Francesca Merlan

Indigeneity: Global and Local

The term indigenous, long used to distinguish between those who are “native” and their “others” in specific locales, has also become a term for a geocultural category, presupposing a world collectivity of “indigenous peoples” in contrast to their various “others.” Many observers have noted that the stimuli for internationalization of the indigenous category originated principally from particular nation‐states—Anglo‐American settler colonies and Scandinavia. All, I argue, are relevantly political cultures of liberal democracy and weighty (in different ways) in international institutional affairs. However, international indigeneity has not been supported in any unqualified way by actions taken in the name of several nation‐states that were among its main points of origin. In fact, staunch resistance to the international indigenous project has recently come from four of them. In 2007, the only four voting countries to reject the main product of international indigenist activity over the past 30 years, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, were Australia, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. In these locations, forms of “indigenous relationship” emerged that launched international indigeneity and that strongly influenced international perceptions of what “indigeneity” is and who “indigenous peoples” may be. Some other countries say the model of indigenous relationship that they see represented by the “establishing” set is inapplicable to themselves (but have nonetheless had to take notice of expanding internationalist indigenism). The apparently paradoxical rejection of the draft declaration by the establishing countries is consistent with the combination of enabling and constraining forces that liberal democratic political cultures offer.

Afterword: Primitivist Encounters: Articulations and Asymmetries

ABSTRACT This afterword presents a view of key contributions of the issues articles, positions those contributions in relation to precedent work, and suggests the need to place heightened emphasis on fundamental asymmetry and differential power to determine context on the part of participants to primitivist tourist encounter.

Taboo: Verbal Practices

Consideration of verbal taboo provides perspectives upon the relation of linguistic and nonlinguistic practices in the structuring of communicative situations in ways that directly index elements of them as special or attention-worthy; the kinds of repertoires or registers (Agha, 1999) involved, both linguistic and other, within languages as well as interlingually, and in spoken as compared with written forms; the kinds of sociocultural dimensions and identities that attract this sort of treatment; issues of the social distribution, dissemination and contraction, persistence or obsolescence over time, of the usages involved; the grammatical, semantic and pragmatic similarities and differences between taboo and ordinary speech forms; and the role of verbal taboo in language change. Certain kinds of denotational relationships, topographic and other situational factors, and associated kinds of activities regularly attract systematic taboo enregisterment cross-culturally.

Culture, Development, and Social Theory

The following comment was written in response to conference presentations by John Clammer and Raymond Apthorpe. In his paper, ‘Development Futures and Cultural Choices’ (in this issue as ‘Culture, Development and Social Theory’), Clammer traced recent emphases in conceptualisations of ‘culture’, in order to ask whether these better serve an integration of culture and development: (1) the idea of culture as process, (2) the rediscovery of indigenous knowledge, and (3) the integration of economy and culture. I argue that, while each of these has something good to bring, even taking account of all of them would leave us with a rather anorexic version of what is needed: systematic and sustained analysis and theorisation of social relations; and the attempt to weigh up the implications for proposed or negotiated social intervention and directional change. I exemplify issues with a discussion of the Papua New Guinea elections of 2002. Apthorpes contribution builds on his explorations of tendencies inherent in development practice and discourse, to which I add its claims to serial progress, consistent with its technocratic tendencies.

Anthropology and Policy-Preparedness

This paper considers the relationship between anthropology and public policy by looking at differences between national-level discourses about indigenous relationships to land and their informing of public policy and the view that one gets of indigenous relations to land as an anthropologist, gathered from familiarity with particular situations and people. In view of the clear disparities, how may anthropology contribute to public policy? Anthropologys principal posture should remain a contributory one, rather than one of policy-readiness, based on the disciplines particular combination of ethnographic immersion and critical perspective.

Obituary: Thomas Mitchell Ernst (1943–2016)

We knew Tom Ernst over the last three decades of his life. Our fondest memories of him are of a medium-sized bear of a man with rounded shoulders, bushy moustache and wirebrush grey mop of hair, looming over our kitchen table in Sydney and talking at a steady clip about all the things that most interested him: baseball stories; Coen brothers films; the McCarthy era in the United States; his youth in Buffalo, New York; his graduate work at the University of Michigan; his time at the University of Adelaide; and his fieldwork with the Onabasulu of the Papuan Plateau, where he had done his PhD research. On most of those visits he would have just arrived from Bathurst, Wagga Wagga or Albury with his partner, anthropologist Kerry Zubrinich. They came regularly to the big smoke for conversation and get-togethers with academic friends, some of them former students and colleagues from the University of Adelaide. During some of that early period of our acquaintance, Tom was gracefully oblivious and (as needed) situationally attentive to the squawking of our then very young sons James and Jesse, in a period when Francesca believed she would never finish another sentence. Tom kindly assured her that she would. We would also make occasional trips to Bathurst, Albury or Wagga to visit Tom and Kerry. Tom would think of interesting expeditions for small fry. He drove us out to the Murray River, allegedly to catch yabbies. Although such expeditions were anticipated excitedly, strangely they never resulted in catching anything—the fun was all in the stories and expectations. Our family later moved to Canberra and, some years later, so did Tom and Kerry. Tom had a long and close association with Papua New Guinea. He first went there in 1969, from the University of Michigan, to do his doctoral research among the Onabasulu people in the Strickland-Bosavi region on the Papuan Plateau. In the early 1970s during the lead-up to independence, he taught in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Papua New Guinea. In 1974 he was hired by foundation professor Bruce Kapferer as the first lecturer in the newly created Department of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide, where he stayed until 1990. From then until his retirement in 2004, he taught in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Charles Sturt University. It was following his retirement that Tom and Kerry moved to

Anthropology, Public Policy and Social Process in Indigenous Australia

These four papers were originally presented at a two-day celebration of sixty years of anthropology at the Australian National University as part of a session entitled ‘Anthropology, Publics and Aboriginal Policy: Evidence and Engagement’. Like much other work on indigenous policy in Australia over the past half-dozen years (for example, Altman and Hinkson 2010), this focus was prompted, in part, by the debate surrounding the drastic policy step taken in relation to Aboriginal communities and people in the Northern Territory in June 2007, formally known as the Northern Territory Emergency Response, but more generally known as the Intervention. This radical change to policy was brought about by wide concern over conditions in Aboriginal communities, including studies that concluded there were unacceptably high levels of domestic violence and child abuse among the Aboriginal population (Gordon et al. 2002; Anderson and Wild 2007; also see Sullivan, this issue, for more). Many among the general public and some in the anthropological community were concerned by the almost complete absence of anthropologists from the ensuing public debate about the Intervention and policy in Aboriginal affairs more generally. So we sought papers relating to policy, anthropology and the Northern Territory. At the conference, we began with three papers describing day-to-day aspects of the social problems facing Aboriginal people in Alice Springs*the centre of the troubles*from the perspectives of people working closely with Aboriginal people on issues of violence and community development. We expect that these detailed, valuable papers will appear elsewhere. After the conference, we began to realise that some of the papers*those we have ended up presenting here*spoke not only to our original question of the relation between anthropology and policy, nor simply to empirical and critical questions provoked by the Intervention and storm of proand counter-opinion following it. They were also products of our ongoing work towards understanding social processes

Size and Place in the Construction of Indigeneity in the Russian Federation

Within the Russian Federation there are nearly 200 recognized “nationalities,” approximately 130 of which could claim to be “indigenous.” However, only 45 peoples are officially recognized as “indigenous small‐numbered peoples of the Russian Federation” and thereby qualify for the rights, privileges, and state support earmarked for indigenous peoples. This status is conditioned upon a maximum group size of 50,000. While experts insist that this numerical criterion is provisional and without serious political implications, our fieldwork demonstrates that it has become a social fact that cannot be ignored, especially in light of the 2002 All‐Russia Census and the release of its results in 2004. This numerical benchmark forces a dichotomization into small‐numbered versus non‐small‐numbered peoples and creates a peculiar type of identity politics based on ethnic‐group size. The “indigenous small‐numbered” status is also conditioned upon a set of overlapping but often contradictory residency requirements. Using case studies from southern Siberia and the north of European Russia, we document the dynamic interplay between these dimensions of identity and the opportunities for maneuvering in the competition for the benefits that attach to certain categories. However, indigenous peoples who engage in such identity politics run the risk of becoming “incarcerated” within the confines of those categories.