Recent rituals of indigenous recognition in Australia: Welcome to Country

In this article, I examine the recent emergence in Australia of two small, and now regularly enacted, rituals: "Acknowledgments" and "Welcomes to Country." These are expressions of recognition, or response to perceived neglect and injustice. Recognition has become a global theme, part of a broader politics of reparation focused on indigenous and other colonized and subordinated peoples, and includes practices of apology and reconciliation. In Australia, recognition implies expansion the of relationship between categories of people who have been on unequal, distant, and (at some levels) negligible terms as settlers and natives, colonizers and colonized. Practices of recognition are therefore ambiguous: What is to be recognized, and how is recognition to proceed? Here I consider these rituals and their putative origins, structure, content, variations, and affect of participants and audiences. Both rituals cast recognition in ways that continue recent decades of national emphasis on indigenous emplacement, judgments concerning originariness, and authenticity; "Welcomes" also recast relations in terms of a host-guest framework. The emergence of these rituals fosters new kinds of indigenous public expression and receptions of recognition as well as some standardization of both. It is an indication of change, as well as of its limits in indigenous-nonindigenous relationships

Purging parliament: a new christian politics in Papua New Guinea?

In November and December 2013, a controversy erupted in Papua New Guinea when the speaker of the national parliament, Theodore Zurenuoc, a devout Christian, tried to rid Parliament House of what he described as ‘ungodly images and idols’. Zurenuoc had already begun by removing the carvings from a lintel above the entrance to Parliament House, but planned to remove many more carvings throughout the building. His plans were strongly opposed, and considerable debate was generated in the two national newspapers and in social media. Those who opposed him saw him as a ‘religious fundamentalist’ and his actions as ‘sacrilege’ and ‘cultural terrorism’,1 while those who supported Zurenuoc’s plans saw him as a ‘God-fearing’, ‘modern-day Reformer’ and ‘God’s anointed vessel’. Despite the protests, which included a number of high-profile critics, and the intercession of the prime minister, the speaker was unrepentant, vowing to continue his work until there were ‘no traces of elements of cult and demonic worship in the national parliament of PNG’ (Evara 2013). (First paragraph of paper)AusAI

Tracking Rural Change

A key, intensifying change affecting rural areas in the last few decades has been a decline in the proportion of national populations whose principal livelihood is farming. The corresponding re-distribution of population has typically resulted in a net population loss to rural areas, and diversification of rural activity. The corporatization and technological modification of food production has prompted new policy challenges, and has bound rural and urban populations together in new relationships articulated in moral discourses of custodianship, food safety, and sustainability. Contributors to this volume came together in the attempt to stimulate collective insight into trends of rural change in Australia, New Zealand and Europe. The first two countries have been characterised by avowedly `neoliberal’ rural policy – with considerable departures from it in practice; Europe, on the other hand, by a mix of policy measures which attempt to integrate land management and sustainability, diversification and maintenance of a competitive farming sector within an overarching policy framework more overtly, though only partially, oriented towards sustaining rural society. Aiming to build on research relating to the character of rural transitions, this volume offers substantive and critical contributions to the understanding of the sources of unpredictability, instability, and continuity, that underpin rural transition. The papers explore changes and continuities in policy, the governance of rural spaces, technological developments relating to rural areas and populations, and social forms of subjectivation and participation in increasingly diverse rural settings