Barry Morris

Domesticating resistance : the Dhan-Gadi aborigines and the Australian state

In this fascinating study of the Dhan-Gadi Aboriginal people of New South Wales, Australia, the author combines the skills of a social historian with the detailed observation of a social anthropologist. In so doing he brings alive the contours of crude racism, as well as the more subtle expressions of paternalism, bureaucratic social control and educational and economic marginalization.

The Australian society of the state: egalitarian ideologies and new directions in exclusionary practice

This article considers the broad historical and ideological processes that participate in forming the continuities and discontinuities of Australian egalitarian nationalism. We draw attention to its formation and re-formation in the debates surrounding the so-called Hanson phenomenon. Hansonism refracts the crisis of what we regard as the Australian society of the state in the circumstances of the development of neoliberal policies and the more recent neoconservative turn of the current Howard government. Our argument is directed to exploring the contradictions and tensions in Australian egalitarian thought and practice and its thoroughgoing creative reengagement in contemporary postcolonial and postmodern Australia.

Expert knowledge : first world peoples, consultancy and anthropology

Contributors: Rohan Bastin, Barry Morris, Janine R. Wedel, Craig R. Janes, Stevan Weine, Ralph Cintron, Ferid Agani, Elissa Dresden, Van Griffith, June Nash, Alcida Rita Ramos, Georg Henriksen, Richard Daly, Steven Robins, Barry Morris, Roland Kapferer.

A crisis in identity: Aborigines, media, the law and politics - civil disturbance in an Australian town

This article considers the interpretations of a ‘riot’ that took place between Aborigines and police in a small rural town, Brewarrina, in New South Wales in 1986. The ‘riot’ achieved widespread national coverage. My concern here will be to analyse the representations of the ‘riot’ in the newspapers, television and in the trial of the ‘rioters’ that followed. The analysis of the ‘riot’ seeks to consider the shifts and changes of social and political processes of the Australian state that perform such a critical part in the continual defining and redefining of Aboriginal identity. The Brewarrina ‘riot’ acted as a switch point, where both conservative and liberal polity contested the changing nature of Aboriginal autonomy and polity within the Australian state. The images from the ‘riot’ provided fertile grounds for the reworking and reassertion of a conservative polity in a period that had seen marked liberal political change within the limitations of legal-bureaucratic reforms of the welfare state.

Contesting the state: the dynamics of resistance and control, edited by Angela Hobart and Bruce Kapferer

This is an important collection that deserves a wide readership. Contesting the state provides a systematic and innovative reworking of the anthropology of politics and power, giving a comprehensiv...