Introduction

Abstract

This book is based on a workshop, ‘The difference that identity makes’, held in July 2016 at the Sydney campus of New York University, on Gadigal land. The workshop was one event in a longer research program, Australian Cultural Fields, a series of related inquiries into the sociology of contemporary Australian culture. One line of inquiry was to consider the significance of Indigeneity in Australian cultural fields. We take the concept of cultural field from the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu while acknowledging that, as a settler–colonial society, Australia is different from France, the object of Bourdieu’s influential study La Distinction (Bourdieu 1984). The distinction Indigenous/non-Indigenous was not considered by Bourdieu and it has rarely figured in studies inspired by his cultural sociology. In Australia the distinction Indigenous/non-Indigenous has become highly significant, in a variety of ways that compel our attention. We ask: how has it become significant, in the production and consumption of culture in Australia, to make the distinction Indigenous/non-Indigenous? In preparing our participants for this question, we broke it down into a series of illustrative and more particular questions: What is Indigeneity? Who has it? What is racism? And who has responsibility for it? What is ‘Indigenous music’? And what is its relationship to ‘Australian music’? How should a museum or art gallery present artefacts that are ‘Indigenous’? Does such an institution require Indigenous curators to do this properly? Why? How should sporting teams refer to the fact that some team members understand themselves to be ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Torres Strait Islander’ Australians? What is ‘Indigenous television’? How has the assertion of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction affected the field of ‘heritage’? The answer that emerged from the workshop papers is that the currency of this distinction has enabled the formation of a distinct Indigenous ‘cultural capital’