both categories. This latter view has probably been the most pervasive both in anthropology and elsewhere, to the extent that the 'southern' or 'non-traditional' groups are sometimes denied inclusion in the category of Aborigines

"We know each other, but we're not loving..."

Annette\u27s story is not just another addition to Australia\u27s \u27stolen generation\u27 narrative, writes Gillian Cowlishaw This is an edited extract from The City\u27s Outback, an account of an ethnographic research project I conducted with Aboriginal people of western Sydney in 2000, inspired by a Bourke man, Frank Doolan. \u27Our Mt Druitt mob have deadly stories too,\u27 he told me. \u27You have to come to Mt Druitt.\u27 Frank’s urgency came from the insignificance usually attributed to the lives of the Aboriginal people there. Frank\u27s poetic vision gives these lives a global significance in their struggle to be. - Gillian Cowlishaw Read the full extract on our partner website, Inside Story > Photo by Gillian Cowlishaw, from the cover of The City’s Outbac

A new protection policy?

University ethics committees and the social sciences make awkward partners. . A younger colleague was thrilled last year at being one of the few successful applicants for a four-year research fellowship from the Australian Research Council, or ARC. Already an experienced anthropologist, she had spent months carefully crafting her project with the help of colleagues and university resources. She planned to continue her intensive field research in an Aboriginal community whose language she speaks. For eighteen years she has been building close and trusting relationships with people who appreciate the chance to explore and articulate their own values, perceptions and ambitions, in a social setting that the nation considers so problematic. At the ARC, her proposal had gone through a rigorous ranking process involving external peer reviewers and an expert discipline-based panel. But then, suddenly and surprisingly, her application for ethics approval met with queries about matters of method and scientific merit from her university’s ethics committee that cut across the aims and methods that had already been examined and approved. She has been forbidden to begin the research until the committee is satisfied, and is now preparing her fourth attempt to gain approval. This is one of several cases I’m aware of that are fuelling increasing concerns within the academy about the role of university human research ethics committees, or HRECs, in judging social science research. Another, even more distressing case involved a PhD candidate who received a scholarship through a highly competitive process, also for an original and valuable research project in an Aboriginal community, but has abandoned her university in despair after being faced with unanswerable questions that had nothing to do with ethics or the subject matter of the project. Read the full article> Image: Notebook / Shutterstock &nbsp

Abstracted anthropology

Field-working anthropologists must navigate the complex relationship between their empirical observations and the representations they create in writing about those observations. In anthropology, the self is an instrument of knowing: incorporating relationships between, for instance, colonised and coloniser can open up valuable comparative questions, but too much emphasis on the researcher’s personal involvement can lead to self-indulgent and superficial writing. What kind of anthropology do we get when the researcher skips fieldwork altogether, to focus on representations, on texts, asks Gillian Cowlishaw in her review essay of James Clifford’s book Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Read Gillian\u27s article in the Australian Review of Public Affairs. Book title: Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century Publisher: Harvard University Press Date Published: 2013 Author: James Clifford Image: book cove