Adrian Peace

Discourses of ecotourism: the case of Fraser Island, Queensland

Abstract The importance of language in the changing usage of particular environments is a topic worthy of greater attention than hitherto. Fraser Island has passed through a period of intense political conflict to one in which it is dominated by the new discourse of ecotourism. It is now part of that global development in which it is claimed that tourists can become properly informed about, and become particularly sensitive to, the complex and the fragile nature of the places which they visit. In this paper, which concentrates on the discourse of ecotours and whale watching, it is argued that such claims fall a long way short of being realised in one of Australias prime ecotourism destinations.

Dingo discourse: Constructions of Nature and contradictions of capital in an Australian eco-tourist location

During the 1990s, the symbol of the dingo was extensively used to market Fraser Island, located off the east coast of Australia, as a signi® cant destination for ecotourists from both inside the country and overseas. Situated some 190 kilometres north of Brisbane, capital city of Queensland, Fraser Island is geologically unique. The largest sand island in the world, it contains over 400 distinctive perched lakes, and distributed throughout its 124-kilometre length is a striking diversity of ̄ ora and fauna. The dingo is amongst the largest of the island’s fauna, and it is made to play a prominent part in the commercial advertising geared to selling the island and its major up-market resort, King® sher Bay, to visitors. It ® gures extensively in lea ̄ ets, guidebooks, magazine articles and maps, as well as on postcards, T-shirts, posters, videos and the many other commercial items commonplace in Australian tourist destinations. Yet in mid-1998, at the same time that the dingo’s iconic potential was being commercially explored, rangers in charge of the island’s many eco-tours were in a backroom of the King® sher Bay Resort drawing up a pro® le of dingoes selected for disposal. On an of® ce wall chart, the distinctive markings and current misdemeanors of several dingoes were being carefully recorded, with a view to transporting them to the north of the island, or feeding them arsenic-laced food, or shooting themÐ though the word actually used by local rangers and regional politicians was `culling’. In this paper, I aim to unravel this paradox in order to explore the contradictions underpinning eco-tourist practices on Fraser Island. My initial focus is on the discursive strategies used to constitute the island as the embodiment of Nature and to construct its ̄ ora and fauna as the natural constituents of that space. All tourist venues are sold on the strength of their environmental distinctiveness. Eco-tourism, however, especially privileges the environment and the experiences that visitors might variously derive from contact with it. This being so, the social practices involved in constituting the environment and its parts must be of analytic interest to an anthropologist. This means examining the words, phrases, metaphors, images and other linguistic resources that go into constructing Fraser Island as the embodiment of Nature. Within the marked degree of unanimity among those who commodify Fraser Island as the ultimate encounter with Nature, one ® nds the discursive practices that constitute the objects of which they speak. What is most striking about this

Ponies out of place? Wild animals, wilderness and environmental governance

Powerful institutions in Australia regularly depict the continent as overrun with fauna variously described as ‘feral’, ‘vermin’, ‘alien’ and ‘invasive’. This paper addresses the issue of ‘animal matter out of place’ through the ethnographic analysis of a long-running conflict over ‘feral’ ponies in Coffin Bay National Park, South Australia. As the Department of Environment and Heritage manoeuvred to eliminate this ‘alien’ presence from the ‘pristine’ landscape of the Coffin Bay Peninsula, local residents argued that the herd was a product of this ecological niche and should remain in its ‘natural’ home. The trajectory of the conflict suggests that the expansion of environmental governance from centre to periphery is by no means as predictable and inevitable as is often anticipated.1

When the Salmon Comes: The Politics of Summer Fishing in an Irish Community

Despite the economic, political, and cultural pressures to which local level communities are currently subject, they frequently prove resilient in the maintenance of their distinctiveness. This paper examines the processes whereby the fishing families of Clontarf constitute themselves as a community within a community, especially when, as residents of the pier, they become preoccupied annually with the advent of the salmon.

Barossa Dreaming: Imagining Place and Constituting Cuisine in Contemporary Australia

Regional cuisines have become a prominent feature in the consumer landscape of modernised societies. This article describes how a regional cuisine is being socially constituted in the Barossa Valley, one of the most important wine-growing areas in Australia. Initially, I detail how small farmers, winegrowers and other entrepreneurs idealise the Barossa landscape and fabricate the heritage that is integral to the idea of a distinctive cuisine. This is followed by examination of how the notion of Barossa food as having distinctive qualities because of the artisanal ways it is produced is constantly being elaborated by the valleys small-scale enterprises. Lastly, I explore the contribution of wider influences to this cultural process, from the role played by an internationally recognised celebrity chef through to the recent arrival of the Slow Food movement. Local factors and global influences contribute to the social manufacture of the Barossas regional cuisine, the overall appeal of which to middle class consumers is as much cultural as it is culinary.

Structured inequalities in a North Indian city

T’he essential concern of this paper is with the structure and reproduction of social inequalities in Jaipur, capital of Rajasthan State.* Its focus comprises the two major, or mainstream, social classes of the city, the well-to-do middle class and a lower class of urban poor. Major inequalities are much in evidence in this North Indian city. Notably they are marked in the physical separation of, on the one hand, the traditional Inner City, a vast walled location characterised by the immediate propinquity of bazaars and ancient multi-storied dwellings, in which are concentrated the majority of the urban poor, and, on the other, a string of modern suburbs to the west and south of the Inner City, primarily residential locations, well provided with basic services, and in a number of ways exuding middle class affluence. In short, Jaipur’s physical aspect provides a rough guide to some dominant elements of its internally stratified structure. As might be expected of a large, rapidly transforming city, the social order is by no means encompassed by reference to its middle and lower class populations; but this paper is not presented as a fully developed class analysis. I am merely concerned to analyse certain key local-level processes which structure and reproduce central inequalities in the distribution of

From Arcadia to Anomie

Achievements in this sphere have, however, rarely been subject to critical appraisal2; the anthropology of Eire in particular appears to have escaped critical scrutiny altogether. The theme of this essay is that Irish society (by which I mean the twenty six counties of Eire) has often been approached in an ethnocentric fashion, and frequently been characterized in a manner which reflects poorly on the discipline’s interpretive capacity 3 My aim is not to provide another state of the art review. In considering a series of key texts drawn from the literature on Western Ireland, my concern is the more important one of working out how Irish society has become identified as an ‘object’ for anthropological enquiry and looking critically at the nature of the discourse which currently encompasses this anthropological object. More precisely, attention is focussed on the influences which have led anthropologists to caricature Ireland as a dying society, a culture in demise, a social system characterized by pathogenic tendencies. I show, by working outwards from the premise that much of anthropology constitutes an exercise whereby representatives of the developed core areas of the world system explore the cultural Otherness of those in the subdued peripheries (Ekholm and Friedman 1980:102), how it becomes possible to identify the ethnocentrism which is consistently in operation. The determining point of departure is that any social anthropology about any Other is never exclusively about Them: it is recurrently about Us also; and it is influenced by the changing relations of power