Suchergebnisse

The intersection of colonialism, legal systems, and human rights is revealed in the Alice Springs Watch House, a place for the temporary custody of, usually intoxicated, Aboriginal men. "Kwementyaye Briscoe" became the fourth death in custody since 1999; and this article draws on his coronial inquest. The post‐mortem humanity of the coroner is contrasted with the uncaring disregard of the police for Briscoe while he lived. These contradictory postures reveal the contingency of Aboriginal people's human rights in the neoliberal colonial state. Critical criminology has revealed that the Australian legal system has been complicit in establishing and reproducing the Aboriginal "criminal". Relative to colonial relations of power, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the associated machinery of international law are relatively recent phenomena. This articles questions: What can a consideration of the discourse of human rights bring to an understanding of the treatment of an Aboriginal man in custody, and is this discourse complicit? Also, would sanctioning human rights in national law, via, for example, a bill of rights, legitimize human rights while simultaneously revealing their tacit assumptions? Agamben's concept of "bare life" sheds light on the paradoxes of human rights, as they are intensified in this custodial context.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2007 and endorsed by the Australian Labor government two years later. This achievement is an essential element in the global politics of Indigenous recognition and includes unique rights, such as the right to a cultural collectivity and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, while reinforcing the right to self-determination. Yet this new Indigenous rights regime is both underpinned and constrained by the UN human rights system, the implications of which include constraint within a secular neo-imperialist liberal paradigm. However, this human rights paradigm can also offer generative potential to challenge existing relations of power. According to Kymlicka, the UN's system of human rights has, after all, been 'one of the great moral achievements of the twentieth century'. How can these tensions between the aspirations to universal secularism and the right to culture, for instance, be accommodated within the Indigenous human rights discourse? And how does this new international legal and norm-setting instrument speak to the glaring disjunct between declaration of rights and social fact in central Australia, the focus of this research? The move toward an anthropology of human rights looks squarely at this conundrum and attempts to locate spaces of continuity and co-option or, conversely, subversion and rejection as local cultures of human rights are articulated.

This paper explores the history of the emergence of Pintupi Luritja as the dominant language in the Central Australian community of Amunturrngu (Mt Liebig), traced from the people's first encounters with settlement in the 1940s at Haasts Bluff, through to the present. It is a political history, as movement toward settlement demanded a re-structuring of social relations within a newly settled polity. To elaborate on this polity I examine the concept of a language community through the construction of Pintupi Luritja as a 'communilect'. The development of this communilect as a lingua franca in these early settlements signals the value of the original term 'Luritja' as a trope. The meaning of this original Indigenous term is not only indicative of the regional history, but also of the flexible potential in group formation. The pattern of contact and settlement in this Pintupi Luritja region has compelled a socio-linguistic re-configuration, lending a currency to the label Pintupi Luritja that suggests a modern, firmed up, 'tribe'. This tribe is a 'secondary phenomenon' formed through the manipulation of relatively unstructured populations - stateless societies - by the colonial State (Fried 1975). At issue here is the inter-cultural aspect of this language formation that is the elemental process in the creation of this 'new' social formation.

In the Central Australian community of Amunturrngu the Luritja management of the State is not only subversive to the development of representative democracy and a capitalist economy, but this discourse of (dis)engagement empowers community members. This offers autonomy, albeit marginal, from the mainstream. The 'problem of the cultural' emerges in this engagement and the production of meaning requires enunciating the 'third space' : the ambivalent space of the cultural interface. Within this post-settlement space certain modalities have been reformulated to structure a complex locality that defies the reification of social structures that anthropology so readily draws. How do people operate in this space and what type of person is most active here? The theoretical tools for this examination of Amunturrngu's engagement with the State are taken from political anthropology and post-colonial theory.

In the Central Australian community of Amunturrngu the Luritja management of the State is not only subversive to the development of representative democracy and a capitalist economy, but this discourse of (dis)engagement empowers community members. This offers autonomy, albeit marginal, from the mainstream. The 'problem of the cultural' emerges in this engagement and the production of meaning requires enunciating the 'third space' : the ambivalent space of the cultural interface. Within this post-settlement space certain modalities have been reformulated to structure a complex locality that defies the reification of social structures that anthropology so readily draws. How do people operate in this space and what type of person is most active here? The theoretical tools for this examination of Amunturrngu's engagement with the State are taken from political anthropology and post-colonial theory.

This paper explores the history of the emergence of Pintupi Luritja as the dominant language in the Central Australian community of Amunturrngu (Mt Liebig), traced from the people's first encounters with settlement in the 1940s at Haasts Bluff, through to the present. It is a political history, as movement toward settlement demanded a re-structuring of social relations within a newly settled polity. To elaborate on this polity I examine the concept of a language community through the construction of Pintupi Luritja as a 'communilect'. The development of this communilect as a lingua franca in these early settlements signals the value of the original term 'Luritja' as a trope. The meaning of this original Indigenous term is not only indicative of the regional history, but also of the flexible potential in group formation. The pattern of contact and settlement in this Pintupi Luritja region has compelled a socio-linguistic re-configuration, lending a currency to the label Pintupi Luritja that suggests a modern, firmed up, 'tribe'. This tribe is a 'secondary phenomenon' formed through the manipulation of relatively unstructured populations - stateless societies - by the colonial State (Fried 1975). At issue here is the inter-cultural aspect of this language formation that is the elemental process in the creation of this 'new' social formation.