THE CUNNING OF RECOGNITION

POLITICS, HISTORY, AND CULTURE

A series from the International Institute at the University of Michigan

series editors: George Steinmetz and Julia Adams

series editorial advisory board: Fernando Coronil, Geoff Eley, Fatma Muge
Gocek, Nancy Hunt Rose, Webb Keane, David Laitin, Ching-Kwan Lee, Julie Skurski,
Margaret Somers, Katherine Verdery, Elizabeth Wingrove

Sponsored by the International Institute at the University of Michigan and published by the
Duke University Press, this series is centered around cultural and historical studies of power,
politics, and the state—a field that cuts across the disciplines of history, sociology, anthro-
pology, political science, and cultural studies. The focus on the relationship between state and
culture refers both to a methodological approach—the study of politics and the state using
culturalist methods—and a substantive one that treats signifying practices as an essential
dimension of politics. The dialectic of politics, culture, and history figures prominently in all
the books selected for the series.
THE CUNNING OF RECOGNITION
Indigenous Alterities and the Making

of Australian Multiculturalism

elizabeth a. p ovinelli

Duke University Press Durham & London 2002

 © 2002 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
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TO CLAIRE AND ERIC KREBS WHO CHANGED OUR MINDS
CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Critical Common Sense 1
1 / Mutant Messages 35
2 / The Vulva Thieves (Atna Nylkna): Modal
Ethics and the Colonial Archive 71
3 / Sex Rites, Civil Rights 111
4 / Shamed States 153
5 / The Poetics of Ghosts: Social Reproduction
in the Archive of the Nation 187
6 / The Truest Belief Is Compulsion 235
Notes 269
Selected Works Cited 311
Index 325
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of conversations with a number of people who were
generous to share with me their insights on problems addressed in the fol-
lowing pages. Gillian Collishaw, Francesca Merlan, Deborah Bird Rose, and
Alan Rumsey provided critical conversation on indigenous social life from an
anthropological perspective. Wendy Asche, Ross Howie, Tom Keely, Jessica
Klingender, Maria Lovinson, Ken Lum, and Ben Scambari and others work-
ing at the Northern Land Council played a vital role in deepening my thinking
about the legal and institutional mediations of indigenous recognition. The
staff working at the Australian Archives in Darwin, Sydney, and Melbourne,
with the Elkin papers at the University of Sydney, with the Stanner papers at
the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Council library, and at the North-
ern Territory Archives provided patient, vital help navigating the historical

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 Acknowledgments

record on which much of the following depends. Geoff Gray in particular

provided invaluable help. Two research projects—the Center for Late Liber-
alism at the University of Chicago and the Center for Transcultural Studies—
have been vital to my thinking through of some of the problems of liberal
forms of recognition and obligation. Whether they fully realized it or not, the
following people from these projects critically informed this book: Ackbar
Abbas, Lauren Berlant, Craig Calhoun, Vincent Crapanzano, Dilip Gaonkar,
Elaine Hadley, Charles Hirshkind, Ben Lee, Leo Lee, Michael Leff, Patchen
Markell, Saba Mahmood, Mary Poovey, Michael Silverstein, Charles Taylor,
Rolph Trouillot, Candace Vogler, and Michael Warner. Their intellectual guid-
ance was matched by the vigorous conversations—inside and outside Haskell
Hall, by door jambs and in cars, over food and the phone—with Nadia Abu
El-Haj, Arjun Appadurai, George Chauncey, Lisa Cohen, Jean and John Co-
maroff, Ray Fogelson, Susan Gal, Neville Hoad, John Lucy, Danilyn Ruther-
ford, Marshall Sahlins, Saskia Sassen, and Siobhan Somerville. Audiences at a
number of institutions also were critical to the emergent structure of my argu-
ment, especially at Berkeley, Harvard, Emory, Australian National University,
LaTrobe, Cornell, McGill, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Rutgers, Columbia,
the Arena Center, University of Technology Sydney, and the University of
Pennsylvania. Finally, Ken Wissoker and two anonymous reviewers for Duke
University Press provided constant encouragement and challenge to the form
and content of this manuscript.
There are several people who deserve more than thanks, in particular
my friends and family at Belyuen and Port Keats with whom I have shared
lives for the last seventeen years, especially Marjorie Bilbil, Ester Djarem,
Ruby Yarrowin, Alice Wanbirri, Anne Kunggul, Gracie Binbin, and Theresa
Timber, and the deceased Betty Bilawag, Tommy Barradjap, Maggie Timber,
Agnes Lippo, and Maudie Bennett. Equal to them are Stacey D’Erasmo, Susan
Edmunds, and Sharon and Chris Povinelli.
Research for this book was funded by the National Science Foundation, the
Wenner Gren Foundation, and the Adolph Lichstern Faculty Research Fund.

Early versions of several of the chapters in this volume have appeared in pre-
vious publications. ‘‘Mutant Messages’’ appeared as ‘‘Settler Modernity and
the Quest for an Indigenous Tradition,’’ Public Culture 11.1 (1999): 19–48, spe-
cial issue: Alternative Modernities,’’ ed. Dilip Gaonkar; ed. ‘‘Sex Rites, Civil
Rights’’ appeared as ‘‘Native Sex: Ritual Sex, State Rights, and the Making

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Duke University Press, 2002. All rights reserved.
 Acknowledgments

of an Aboriginal Civic Culture’’ in Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the

Nation, ed. Tamar Mayer (London: Routledge, 2000), 163–86; and ‘‘Shamed
States’’ appeared as ‘‘The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the
Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship,’’ Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998): 575–610, special
issue: ‘‘Intimacy,’’ ed. Lauren Berlant.

xi

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From The Cunning of Recognition by Povinelli, Elizabeth A.. DOI: 10.1215/9780822383673
Duke University Press, 2002. All rights reserved.
 I been panic. I been have to get up.
I been have to get up, talk now. ‘‘No.
No. You not going to forget them
Dreaming. You can’t forget. They still
there. They still going. They danger-
ous, that mob. You say, ‘No.’ ’’
—Betty Bilawag, conversation with
the author, 1993

INTRODUCTION / Critical Common Sense

JUST BE YOURSELF

In his 1958 essay ‘‘Continuity and Change’’ anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner

reflected on whether the indigenous population of Australia should assimilate
into mainstream settler society. Stanner’s discussion would probably not sur-
prise those familiar with mid-century public debates on indigenous assimi-
lation in Australia or, for that matter, in the United States, New Zealand, or
Canada. But Stanner writes something that we might easily pass over, rushed,
as we often are, to get to the point. He states: ‘‘Let us leave aside the question
that they may not want to [assimilate], and the possibility—I would myself
put it far higher than a possibility—that very determined forces of opposition
will appear. Suppose they do not know how to cease to be themselves.’’ 1
Thirty-five years later, long after Australian state indigenous policy had

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Duke University Press, 2002. All rights reserved.
 The Cunning of Recognition

shifted from assimilation to self-determination and then to reconciliation,

Betty Bilawag described to me the feelings of panic she experienced when she
attended a meeting to discuss whether mineral exploration should be allowed
in Marriamu and Marritjeban country, a small area of land on the northwest
coast of the Northern Territory of Australia. When she realized younger Mar-
riamu and Marritjeban family members were about to vote in mass in favor
of mining near a particularly sacred Dreaming site, she described her actions
to me in this way: ‘‘I been panic. I been have to get up. I been have to get up,
talk now. ‘No. No. You’re not going to forget them Dreaming. You can’t forget.
They still there. They still going. They dangerous, that mob. You say, No.’ ’’
Is it surprising to find younger members of Bilawag’s family seriously con-
sidering a mining venture as a means of relieving their structural poverty; or
to find her feeling ‘‘panic’’ in opposing their desires? This panic acts as a cor-
poreal index of the various contradictory orders and levels of obligation she
and her family face as they move across—and within—now complicatedly
intercalated discursive and practical spaces of capital, the Dreaming, and, as
we will see, state law in relation to them. Wadeye (Port Keats), where many
Marriamu and Marritjeban live, is the sixth-largest town in the Northern Ter-
ritory, a fact often obscured by its nonwhite population and geographic re-
moteness, located as it is off the main highway that runs from Darwin south to
Alice Springs. Wadeye is also, by far, one of the poorest of these Northern Ter-
ritory towns, with all the incumbent health and social problems of endemic
poverty: high childhood mortality, high substance abuse, suicide and depres-
sion, and low life expectancy. Mining ventures in the region might alleviate
some of this poverty, but there is a hitch.
If capital ventures like the mining proposal are able to relieve certain con-
ditions of poverty these women and men face, such ventures also can cre-
ate impediments to some of their other territorial and economic aspirations.
Just two years after my conversation with Bilawag, I was working with other
Marriamu and Marritjeban, preparing for a sea claim to be lodged under
the Native Title Act, 1993. As part of the application process, we had to pro-
duce a report and map demonstrating the continuing existence of their tra-
ditional laws, customs, beliefs, and practices. These traditional customs give
their native title application its legal efficacy under Australian statutory and
common law. Most jurists loosely agree with an understanding of traditional
customs as outlined by one of the first land tribunal justices in the Northern
Territory. Justice Olney, who had also served as a land commissioner under
the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976, described tradi-

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Duke University Press, 2002. All rights reserved.
 Introduction

tional customs as a set of laws, beliefs, and practices that are ‘‘integral to a
distinctive culture’’ rather than a mere ‘‘description of how people live,’’ how
their ancestors once lived, or how a portrait of their lives might be opportu-
nistic to the law.2 But although state courts and publics demand evidence of
the continuity of traditional beliefs, practices, and dispositions as the condi-
tion of cultural recognition and, through this, land title, some features and
practices of ‘‘customary law’’ are prohibited by common and statutory law
and by a public sense of moral decency—what constitutes the socially and
culturally repugnant and the limits of recognition.
It is not necessary to conceptualize a coherent subject nor completely sepa-
rate discursive orders in order to conceptualize the vital sociological conse-
quences of moments in which indigenous and nonindigenous subjects (or any
subjects for that matter) experience contrasting obligations to reasoned ar-
gument and moral sensibility—and, most important, are called upon to per-
formatively enact and overcome this impasse as the condition of recognition.
Moreover, as Bilawag’s reminiscences suggest, the subjective embodiment of
reason and moral sensibility varies, often significantly, across age and social
groups within a community—her younger family members were poised to
vote ‘‘yes’’ to the mining venture after all. Is it surprising, then, that the em-
bodiment of ‘‘culture’’ reflects the variations, slippages, dispersions, and am-
bivalences of discursive and moral formations across the variegated terrain of
indigenous and nonindigenous social life? Two types of social risks arise in
these moments. First, discursive norms and legal codes are placed at risk as
subjects like Bilawag and her family creatively engage the impasses they face,
generating new forms of social life. Second, the subject herself—Betty Bila-
wag—is placed at risk. Numerous people throughout the northwest coastal
region have described to me the personal consequences of not being able to
reconcile these various orders. They identify people as piya wedjirr (literally,
‘‘head-rotten’’) or ‘‘silly,’’ made so by their inability to reconcile the competing
obligations and desires that make up local lives. These people could neither
be nor cease to be themselves in social conditions that maximize the impasse
of discursive and moral orders. Whatever else might be said about Betty Bila-
wag’s ‘‘panic,’’ this much seems true—it points to and expresses the contra-
dictory mandates she inhabits and embodies. But she is not the only one in-
habiting the impasses of late liberalism. In other words, the contradictions
and impasses of late liberalism are not found only in and among minorities
and subalterns. They are a total social fact.
Nonindigenous Australians must now grapple with what constitutes a fe-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

licitous version of ‘‘traditional custom’’ in the context of these legal, public,

and moral binds. Nonindigenous jurists and other national citizens face the
question of whether commercial cultures are incompatible with the image of
distinctive traditional cultures and whether they are incompatible with other
capital ventures hinged to traditional cultural forms, such as cultural tourism,
ecotourism, and New Age tourism. (Wadeye bark and canvas paintings are
auctioned at Sotheby’s in Melbourne for thousands of dollars and can now be
perused on the Web.3) In these uneven cultural fields how do jurists and other
nonindigenous citizens discern a real indigenous subject from a ‘‘more or less’’
diluted subject? Is it sufficient for indigenous persons to assert that they know
customary beliefs or must they demonstrate some internal dispositional alle-
giance to that belief ? How does one calibrate an internal disposition? Does
Betty Bilawag’s panic, her seeming concern first and foremost for the lifetime
of the Dreamtime, indicate an internal disposition truer to a traditional out-
look than that of her younger family members, no matter what they might
say? Does her panic place her closer to traditional nonsettler values? The pos-
sibility of entertaining this thought has real material and social consequences
in the law of recognition.
But the problem of cultural difference is not merely whether commercial
cultures are incompatible within legal and other commercial imaginaries or
whether an assertion can be distinguished from a dispositional allegiance. It
is also a question of whether they are incompatible with personal and public
senses of the moral and the criminal. From this perspective new questions sur-
face. On what basis does a practice or belief switch from being an instance of
cultural difference to being repugnant culture? How does one calibrate differ-
ences across cultural distinctions in order to decide what counts as evidence
of continuing culture as opposed to what counts as evidence of criminal con-
duct?
No less than Bilawag, nonindigenous liberal Australians are confronted
with a set of historically variable and seemingly irresolvable obligations.
Settler Australians face a central irresolvable tension in the simultaneous obli-
gation to public reason and moral sense; in a multicultural context, to value
diversity and to repudiate immorality, to understand the practices of another
person or group and to accept them as viable neighbors. In other words, the
generative power of liberal forms of recognition derives not merely from the
performative difficulties of recognition but also from something that sociolo-
gists and philosophers have called moral sensibility, of the social fact of the
feeling of being obliged, of finding oneself under an obligation to some thing—

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Duke University Press, 2002. All rights reserved.
 Introduction

or to a complex of things. A person might find herself or himself obliged to

a feeling, a practice, a person, or an idea. In this book, I am especially inter-
ested in moments in which persons find themselves simultaneously obliged
to their moral sense and to reason, especially instances in which the two are
not reconciled, and in the new social imaginaries and formations that un-
fold from these moments. Betty Bilawag, for instance, found herself obliged to
the Dreaming inspite of the socioeconomic sense of the mineral exploration
or any reason that might arise from public debate. In chapter 3 I discuss in-
stances in which administrators in northern Australia in the 1930s and 40s
found themselves opposing federal policy on ‘‘tribal customs,’’ not because
they did not understand its economic or political rational but because they
thought it violated their sense of decency. They knew they ought to oppose
federal policy, although if asked why they might not say much more than
‘‘because it is the right thing to do.’’ In moments like this, persons face most
starkly the fact that following one law means violating another. They discover
that their reasoning and their affect are out of joint: I should be tolerant but
you make me sick; I understand your reasoning but I am deeply offended by
your presence.
The experience of what analytic philosophers describe as deep epistemo-
logical and deontological differences may well create irresolvable cleavages,
not simply between two social groups but within one of them which, prior
to encountering radical alterity, was tacitly accepted and experienced as a
collectivity. For instance, the intimate ‘‘We’’ of the national ‘‘We the People’’
can come precariously close to being refashioned as a collection of strangers
who turn not toward but away from each other in the neighborhood of radi-
cal alterity. ‘‘We’’ identifications are refashioned as third-person attributions:
they, them; their ways, moralities, and cultures; their liberal or conservative
prejudices. National subjects find that no matter the heroic rhetoric of en-
lightenment understanding, ‘‘their ways’’ cannot cease to make ‘‘us’’ sick. And
this sickness scatters the self (I, us) across contrasting obligations to public
reason and moral sensibility. It is this cauldron of competing social impulses
that interests me, because of the way it generates new ethics and metaethics
of national and international social life.

LIBERAL DIASPORAS

In this volume I critically examine Australian liberal multiculturalism as an

ideology and practice of governance, a form of everyday affective associa-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

tion and identification, and a specific discursive incitement across the varie-
gated contexts of national and transnational life. I do not comment on Aus-
tralian multiculturalism in a general way, but rather only in the specific way it
emerges in the neighborhood of indigenous subjects and societies.4 And I am
interested in a very particular legacy and moment of ‘‘liberalism’’ within what
I call the liberal diaspora. By liberal diaspora I mean to gesture at the colo-
nial and postcolonial subjective, institutional, and discursive identifications,
dispersions, and elaborations of the enlightenment idea that society should
be organized on the basis of rational mutual understanding.5
To understand how liberal discourses and identifications are elaborated
in colonial and postcolonial worlds, I think it is important to differentiate
postcolonial struggles from multicultural ones.6 Frantz Fanon and members
of the school of Subaltern Studies have suggested how colonial domination
worked by inspiring in colonized subjects a desire to identify with their colo-
nizers.7 The Australian example suggests that multicultural domination seems
to work, in contrast, by inspiring subaltern and minority subjects to identify
with the impossible object of an authentic self-identity; in the case of indige-
nous Australians, a domesticated nonconflictual ‘‘traditional’’ form of soci-
ality and (inter)subjectivity. As the nation stretches out its hands to ancient
Aboriginal laws (as long as they are not ‘‘repugnant’’), indigenous subjects are
called on to perform an authentic difference in exchange for the good feel-
ings of the nation and the reparative legislation of the state. But this call does
not simply produce good theater, rather it inspires impossible desires: to be
this impossible object and to transport its ancient prenational meanings and
practices to the present in whatever language and moral framework prevails
at the time of enunciation.
Although on the one hand I am interested in liberal forms of multicul-
turalism as a form of domination, I am also interested in these forms both
as a response to previous discursive impasses of national life and as a place
within which minority and subaltern subjects creatively elaborate new social
imaginaries. In this way this book is a partial story, as stories and analyses
always are. In it I try to understand how a discursive, affective, and insti-
tutional calculus of citizenship and nationalism—the liberal aspiration for a
rational nonviolent form of association based on competing knowledges and
moral values—is intercalated in legal, public, and state assessments of indige-
nous claims for material compensation for colonial harms. I am especially
interested in these issues as they occur in land and native title claims and in
public assessments of state-based indigenous welfare programs and benefits.

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 Introduction

At the book’s core, then, I attempt to analyze critically a liberal aspiration

for a critical rational foundation to national and transnational cultural her-
meneutics. I try to understand what this aspiration is—its immanence in real-
time ‘‘multicultural’’ social life—and how it acts as a social ethics and social
technology for distributing the rights and goods, harms and failures, of lib-
eral capital democracies, and for making sense of who and what ought to be
held responsible for the successes and failures of these personal and national
dreams. As I do so, I try to understand, on the one hand, how the real hopes
and optimisms invested in a particular form of national association—liberal
multiculturalism—divert social energy from other political and social forms
and imaginaries; how they make certain violences appear accidental to a social
system rather than generated by it; and, most important, how they attribute
and distribute failures arising from a social system to conflicts between social
systems. And I try to understand, on the other hand, how indigenous subjects
creatively engage the specific logic of liberal multiculturalism.
Long ago I was humbled by the task of capturing analytically or socio-
logically the stakes on indigenous life of something so seemingly vague and
ephemeral as an aspiration. What model of the social could concretely cap-
ture and demonstrate the social effect of this aspiration on Bilawag and her
family and on indigenous politics and public assessments and national econo-
mies and social poverty? What could demonstrate the response of her and her
ancestors to these changing aspirations? Moreover, I worried that something
very unusual, hardly representative, might be happening along the northwest
coast stretching south from Darwin, in the Northern Territory, to Wadeye,
near the Western Australian border, where I had been working year in and
year out since 1984. Several important land claims had been given hearings
throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. The unusual nature of one, the Kenbi Land
Claim (which covered lands on the peninsula just across the Darwin Harbor),
was hardly reassuring. To date it has been heard twice and has generated four
often-competing indigenous claimant groups, each with their own legal and
anthropological counsel. The case concerns the limits of historical transfor-
mation in the context of legally mandated customary continuity. Here is an
example of how indigenous people critically and creatively engaged the often
brutal history of a liberal diaspora, elaborating local imaginaries and trans-
local economic, political, and social facts, only to meet the law of recognition
that places a limit on exactly this type of creativity.
Perhaps only this context would have motivated local indigenous people
to speculate that the failure of the claim was the result of their failure to have

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Duke University Press, 2002. All rights reserved.
 The Cunning of Recognition

and hold onto their ‘‘traditional culture’’ after 120 years of often brutal coloni-
zation. Maybe only this particular scene would elevate to sociological signifi-
cance the impossible demand placed on these and other indigenous people:
namely, that they desire and identify with their cultural traditions in a way
that just so happens, in an uncanny convergence of interests, to fit the national
and legal imaginary of multiculturalism; that they at once orient their sen-
sual, emotional, and corporeal identities toward the nation’s and law’s image
of traditional cultural forms and national reconciliation and at the same time
ghost this being for the nation so as not to have their desires for some economic
certainty in their lives appear opportunistic.8
To understand the social sources of these social conditions I began looking
for whatever signposts I encountered along the way. One was found in lib-
eral accounts of obligation. This much seems certain: a range of obligations
strike people throughout the course of their lives in a variety of social set-
tings. Statements invoking obligation address different persons and scales of
personhood: first person, second person, third person (I, we, you, she, he, it);
Everyone or Manyone or Someone. And these obligations encompass a wide
range of social values from justice to cleanliness, and rituals from formal to
informal. Philosophers and sociologists working in the legacy of the Enlight-
enment have been occupied by the striking nature of obligation—the force
with which an obligation imposes itself on one—and the seeming differences
among the feelings of obligation (of being obliged to something or to some-
one), the justifications provided for abiding by this or that obligation, and
the procedures for reaching shared understandings. One set of obligations
in particular have exercised western scholars: the seemingly unconditional
nature of ethical and moral obligations and its relation to the enlightenment
obligation to public reason (critical rational discourse).
One can immediately see why this domain of obligation would be so inter-
esting to philosophers and sociologists confronting the question of social and
cultural difference in postcolonial and multicultural contexts and yet be so
difficult for them to resolve analytically. Although reason and moral sensi-
bility are often said to coincide in the last instance, moral obligation becomes
philosophically and sociologically interesting exactly where it seems to differ
from reason—or is strained to the point of extreme tautology. Why . . . Be-
cause . . . Why. When people have moral obligations, they seem to have them
independent of the way they arrive at critical rational conclusions. People
seem to be had by them rather than to have them. In the procedural ideal of
critical rational discourse, reasoned public debate occurs prior to a judgment

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Duke University Press, 2002. All rights reserved.
 Introduction

(judgment is a posteriori to public reason). But moral sensibility works as an

a priori type of ‘‘knowledge.’’ People feel like they know what is morally right
prior to arguments concerning why; they might subsequently change their
minds after a long talk, but they know first. Kant was not the only person to
be bothered by this. The deconstructive philosopher John Caputo puts the
outrage of obligation this way: ‘‘I know that I am under an obligation, that the
call is received, that I am laid claim to.’’ But if you pressed me for an answer
why I am obliged ‘‘I will develop a serious cough and ask to be excused.’’ 9
All this gets a little complicated, especially when liberal obligations to
moral sensibility and critical rational discourse are examined as discursively
constituted social facts. We do well to remember that ‘‘rational critical dis-
course’’ and ‘‘moral sensibility’’ are discursive characterizations not presocial
facts. On the one hand, rational critical discourse refers to and describes a
procedure of interaction (that is, how one should do this thing called rational
critical discourse in the process of stating what it is), and is itself a metadis-
cursive characterization of a social interaction—namely, what type of talk
(rational, self-reflective) counts as an instance of public reason. People may
well disagree whether or not an exchange should be characterized as critical
rational, public, reasoned, or reasonable. In any case, this form of talk and the
characterization and valuation of this form of talk arose historically. On the
other hand, moral sensibility refers to and characterizes a form of knowing,
often described as moral intuition or embodied insight. Other societies have,
however, characterized this form of social insight in other ways, perhaps as
evidence of the divine working through the human, or a moment of revela-
tion. Given this minor historiography, note that although both moral reason
and public reason are metadiscursive characterizations, each also refers to a
different aspect of social life. Rational critical discourse refers to a type of talk,
so it is a form of language used to refer to an instance of language. But moral
feeling, or moral sensibility, refers to a social phenomenon outside or other
than discourse—even though, technically, it may be a form of inference. And
insofar as it refers to something other than itself, what moral sensibility ‘‘is’’
is always in excess of what enunciates it and what is enunciated.
There is nothing intrinsically anthropologically interesting or socially
problematic about this difference between moral sensibility (deontology) and
critical rational knowledge (epistemology). The difference between moral
sensibility/feeling and rational critical discourse could be and is viewed with
indifference in many cultural contexts. The difference is interesting only and
exactly because of the way it works as a generative impasse in liberal dis-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

courses about and institutions of cultural recognition. A core obligation of

liberalism is to decide public matters on the basis of autonomous, reasonable,
and rational subjects (‘‘private persons’’) bracketing the social differences that
exist among themselves and presenting to their fellow citizens the most ro-
bust, true, sincere, and legitimate argument they can muster. And yet moral
obligation proper is otherwise in nature than this obligation to reason. Moral
obligation—moral sensibility—is exactly where critical rationality is not.
Seemingly far afield, the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce’s
understanding of the inference of ‘‘perceptual judgment’’ gestures at the in-
tractability that obligations present to critical social practice—especially that
aspect of critical social theory addressing the liberal aspiration to ground
national and transnational cultural hermenuetics in the procedures of critical
rational discourse—even as it points to the horizon where public and moral
reason converge. In ‘‘The Three Normative Sciences,’’ Peirce presents, as an ex-
ample of perceptual judgment (also called ‘‘extreme abduction’’), Legendre’s
proof that if a line abuts upon an ordinary point of another line, thereby form-
ing two angles , then the sum of the two angles is equal to the sum of
two right angles. This can be shown by drawing a perpendicular line at the
point of abutment. This perpendicular will always fall within one or the other
angles . Peirce focuses on the transparent truth of this fact, noting that, al-
though we only ever see a specific case of this argument, ‘‘the pupil is suppose
to see that . . . it will be so in any case.’’ 10 Even leaving aside the ninety degrees,
we see that the perpendicular will always fall within one or the other angle.
This is a ‘‘truth’’ whose self-evidence is guaranteed by the visual field. What
separates such instances of extreme abduction from ordinary abduction is the
fact that, in Peirce’s words, the former feels like ‘‘a judgment absolutely forced
upon my acceptance and that by a process I am utterly unable to control and
consequently am unable to criticize.’’ 11 Sense certainty: where else would the
perpendicular fall if not within one or the other angle in two-dimensional
space? How could it be otherwise?
Here we see that moral sensibility is, in fact, the experience of the infer-
ence of perceptual judgment. And if this is so, then moral reason is as liable
to refiguration in social history as is public reason; indeed, all perceptual
judgments are. Even the once self-evident universal application of Euclidean
geometry was displaced in non-Euclidean space. In another possible world,
parallelism suddenly looked very different. And so we are led to wonder what
allowed anyone to imagine this other possible world and thereby disrupt the
visual guarantee of this actual world. What introduces irritation and doubt

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 Introduction

about an object of knowledge or a practice or a sense of morality, their status,

self-evidence, and value as true without reserve? What allows anyone to value
such critical irritation—what Peirce called ‘‘critical common sense’’—in what
contexts; and to wonder, in the form of a second-order abstraction, whether
this critical gesture is going anywhere; whether it is going in any sense other
than figuration and refiguration, subject to social struggle, but not oriented
toward anything.12 Does some ‘‘culture’’ own the critical spirit? Does one his-
torical people or conversation have a type of world historical courage for
critique without reserve? These questions are, at bottom, what critical so-
cial theorists of the liberal enlightenment have asked, from Kant to Marx to
Gramsci, and Luxemburg to Du Bois to Spivak to Agamben and their conser-
vative counterparts, Huntington, Fukuyama, and Bloom.
For Peirce, there was movement and direction in reason. It headed toward
truth, with ‘‘truth’’ understood as a real fact corresponding to a proposition,
a final interpretant at the end of a long asymptotic curve of reasoned inquiry
stimulated by the irritation of doubt. Even if reason never did reach truth,
man still needed the notion of truth—the experience of the inference of ex-
treme abduction—in order to continue to search for better understandings.
The notion of a truth incited, guided, and soothed man. Peirce also thought
that particular forms of society provided the conditions of possibility for the
arrival of particular forms of doubt and irritation—not for critique in general
but for specific forms and modalities of critique. And I agree to this extent—
social institutions and relations incite or mitigate against thinking particular
modes of otherwise. They influence whether and when critical thought takes
place. For those places where it cannot take place in liberal and illiberal soci-
eties, courage, indeed, is necessary to think and live otherwise in contexts that
indicate the risk of being various forms of otherwise. The celebratory rhetoric
of liberal multiculturalism rests on the grounds that this social form provides
the social conditions (discursive, institutional, [inter]subjective) for dimin-
ishing the heroics of critique; that it makes thinking otherwise safe for liberal
democracies—indeed, gives democracy its unique social vitality. Some go so
far as to claim for liberalism an ownership of a universal form of critique in
the proceduralism of liberal public reason.13
And yet in liberal multicultural democracies, subjects still experience cer-
tain truths as self-evident and undeniable, and certain ways of thinking, let
alone acting, as dangerous and unreliable. Moreover, subjects who consider
themselves to be liberals often hold onto their moral intuitions even when
their historical knowledge tells them that these truths are not likely to hold.

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 The Cunning of Recognition

As I elaborate in chapter 4, an invisible asterisk, a proviso, hovers above every

enunciation of indigenous customary law: ‘‘(provided [they] . . . are not so re-
pugnant).’’ This proviso interprets specific instances of cultural practices and
indexes where public reason no longer applies. For instance, although Austra-
lian law might demand ‘‘real acknowledgement of traditional law and real ob-
servance of traditional customs’’ as the basis for a successful native title claim,
real customary being must be free of any sense of a repugnant that would
‘‘shatter the skeletal structure’’ of state law; that is, provoke an affective rela-
tion to a cultural or social otherwise, an experience of fundamental alterity.
But national jurists and subjects are not exempt from the very problem posed
to Aboriginal subjects: the dilemma of capturing real justice in real discourse
and narrative time without prompting the appearance of the same interpre-
tant hovering over judgments of native title, criminal law, or public morality.
This judgment is just (unless [although] . . . it may appear retrospectively as
repugnant or shameful). Australian history is littered with instances in which
a moral sensibility of just action was retrospectively seen as a merely prejudi-
cial reaction. In recent years, the Australian public sphere has loudly lamented
this mistaken moral sensibility in a number of cases, most recently that of the
Stolen Generation (which I discuss below and at more length in chapter 1). The
social implication of this double session of institutionally mediated knowing
is clear, and it is perhaps nowhere more clear and seriously encountered than
in the context of multicultural pronouncements on the limits of tolerance in
liberal society.
This may seem a very strange way to get to a simple point about liberal
settler forms of multiculturalism. But it raises, in a particularly visceral fash-
ion, important questions for the stance critical theory should take toward cer-
tain liberal social institutional phenomena and regulatory ideals, certainly for
how the distinction between the true and the inconceivable (which I rely on)
opens itself to being read. And it raises important questions for how we ap-
proach the ways people actually experience the regulatory ideals of liberal life.
How do we, and why would we, critically engage a seemingly irreducible good
and truth—the liberal regulatory ideal of decreased harm through increased
mutual understanding of social and cultural differences? Of a liberal aspira-
tion for a world where conflict does not exist across epistemic and deontic
communities? We could ask whether this is actually the aspiration of liberal
multiculturalism or whether this is how people actually experience this aspi-
ration—two questions that greatly interest me—but this is to ask something
different from whether there is a point to criticizing it. To ask if we should

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 Introduction

critique these ideals is to allow for the possibility of conceptualizing the in-
stitutional, discursive, and subjective conditions of liberalism outside its own
terms. It is to allow for the possibility that liberalism is harmful not only when
it fails to live up to its ideals, but when it approaches them.
Let me turn to a book by Michael Walzer (who has thought long and hard
about liberal political forms) to clarify what is at stake in asking these ques-
tions and in the models we develop to answer them. On Toleration (1997) re-
minds us of a certain set of commonplaces among liberal political theorists:
that all liberals acknowledge that ‘‘we choose within limits’’; that few would
ever be so daring as to advance ‘‘an unconstrained relativism’’; and that not
every act should be tolerated.14 Having said this, Walzer does what theorists
of liberal pluralism, multiculturalism, and diasporic nationalism often do, he
urges readers to set aside the intractable problems facing national and inter-
national life—both within liberalism and across liberal and nonliberal soci-
eties—and concentrate instead on the levels and types of disagreement that
can be resolved without physical violence. Begin with the doable.
The trouble with this tactic is that in actual social worlds those who con-
sider themselves to be liberal are confronted with instances of intractable so-
cial differences that they do not set aside—that they do not feel they can or
should set aside. They encounter instances of what they experience as mo-
ments of fundamental and uncanny alterity: encounters with differences they
consider abhorrent, inhuman, and bestial, or with differences they consider
too hauntingly similar to themselves to warrant social entitlements—for ex-
ample, land claims by indigenous people who dress, act, and sound like the
suburban neighbors they are. Moments in which subjects are prompted to
calibrate the forms and modes of difference confronting them occur in large
and small scales, in political and intimate settings; they startle and are long-
expected. Courts dismiss the juridical viability of these moments. Govern-
ments and public spokespersons denounce them as the limits of good law and
good society in a multicultural framework. More important, these moments
are not moments at all, but somebody’s life. They mark the site where in-
digenous persons struggle to inhabit the tensions and torsions of competing
incitements to be and to identify differentially. And I mean incitements. Dif-
ference does not simply exist out there in nonliberal beliefs and practices. Par-
ticular people and communities are also called on to perform particular types
of liberal and nonliberal differences for a variety of other persons and com-
munities, be they tourist attraction, ceremonial man, or bush-tucker guide.
Rather than setting aside the intractable, I have decided to give attention

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 The Cunning of Recognition

to these moments of seemingly irresolvable liberal judgments and indigenous

struggles in order to understand their generative social force. In this volume I
am particularly interested in a specific nonpassage between discursively and
morally grounded ideologies of justice. My discussion is centered on social
encounters in which a judgment about what constitutes a viable neighbor is
experienced as moral irrespective of its ‘‘reasoned’’ grounds or institutional
supports. I seek to understand how this experience is subjectively, textually,
and institutionally mediated in the given time of constitutional liberal democ-
racies, and how this ideological and experiential nonpassage—rather than di-
lemma or contradiction—is deferred rather than resolved into a new national
ideological formation—namely, multiculturalism.
I ask: What minimal analytical foundations are necessary for an examina-
tion of the social consequences of liberal ethics and anxieties, of the unre-
solved and irreducible tensions within liberal national settler institutions and
ideologies? How do these exact moments—too much and too little difference
in indigenous Australia—generate new local and national discursive, affec-
tive, and institutional forms and incitements across diverse social fields? How
do indigenous persons and communities struggle within and across these dis-
cursive, subjective, and institutional fields? At what point does the indigenous
become dangerous rather than good to think? 15 Building up from these ques-
tions is a second-order series of inquiries; namely, how do these intractable
moments form high-order social discourses, social programs, law, and cul-
tural programming?
The critical study of liberal diaspora I propose is not interested in simple
critiques of ‘‘liberalism,’’ which often move quickly past the complexity of lib-
eral traditions as they have evolved in the context of political struggles within
Western, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. Numerous scholars have shown
that as emergent social forms and practices were diverted to liberal forms and
practices, liberalism itself was dilated and transformed often in strikingly in-
consistent ways. One of the great persuasions of liberalism has been its seem-
ing openness, its voracious encompassment. And this is not merely a false
front. Liberals do actually value certain forms of thinking and being other-
wise, annd it wants to supercede all others in order to be the end of history.
The aim of public reason seems to be to achieve this end through a nonviolent
convergence of minds and hearts. The trouble is that this is not true without
reserve. As I hope to demonstrate, in certain contexts the aim of public rea-
son is not to understand, let alone agree, but rather to sequester some often
inexpressible felt-thing from reflexive judgment. Under this procedural prin-

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 Introduction

ciple, public debate ‘‘ought’’ to (or in the stronger ethical form, ‘‘must’’) give
way to a collective moral sense, and not only that public debate must give way
but that collective moral sense should be protected from the procedures of
critical reason. What is considered exemplary of collective morality may be
open to public debate or private conscience. My point here is simply that the
ideal still formally holds. The algebra of this principle would look like this:
>x (Public Reason)x.
Let me turn to the representation of procedural reason in an episode of the
American television drama Law and Order in order to concretize this point.
In ‘‘God Bless the Child’’ (22 October 1991), the ailing child of members of a
thinly disguised sect of the Church of Christ, Scientist dies because her par-
ents, believing in the healing power of prayer, refuse all medical intervention.
The police are faced with the question of whether or not to prosecute the
parents for manslaughter. The episode discusses at length whether doubt—
a crisis of faith in times of emergency—opens religious belief to legal prose-
cution. If the parents doubted their faith, but nevertheless withheld medical
aid, was the action constitutionally protected in the space of doubt? At the
end of the episode, the leader of the church is in the witness stand. In re-
ply to a critical question about church practices posed by the prosecutor, the
church leader reminds viewers of the U.S. constitutional separation of church
and state so fundamental to liberal democratic proceduralism. The prosecu-
tor has the last word in this exchange, retorting with a set of questions: If child
abuse were a religious belief held by some people, should the state stand aside
and let the children be abused? If the handling of snakes by children were
a religious belief that some people held, should the state stand by? In these
statements viewers might hear not-so-veiled references to David Koresh and
Appalachian snake handlers.
So why isn’t this part of the minor pedagogy of liberal democratic pro-
ceduralism? Liberal theorists might hear, and rightfully point to, the prose-
cutor’s conformity to the proceduralism of public reason, opening belief to
reasoned and rational argument and placing justification in actual and pos-
sible worlds of practice. But this surely would misinterpret the communicative
event. These questions are not to be answered (the judge has the last word,
ruling the prosecutor’s questions ‘‘out of bounds’’). The questions are perfor-
mative marks of the line past which the procedures of public reason should not
tread, the Pandora’s box opened by not heeding our perceptual judgments in
moral domains. These performatives issue intolerance in the form of a ques-
tion, but a question that teaches audiences how to stage the internal limit of

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 The Cunning of Recognition

liberal tolerance as a reasonable openness to a very open and shut case. When
in doubt, drop the bar until critical abduction turns to extreme abduction and
your opponent breaks her back (see also Law and Order’s episodes ‘‘Ritual,’’
17 December 1998, and ‘‘Disciple,’’ 24 February 1999).
Broad characterizations of liberalism, humanism, and modernity fail to
capture the complexity of this historical terrain of social and political worlds.
They miss the jobs done by minor emotions and discourses such as doubt
and irritation and failures of faith and exhaustion in liberal discursive forma-
tions—and these are jobs they indeed do. They authorize, authenticate, and
guarantee Truth in liberal regimes of critical rational reflection. They indicate
that reflexive judgment has commenced, allowing subjects to feel engaged in a
social process labeled ‘‘justice’’ and to feel that such mass subject-projections
like the nation, the public, and the state are equally engaged. These feelings
of moral right provide an excess ‘‘reason’’ beyond the procedures of public
reason itself that supports and advances whatever justificatory framework is
provided. These feelings superanimate the self-evidence of the justification
itself by creating the sense of a ‘‘beyond itself.’’
Far from dismissing the optimisms and aspirations captured in the form
of Australian multiculturalism, far from viewing the diverse set of social per-
sons discussed in this book as in silent alliance with the leaders of a grand
historical conspiracy, far from casting personal and public crises of identity,
tolerance, and material restitution as mere performative maskings, I propose
that we only approach a true understanding of liberal forms of multicultur-
alism by inching ever nearer to the good intentions that subjects have, hold,
and cherish and to the role these intentions play in solidifying the self-evident
good of liberal institutions and procedures. Many Australians truly desire that
indigenous subjects be treated considerately, justly, and with respect, publicly,
juridically, and personally. They truly desire a form of society in which all
people can have exactly what they want . . . if they deserve it. They do not feel
good when they feel responsible for social conflict, pain, or trauma. This is,
after all, a fantasy of liberal capitalist society too simply put: convulsive com-
petition purged of real conflict, social difference without social consequences.
To provide a sensorium of cultural competition and difference without sub-
jecting the liberal subjects to the consuming winds of social conflict—no more
or less is asked of the indigenous subject, the subaltern subject, the minority
subject.
In sum, in this book I suggest that before we can develop a ‘‘critical theory
of recognition,’’ or a politics of distribution and capabilities, we need to

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 Introduction

understand better the cunning of recognition; its intercalation of the politics

of culture with the culture of capital.16 We need to puzzle over a simple ques-
tion: What is the nation recognizing, capital commodifying, and the court
trying to save from the breach of history when difference is recognized? If
Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition takes inspiration from Herderian and
post-Hegelian notions of recognition, this analysis of the cunning of recog-
nition draws inspiration from Hegel’s dark account of reason found in The
Philosophy of History. In Hegel’s hands the cunning of reason was revealed at
the same time its brutality was exposed. In this spirit, I ask how late liberal
ideology works through the passions of recognition, tries to develop its worth
without subjecting itself to the throes of contestation and opposition. I ask
how national pageants of shameful repentance and celebrations of a new rec-
ognition of subaltern worth remain inflected by the conditional (as long as
they are not repugnant; that is, as long as they are not, at heart, not-us and
as long as real economic resources are not at stake). I think we should refuse
to concede that the answer to the aporias of liberalism is, in the first or last
instance, to extend liberalism in ever more radical modes of democracy, but
rather we should pause and wonder what it is we are disseminating in actual
rather than mere philosophical worlds. Let us look at what various forms of
liberalism do rather than decide to be for or against them in their abstraction.
Australia seems an ideal place to examine the generation of a new national
metaethics around multiculturalism, both because of the depth of its commit-
ment to this national form and because of the relative rapidity in which it has
adopted it. Take Betty Bilawag, for example. Over the course of her lifetime
she has witnessed settler Australians shoot her extended family for sport and
economic gain, public and state repression of ritual; and national celebrations
of Aboriginal culture and regret for past harms.

BANANA REPUBLICS

Much earlier than in the United States, and in response to very different geo-
political conditions, Australian nationalism came to mean something other
than descent from the convict, ruling, or immigrant classes who arrived from
Britain and western Europe. And more firmly and publicly than the United
States and Europe, to varying degrees the various political parties of the Aus-
tralian state claim to have renounced the ideal of ‘‘a unitary culture and tra-
dition’’ and, instead, now recognizes the value and worth of ‘‘cultural diver-
sity within, . . . as the basis of . . . a more differentiated mode of national

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 The Cunning of Recognition

cohesion.’’ 17 Australian state officials represent themselves and the nation as

subjects shamed by past imperial, colonial, and racist attitudes that are now
understood as having, in their words, constituted the ‘‘darkest aspect’’ of the
nation’s history and impaired its social and economic future. Multiculturalism
is represented as the externalized political testament to the nation’s aversion
to its past misdeeds, and to its recovered good intentions.
In short, rather than just some general acknowledgment of shameful past
wrongdoings and some limited tolerance of present cultural differences, Aus-
tralia has putatively sought a more radical basis of national unity. In state
and public discourse, the Australian nation aspires to be ‘‘truly multicultural.’’
Official spokespersons claim that multiculturalism is an assemblage of the
diverse and proliferating social identities and communities now composing
the nation’s internal population, with no one social position or group’s views
serving as an oppressive grounding discourse. Cleansed by a collective mo-
ment of shame and reconciliation, the nation will not only be liberated into
good feelings and institutions but also acquire the economic and social pro-
ductivity necessary to political and economic hegemony in the Asia-Pacific
region—or, at least, to keep the nation from falling further and further behind
its northern neighbors.
It was as part of this history that on 14 May 1986, Paul Keating, then trea-
surer in the Labour Party government of Prime Minister Hawke, described
Australia to Australians as a fledging ‘‘banana republic.’’ 18 Although an econo-
mist, not a Deleuzian, by training, Keating nevertheless acted as if he sought
to bend ‘‘the outside’’ inward ‘‘through a series of practical exercises’’—speech
acts, economic policies, and labor practices—in order to reformulate Austra-
lian subjectivity along a rationalized spatial economy.19 He saw this realign-
ment of national identity as a prerequisite to the nation’s economic produc-
tivity and thus to its social well-being, in the conditions of advanced global
capital. Keating was, however, simply eloquently and passionately engaged
in Labour’s more general campaign to make the Australian public literate in
economic rationalism: how ‘‘culture(s) and identity (or, better, the processes
through which they are formed)’’ are a ‘‘resisting ‘environment’ of the eco-
nomic system that has to be made more economically ‘rational’ and ‘produc-
tive.’ ’’ 20
Nearly ten years later, as prime minister, Keating proclaimed on national
tv: ‘‘I am Asian,’’ thereby replacing the banana republic image with a new
mapping of Australia in the world to shake what he saw as those national fanta-
sies and complacencies that affected economic growth. Keating’s cartographi-

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 Introduction

cal imaginary aimed to provoke Australians to consider the profits available

to them if they would understand their identities and identifications to be
flexible and strategic and dislodge questions of ontology from essentialized
corporeal and historical grounds. But in reiterating Australian ethnic identity
while locating it in Asia, Keating repeated the very assumptions his metaphor
was suppose to shake. The addressee of Keating’s comments remained, like
Keating, a loosely defined Anglo-Celtic forced to think of his or her ‘‘white-
ness’’ at a double economic margin—at the margin of Europe and the United
States and at the margin of the Asia-Pacific.
Social and political-economic conditions in these margins have undergone
significant transformations since the emergence of the East Asian so-called
miracle economies in the 1960s and 70s and their sudden collapse and re-
vitalization in the late 1990s. Because of these transformations, Keating had
good reason to be passionate about the nation and the future of its citizens.
He spoke at a moment when Australians already were experiencing a crisis
of identity, if not yet a ‘‘crisis of authority,’’ owing to significant global, state,
and capital realignments.21
For the first sixty-odd years of Australian federation, the nation had ‘‘the
highest living standards and the most equal distribution of income in all
the ‘developed’ nations,’’ primarily as the result of the Labour Accord (the
state’s direct control over wages, industrial relations, and tariffs).22 But this
economic stability was also a result of Australia’s long-standing trading part-
nership with England, in which Australia provided the primary materials
for British industry and imported from Britain manufactured and consumer
goods and received capital investment. Most Anglo-Celtic Australians, in-
deed, were living the good life, beachside and basking in the glow of a well-
functioning state and economy. Citizens could, for a while, imagine them-
selves living in a ‘‘lucky country,’’ if they forgot about the indigenous people
interned in disease-stricken detention camps in the far north and west of the
nation and the Asian laborers and businesspersons suffering from a racial-
ized nationalism.23 The everyday conditions of these unlucky others did not
often puncture public representations in which Australians felt good about
themselves, their future, their national self-understanding as a white nation
advancing western humanism in the Asia-Pacific.24
The Australian standard of living began to change significantly in the early
1970s when England, after a period of economic instability, integrated more
tightly into the eec, leaving Australia bereft of its major historical trading
partner. Battered about by a number of global economic crises, the Australian

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 The Cunning of Recognition

state and business expanded long-standing trading patterns with the so-called
miracle economies of the Asia-Pacific, most importantly with Japan.25 But
even as Australia changed economic partners, its economic profile remained
remarkably stable. Japan was in need of industrial raw materials and Aus-
tralia remained in need of capital investment and manufactured and durable
consumer goods.
Yet, Australian business leaders discovered that the global conditions of
capital had changed by the time they refigured their trading partners. The
Asia-Pacific was not simply a new site of capital accumulation but an inno-
vator in new forms of social and capital organization. Japanese businesses,
in particular, developed novel production techniques as firms ‘‘rationalized’’
their manufacturing operations by establishing multilayered subcontracting
systems and by relocating production facilities to geographical areas unaccus-
tomed to Fordist wage and consumption standards.26 Subcontracting firms
and production facilities increasingly transgressed national borders, leading
not only to Japanese economic dominance in the region but to the formation
of an interdependent, if not an integrated, Asia-Pacific political economy—
the creation of dense linkages among the organization of modes and sites of
production, consumer patterns, and material extraction and manufacturing.
And while Japan’s Southeast Asian trading partners nursed lingering suspi-
cions about the possible emergence of a new Japanese imperialism in the area,
a regional bloc nevertheless began to congeal and harden by the middle of
the 1970s.
As a result of these changing capital formations, Australia began to face
‘‘mounting economic challenges due to falling commodity prices, rising debt
burden, and inefficient and uncompetitive industries.’’ 27 The nation was be-
coming ‘‘Latin Americanized.’’ 28 In every financial quarter, it seemed, the
national economy shrunk relative to the emerging so-called flying geese of
the Asia-Pacific. Jobs were harder to find, although the Labour Accord kept
the minimum wage high. Whole generations of Anglo-Celtics, ‘‘our kids,’’
were on the dole or on the dole roller coaster. In the midst of this economic
downturn, the mass media ran story after story of Asian capitalists buying up
choice Australian real estate, along with descriptions of the lifestyles of the
new Asian millionaires, and of the ‘‘Asian’’ social and cultural values puta-
tively at the basis of the Asian miracle economies.29 The mass media rarely
discussed the underside of capital transformations, although it did cover the
occasional collapsing building and environmental disaster in Malaysia and
Indonesia.

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 Introduction

What the Australian mainstream media foregrounded were the cultural

differences separating Australian and Asian societies, typically Australia’s
commitment to a notion of universal human rights, rights that appeared to
be threatened by these new forms of the economic good. Western humanism’s
fragility and defensiveness at the double margin of Asia-Pacific and Euro-
American hegemony is suggested by the newspaper headlines that greeted my
arrival in Sydney on 18 September 1996. In front-page stories, both the Sydney
Morning Herald and The Australian reported that in a speech in Jakarta, Lib-
eral prime minister John Howard defended the Europeanness of Australian
nationalism: ‘‘We are immensely proud of our distinctive culture, our distinc-
tive history, and our distinctive traditions, and we yield to nobody in asserting
their great quality and enduring value.’’ 30 Three years later Howard would op-
pose the republican movement that sought to divest the state from its formal
ties with the British Commonwealth, replacing the Crown with an elected
head of state.
The mainstream media weighed these cultural issues against the economic,
social, and political profits that might accrue to Australians if they thought
of themselves spatially, from a bird’s-eye view as a point on the globe, rather
than primarily historically, as descended and therefore essentially being from
another point on the globe. Although Australia may have needed the strong
economies of Asia, did the identification with Asia, or as Asians, cross the
discursively thin line preserving European culture and its political and so-
cial institutions at the nation’s core? At what cost would Australians maintain
or erase these social and cultural differences and traditions? And, finally, no
matter the political-economic sense that his statement might have made, did
statements like Keating’s ‘‘I am Asian’’—or, later, an event like the republican
movement—constitute a form of race betrayal for those in the nation who
still worried whether they would be swamped both by Asian immigration and
economic power? Or was it an index of the maturing confidence of Austra-
lian nationalism? Rather than a unified stance and a monological voicing of
the meaning of multiculturalism, Australian political parties and the public
evoke the contestorial field often hidden under this national ideology.
Australia’s historical and economic relationship to Asia provided one side
of a double margin between which a multicultural national imaginary was
to be constructed. On the other side lay indigenous people. As I note in
more detail in chapter 3, the 1901 Commonwealth Constitution, which set
up the Australian federation government and formally founded the Austra-
lian nation, mentions Aboriginal persons in just two places: section 51 (26),

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 The Cunning of Recognition

which excluded people of the ‘‘Aboriginal race’’ from the special race power of
the Commonwealth government; and section 127, which excluded ‘‘aboriginal
natives’’ from being counted in the census. Under the 1901 Constitution, states
retained the right to formulate their own policies regarding Aboriginal per-
sons within their territories, including the ability to pass legislation excluding
them from the franchise; something most states did.31 Although considered
de facto British subjects, most persons classified as ‘‘aboriginal natives’’ were
not afforded full citizenship rights in the new Australian nation.32
In 1911, a year after the Commonwealth assumed governance of the North-
ern Territory from South Australia, the Aboriginal Ordinance further eroded
the social autonomy of ‘‘Aboriginal natives’’ in the north through the office of
Chief Protector of Aborigines. The act granted the Chief Protector authority
over Aboriginal employment, movement, marriage, and social intercourse;
and it gave the position power as the ‘‘legal guardian of every Aboriginal and
part-Aboriginal child under the age of eighteen years.’’ 33 It was under this act
that between 1910 and 1970, 10 to 30 percent of children of mixed parentage
were taken away from their Aboriginal parents—a group that would later be-
come known as the Stolen Generation.34 Within a few years of the passage of
the Northern Territory Welfare Act, 1953, 80 percent of the indigenous popu-
lation had been declared wards of the state, which they remained until 1963,
the year Martin Luther King Jr. led a civil rights protest march on Washing-
ton, D.C.35 It was not until 1962, in the face of persistent, organized, national
and international criticism from indigenous activists such as Bobby Sykes and
Charles Perkins, as well as nonindigenous groups, that ‘‘aboriginal natives’’
were allowed to vote in federal, Northern Territory, and South Australian elec-
tions (Queensland did not follow until 1965).36 The rise of Aboriginal activism
in the 1960s coincided with a more general global phenomenon in which pro-
gressive politics splintered into class-based, colonial, and new social move-
ments. In Australia, indigenous and colonial consciousness was raised and
deepened by that state’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
At the same time that markets in the Asia-Pacific were being restructured
from the 1970s through the early 1990s, the state began to shift financial and
social resources into Aboriginal communities in response to a national and
transnational indigenous liberation movement. This movement highlighted
the disjunction between the ideal image of the state as a postimperial exemplar
of Western humanism in the region and the actual brutality of the its laissez-
faire stance toward its own internal colonial subjects. This would continue to
be a problem at the turn of the century. In 1999, after the Howard government

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 Introduction

figure 1. ‘‘Mr. Howard What Happen with the ‘Aborigines’?’’ (Photograph by AP/Bullit
Marquez, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 September 1999, p. 12.)

committed ground troops to East Timor, Australian newspapers ran pictures

of Indonesian protest banners that read ‘‘Mr. Howard What Happened with
the ‘Aborigines’?’’ 37 Similar reactions were broadcast during the coup in Fiji
in 2000 and after John Howard threatened to withdraw from the U.N. com-
mittee system because of criticism by the un Committee on the Elimination
of Racial Discrimination on mandatory sentencing laws in Western Australia
and the Northern Territory.
By the mid-1980s indigenous culture and politics had gained a public lumi-
nosity, political legitimacy, and economic base unparalleled in Australian his-
tory. Almost ten years had passed since the first Commonwealth land rights
legislation had been enacted with the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Ter-
ritory) Act, 1976, spawning similar, if less effective, copies in most states and
giving indigenous communities, activists, and publics access to capital and
bureaucratic and public institutional bases. Aboriginal activists-artists, such
as members of the band Yothu Yindi, and popular figures such as Sting and
the rock band Midnight Oil, popularized globally indigenous land rights
struggles.
Emerging alongside this political revaluation of indigenous social and cul-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

tural forms was a vibrant tourism and commodity market in Aboriginal heri-
tage.38 ‘‘Good Aboriginal art’’ (paintings, sculptures, and artifacts) went on
tour, so to speak, and was exhibited in international galleries to critical ac-
claim.39 ‘‘Bad Aboriginal art’’ was sold in tourist stalls across Australia and
beyond.40 But both high and low cultural forms contributed to a new global
traffic in commoditized indigenous culture, contributing significantly to the
national gnp. In the process particular indigenous knowledges were gener-
alized into a natural commercial product, and they contributed to a global
resignification of the ‘‘indigenous’’ in relation to social struggle. Indigenous-
ness was unhinged and ‘‘liberated’’ from the specificity of actual indigenous
struggles, from their differing social agendas and visions of a reformed social
world, and from the specific challenges they posed to contemporary nation-
based governmentality and capital.
Freed from specific struggles, the signifier ‘‘indigenousness’’ began to func-
tion as an interpretant to be experienced as an aura, naturalizing any struggle
or commodity desire to which it was attached. Sydney neighborhood pro-
testors of the Olympic development at Bondi Beach carried banners pro-
claiming Bondi Beach as a ‘‘sacred site.’’ And, when the head of the Austra-
lian Children’s Television Foundation accused U.S. broadcasters of a ‘‘sinister
new form’’ of cultural colonialism, she troped a national counterinsurgency
as indigenous and countercolonial.41 She did this at the cost of effacing the
struggles of actually existing indigenous groups against ongoing state colo-
nialism, struggles themselves drawing on transnational discourses and insti-
tutions including North and South American indigenous movements. But, in
doing so, she demonstrated the elasticity of the notion of indigenous and its
function in naturalizing even those social struggles that are potentially to the
detriment of actually existing Aboriginal people.
If the indigenous was unhinged from its previous social referent, it was
also resituated within a complex field of national and international civil and
human rights standards of acceptable and unacceptable social and cultural
difference.42 International bodies produced protocols and held conventions
outlining what practices violated human rights, gender rights, racial rights,
and cultural rights. Foreign national public debates ensued on the limits of
cultural tolerance within liberal multicultural formations, which then circu-
lated through the transnational mass media. Pederasts and gays, religions
and cults, cliterodectomies and gential mutilations: national news media
struggled to differentiate international forms and their good and bad cultural
incarnations, their normative and grotesque referents, their relative values,

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 Introduction

figure 2. ‘‘Bondi Beach Sacred Site.’’ (Photograph in The Weekend Australian,

26–27 June 1999, p. 23.)

and their deformation and reformation of citizenship. Public debate cen-

tered, on the one hand, on the question of how courts could prohibit indige-
nous ritual practices as repugnant to the common law while allowing western
sexual practices or religious practices; and, on the other hand, on the question
of who deserved the reparative legislation of the state.43 These debates were
driven not so much by the actual amount of land and benefits returned, but by
the fact that the process was occurring at the moment when white Australians
were suffering from an uncertain future.
When the Australian state, law, and public struggle to piece together a new
form of national cohesion in the midst of these modes of difference, they are
not acting in bad faith. Nor is Australian multiculturalism ideological in the
sense of masking a dominant class interest. Instead, Australian multicultural-
ism is a deeply optimistic liberal engagement with the democratic form under
conditions of extreme torsion as social and cultural differences proliferate and
as capital formations change. This engagement is generating, in the words of
Slavoj Žižek, ‘‘ ‘utopian’ narratives of possible [if, in the end,] failed alterna-
tive histories,’’ which, nevertheless, ‘‘point towards the system’s antagonistic
character’’ and thereby ‘‘ ‘estrange’ [the nation from] the self-evidence of its
established character.’’ 44 The real optimism of Australian multiculturalism is
what I trouble and am troubled by in this book—its affective, not simply dis-
cursive and institutional, dimensions.
To be sure, the problems indigenous people face in Australia are not unique

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 The Cunning of Recognition

to them. But the indigenous does seem to be playing a particular role in de-
bates on multiculturalism. The concept, as opposed to the actual socially em-
bedded persons, seems to be providing the nation an experience of ‘‘before
nationalism,’’ and an experience of a time before the failures and compro-
mises of national projects. But rather than offering a counternational form,
the concept of the indigenous seems to be purifying and redeeming the ideal
image of the nation (a problem I take up explicitly in chapter 1). Still, while
Australia is an interesting site to explore the conjuncture between indigenous
forms of difference and national forms of citizenship, the problem indige-
nous people face in Australia is faced elsewhere. South Africa, the European
Union, Canada: we are witnessing a global adjustment of the constitution of
public and legal national imaginaries as state institutions and public sym-
pathy attempt to address the multiplicity of social identities and traditions
constituting and circulating through the contemporary nation. Whether the
solution is the constitutional protection of a serialized set of social identities
(South Africa 45) or public and constitutional proclamations of the worth of all
cultures ‘‘that have animated whole societies over some considerable stretch
of time’’ (Canada 46), we must bear in mind the following: First, the emer-
gence of national formations of toleration need not have emerged in these
particular forms. There is no necessary fit or identity between the crisis to
which these forms respond and the forms themselves. Second, these emergent
national forms have merely responded to, not solved, the crisis from which
they have emerged, namely, the stance liberal national subjects should take
toward the compulsory aspects of others’ ‘‘cultures.’’ It is important to repeat
these concepts, and to repeat them again and again if we are to quiet the cele-
bratory sounds of the New Society long enough to hear the ideologies of the
actual.
The partiality of multiculturalism as manifest in Western Europe, the
United States, and the Pacific finds exemplary expression at the tip of the cli-
toris. In the late 1990s, an economically depressed and politically terrorized
France could not agree on the grounds for excluding the North African dias-
pora living in the country, but could, at least initially, agree on the necessity
of outlawing the ‘‘genital mutilations’’ some of the community ‘‘inflicts’’ on
its young girls.47 Moreover, in 1996, the U.S. Congress outlawed North African
ceremonial clitoridectomies and directed U.S. representatives to the World
Bank and other international financial institutions to withhold billions of dol-
lars in aid to twenty-eight African countries if they did not sponsor education
programs aimed at eradicating the practice.48 A putative prodiversity presi-

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 Introduction

dent signed this bill in a national ‘‘post-civil rights’’ context in which ‘‘most
Americans believe themselves and the nation to be opposed to racism and in
favor of a multiracial, multiethnic pluralism.’’ 49 The U.S. Congress did not pass
legislation outlawing individual-based consumerized ‘‘mutilations’’; that is,
the trade in piercing, tattooing, and transsexual surgery. In 1997 some mem-
bers of the Illinois legislature proposed a bill that would stiffen this federal
legislation in the state. The urgency they expressed, which suggested that the
Midwest was in the grip of a clitoridectomy epidemic, was perhaps rather
more motivated by their anxiety that urban areas like Chicago were haunted
by the black Muslim movement.50 In France and the United States, state offi-
cials and public figures struggled to maintain a utopian image of a national
culture against the pressure of transnational migration and internal ethnic
divisions by holding up this clipped bundle of nerves to public scrutiny as the
limit of a ‘‘civilized’’ nation’s tolerance of its internal ‘‘cultural’’ diversity.
State and public figures made clitoridectomy and bride murder a com-
monsense limit of nationalism, and thereby produced a ‘‘civil nation’’ from
this limit not simply by referring to the universal principles that the practice
violated but by evoking complex affective reactions. They did what Gramsci
insisted was necessary to hegemonic projects: they cohered a national will
through passionate dramas and experiences of intimate community, not for
the most part through pedantic argument. Whereas trappings and dramas of
religion were critical to the coherence of a national will in Gramsci’s time,
now the putative preideological truth of a feeling roused by an encounter with
fundamental alterity is critical to ‘‘the formation of a national-popular collec-
tive will’’ that the state can use to produce ‘‘a superior, total, form of modern
civilization.’’ 51 As if they deeply understood these thoughts, state and public
figures trumpeted the national shame of allowing such practices of savagery
and barbarism, of ignorance and superstition, to take place within its bor-
ders. The phrase ‘‘such practices’’ acts to expand the field of shame and cast
a pall over unnamed subaltern practices where no national-popular collec-
tive will would be possible and over entire continents where such practices
are imagined to occur.52 In sum, they took a stance on how a citizen ought to
understand his or her experience of the fundamental alterity of other moral
orders—that is, what is and should be the proper attitude of persons to their
own and others’ modal feelings (what they should, ought, must act)—and how
these attitudes should determine the distribution of rights, sympathy, and re-
sources in national and global contexts. It is exactly the metamorphosis of
these ethical feelings that I track in this book.

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 The Cunning of Recognition

For the moment, the above national fetish of severed nerves seems to weld
the contradictions and ambivalences of liberal multiculturalism.53 But when
official spokespersons of national culture repudiate subaltern practices by
evoking the nation’s aversion to them, they encounter the difficulty of dis-
cursively grounding their moral claim within a multicultural discourse.54 And
they encounter the double-edged nature of using discourses and affects such
as shame as a tool for building national collective wills. On the one hand, as
the ban on clitoridectomies shows, certain subaltern practices can produce
the experience of a national collective will, even in the midst of public debate,
by producing an experience of intimate communal aversion to the barbaric,
uneducated, and savage practice that we as a civilized nation cannot allow to
occur within our borders. A particular body of belief is, at least temporarily,
elevated to the status of a universal principle primarily through pageantries
of corporeal shame and revulsion. But in this case as in others liberal demo-
cratic societies are now haunted by the specter of mistaken intolerance. They
now know that in time their deepest moral impulses may be exposed to be
historically contingent, mere prejudices masquerading as universal principles.
In particular, past colonial and civil rights abuses cast a shadow over present
moments of national and individual intolerance.55 In the ‘‘historical muta-
tion’’ of the modern liberal democratic society, not only are many ‘‘universal
grounding[s] . . . contemplated with deep suspicion’’ but every moment of
moral judgment is potentially a moment of acute personal and national em-
barrassment.56 Popular and critical thinkers suffer their (in)tolerance; they do
not simply decide to be tolerant or intolerant. Liberal members of democratic
societies stumble, loose their breath, and panic, even if ever so slightly, when
asked to say why, on what grounds, and according to whom is a practice a
moral, national limit of tolerance. And, as they panic, they show how the logic
of multiculturalism disorganizes the discursive and imaginary field that every
limit to it coheres.
It is the contemporary intractability of these questions—and the social
generativity of these nonpassages—that interest me in this book. The lost cer-
tainty of its moral groundings wracks national hegemonic projects and helps
explain the force of national cultural censure in those moments when some
national collective will can be found or forged. The nausea created by these
shifting grounds becomes especially clear in public debates over particular
national intolerances, in which the difficulty of grounding (in)tolerance in
specific instances spreads and threatens the general notion of the nation itself,
along with a nation-based identity and identification. These anxious national

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 Introduction

debates circulate through national and transnational mass media and intel-
lectual publics and become much broader crises of modernism, liberalism,
humanism, and the democratic polity. After all this history, whose nation is
any one nation, after all? Who, after all this history, owns modernity and its
hallmarks, humanism and democracy? What groups do humanism, democ-
racy, and the common law serve, protect, and maintain? These questions gen-
erate new social discourses, institutions, and subjects.
This is the nerve ending I seek here to understand: how a state and pub-
lic leans on a multicultural imaginary to defer the problems that capital,
(post)colonialism, and human diasporas pose to national identity in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. How do these state, pub-
lic, and capital multicultural discourses, apparatuses, and imaginaries defuse
struggles for liberation waged against the modern liberal state and recuper-
ate these struggles as moments in which the future of the nation and its core
institutions and values are ensured rather than shaken; how they recreate a
superordinate monocultural referent, chase a transcultural if not transcen-
dental desire, a flickering something beyond our differences, even as they pur-
port to be recognizing the cultural subjects standing before them. And, finally,
how they open up a space for critical reimaginings of social life as indige-
nous subjects creatively engage the slippages, dispersions, and ambivalences
of discursive and moral formations that make up their lives.
At this switch point, when multiculturalism becomes the grounds for a
new transcendental national monoculturalism, the state struggle for hege-
mony depends on representing and working through liberal practices and in-
tentions in two very different registers. On the one hand, juridical, political,
and public spokespersons deploy an abstract language of law, citizenship, and
rights—a principled, universalizing, pedantic language. On the other hand,
they deploy a language of love and shame, of haunted dreams, of traumatic
and reparative memory, of intimacy and desire. Dominant and subordinate
social groups draw each other into in an intimate drama of global discourse
and capital, of national identity, of history and consciousness. And as they do,
shame and reconciliation, a public collective purging of the past, become an
index and requirement of a new abstracted national membership. But law and
public do not require all citizens to undergo the same type of public, corporeal
cleansing, the same type of psychic and historical reformation.
‘‘Suppose they do not know how to cease to be themselves.’’ Suppose your
life depends on performing this ontological trick.

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 The Cunning of Recognition

THE LAY OF THE LAND

In many ways this volume is the result of a classical anthropological approach

to social analysis. I have spent the last seventeen years living with and working
on behalf of a small group of people, most of whom live at Belyuen, a small in-
digenous community on the Cox Peninsula located on the western side of the
Darwin Harbor in the Northern Territory of Australia. Other indigenous men
and women with whom I have worked live in Darwin and along the coastal
communities stretching along the coast from Belyuen to Port Keats (Wadeye),
Northern Territory. Year after year I have returned to this small coastal area,
acting sometimes as a driver, sometimes as a senior anthropological adviser
for land and sea claims, and sometimes as a hunter—shooting more walla-
bies, pigs, cockatoos, geese, and goanna than I care to remember. At other
times I have been a ceremonial actor, a mom, grandmother, wife, kid, and
white lady. Children born after I arrived in 1984 are now adults, some with
kids. I am an old lady at thirty-nine.
The people I work with go about living their lives within a background both
incredibly rich and incredibly brutal. Year after year, I have watched women
and men die from the diseases of poverty at ages that would shock those for
whom life does not seem a privilege. Tuberculosis, kidney failure, chronic
bronchitis, lung cancer: the bodies of those of us who live are mottled with
scars from tropical ulcers, fights, and ceremonial practices. I have been asked,
and I have asked myself many times, why in the light of so much death and so
much life, of the political and economic and social structures of discrimina-
tion and poverty most indigenous people face in Australia and certainly in the
indigenous communities I live and work in, why the following book is written
as an extended, historically and sociologically grounded, theoretical essay.
In other words, several questions faced me as I attempted to write a critique
of the liberal diaspora in the context of indigenous Australia. Most straight-
forward of the questions is where do the people I have lived and worked with
over the last seventeen years appear in the narrative of this liberal diaspora?
And where do other indigenous actors, agents, and subjects appear in the
narrative of how a new metaethics—and critique—of Australian nationalism
was generated. As should be apparent from this introduction, the answer is
not at all straightforward. These people certainly appear in an explicit way
throughout this book. Although I am centrally concerned with settler experi-
ences of the nonpassage between understanding-based ideologies of justice
and subjective-based ideologies of morality, this volume continually situates

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 Introduction

this experience in an actively responsive indigenous social world. Indeed, if

I begin the book with a concern for the material mediations of an emergent
multicultural Australia, I end it with a concern about how a specific non-
passage between reason and morality has been exploited by a particular Ab-
original community. But indigenous persons are the agents of this book in a
deeper and more profound sense. They provided the insight and incitement
to think critically about the self-evident good of liberalism and liberal recog-
nition.
Second, how do I describe the creative engagement of indigenous subjects
with the impasses that liberal diasporas present to them, without their creative
response becoming the source for a new heroic rhetoric of liberalism itself ?
To be sure, many indigenous persons embrace the institutions and ideals of a
multicultural form of liberal nationalism. I would just repeat that it does not
seem necessary to me to conceptualize a homogeneous social order in order
to conceptualize the vital sociological consequences of moments in which in-
digenous and nonindigenous subjects (or any subjects for that matter) experi-
ence contrasting obligations to reasoned argument and moral sensibility—no
matter their various stances toward these impasses.
Third, how is the story I tell exemplary of a movement in social critique
outside this particular social context? If this book gives the story about the
generative role the indigenous plays in the emergence and form of Austra-
lian multiculturalism, it is not about this story at all. Rather it is about how
the social sciences and socially inflected humanities analytically approach the
various historical determinations, displacements, iterations, and irritations of
contrasting orders of knowledge and obligation in (liberal) societies. It re-
turns to the spirit, if not the conceptual framework, of Durkheim’s call for
a sociological science of the ought in order to develop an ethnography not
simply of existing states of mood and modality, of propositionality and obli-
gation, and of moral possibility and necessity, but also of the conditions of
their emergence and transformation as social phenomena.57 After all, the un-
imaginable is imagined. And the reasons it is have interested social theorists
throughout the twentieth century. In approaching the question of why new
modes of knowledge and obligation emerge, I rely on a specific understand-
ing of the trial determinations of social life that I mentioned above—material
institutions, semiotics, and (inter)subjectivity. This book is not, however, a
theoretical elaboration of the broader conceptual space it relies on.58
Nor is this book a standard ethnography of one social group or a stan-
dard sociology of a single historical or institutional site. Whatever analytic

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 The Cunning of Recognition

power such studies have, and such power they do have, in this book I at-
tempt to demonstrate the dynamic of liberal impasses from a different critical
perspective, from the perspective of a critique of the liberal notion of self-
correction. Liberal procedural accounts of public reason highlight the self-
correcting nature of rational argument. The self-reflexivity of public reason
leads over time toward a shared and better sense of public opinion because
it is supposedly (ideally) oriented only to the best argument, and, as more
persuasive arguments arise, they continually renew, emend, revise, and rectify
past accounts. This provides the historicity of public reason. But liberal rea-
son is not merely a discursive procedure, it is institutional dynamic. In other
words, the dynamic among the domains of liberal society provides for a simi-
lar self-correcting movement. In the case I analyze, court members may well
represent themselves as making decisions according to precedent and other
genre-specific procedures of the juridical domain, but they also understand
themselves to be continually revealing the relevance of the common law to
contemporary public opinion of what constitutes the good, the tolerable, the
abhorrent, and the just and to statutory laws passed by parliaments and con-
gresses (themselves understood as reflecting the public will). Legal readings of
statutory law and common law precedent are constantly represented as being
corrected by the dynamic among publics, state, and civil society.
As with all pieces of writing this book reflects a decision to approach the
conditions of these discriminatory practices in a particular way. It does not,
for instance, present a general political economy of land rights or territorial
distribution in Australia; that is, how much land has actually been redistrib-
uted under the various land rights and native title laws now in existence. Nor
does it provide an extended account of the forms of title available to indige-
nous Australians under the various statutory laws and their specific contradic-
tory demands.59 Nor does it provide an extended account of how one group of
indigenous Australians has grappled with the legal, political, and cultural con-
ditions of Australian multiculturalism, although throughout and especially in
the last two chapters, the focus is exactly on these questions.60
The chapters of this book reflect an attempt to understand the various dis-
cursive, subjective, and material/institutional mediations of liberal social life
on the one hand, and, on the other, the manner in which the historical im-
passe of public and moral reason has generated a new metaethics of national
life; namely, multiculturalism. The central rhythm of the text is a return in
different contexts and archival materials to an impossible demand placed on
indigenous and nonindigenous Australian subjects within the discursive and

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 Introduction

performative regime of settler multiculturalism and their creative response to

these impasses. Different chapters slice into different regions of this impasse.
Chapter 1 tracks this impasse across public sphere representations of an in-
digenous multiculturalism, while chapter 4 focuses on the generative force of
this impasse in one state institution—the High Court—and more specifically
its judgments on native title. Chapter 1 asks what the state and nation are rec-
ognizing and finding worthy when they embrace the ‘‘ancient laws’’ of indige-
nous Australia: how is this thing socially produced and politically practiced;
and why must Aboriginal persons identify with it to gain access to public sym-
pathy and state resources. The chapter tracks public debates over the worth of
ancient aboriginal law, legal mandates on the form traditional culture must
take, and mass-mediated commercial portraits of traditional indigenous cul-
ture. Chapter 4 turns to two High Court cases, Eddie Mabo v. the State of
Queensland (1992) and The Wik Peoples v. The State of Queensland (1996) to
examine how liberal legal subjects manage to protect themselves from experi-
encing, in the moment of cultural discrimination, the experience of future
negative judgment. How is judgment possible in multicultural contexts? And
how do judges escape as individuals, and as the authors and proponents of
social projects, the unconditional of the future perfect proposition: We will
have been wrong.
Chapters 2 and 3 examine the ways in which particular forms of indigenous
corporeality (ritual sex) superanimated liberal self-reflection, causing Austra-
lian non-Aboriginal citizens to experience their intolerance as their moral and
intellectual limits, thereby helping to precipitate the discursive grounds for
a new national ideological formation. These chapters view the social genera-
tivity of the impasse between public and moral reason from the perspective of
indigenous and settler everyday life, as do chapters 4 and 5, which return to
the present and shift the perspective from settler to indigenous Australians.
Chapter 2 takes up the theme of the repugnant and the uncanny in the writ-
ings and research of Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen as they lived among
the Arrente and other central Australian indigenous groups at the turn of the
century. It examines the ways in which particular forms of indigenous and
settler corporeality, corporeal relations, and corporeal practices (public, vio-
lent, playful, ceremonial, noncouple, retributive) superanimated liberal re-
flection; caused a crisis of reason in Australian non-Aboriginal citizens; caused
these citizens to experience their intolerance as their moral and intellectual
limits; and helped to precipitate the discursive grounds for a new national
ideological formation. Spencer and Gillen’s writings are read not to produce

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 The Cunning of Recognition

a historiography of settler sexuality so much as to situate the problem of the

indigenous difference in the national archive. Chapter 3 continues this exami-
nation of the nonpassage between understanding and obligation played in the
emergence of the Australian indigenous multicultural. It examines adminis-
trative, public, and anthropological debates about how indigenous and settler
sexuality should be administered in the Daly River region in order to examine
the emergence of a new multicultural metaethics of Australian nationalism
in the field of indigenous and settler interaction in the 1930s and 40s. Both
chapters foreground the problem of the national archive of the repugnant in
contemporary indigenous efforts to secure an acceptable form of cultural dif-
ference.
The last two chapters discuss how the relatives of Betty Bilawag attempt to
produce a felicitous form of cultural difference within the shadow of these lib-
eral archives, institutions, discourses, and subjectivities. They examine how
these histories of difference, their institutions of law and common sense,
play out in a community’s attempt to claim land under the Aboriginal Land
Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976. Chapter 5 examines Belyuen women
and men’s reading of the national archive in order to show how they experi-
ence, grapple with, and try to produce a legally and morally workable form
of locality by articulating local social processes, often themselves contested,
with the federal law of land rights and cultural difference. I try to show how
these women and men make Belyuen a socially felicitous place as they en-
gage the legal and social forms within which they live; the archived memorial
forms of their own histories; the national and transnational circulations of
these forms; and their own ambivalences toward the traditions, identities, and
identifications of this archive in light of changing standards of the legally and
normatively acceptable.
Chapter 6 concludes by examining the fate of Aboriginal belief in the con-
text of three principles of contemporary liberal multiculturalism: that all de-
liberations that affect the public should be accessible to public scrutiny; that
the validity of an argument stands in a negative relation to self-interest (the
more disinterested a position is, the more likely it is to be universally valid
and rational); and that in certain contexts principled public debate ought to
give way to a collective moral sense—and, not only that public debate must
give way, but that collective moral sense should be protected from the proce-
dures of critical reason. The chapter asks, in the shadow of these liberal ideals,
how Belyuen women and men produce ‘‘true beliefs’’ in the practice of land
claims.

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 ‘‘Take into care beings as a whole.’’ And
if we attempt to think the whole of
beings at once, then we think, roughly
enough, this: that the whole of being
‘‘is,’’ and we consider what it ‘‘is.’’ We
think the whole of beings, everything
that is, in its being. In so doing we think
at first something indeterminate and
fleeting, and yet we also mean some-
thing for which we find nothing compa-
rable, something singular. For the whole
of beings does not occur twice, other-
wise it wouldn’t be what we mean.
—Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts

1 / Mutant Messages

INTRODUCING (THE THING)

In the 1880 introduction to the ethnology Kamilaroi and Kunai, the Reverend
Lorimer Fison described a sensation he experienced studying the ‘‘inter-
sexual arrangements’’ of indigenous Australians.1 He described feeling ‘‘an-
cient rules’’ underlying the Kamilaroi and Kunai’s sexual practices, catching
fleeting glimpses of an ancient ‘‘strata’’ cropping up from the horrific given
conditions of colonial settlement, sensing a ‘‘something else, . . . something
more’’ Kamilaroi and Kunai than even the Kamilaroi and Kunai themselves,
a some thing that offered him and other ethnologists a glimpse of an ancient
order puncturing the present, often hybrid and degenerate, indigenous social
horizon. Fison pointed to this ancient order as the proper object of ethnologi-
cal research, and he used the promised feelings this order produced to prod

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 The Cunning of Recognition

other ethnologists to turn its way. But Fison cautioned, even admonished,
other researchers that to reach this order and to experience these feelings they
had to be ‘‘continually on the watch’’ that ‘‘every last trace of white men’s effect
on Aboriginal society’’ was ‘‘altogether cast out of the calculation.’’ 2 Only by
stripping from their ethnological analysis the traumatic effect of settlement on
indigenous social life could the researcher reach, touch, and begin to sketch
the outline of that thing, which was not the present corrupted Aboriginal so-
cial body but an immutable form that predated and survived the ravage of
civil society.
The emergent modern ethnological epistemology Fison promoted bor-
dered on the paranoid. Every actual indigenous practice was suspect. All
‘‘present usages,’’ even those seemingly ‘‘developed by the natives themselves’’
and seemingly untouched by ‘‘contact with the white man,’’ might be mere
mirages of the investigator’s own society. They might be like the ‘‘present
usages’’ of the ‘‘Mount Gambier blacks,’’ the desperate social acts of men and
women who had watched their society be ‘‘reduced from 900 souls to 17’’ in
thirty years, and who were ‘‘compelled to make matrimonial arrangements
as [they could], whether they be according to ancient law or not.’’ 3 But even
‘‘present usages’’ untouched by the ravages of British settlement were little
more than mere chimera of the ancient thing Fison sought. They taunted him
with glimpses of what he truly desired—a superceded but still signifying an-
cient society shimmering there just beyond him and them, settler time and
emergent national history.4
The proper ethnological thing Fison sought would always just elude him,
would always be somewhere he was not. Maybe this ancient order survived
in the remote interior of the nation, but it was never where he was. Where he
stood the ancient rules were submerged in the horror of the colonial present
and were mediated by the faulty memory of a ‘‘few wretched survivors [who
were] . . . obliged to take such mates as death has left them, whether they
be of the right classes or not.’’ 5 Or the ancient rules were heavily encrusted
with the autochthonous cultural debris generated by the inexorable tectonic
shifts Fison’s colleagues called social evolution. Not surprisingly, a restlessness
pervades Fison’s ethnology. Irritation and humiliation punctuate the rational
veneer of his text as he is forced to encounter his own intellectual limits and
to account for his own conceptual failures. Time after time, Fison is forced to
admit that what he feels and desires cannot be accounted for by what he sees,
reads, and hears.6
Whatever Fison was chasing, Australians still seemed in desperate pursuit

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 Mutant Messages

of more than a hundred years after Kamilaroi and Kunai was first published. At
the turn of the twentieth century, most Australians had the distinct feeling that
some decisive national drama pivoted on their felicitous recognition of an an-
cient indigenous law predating the nation and all living indigenous subjects.
In two crucial, nationally publicized and debated decisions, Eddie Mabo v.
the State of Queensland (1992) and The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland
(1996), the Australian High Court ruled that the concept of native title was
not inconsistent with the principles of the Australian common law (the Mabo
decision) and that the granting of a pastoral lease did not necessarily extin-
guish native title (the Wik decision). As a result, native title still existed where
the state had not explicitly extinguished it; where Aboriginal communities
still maintained its foundation—namely, the ‘‘real acknowledgment of tradi-
tional law and real observance of traditional customs’’; and where those real
traditions did no violence to common law principles.7
As I will discuss at greater length in chapter 4, in the fantasy space co-
ordinated by these two legal decisions, traditional and modern laws seem
to coexist without producing conceptual violence or social antagonism. The
legitimacy of native title is granted; its authority is rooted in the ancient rules,
beliefs, and practices predating the settler nation. The object of native title tri-
bunals is merely to judge at the ‘‘level of primary fact’’ if native title has disap-
peared ‘‘by reason of the washing away by ‘the tide of history’ and any real ac-
knowledgment of traditional law and real observance of traditional customs’’
and to judge whether any of these real ancient customs violate contemporary
common law values.8 This is why the Wik decision on pastoral property was
so important: the vast hectares under pastoral lease were ‘‘the parts of Aus-
tralia where [native] laws and traditions (important to sustain native title) are
most likely to have survived.’’ These places were the spaces perceived as least
touched by modern society.9
The moral and legal obligation of the nation to its indigenous popula-
tion was foregrounded in another well-publicized debate; namely, the moral
and economic claim of the ‘‘Stolen Generation’’ on the Australian nation. The
Stolen Generation refers to the 10 to 30 percent of the total population of Ab-
original children between 1910 and 1970, who were forcibly removed from
their parents as part of the state’s policy of cultural assimilation. Members
of the Stolen Generation filed a federal class action lawsuit against the state,
arguing that it had violated their human and constitutional rights. A Royal
Commission investigated the intent and effect of these assimilation policies. It
found that past state and territory governments had explicitly engaged in what

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 The Cunning of Recognition

could most accurately be called a form of social genocide, a cultural holocaust

as defined by the 1951 Genocide Convention—an analogy made more compel-
ling by the age of the Aboriginal applicants, many of whom had been taken in
the early 1940s.10 Australians looked at themselves in a ghastly historical mir-
ror and imagined their own Nuremberg. Would fascism be the final metaphor
of Australian settler modernity? In 1997 the High Court ruled that the 1918
Northern Territory ordinance allowing Aboriginal and ‘‘half-caste’’ children
to be forcibly removed from their mothers was constitutionally valid and did
not authorize genocide de jure, although in retrospect it was misguided and
morally questionable.
This Australian drama would not surprise most liberal theorists of the
global travails of liberal forms of nationalism, and settler nationalisms in par-
ticular. The works of Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Jürgen Habermas, and
Will Kymlicka, among others, pivot on the question of whether and how a
multitude of modern liberal nation-states should recognize the worth of their
interior ethnic and indigenous cultural traditions. In this chapter I turn away,
however, from the question of whether and how the settler nation should rec-
ognize the worth of indigenous customary law. Instead, I ask more fundamen-
tal questions: What is the state and nation recognizing and finding worthy
when it embraces the ‘‘ancient laws’’ of indigenous Australia? What is it about
the thing of ‘‘indigenous tradition’’ that produces sensations, desires, anxi-
eties, and professional, personal, and national optimisms? What is this thing
that is only ever obliquely glimpsed and that resists the bad faith of the liberal
nation while at the same time does no violence to good civil values, indeed
crystallizes the best form of community ‘‘we’’ could hope for? What is the
glimmering object the public support of which can produce, as if by magical
charm, the feelings necessary for social harmony in the multicultural nation,
for good trading relations with the Asia-Pacific, and for a new globally inspi-
rational form of national cohesion? 11 How is this thing socially produced and
politically practiced? Why must Aboriginal persons identify with it to gain
access to public sympathy and state resources?
To understand what the nation is seeking to recognize, touch, feel, and
foreground through its recognition of an ancient pre(ter)national order, this
chapter tracks (across multiple state and public domains) the public debates
over the worth of ancient aboriginal law, legal mandates on the form tra-
ditional culture must take, and mass-mediated portraits of traditional in-
digenous culture. In this chapter I focus specifically on the intersection of
mass-mediated public representations and political debates over land redis-

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 Mutant Messages

tribution. As I track the transformations of the object ‘‘traditional indigenous

law’’ across these public, state, and commercial domains, I map the politi-
cal cunning and calculus of cultural recognition in a settler modernity. More
than ten years ago, Kaja Silverman noted the ‘‘theoretical truism that hege-
monic colonialism works by inspiring in the colonized subject the desire to
assume the identity of his or her colonizers.’’ 12 Perhaps this is what funda-
mentally distinguishes the operation of power in colonial and (post)colonial
multicultural societies. Hegemonic domination in the latter formation works
primarily by inspiring in the indigenous subject a desire to identify with a lost
indeterminable object—indeed, to be the melancholic subject of traditions.13
To understand this new form of liberal power, I examine how recognition is
at once a formal meconnaissance of a subaltern group’s being and of its being
worthy of national recognition and, at the same time, a formal moment of
being inspected, examined, and investigated.14 I suggest this inspection always
already constitutes indigenous persons as failures of indigeneity as such. And
this is the point. In certain contexts of recognition, Aboriginal persons must
produce a detailed account of the content of their traditions and the force
with which they identify with them—discursive, practical, and dispositional
states that necessarily have a ‘‘more or less’’ relationship to the imaginary of
a ‘‘real acknowledgment of traditional law and real observance of traditional
customs.’’ What are the social consequences of the noncorrespondence be-
tween the object of national allegiance, ‘‘ancient tradition,’’ and any particular
Aboriginal person, group, practice, memory, or artifact?

INTERROGATIONS

Meaghan Morris noted that 1992 marked a certain watershed in the Austra-
lian national stance toward indigenous people.15 In 1992, in Eddie Mabo v.
the State of Queensland, the Australian High Court overturned the doctrine
that Australian was terra nullius (a land belonging to no one) at the point
of settlement and ruled that Aboriginal Australians had and retained native
title interests in the law. In a subsequent ruling (The Wik People v. the State of
Queensland, 1996) the court further ruled that the granting of a pastoral lease
did not necessarily extinguish native title. In 1993, in response to the Mabo
decision, public pressure, and its own political strategy, the Labour govern-
ment passed the federal Native Title Act, which legislated the mechanisms by
which indigenous groups could claim land.
A year later the conservative Liberal-National coalition, which promised to

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 The Cunning of Recognition

protect the interests of (white) miners, farmers, and landowners from delete-
rious native title claims, defeated the Labour Party for the first time in nearly
a quarter century. During the first session of the new Liberal parliament,
Pauline Hanson, an independent minister from Queensland, vehemently at-
tacked the basic tenets of the state’s twenty-year-old multicultural policy,
especially two of its central tenets: self-determination for indigenous Aus-
tralians and increased Asian immigration.16 She claimed that multicultural-
ism was a guilt-based ideological program doing little more than partition-
ing the country into drug- and crime-ridden Asian and Aboriginal enclaves.
In what would provoke a national scandal, Hanson argued that indigenous
self-determination was just another name for a massive and massively mis-
conceived social welfare program, transferring through taxation national
wealth generated by hardworking (white) Australians to socially irrespon-
sible (black) Australians. It was time for white outrage. ‘‘Ordinary Australi-
ans’’ should reject ‘‘the Aboriginal industry’s’’ insistence that they feel guilty
for past colonial policies they were not responsible for and, instead, proudly
embrace what was for Hanson the obvious point: that white Australians made
the modern nation, no matter that present-day white Australians had as little
to do with past economic policies as they did with past colonial policies. In
hailing what she often referred to as ‘‘ordinary Australians’’ Hanson consti-
tuted a political space for all who desired to be such and to have such define
the motor of Australian settler modernity.
Pauline Hanson went to the heart of the traditional thing. In a series of
public addresses and interviews, Hanson argued the ‘‘ordinary’’ Australians
should ignore the romantic image of traditional Aboriginal society and in-
stead examine what she believed were the real conditions of present-day
indigenous social life: third-world health and housing conditions, dread-
fully high infant mortality rates, rampant substance abuse, sexual disorder,
and truncated life spans—namely, the horrific material conditions that, she
claimed, indexed a tremendous ‘‘waste’’ of ‘‘our’’ tax dollars. In 1998, the Mel-
bourne Age reported that census figures indicated that one in two Aborigines
would be jobless by 2006.17 What was this thing ‘‘Aboriginal tradition,’’ which
was never wherever anyone was? What did ‘‘self-determination’’ mean when
so many Aboriginal communities and individuals would be destitute with-
out massive government financial support? Indigenous social conditions had
barely budged, she argued, in the thirty-odd years since Aboriginal men and
women had been made citizens, had been removed from ward rolls, and had

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 Mutant Messages

been given the right to vote, receive social security benefits, and drink. Indeed,
she and other conservative critics argued that indigenous social life had gotten
worse since full citizenship had been extended to Aborigines. The availability
of social security benefits increased drug and alcohol addiction and lessened
the incentive for Aboriginal women and men to become working members
of the national economy.
Most public and political spokespersons labeled Hanson and her followers
‘‘fringe’’ and ‘‘extreme,’’ and called their views dangerously antiquated. They
wrung their hands and rang warning bells, cautioning the nation that a line of
tolerance was being approached that, if crossed, would bring grave social and
economic consequences. But although Hanson was politically marginalized
and her views historicized, mainstream political officials were also recorded
as publicly questioning the value of an ancient indigenous law for a mod-
ern technological society. Just days before Liberal Party Prime Minister John
Howard appointed Liberal Senator Ross Lightfoot from Western Australia to
the coalition backbench Committee on Aboriginal Affairs, he forced the sena-
tor to apologize to parliament for claiming ‘‘Aboriginal people in their native
state are the lowest colour on the civilisation spectrum.’’ 18 The Liberal Party’s
Aboriginal Affairs Minister, John Herron, nearly lost his portfolio after pub-
licly supporting the assimilation policies of the 1950s, including the forced
removal of indigenous children from their parents. Herron argued that forced
assimilation had had positive social effects: ‘‘Half-caste’’ children had been
given an economic and social head start over their ‘‘full-blood’’ cousins who
were handicapped in the race to civil society by their adherence to outmoded
beliefs and practices.
In 1997, claiming that the Wik decision on pastoral property threatened
to ruin the moral, social, and economic health of the Commonwealth, the
Liberal government introduced federal parliamentary legislation exempting
pastoral lands from native title claims and restricting native title rights in
other contexts. Many public spokespersons and groups swiftly responded,
couching their criticisms in a rhetoric of principle and passion, finance and
freedom, and modernity and its moral encumbrances. Labour opposition
leader Kim Beazley; two former prime ministers from opposing parties, Paul
Keating (Labour) and Malcolm Fraser (Liberal); and church and business
leaders urged the public to look beyond ‘‘simple property rights,’’ beyond
their pocketbooks, and beyond the actual conditions of Aboriginal social
life. They should consider, instead, the question of national honor, national

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 The Cunning of Recognition

history, and national shame looming just beyond these economic and so-
cial struggles,19 and recognize that the value of ancient indigenous law would
finally free the settler nation from its colonial frontier and confirm its con-
temporary reputation as a model (post)modern multicultural nation. So sug-
gested Beazley in a nationally televised address explaining the Labour Party’s
support of existing native title legislation: ‘‘There’s more bound up in this
than simply property rights. We face here a question of our history and our
national honour. We have a diverse and vibrant community which we will be
putting on show in three year’s time at the Sydney Olympics. We won that
bid because nations around the globe believed rightly our better instincts lead
us to coexist effectively with each other in a way in which a torn world finds
inspirational.’’ 20
In giving over the self-image of the nation to the world’s aspirations, ‘‘Aus-
tralia’’ would be reaffirmed, strengthened, and deepened by the very multi-
cultural forces that Hanson thought threatened, weakened, and undermined
it. Mourning a shared shameful past would do no more, and no less, than pro-
pel the nation into a new cleansed national form. Besides, Beazley reassured,
native title was materially minor if not outright meaningless: ‘‘Native title will
only ever be able to be claimed by a small minority of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Australians—those who can evidence some form of ongoing
traditional association with the land in question.’’ 21 And, ‘‘Native title itself
will very often mean not much more than the right to access for hunting, fish-
ing and traditional ceremonial purposes: only in a small minority of cases will
it ever involve anything like rights of exclusive possession.’’ 22
Indeed, rather than subtracting from the nation’s wealth, the primary pur-
pose of native title legislation was to provide the symbolic and affective condi-
tions necessary to garner financial investment in the new global conditions of
late modern capital. In the global reorganization of finance, commerce, and
trade, cultural intolerance was a market matter. The world, especially Asian
and Southeast Asian financial and tourism industries, was listening into the
national conversation about Asian immigration and Aboriginal human and
native title rights. Moreover, Aboriginal traditions were a vibrant sector of the
economy mark(et)ing the Australian difference to national and international
cultural consumers. Major regional newspapers presented a daily tally of the
political and financial stakes of Hansonesque rhetoric—lost trade, lost finan-
cial investment, lost international political influence and tourism, and lost
jobs due to uncivil, intolerant talk.23 These financial stakes took on height-

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 Mutant Messages

ened significance as regional financial markets began to collapse in the first

half of 1998. The Australian economy maintained moderate growth, but in a
general field of financial anxiety.
National spokespersons did not simply point to juridical principles of com-
mon law, abstract notions of national honor, or the public’s pocketbooks.
They also spoke of the pleasures produced by concentrating on the vibrant
ancient laws found not only in remote interior indigenous communities but
also in public classrooms and curricula; on major networks and cable chan-
nels; in concert halls and art galleries; in the glossy magazines leafed through
on airplanes, couches, and toilets. An ancient law was now thoroughly inter-
calated in public, intimate, even scatological spaces of the nation. If the good
Australian people could look past the current bad material conditions of
much of Aboriginal Australia, if they could strip away the incrustations of two
hundred years of engineered and laissez-faire social neglect and abuse, they
would catch a glimpse of the traditional values that remained, persisted, and
survived state and civil society. Shimmering off this traditional mirage they
would catch a glimpse of their own best selves.
But this shimmering surface would prove to be a complicatedly reflective
and refractive one. As Hanson’s political party, One Nation, rose to national
prominence in the mid-1990s, Australians were forced to ask themselves, and
ask themselves publicly: Has a malignant intolerance lodged itself in the lib-
eral body of the contemporary Australian nation? National spokespersons and
ordinary citizens pointed to both worrisome symptoms and hopeful signs. In
May 1998, a ‘‘National Sorry Day’’ was held to atone for the nation’s treat-
ment of the Stolen Generation. The day was organized after a federal inquiry,
published in a volume titled Bringing Them Home, shocked the nation with
graphic details of the liberal state’s inhuman treatment of generations of in-
digenous families. Believing they were acting for the good of both indigenous
people and the nation, Anglo-Australian government officials tore Aboriginal
families apart between 1910 and the late 1960s and interned thousands of Ab-
original children in horse paddocks, abandoned army barracks, and worse.
State and territory officials were intent on severing the generational transmis-
sion of Aboriginal traditions and, thereby, speed up the process of cultural
assimilation. In the process many children were psychologically, physically,
or sexually abused. According to Ronald Wilson, the author of Bringing Them
Home, this massive government-initiated social experiment was carried out
‘‘because the Aboriginal race was seen as an embarrassment to white Aus-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

tralia.’’ 24 But no longer. By 1998, most Australians believed that they them-
selves and their right-minded fellow citizens not only tolerated the nation’s
indigenous heritage but recognized its worth.25 They encouraged Aboriginal
men and women to embrace the wealth of their cultural traditions and to pre-
serve and pass down these traditions to their children.
But as much as Australians might wish, racial prejudice would not remain
consigned to the history books. Not long after the last Sorry Book was closed,
the One Nation Party—staunchly opposed to Asian immigration and Ab-
original land and social welfare rights—stunned the country by capturing
nearly a quarter of the vote in the Queensland state elections.26 The racial rhe-
toric and policies of One Nation shocked and shamed many Australians. They
saw the liberal credentials of the nation threatened, and they feared an unwit-
ting repetition of the very racist history that had led to Mabo and to contem-
porary pageants of atonement like National Sorry Day. Attacks on Aborigi-
nal rights and multiculturalism prompted grassroots groups to organize large
and small antiracist rallies wherever the leader of One Nation, Pauline Han-
son, appeared. An outpouring of high school students in Sydney, Melbourne,
and Canberra renewed a nation’s pride. Labor Party leader Kim Beazley de-
scribed the student demonstrations as ‘‘one of the most moving affirmations
of basic Australian decency I have ever seen.’’ 27 For many Australians, the stu-
dent demonstrations were the literal embodiment of more than a decade of
social and civil rights struggle.
But not all protests against One Nation and not all aspects of Aboriginal
customary law and culture deepened Beazley’s patriotism and sense of de-
cency. Nor did these protests immediately modify or lessen the appeal of One
Nation’s rhetoric. School administrators warned parents to be on guard for
a socialist infiltration of the student movement. Cameras caught protesters
spitting, shoving, kicking, and screaming at older, frail-looking women and
men—everybody’s grandmother and grandfather. Northern newspapers and
street gossip circulated descriptions of ‘‘traditional’’ Aboriginal customs that
shocked liberal sensibilities.28 And One Nation continued to threaten the
electoral hold of both Labour and Liberal-National party candidates even
as its racial rhetoric intensified. Not long after the Queensland victory, at a
fundraising dinner in Adelaide, Hanson claimed that the ‘‘Australian people
[would] have thought twice about casting’’ their vote to give Aboriginal
people full citizenship rights ‘‘what they knew today was foreshadowed for
them.’’ 29 Although acknowledging that Australians had voted overwhelm-
ingly in a 1967 referendum to give ‘‘the Aboriginal race equality,’’ she claimed

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 Mutant Messages

most Australians now believe ‘‘the pendulum has gone too far the other way
and now there is so much discrimination, so much inequality in our society
that it is causing resentment among all people.’’ 30
Numerous outraged public spokespersons, including Liberal Party Prime
Minister John Howard, described Hanson’s speech on Aboriginal citizenship
as ‘‘sinister,’’ ‘‘abhorrent, undemocratic, ignorant and inaccurate.’’ 31 Public
spokespersons pointed out that the 1967 referendum did not give Aborigi-
nal people voting rights, as Hanson had claimed, but rather gave the federal
parliament powers to enact race-based legislation; that is, it was about social
justice not citizenship. In the late 1960s, the sound of social justice struck a
convincing national and international chord. The chant for Aboriginal rights
resonated with the protests of African Americans in the United States and de-
colonialized people throughout the world. The Australia public responded to
the call from Aboriginal activists for social justice by registering the largest
affirmative majority in a national referendum (90.8 percent).32
Yet, nearly a decade passed before the lofty ideals of the 1967 referendum
were translated into any economically meaningful piece of federal legislation.
It was not until the federal parliament passed the Aboriginal Land Rights
(Northern Territory) Act of 1976 that Aboriginal groups were allowed to claim
vacant Crown land in the Northern Territory, an area with a low nonindige-
nous population. The more populous states followed with much weaker legis-
lation.33 Another decade and a half passed before the Australian High Court
ruled that native title still existed over all Australian lands and seas where
it had not been explicitly extinguished and where Aboriginal people main-
tained a ‘‘real’’ acknowledgment of traditional law and ‘‘real’’ observance of
traditional custom. And it was not until 1993, twenty-six years after the 1967
referendum, that the federal Native Title Act (1993) brought home to most
Australians the economic costs of social justice and the potential social costs
of multiculturalism.
These costs proved too high for many Australians. Editorials published in
northern papers confirmed Hanson’s claim that federal legislation designed to
give Aborigines a ‘‘fair go’’ was simmering a politics of resentment. In a letter
to the editor of the Northern Territory Sunday Territorian, Andrew Harvey de-
scribed the compensation claims of the traditional Aboriginal owners of land
on which the Alice Springs to Darwin railroad was to be built as ‘‘a greedy ploy
to bleed taxpayers for monies not earned, nor justified.’’ He warned Aborigi-
nes to ‘‘wake up to yourselves before you lose everything and have to save for
the majority of your life to purchase land, like every other Australian.’’ 34 Ted

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 The Cunning of Recognition

Hagger, One Nation candidate for Parliament in the Northern Territory, ar-
gued that ‘‘only people who have undergone traditional Aboriginal initiation
rites should be regarded as Aborigines’’ for the purpose of social welfare and
land rights. All others should be viewed as ‘‘yellow fellas . . . rorting the (wel-
fare) system.’’ 35 Preparing for what many feared would be a race-based fed-
eral election campaign, the Liberal government amended the Native Title Act
restricting native title over pastoral lands and seas, while Aboriginal Affairs
Minister John Herron of the Liberal Party attacked Aboriginal land councils
and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission for gross misuse of
funds and disregard for Aboriginal health and welfare. Monoculturalism re-
emerged as a legitimate form of national desire. Howard and Hanson publicly
claimed that Australia remained monocultural (and European) in its core in-
stitutions and beliefs and retained the right to defend its unique traditions and
identity from Asian or Aboriginal incursion, although neither gave specific
content to their view of ‘‘the Australian way of life.’’ 36
In the darting shadows cast by these social actions and reactions, the pub-
lic media asked a number of questions: How does a person, a party, a nation
know when they are acting for the Good, for Justice, but not intolerantly? How
does a person and community distinguish between discriminatory prejudice
and moral conviction? Between good forms of (in)tolerance and bad forms
of (in)tolerance? Between social justice and social discrimination? Is there
some essential Liberal Good, some form of Social Justice, that neither time
nor cultural perspective can defile? History had provided few answers to these
questions, and little comfort. Given time, deeply held moral convictions had
reappeared as simple parochial beliefs, as good intentions gone awry. Govern-
ment policies meant to promote social health and welfare ended up produc-
ing individual and social trauma (the Stolen Generation). Citizens protesting
violent and intolerant speech turned into the very things they protested—
violent and intolerant thugs. Federal social justice legislation that required
Aboriginal land and native title claimants to demonstrate a ‘‘real’’ acknowl-
edgment of traditional law and a ‘‘real’’ observance of traditional customs
was transformed into a demand by One Nation members that social welfare
and land rights intended for Aboriginal Australians be restricted to ‘‘real’’
initiated ‘‘tribal blacks’’ and exclude ‘‘yellow fellas.’’ How do citizens distin-
guish the beliefs of the nation’s judiciary that native title is tied to cultural
difference from the beliefs of a One Nation member who believes there are
‘‘real blacks’’ and ‘‘yellow fellas’’? Likewise, how do courts and ordinary non-
Aboriginal citizens distinguish between indigenous traditions that deepen

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 Mutant Messages

and strengthen liberal national traditions from indigenous, but nevertheless,

repugnant practices?
In 1998 a coalition of senators from both Labour and Democratic parties
refused to pass the Howard government’s new native title legislation. As a re-
sult, Howard threatened to dissolve both houses of parliament and call a new
election. If he had done so, the Australian government would have been de-
cided in large part on the basis of its citizens’ belief about the extant value to
the modern nation of an enduring ancient prenational tradition. In the end,
however, Howard did not act on his threat, and the election did not focus on
indigenous issues. Indeed, many political pundits considered Howard’s focus
of the campaign on whether or not a Goods and Service Tax should be im-
plemented rather than the issue of a race-based election to be a brilliant ma-
neuver to refigure the grounds of public debate in order to defuse the major
issue of the One Nation Party. Thus, the election was about indigenous justice
only in a negative sense—that social justice mattered less than taxation. But in
discussing whether or not the election should focus on the support of indige-
nous land and entitlement legislation, what did the public and its politicians
think they were recognizing or rejecting? 37

EXCITATIONS

We can begin to answer this question by examining the difference between

the traditions to which a cacophony of public voices pledge their allegiance
and the indigenous people who are the alleged sociological referent of these
traditions. Simply put, what does ‘‘indigenous tradition’’ refer to and predi-
cate, what does the nation celebrate? Answering this question entails examin-
ing the relationship between indigenous tradition, identity, and subjectivity
and their discursive, affective, and material entailments. Let me begin with
a set of commonplaces; in other words, with what might be described as the
hegemonic status of ‘‘indigenous traditions’’ in Australia.
Most people would probably not spontaneously describe indigenous sub-
jectivity, or other social subjectivities, as a passionate attachment to a point in
a formally coordinated system of semiotic presuppositions and entailments;
nor would they call it the ongoing regimentation of semiotic practices as
people, consciously or unconsciously, articulate gaps and differences in an
unfolding relational network itself part of the ‘‘historical reality of the inter-
textual, multimedia and multimediated modern public sphere.’’ 38 But most
Australians would have a strong sense that indigenous subjects are more or

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 The Cunning of Recognition

less like other social subjects as a result of shared or differing beliefs, charac-
teristics, and practices (often experienced as characterological essentialisms)
and that the loss of certain qualities and qualifiers would narrow the difference
between contemporary social groups. For instance, they might not be able
to say why, but they would ‘‘feel’’ that ethnic and indigenous identities share
the common qualifiers of ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘tradition-culture.’’ And they would feel
that these qualifiers somehow differentiate their social location from the other
social positions, or identities, crowding the symbolic space of the nation—
say, whites, homosexuals, women, or the disabled. But an indigenous identity
would not be considered the same as an ethnic identity because traditional
indigenous culture has a different relationship to national time and space.39
Indigenous modifies ‘‘customary law,’’ ‘‘ancient tradition,’’ ‘‘traditional cul-
ture,’’ and so forth by referring to a social practice and space that predates the
settler state. Commonsensically, ‘‘indigenous people’’ denotes a social group
descended from a set of people who lived in the full presence of ‘‘traditions.’’
I would hazard that in contrast to the concept of, say, a ‘‘unicorn,’’ most Aus-
tralians believe that to which ‘‘tradition’’ refers existed at some point in time
and believe some residual part of this prior undifferentiated whole remains
in the now fragmentary bodies, desires, and practices of Aboriginal persons.
And I would also hazard that most non-Aboriginal Australians think indige-
nous people are not only distinguished by their genealogical relation to the
nation-state but also by their affective, ideational, and practical attachment
to their prior customs. To be truly Aboriginal, indigenous persons must not
only occupy a place in a semiotically determined social space, they must also
identify with, desire to communicate (convey in words, practices, and feel-
ings), and, to some satisfactory degree, lament the loss of the ancient customs
that define(d) their difference.
I mean here the awkward ‘‘that to which’’ to evoke the strategic nonspeci-
ficity of the discursive and affective space of ‘‘indigenous tradition’’ in the
contemporary Australian nation, a point I will elaborate later. And I mean
my constant use of conditionals—‘‘to some satisfactory degree,’’ ‘‘some . . .
part’’—to mimic the juridical, public, and political conditioning of an au-
thentic Aboriginal subjectivity. And, finally, I intend these mimetic provisos
to suggest how the very discourses that constitute indigenous subjects as such
constitute them as failures of such—of the very identity that identifies them
(differentiates their social locality from other social localities) and to which
they expected to have an identification (affectively attach).

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 Mutant Messages

In their discursive passage into being, then, indigenous people are scarred
by temporal and social differences. These scars are the difference between any
actual indigenous subject and the full presence promised by the phrase ‘‘in-
digenous tradition’’ and thus the identity ‘‘indigenous.’’ At the most simple
level, no indigenous subject can inhabit the temporal or spatial location to
which indigenous identity refers—the geographical and social space and time
of authentic Ab-originality. And no indigenous subject can derive her or his
being outside a relation to other social identities and values currently pro-
liferating in the nation-state. The category of indigeneity came into being in
relation to the imperial state and the social identities residing in it, and it con-
tinues to draw its discursive value in relation to the state (and other states)
and to other emergent national subjects (and other transnational subjects). To
be indigenous, therefore, requires passing through, and in the passage being
scarred by the geography of the state and topography of other social identi-
ties. Producing a present-tense indigenousness in which some failure is not
a qualifying condition is discursively and materially impossible. These scars
are what Aborigines are, what they have. They are their true difference; the
‘‘active edge’’ where the national promise of remedial action is negotiated.40
Legal and popular questions coagulate there: Is the scar small or large, ancient
or recent, bleeding or healed, breeded out or passed on? What institutional
suturing was and is necessary to keep this lacerated body functional, and for
whom and for what? These questions are asked in a practical political sense
in the context of public debates about the allocation of resources to various
Aboriginal cultural, social, and political organizations.
The gap existing between the promise of a traditional presence and the
actual presence of Aboriginal persons is not simply discursive. It also pro-
duces and organizes subaltern and dominant feelings, expectations, desires,
disappointments, and frustrations sometimes directed at a particular person
or group, sometimes producing a more diffuse feeling. For instance, as early as
1951, while advocating the forced assimilation of ‘‘half-castes’’—to make them
‘‘white’’ by forcibly removing them from their Aboriginal mothers—the Lib-
eral Party leader Paul Hasluck counseled the nation not only to tolerate but to
take full ‘‘enjoyment’’ of the traditions of its indigenous ‘‘full-bloods.’’ 41 Like-
wise, mid-century liberal educational films like Art of the Hunter promoted
traditional Aboriginal ‘‘culture’’ as a critical contribution to the production of
a unique, distinct Australian nationalism and, thus, to the global relevance of
the nation—its ‘‘artistic and social contribution to the history of mankind.’’ 42

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 The Cunning of Recognition

By the 1990s the nation seemed to have fully incorporated Hasluck’s sug-
gestion. In certain commercial and cultural domains the Australian pub-
lic took pleasure from representations of brightly smiling Aboriginal per-
sons, thereby forgetting the trauma of three decades of Aboriginal activism
for the most part archived in remote land council offices, personal homes,
and private memories. Businesses took advantage of this shift in public atti-
tudes, regularly using images of traditional Aborigines to establish an iden-
tification between consumers and commodities. Citations of nonabrasive in-
digenous ‘‘traditional culture’’ saturated the mass-mediated public sphere. In
Coke, Telecom, and Qantas Airline commercials, in popular novels and songs,
Hasluck’s command, enjoy their traditions, was translated: enjoy our product
like you enjoy their traditions. And, as the public consumed indigenous tra-
ditions in the form of art, music, and cultural tourism, the national economy
came to rely increasingly on the popularity of the simulacra of indigenous
culture to fuel the internal combustion of national private capital. It would
only be in the late 1990s that the national mainstream Australian media would
begin to question whether some of the profits from the art and tourism indus-
tries were being fairly returned to indigenous communities, an issue of fair-
ness researchers and advocates had been arguing about since the emergence
of the market in the 1980s.43
The listening public probably needed little urging to imagine the ancient
traditions of Aboriginal people as a powerful, pleasurable, persisting force
predating the nation and defining its historically specific difference in moder-
nity’s global diaspora. A generation of film and music (for example, Walka-
bout, 1971; Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975; The Last Wave, 1977; The Chant of
Jimmy Blacksmith, 1978; The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, 1993;
Yothu Yindi, and Midnight Oil) refigured Australian modernity through an
archetypical ancient law sensual and perduring, lying under the physical and
social space of the nation and gestating in the bodies and practices of Aborigi-
nal people living in remote bush, in fringe communities, in urban centers.
Traditions were a level, a layer, a strata, existing before but now thoroughly
intercalated in the present symbolic and material conditions of the multi-
cultural nation. Ecofeminism, ecotourism, and New Ageism, as well as mass
popular books like Mutant Message Down Under, Crystal Woman, and The
Songlines, elaborated and ploughed into the national consciousness a com-
monsense feeling that this ancient order made Australia a special country.

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 Mutant Messages

RECITATIONS

Given the public commotion and commercial promotion, it might surprise

us to learn that most Australians know very little about the actual social con-
ditions of indigenous Australia. Many Australians acquire an outline of ‘‘Ab-
original culture’’ in school and from mass-media and multimediated images
—glimpses of traditional culture garnered from popular books, movies, tele-
vision talk shows, commercials, audio tapes, and cds. But although many
Australians have heard Peter Garrett of the rock band Midnight Oil sing the
lyrics from ‘‘The Dead Heart’’ (‘‘we carry in our heart the true country and
that cannot be stolen, we follow in the steps of our ancestry and that cannot be
broken’’) few know to what these musically moving evocations of ‘‘ancestry’’
refer.44 Likewise, after the Wik decision on pastoral property and the threat
of the Howard government to extinguish native title, The Body Shop stores
in Melbourne began selling armbands bearing the message ‘‘Coexistence, Jus-
tice, Reconciliation.’’ Most Australians knew that the colors of the armband
(red, black, and yellow) referred to the Aboriginal flag. But few Australians
knew to what the nation was reconciling itself, nor how specific legislative,
juridical, or constitutional principles had already figured the sign ‘‘tradition’’
as a rights-bearing instrument in a series of federal, state, and territory acts of
land rights, social welfare, and cultural heritage. Still fewer had any sense of
the local, national, and transnational political and social struggles entextual-
ized in law and legislation.
Most people did not know, for instance, that the federal Aboriginal Land
Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976 defined ‘‘aboriginal traditions’’ as ‘‘the
body of traditions, observances, customs and beliefs of Aboriginals or of a
community or group of Aboriginals, and includes those traditions, obser-
vances, customs, and beliefs as applied in relation to particular persons, sites,
areas of land, things or relationships.’’ 45 Or that this definition became the
blueprint for most major legislative references to ‘‘aboriginal traditions.’’ Nor
would most people know that if Aboriginal persons are to be successful land
or native title claimants, they must not only provide evidence of the enduring
nature of their customary law but also evidence of their ‘‘degree of attach-
ment’’ (dispositional orientation) to these ancient laws and lands. Likewise,
although they might know that the federal Native Title Act, 1993 stipulates that
an Aboriginal group must continue to observe ‘‘traditional laws’’ and ‘‘tradi-
tional customs,’’ most Australians would not know that the content of these

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 The Cunning of Recognition

traditional laws and customs are left undefined even as others are altogether
excluded from legal recognition. Still fewer Australians have had the chance
to appreciate the breathtaking rhetorical skill with which the High Court in
Mabo and Wik simultaneously castigated previous courts for their historically
and morally laden refusal to recognize the value of Aboriginal beliefs and cus-
toms and reconfirmed the function of dominant morality in deciding issues
of cultural recognition.
Why then should we be surprised to learn that Pauline Hanson knew little
more about indigenous traditions than the average non-Aboriginal Austra-
lian when she urged the public to avert its eyes from the mesmerizing image
of indigenous tradition and to wake up from the spell cast by a materially
motivated ‘‘Aboriginal industry’’? Hanson should make us pause, but not for
the usual suspects lurking in her rhetoric: specters of racism, intolerance, and
bigotry. We should pause because embedded in this racist rhetoric is a call for
‘‘ordinary Australians’’ to look at the real conditions of Aboriginal social life.
What if we were to do the unthinkable and agree with Hanson that there
is something fishy about the nation’s enjoyment of ancient Aboriginal tradi-
tions? About the national celebration of a social law preceding the messiness of
national history? About the tacit silences surrounding the content of Aborigi-
nal traditions? About legislation written to support an ancient law predating
anything present-day non-Aboriginal Australians are responsible for and any-
thing present-day Aboriginal Australians could know about? To appreciate
Hanson’s uncanny insight while refusing her political or social analysis ne-
cessitates taking seriously the claims of many public spokespersons and ordi-
nary Australians that they are honestly celebrating the survival of indigenous
traditional culture. When they think about it, many Australians are genu-
inely moved by the miraculous persistence of an Aboriginal law in the face of
centuries of traumatic civil onslaught. There in the distance, although never
wherever an actual Aboriginal subject stands and speaks, the public senses a
miracle of modern times, a sublime material impossible to define but truly
felt, an immutable and indestructible thing that predates and survives civil so-
ciety’s social and corporeal alterations. The Last Wave, Picnic at Hanging Rock,
and numerous other popular films and books strive to evoke this affective
state. The nation truly celebrates this actually good, whole, intact, and some-
what terrifying something lying just beyond the torn flesh of present national
social life. And it is toward this good object that they stretch their hands. What
is the object of their devotion?
In part, this object is the easily recognized wounded subject of the modern

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 Mutant Messages

liberal state.46 The political drama of an ancient law’s battle for recognition
is refigured as a series of personal traumas suffered by innocent indigenous
citizens. This figuration accounts for why, in the Australian edition of Time
magazine, a psychiatrist rather than a politician or constitutional lawyer ex-
plained the social meaning and import of the Stolen Generation’s moral claim
on the nation: ‘‘The grief echoes through generations. With no experience of
family life themselves, many find parenthood difficult—one woman told how
she had to be taught how to hug her children.’’ 47 Not surprisingly, given the
ages of the plaintiffs, in its investigation of the forcible removal of Aboriginal
children from their parents, the report Bringing Them Home likened cultural
assimilation, the Australian liberal state’s final plan for Aborigines, to physi-
cal annihilation, the German fascist state’s final plan for European Jews; that
is, the meaning of an indigenous cultural holocaust is figured metaphorically
in relation to the global archetype of holocaust. The report, and many Ab-
original men and women, noted the irony that as Australians were fighting
fascism abroad they were perpetuating it at home.
Bringing Them Home was not alone in raising the specter of a creeping fas-
cism secreted in the heart of Australian nationalism. It was widely feared that
popular support for Hanson’s xenophobic political party, One Nation, sig-
naled a potentially apocalyptic failure of historical consciousness—an actual
amnesia of the social costs of the infamous mid-century white immigration
policy. While commenting on the need for federal recognition of indigenous
native title, former Labour Prime Minister Paul Keating explicitly figured
opposition to native title in the commonsense formula of antifascism: first
they came for X . . . finally they came for me. ‘‘If we start wiping out indigenous
common law rights, when do we start wiping out non-indigenous common
law rights? This is what this game is about.’’ 48
This really is what the game is about or, at least, is also about—the rightness
and authority of ‘‘our’’ common law, its defense, and in its defense the defense
of the liberal subject of rights. Another wounded subject stands behind the
scarred indigenous body: the liberal subject who wielded the frontier blade
and nearly fatally wounded himself in the process. Explicit ongoing intoler-
ance of the indigenous population threatened to reopen the wound and finish
the job. Beazley and other public spokespersons suggested that mitigating the
ongoing failures of the liberal common law through acts of public contrition
and atonement simply provides a means of building a newer, deeper form of
national self-regard and pride, a form freed from its tragic siblings—imperi-
alism, totalitarianism, and fascism.

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 The Cunning of Recognition

In short, national subjects are not pretending to celebrate the survival of

indigenous traditions while secretly celebrating their necessary discursive and
affective failures, returning again and again to wound and to worship the
wound. Liberal supporters of indigenous traditions really want them to have
survived, at least in part. They want to worship a traditional order stripped
of every last trace of bad settlement history, at least in part. This real desire
makes it even more difficult for Aboriginal men and women not to see the fail-
ure of cultural identity as their own personal failure rather than as a structure
of failure to which they are urged to identify. Aboriginal persons I work with
often turn their critical faculty on themselves or become trapped between two
unanswerable questions: ‘‘Were my traditions taken from me?’’ or ‘‘Did I, my
parents, and my children abandon them?’’
We might here ask: What national reformations are accomplished by this
traditional survival? A perduring ancient law wiped clean of the savage his-
tory of modernity burnishes the tarnished image of the settler nation and the
torn imaginary between it and its citizens in four important ways: (1) The
survival of good indigenous traditions transforms liberalism’s bad side into a
weak, inconsequential historical force. The very social weakness of Aborigi-
nal people reinforces this fantasy. If even they could survive liberalism’s bad
side, this bad side must be weak indeed. (2) When good traditions appear
before the nation, liberalism’s good side also appears as a strong supporting
force. The trauma of settler history is revealed to have been an unfortunate
transition on the long road to a new, triumphant national: ‘‘We cannot really
celebrate the triumphs of our history if we’re not also prepared to acknowl-
edge the shame of our history.’’ 49 Of course, much depends on Aboriginal
persons censoring ‘‘those laws and customs . . . repugnant to natural justice,
equity and good conscience’’ so that the nation does not have to experience
its own continuing intolerance, its own failures to achieve a truly multicul-
tural national formation without recourse to discipline and repression. (3) Re-
silient Aboriginal traditional law provides a fantasy space for non-Aboriginal
subjects to imagine their own resilience in the face of the brutal conditions
of liberal capital and to hope that things will get better without the painful
process of social transformation. In other words, resilient Aboriginal tradi-
tions provide the grounds for popularized fantasies like Mutant Message Down
Under, which, while critiquing commodified culture and capital formations,
perpetuate these same forms in being itself a commodity. (4) And, finally,
the survival of some Aboriginal traditions confuses the question of who or
what is responsible for the loss of other traditions. If some Aborigines were

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 Mutant Messages

able to resist the ‘‘tides of history,’’ why weren’t most? Responsibility for the
continuity of native title is shifted from the state to the ‘‘activities and will of
the indigenous people themselves.’’ 50 The social conditions in which Aborigi-
nal subjects must maintain their law is not a matter that law and nation need
consider.
As the nation stretches out its hands to an ancient aboriginal law in order
to embrace its own ideal body, indigenous subjects are called on to perform
a complex set of semiotic maneuvers in exchange for the good feelings of the
nation and the reparative legislation of the state. Indigenous subjects must
transport to the present ancient prenational meanings and practices in what-
ever language and moral frameworks prevail at the time of enunciation; the
rights and resources that the state and nation extend are intended for the in-
digenous subject—that imaginary prenational subject haunting the actions of
every actual Aboriginal person. If conjuring this impossible indigenous sub-
ject were not itself an arduous enough semiotic task, Aboriginal men and
women are also called on to give national subjects an experience of being
transported from the present to the past, including the nation’s failed promise
to the very persons carrying them along. The demand for this dual transporta-
tion is captured in the most banal of public and private queries to Aboriginal
persons: ‘‘Tell us what was it like before us.’’
Aboriginal subjects should, in short, construct a sensorium in which the
rest of the nation can experience the sensations described, at the opening of
this chapter, by Fison. They should model a national noumenal fantasy. But
every determinate content of Aboriginal culture—every propositional con-
tent—forecloses the imaginary fullness of ancient law. Every time indigenous
subjects provide content to their traditional practices, they do so in present
time—linguistic time—and this marks their alteration by history. Thus, no
matter how strongly Aboriginal persons identify with these now lost but once
fully present customary practices, all Aboriginal subjects are always being
threatened by the categorical accusation: ‘‘You are becoming (just) another
ethnic group’’ or ‘‘You are becoming a type of ethnic group whose defining
difference is the failure to have maintained the traditions that define your dif-
ference.’’
So?
What I am saying is hardly news, nor do I mean it to be. In their nature
as socially produced and negotiated abstractions, all identities fail to corre-
spond fully with any particular social subject or group and are propped up or
undermined by their relation to other social identities and institutions. But

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 The Cunning of Recognition

all failures of identity are not the same; they are not related to state and capital
institutional structures in the same way, and they do not produce the same
discursive and affective results. Each one arises from and is situated in a par-
ticular set of social practices and relations, each constitutes a particular set
of social problems and organizes a particular set of social desires, horrors,
and hopes.
My ultimate interest is not in these discursive and affective aspects of in-
digenous subjectivity nor in their commercial tracks. The goal of understand-
ing the necessary failure of indigenous identity is to understand how national
and state recognition of that identity supports and strengthens the nation and
capital, not indigenous peoples, or not primarily indigenous peoples. The real
goal of this chapter and this book is to understand better how power operates
and is configured in multicultural settler nations like Australia. The abstrac-
tion ‘‘indigenous tradition’’ is a critical relay point through which immanent
critiques of dominant social formations, institutions, values, and authorities
are transformed into identifications with these same formations, institutions,
values, and authorities. This socially practiced idea translates national fail-
ures to provide even basic economic and social justice into local failures of
culture and identity. It organizes commonsense notions of who (or what) is
responsible for the social inequalities characteristic of the late liberal Austra-
lian nation.
If for non-Aboriginal Australian subjects indigenous tradition is a nostal-
gic memory-trace of all that once was and now is only partially, for Aboriginal
subjects ancient law is also a demand: You Aborigine establish an identifica-
tion with a lost object. Strive after what cannot be recovered. Want it badly. We
do. See us celebrating it. The social consequences of ‘‘the nation’’ embracing
indigenous traditions is quite different from the consequences of indigenous
people embracing the same. Embracing its shameful frontier history allows
the nation to begin bit by bit to unbind itself from the memories and hopes
once associated with that history, and allows the nation to get on with its busi-
ness, find new ideals and images to identify with. But something very differ-
ent happens with the indigenous subject. For not only are indigenous people
scarred by loss in their discursive passage into being, the historical and ma-
terial pressures on them to identify with the name of this passage (tradition)
affectively constitutes them as melancholic subjects,51 and the risk of produc-
ing a melancholic subject increases; that is, the more they believe publicly
mediated incitements that the nation is embracing them. This melancholia
acts as a communicative vehicle for distributing, and confusing, feelings about

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 Mutant Messages

who is responsible for present-day social maladies, for the state’s failure to
curb the excess of capital and to provide equitable health, housing, and edu-
cation. Non-Aboriginal Australians enjoy ancient traditions while suspecting
the authenticity of the Aboriginal subject; Aboriginal Australians enjoy their
traditions while suspecting the authenticity of themselves.
And so, in the following final section, I examine an all too clear calculus
coordinating the material stakes of an Aboriginal person’s or group’s claim
to be traditional and the determinate content and passionate attachment that
they must produce to support their claim. When capital resources are only
indirectly at stake, the content of the ‘‘ancient order’’ often remains vaguely
defined. But when the material stakes increase, particular indigenous persons
and groups are called on to provide precise accounts of local social struc-
tures and cultural beliefs that necessarily have a ‘‘more or less’’ relationship to
the ideal referent of ‘‘traditional customs and laws’’ and to anything actually
occurring in their day-to-day lives. At some ‘‘to be announced’’ boundary,
the ‘‘less’’ becomes ‘‘too little’’ and the special rights granted to indigenous
persons give way to the equal rights granted to all groups in the multicultural
nation.

SPECIFICATIONS

Managing this discursive gap is clearly the semiotic challenge, dilemma, and
irony of urban Aborigines, many of whom have served at the frontline of
political action, arguing for land rights, social entitlements, and basic jus-
tice. How does an urban Aboriginal person become a convincing indigenous
subject and thus secure the social, discursive, and affective resources avail-
able through this convincing performance? We find a clue in an ordinary
article published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 7 August 1997. The story
featured Lydia Miller, ‘‘a very modern manifestation of Aboriginality . . . a
city power broker . . . in charge of nine staff and an annual $3 million bud-
get.’’ Miller is described as an Aboriginal activist from ‘‘one of Australia’s best-
known indigenous families,’’ a family composed of lawyers, activists, artists,
and actresses. What makes Miller’s Aboriginality compelling is not, however,
(or not simply) her biological heritage, but rather that heritage plus her iden-
tification with the ‘‘diplomatic protocol of ancient Australia.’’ She becomes
authentically Aboriginal only at the moment she willingly alienates her dis-
course and identity to the fantastic claim that she is able to transport from
the past an ancient practice.

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Lydia Miller, until recently the head honcho of indigenous arts funding in
Australia, and current Olympic events organiser, has a particularly Aboriginal
view of the political geography of this nation. ‘‘I think of it as something like
301 nations—300 indigenous nations and one nation called Australia.’’ This
view of the world makes life infinitely more complex for Miller than for your
common or garden variety bureaucrat. For example, during her two and a half
years as director of the Australia Council’s indigenous arts board and now, as a
project head with the Olympic Festival of the Dreaming, she has meticulously
followed the diplomatic protocol of ancient Australia.52

Some readers of the original story probably passed over the strange pas-
sage, ‘‘she has meticulously followed the diplomatic protocol of ancient Aus-
tralia,’’ without much thought. Others might have imagined sun-drenched,
clay-painted black bodies dancing a sacred corroboree, or sacred ritual objects
passing from black hand to black hand. If they did, they imagined bodies and
hands whose color coding is otherwise than Miller’s own, a reading that the
Sydney Morning Herald foregrounds with a large photo of Miller. Still other
readers might have smirked, believing the entire article to be a product of
public relations machinery. If she said anything like what was quoted, Miller
might have thought she was donning an ‘‘ideological mask’’ for a variety of
political reasons.53 In any case, the Sydney Morning Herald does not elaborate
to what ‘‘the diplomatic protocol of ancient Australia’’ refers.
This referential nonspecificity is not the result of a lack of knowledge or
a failure to report it. Rather, ‘‘ancient protocol’’ is experienced as maximally
symbolic at exactly the moment when it seems minimally determinate.54 This
semiotic hinge allows readers to fantasize a maximal variety of images of the
deserving indigenous subject at the very moment the description of the con-
tent of the social geography approaches zero. In other words, nineteenth-
century social models of a male-dominated family and clan walk side-by-
side twentieth-century models featuring crystal woman, and ad infinitum.
This proliferation of possible ‘‘protocols of ancient Australia’’ fits neatly in the
consumer-driven capital, especially in the modern protocols of global tourism
(of which we can now understand the Olympics to be a part).
Of course, the seemingly simple statement ‘‘the diplomatic protocol of an-
cient Australia’’ projects national and state forms and practices into this empty
geography (diplomatic, protocol, and ancient Australia). A landscape actu-
ally emptied of all meanings derived from settlement history is the real un-
imaginable, unrepresentable ground of ‘‘indigenous.’’ All representations of

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 Mutant Messages

this ground must pass through whatever narratives of national history exist
at the time. But it is this fantastic, unrepresentational social ground where the
truly deserving Aboriginal subject(s) stand(s)—the social state against which
the legal apparatus and the jury of public opinion measure whether contem-
porary Aboriginal persons are deserving of national sympathy and special
state reparative legislation. Every actual Aboriginal subject produces personal
and national optimisms and antagonisms because in speaking and being they
stand in the way of this unrepresentable good object in the dual sense of being
merely metonymic of it and a material barrier to it.
When material resources are directly at stake, the distance between un-
knowable prenational social geographies and present social, linguistic, and
cultural practices are more closely scrutinized in the press and are more pre-
cisely measured in law. In these instances, nation and law demand that Ab-
original subjects produce maximally concrete cultural and social referents, di-
minishing the symbolic range and potency of every particular contemporary
practice. For example, in the midst of the Kenbi Land Claim in the Northern
Territory, Rupert Murdoch’s Northern Territory News featured an interview
titled ‘‘Topsy Secretary—Last of the Larrakia.’’ 55 This interview came amidst a
stream of editorials detailing the large cost (to white Australians) of the Kenbi
Land Claim and the amount of land that would be taken out of the ‘‘Terri-
tory’s future,’’ a region defined as white insofar as it defines the allocation of
land to Aboriginal Australians as taking this land out of Territory hands. A
breezy piece, the article pivots on a series of racial, cultural, and ideological
differences between the ancient Aboriginal past and the unfolding Aboriginal
present. The interview begins by describing Topsy Secretary as ‘‘the last full-
blooded Larrakia,’’ while it acknowledges the existence of other ‘‘fair-skinned
[Larrakia] descendents.’’
Although the article describes Topsy Secretary as a ‘‘pure’’ Larrakia in a
racial sense, it suggests she is not a pure Larrakia in her material and cultural
desires. While seemingly celebratory of Topsy Secretary, the article describes
her everyday desires in a way that marks her as just another national hybrid
cultural subject undermining the political cause of which she is cast as a sym-
bol. The article is able to undermine the Kenbi Land Claim by suggesting that
this last real Larrakia is really no different than the average Australian (white)
citizen. Topsy Secretary only retains ‘‘knowledge about traditional foods,’’
an enthusiasm shared by many settler Australians. Her other pasttime plea-
sures are on par with many middle-brow ‘‘white’’ Australians—sitting on her
veranda, watching Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless. The hall-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

mark of Aboriginal high culture, men’s ceremonies are now ‘‘ ‘All forgotten,’
she said. ‘No old men—they’re gone—no-one to teach.’ ’’ Finally, her politi-
cal views, the very fact that she has political views, differentiate her from her
own parents, the site of real precolonial Aboriginality: ‘‘Topsy said her father
never worried about land rights. He accepted the Europeans as friends and
never wished them to go away. But Topsy had lived to see her country shrink
with the passing of generations. She wanted to see freehold title over the Kula-
luk land and was hopeful the Larrakia would be successful in the long-awaited
Kenbi land claim’’ (16).
A knot of speculative enjoyment is captured in this interview, inciting
questions about the deserving Aboriginal subject: Who should receive the
benefits of reparative legislation? How to measure the line between the pol-
luted and diluted present and the pure ancient past? What line demarcates an
Aboriginal subject from a national ethnic subject? The article does not answer
these questions, rather it simply raises the stakes of any particular decision a
land commissioner might make regarding what will constitute legally felici-
tous indigenous traditional cultural difference. Should someone who watches
Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless receive valuable land on the
basis of their traditional beliefs and practices?
All major pieces of cultural heritage and land legislation in some way man-
date such felicitous traditional cultural differences and promote to some de-
gree the paranoid epistemology of Fison’s modern ethnology. Most land legis-
lation restricts claims to ‘‘traditional Aboriginal owners.’’ And they demand
that claimants demonstrate a genealogical connection between their present
and past customary beliefs and practices (the more specifically the better)
and, further, that they identify with those customs (the more passionately the
better). Those few pieces of legislation based on history, or on a combina-
tion of tradition and history, reaffirm as ‘‘unchallengeable’’ the commonsense
notion that tradition provides the true economic and cultural value of Ab-
original society to Aborigines and to the nation. In New South Wales, for in-
stance, land rights legislation is not restricted to traditional owners. It allows
Aboriginal groups to claim land on the basis of their historical attachment.
But the goal of the legislation is the ‘‘regeneration of Aboriginal culture and
dignity . . . at the same time [that it lays] the basis for a self-reliant and more
secure economic future for our continent’s Aboriginal custodians.’’ 56
When Aboriginal persons disrupt the fantasy of traditional identity by re-
jecting it as the authentic and valuable difference of their person and group
or insisting on its alterity to common law values, they risk not only the ma-

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 Mutant Messages

terial values available to them through this idea but also the ability of future
generations to stake a claim based on its semiotic remainders. The following
few interlocutions between lawyers and their Aboriginal clients drawn from
the Kenbi Land Claim suggest the microdiscursive nature of these attempts
to disrupt such fantasies. The first example is taken from a legal proofing ses-
sion held right before the Kenbi claim was first heard in 1989, the second from
public testimony given during a second hearing held in 1995–96, and the third
from a videotape I made with two younger claimants during a lull in a young
men’s ceremony. In the third sequence, Raelene Singh and I tease each other
about the basis of the Belyuen claim: conception relationships (maruy) with
the Belyuen waterhole and by extension a spiritual tie to other sacred sites
in the claim area; a physical relationship to each other and the claim area
by the fact of a shared substance (sweat ngunbudj); and a familial relation-
ship with the spirits and graves of deceased ancestors (nguidj) throughout the
claim area.

(1)
kenbi lawyer: What was it like before the white man?
tom barradjap: I don’t know mate I never been there.
kenbi lawyer: Yeah, right, ha ha ha, but what was the traditional law for this
place? We need to know what was the traditional law for this place.
(2)
robert blowes: Right. And when you were talking to Mr. Howie here you
said that’s the native way to call him brother?
topsy secretary: Yes.
robert blowes: Yes. Was that really brother?
topsy secretary: Well, in your way it’s cousin brother, but my way we call
him brother, and sister.
robert blowes: So he had different father and different mother?
topsy secretary: Yes, but it’s still, we call him brother and sister.
robert blowes: And he’s still Larrakia?
topsy secretary: Yes.
robert blowes: And he’s still the same country?
topsy secretary: Yes.
robert blowes: Okay. And what about your father and Tommy Lyons; is
that the same way, then? Your father Frank—
topsy secretary: Yes, it’s the same way.
robert blowes: So he’s not really brother.

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 The Cunning of Recognition

topsy secretary: Well, they all brothers.

robert blowes: That native way.
topsy secretary: Real brothers.
(3)
beth povinelli: What you? Are you for this country?
raelene singh: He taping for pretend report.
povinelli: Ngambin (cousin’s daughter), you for this country?
singh: Yes. This is my country. It’s like my life.
povinelli: Oh, it’s like your life from the Dreamtime ancestors?
singh: Yeah. And I come out of that Belyuen waterhole.
povinelli: Oh, you been born from there now?
singh: Yeah, that’s the dam. That old man Belyuen gave this mob kid here
now, us here now, like today where we walk around.
povinelli: Yeah, walk around.
singh: It’s like a gift from God.
povinelli: From which one from on top way?
singh: Yeah, well, we got our own, we got our own thing, gift, ah, we got our
own father, see.
povinelli: We got him from here now?
singh: From Belyuen from our ancestors.
povinelli: And do you believe that?
singh: Yes.
povinelli: Oh, you do?
singh: Yes. That is true.
povinelli: And are you teaching your kids?
singh: Yes.
povinelli: Oh, which ones?
singh: I am teaching my niece, there, Chantelle.
povinelli: You call him daughter isn’t it?
singh: Yeh, my daughter from my little sister.

In this case as in other land claim cases, lawyers, and the anthropologists
who help them, practice the law as if knowing that their asking Aboriginal
witness to embody an imaginary and discursive impossibility were irrelevant
to the very organization and operation of power they intend to be challenging.
Keeping with local speech practices, Barradjap uses humor to jolt the Kenbi
lawyer back into social present time—to think about what he is asking. But
speaking the ‘‘truth’’ to fantasy, such as Barradjap tries to do, or creating an

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 figure 3. Belyuen traditional
owners.

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 The Cunning of Recognition

ironic hypertext about law and identity, as Raelene and I do, does not upset
the practice of primarily valuing Aboriginal subjects in relation to their ability
to afford for national subjects a language and experience of ‘‘before all this.’’
It only shifts the register, only sets into motion a chain of signs whose object
is to forestall the collapse of the fantasy: o.k., right, but what about ‘‘before
the white man,’’ about ‘‘traditional law,’’ about the ‘‘real Aboriginal way.’’
The Kenbi lawyer is no fool. It is not a lack of knowledge that prompts his
query. He knows he is asking the impossible of Tom Barradjap. He and I have
laughed about these types of questions, yet he asks anyway. The utterance of
the Kenbi lawyer registers a desire that, if only for a moment, reality be torn,
that what he knows is true not to impede what he wishes for nevertheless, that
the social consequences of violent settler history be suspended even if only for
this private moment, especially in this intimate interpersonal moment. And in
this movement from knowledge to its refusal we see the contours of the desires
and suspicions constantly circulating around Aboriginal men and women, an
affective topology in which they are formed and to which they must respond.
These personal and national needs, desires, and demands disturb every Ab-
original enunciation. In the logic of fantasy, Barradjap’s insistence that the
Kenbi lawyer ‘‘get real’’ is reinterpretable as Barradjap withholding from the
Kenbi lawyer the real truth, a form of truth existing somewhere beyond this
fragmented and corrupted social reality. In the linguistic fragments ‘‘yeah,
right, ha ha ha, but,’’ the Kenbi lawyer marks the irresolvable tension between
a barred desire (his desire to refuse knowledge and gain entry to a traditional
land) and a barring agent (Barradjap’s refusal to act as a discursive passage to
that land).
Like the first Kenbi lawyer, so is another Kenbi lawyer, Robert Blowes,
very knowledgeable about Aboriginal social relations. Along with numerous
land claim cases, he served as counsel assisting in the presentation of the Wik
case before the High Court. Yet, again, something intrudes and interrupts his
knowledge. If the utterance of the Kenbi lawyer indexes some desire for his
knowledge of national history not to bar his access to the prenational, Blowes’s
utterance seems to index some desire for his support of indigenous customary
difference to remain just a matter of words. Although Topsy Secretary refuses
to orient her understanding of family to Blowes’s description, Blowes’s micro-
management of the truth value of various kinship systems is an example, and
just an example, of the historical and still pervasive microsociological inter-
actions that produced in Raelene, Topsy Secretary’s brother’s granddaughter,
the (mis)recognition of her daughter as her niece. Moreover, the evidence of

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 Mutant Messages

Topsy Secretary suggests how any determinate content of local traditions up-
sets the fantasy of ‘‘ancient law’’ as a form of otherness that is deeply recogniz-
able and does not violate the core subjective or social values of settler society.
Raelene and I may pun the micromanagement of discourse necessary to main-
tain the core fantasy of land and native title claims, but our discursive play
also marks the migration of this fantasy. My own reminder to Raelene to de-
scribe Chantelle as ‘‘daughter’’ rather than ‘‘niece’’ provides further evidence
of the microdisciplinary tactics constantly operating within the Aboriginal
social field.
The desires and suspicions circulating around Aboriginal women and men
are not confined to formal legal hearings. In the now-numerous commer-
cial venues commodifying Aboriginal traditional culture, national and inter-
national consumers approach indigenous men and women expectant, opti-
mistic, and cynical. They hope that this time traditional culture will appear
before them (which it always does more or less) and that this time they are buy-
ing sight unseen the real thing (which they always are more or less). But before
they have even purchased their ticket, every consumer of culture is already
disappointed by what they know: what they are about to see is a commercial
product. They, like Fison, leave the scene of cultural performance frustrated.
Why aren’t traditions wherever I am? Who is withholding them from me? I
bet there are none here. Who is to blame for their disappearance?
This is why the ‘‘real law man,’’ and to a lesser extent the ‘‘real law woman,’’
fixes the attention of the nation, law, and commerce, publican and politician.
Law men and women are simultaneously what the nation viciously ghosted
and where it hopes it can recover a previously unstained image. The nation
looks not at but through contemporary Aboriginal faces, past where every Ab-
original and non-Aboriginal Australian meet, wanting the spirit of something
promised there: ‘‘Tell us something we do not, cannot, know from here—what
it was (you and we were) like before all this. What our best side looks like.’’ In
the moment before any particular answer, ears and eyes are transfixed by the
potential of indigenous knowledge, by what might be unveiled, and by a more
general possibility of experiencing the new, the ruptural, the truly transfor-
mative. This moment is filled with horror, anticipation, excitement. Of course
no Aboriginal person can fulfill this desire, be truly positively alterior, nor if
they could would they make sense to the institutional apparatuses necessary
to their livelihood. This ‘‘first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence
of the universe’’ would in fact be experienced as stereotypically psychotic.57
These semiotic figurations and mediations of indigenous spirituality are

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 The Cunning of Recognition

not simply in language but in space. They present travelers with a set of ex-
pectations about what they might and have a right to expect from the people
and places to which they travel. At the heart of these textual mediations is
the expectation of an experience of being in the presence of the spirit. And
this expectation is manifested spatially—it interprets physical space and is
extended into social interactional space. Compare, for example, Belyuen and
Wadeye. Remember Belyuen lies on the Cox Peninsula on the western side
of the Darwin Harbor. Ever since the British settlement of Darwin, the prox-
imity of indigenous camps on the peninsula has provided visiting dignitaries,
international celebrities, film-makers, writers, and academics with access to
Aboriginal culture.58 Periodically between the 1930s and 50s Belyuen served
as a base for national radio programs, films, and anthropological studies; and
traveling dignitaries, scholars, and celebrities desired and were provided with
a variety of cultural performances, productions, and artifacts produced there.
However, as the transportation infrastructure between the Cox Peninsula and
Darwin improved, Belyuen has gotten closer to Darwin and, in the process,
lost its aura of distinctiveness. In 1984, when I first arrived at Belyuen, the
ferry ride between Darwin and the Cox Peninsula took upwards of an hour.
Nowadays, it takes fifteen minutes. Likewise, the drive from Darwin to Bel-
yuen now takes roughly seventy minutes, rather than the two to three hours
it previously took, depending on the condition of the dirt road.
The legal status of Cox Peninsula lands has also contributed to a sense that
the culture of the area has whitened. Under an unresolved land claim for the
last twenty years, most of the peninsula remains Commonwealth land, a no-
man’s land of economic and political practice. Capital investment for large-
and small-scale business ventures continues largely to be unavailable until the
claim is resolved. And no Aboriginal group has any clear, legally sanctioned
mandate for excluding non-Aboriginal people from the country or restrict-
ing their activities in certain places. In late September 1999, non-Aboriginal
campers defiled a women’s ceremonial ground. Several residents of a small
residential development nearby responded by saying that, as Commonwealth
land, the area was open to everyone for any type of use. It was considered
‘‘white land’’ as much as ‘‘black land.’’ The lack of legally enforced Aborigi-
nal title encourages and discourages particular types of visitors. Middle-class
families on package tours are not likely to visit. But self-described freaks, New
Age travelers, ferals, or sportspersons camp on beaches or in the scrub by
themselves or in areas next to those of Belyuen men and women.59 These forms
of interactions have their own economy of scale, resulting in small-scale ex-

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changes of beer, food, shirts, or cigarettes for small informal conversations,

song performances, or tours to sacred sites.
If physical and regulatory space has fashioned Belyuen as a place too close
to white society to profit from the commodification of the spirit, Wadeye has
been too isolated. Located off the Stuart Highway and in the middle of a large
Aboriginal reserve, Wadeye is physically hard to reach. Several Aboriginal
communities lying closer to the main highways profit from the tourist trade.
The regulatory environment likewise impedes tourism. Wadeye lies within
the Daly River Aboriginal Land Trust, as designated under the Aboriginal
Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976. The community can and does
require that nonresidents obtain permits before visiting; and, indeed, all non-
Aboriginal people traveling within the land trust are supposed to have a per-
mit issued for some designated community. Even as they impede travel to
Wadeye, the difficulties these physical and regulatory environments present
to travelers function as an interpretant of that space as more authentically
Aboriginal. The question facing those building regulatory and physical en-
vironments at Wadeye is how to capture the tourism market now serviced
by other Aboriginal communities without, in the very process, deauthoriz-
ing space. Let me put it this way: as Wadeye becomes a bridge to geist—as it
forms material space in the spirit of consumer capitalism—it risks installing
the deauthorizing signs of Western commerce.60
If popontology, law, and economy provide critical texts by which space and
thus its capital manifestations are formed and interpreted, they also orient
visitors’ expectations of what will be found in these spaces. These expecta-
tions include an understanding that a visit to an Aboriginal community is not
about: (1) the horror, exhaustion, and anxiety of being in the world of capital
spacetime, but rather the experience of geist in the midst of this spacetime;
(2) Aboriginal people nor their lives but rather an experience only Aboriginal
people can afford; and (3) the aporia of truth, ethics, or moral action in the
face of fundamental alterity, but rather the experience of a shared movement
of human spirituality in spite of this alterity. Law and capital and publics and
politicians do not need to be colluding in some way—engaged in a concerted
mass conspiracy—to be seen as producing in different forms and for different
purposes certain human beings as valuable insofar as they afford passageway
to an enchanted spiritual being, away from the conditions of the spirit of capi-
tal. Indeed, these various discursive contexts and practices disperse common-
sense understandings of indigenous spirituality and themselves constitute the
dispersed sites in which this spirituality is produced.

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And yet the people who are charged with transporting visitors to this en-
chanted realm, to an experience of being-in-dwelling, themselves dwell within
the legal and economic debris of advanced capital. They inhabit a form of
poverty that makes well-intentioned visitors afraid, physically ill, or subject
to panic. It is a type of poverty that can place such visitors in limits similar
to those in which Betty Bilawag and her family found themselves. Tourism
in these limits risks (and promises) opening experience not to the spirit that
capital commodifies, but to the overwhelming presence of liberal capitalism’s
bad faith, its dirty corners, its broken covenants.
Legal practitioners may hope to disambiguate themselves from these other
cultural markets, but economic and symbolic logics articulate them, as do the
Aboriginal subjects who move between them. Aboriginal subjects field simi-
lar desire-laden questions from tourists, anthropologists, and lawyers: Is this
how it was done before white people? And they hear legal and commercial
consumer reports—satisfied consumers grateful to be shown a part of real
traditional culture; dissatisfied consumers grumbling that what they heard
and saw didn’t seem real enough. As did their ancestors, Tom Barradjap, Topsy
Secretary, and Raelene Singh must orient themselves to the multiple sym-
bolic and capital economies of ‘‘traditional law’’ if they are to gain the per-
sonal and material values available through them—if they are to alleviate to
some extent the social conditions to which Hanson alluded and produced. As
they navigate among mass-mediated and multimediated fragments of pub-
lic discourses about the value of Aboriginal traditions and about the limits
of cultural alterity, Aboriginal men and women like Topsy Secretary and her
granddaughter Raelene Singh are left to grapple with how to present a form
of difference that is maximally other than dominant society and minimally
abrasive to dominant values. The hot potato of multicultural nation-building
is dropped in their laps.
The ever-widening stretch of history never seems to soothe the desires or
irritating suspicions of white subjects that somewhere out there in archives
or within a withholding Aboriginal subject is the knowledge that would fill
the fantasy space of ‘‘tradition.’’ At the time Fison wrote Kamilaroi and Kunai,
one hundred years had passed since the settlement of Sydney. At the time Tom
Barradjap spoke, over two hundred years had passed and Aboriginal tradi-
tions had long since become a politicized and commodified form of national
identity. Raelene Singh, her sister, and nieces (or daughters) had literally
grown up under the shadow of the Kenbi Land Claim. For the entire span of
their lives they heard their grandfather, grandmother, and mother publicly

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 Mutant Messages

valued primarily for their traditional knowledge and role. Now they must be
that impossible thing of national desire. And if the Kenbi Land Claim were
ever to end, other land claims, native title claims, and cultural heritage claims
are over the southern horizon. The external suspicion that somewhere out
there someone is withholding a valuable thing is transformed into an internal
local anxiety: Which of ‘‘our’’ old people is withholding information from us?
What will they say or not say? How will the lives of the next generation be
altered on the basis of a speaking or withholding relative? What if someone
reveals a ‘‘real tradition’’ repugnant to the common law?

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 For external as well as for internal reasons, I shall select as the
basis of this comparison the tribes which have been described by
anthropologists as the most backward and miserable of savages,
the aborigines of Australia, the youngest continent, in whose
fauna, too, we can still observe much that is archaic and that
has perished elsewhere.
—Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo

Australia is the present home and refuge of creatures often

crude and quaint, that have elsewhere passed away and given
place to higher forms. This applies equally to the aboriginal as
to the platypus and kangaroo.
—Baldwin Spencer, The Arunta

This ethical problem of the definition of practices of freedom, it

seems to me, is much more important than the rather repetitive
affirmation that sexuality or desire must be liberated.
—Michel Foucault, ‘‘The Ethics of the Concern for Self ’’

2 / The Vulva Thieves (Atna Nylkna):

Modal Ethics and the Colonial Archive

EMPTY CITES AND MODAL ETHICS

A simple empty square confronts the reader on page 231 of Michael Taus-
sig’s ‘‘Maleficium: State Fetishism.’’ An empty site captivates, holds, and is
meant to hold the reader’s attention. It is captioned with the following: ‘‘This
empty space is where I would have presented Spencer and Gillen’s drawing of
the frog totem because it seemed to me next to impossible to get the points
about representation across without this amazing image. But my friend Pro-
fessor Annette Hamilton, of Macquarie University, Sydney, tells me that to
reproduce the illustration would be considered sacrilege by many Aboriginal
people—which vindicates the power not only of the design but of the prohi-
bitions against it being seen.’’ 1

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 The Cunning of Recognition

What Annette Hamilton says is true, I think. And, insofar as this modifies
the textual practice she proposes, it positions both writer and reader on the
side of an anthropological ethics arising from a modal architectonics; that is, a
professional textual ethics built up from a grammatical structure that indexes
the relationship between a predicate and the interior ‘‘mood’’ of a subject—
here, a class of subjects. In the English language, mood is marked by auxiliary
verbs such as ‘‘would,’’ ‘‘should,’’ ‘‘must,’’ and ‘‘might.’’ Hamilton’s promotion
of a specific text-building (or demolition) practice is dependent on delicate
calibrations of knowledge and belief that these grammatical structures signal
not only a person’s attitude (epistemic modality) but the multiple obligations
that arise out of that attitude (deontic modality). In short, Hamilton’s ethics
of the colonial archive is built on her sense certainty about how compulsory
aspects of attitude should translate into compulsory aspects of behavior. In
this case, a hypothesized Aboriginal subject ‘‘would be’’ offended or, worse, be
fundamentally violated by the textual reproduction of the frog totem. Anthro-
pologists should not, therefore, indeed must not—perhaps more interestingly
cannot—reproduce the image. Something holds back the hand. Indeed, the
‘‘proper’’ of anthropology discovers itself retrospectively in each anthropolo-
gist’s discovery that she or he is subject to an obligation.
In the broadest sense, in this chapter I reflect on the substitution of a prac-
tice of textual deletion, ellipsis, and paraphrase for a fuller social theory of
the politics and ethics of alterity and similarity. In the narrowest sense, I ana-
lyze the material emergence of ritual sexuality as such in the colonial context
of ‘‘radical interpretation’’ and examine why sexuality was the site in which
an emergent ethical relationship to colonial cohesion and the customary was
played out. Thus, I meditate on the emergent metamodality of liberalism mo-
tivating these textual practices, a philosophy not merely of the ought but of
the emergence of a new normative relation to liberalism’s own and others’
moral philosophies, their oughts. At the same time I attempt to understand
the limits and possibilities of ‘‘radical interpretation’’ in colonial contexts and
its retroactive inscription in present political and social imaginaries, as dis-
cussed in the last chapter.
I do not mean to question here Hamilton’s good intentions or, for that mat-
ter, her ethical project. As an ethics of respect this text-building project is, for
the present, unassailable. Rather I want to understand who and what are being
protected, saved, and recuperated from the breach and shadow of the settler
archive and colonial history. My point is simple: something other than the
Aboriginal subject risks being fundamentally violated when parts of the colo-

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 The Vulva Thieves

nial archive are cited verbatim. Reading and reproducing the colonial archive
risks the liberal subject’s experience of the necessity of liberal intolerance and
its translation into domineering force. And yet these uncitable sections con-
tinue to play a vital role in the evaluation of contemporary indigenous subjects
and groups (as we will see in subsequent chapters) and the national celebra-
tion of tradition (as discussed in the last chapter). Land commissioners, native
title tribunals, and formal and informal students of indigenous society read
them and use them as the grounds from which contemporary practices are
calibratable deviations.
I begin by situating these meditations in Baldwin Spencer and Frank
Gillen’s representations of Arrente sex acts and conclude by resituating them
in the politics of cultural recognition and material distribution in contempo-
rary Australia. Although I analyze the when and how of the textual constitu-
tion of a sex act qua sex act, and analyze how these acts subjectify persons,
I am not so much interested in sex, ritual sex, or sexual violence per se in
this chapter, or in the next. Rather both chapters examine the ways in which
particular forms of corporeality, corporeal relations, and corporeal practices
(public, violent, playful, ceremonial, noncouple, retributive) superanimated
liberal reflection; caused a crisis of reason in Australian non-Aboriginal citi-
zens; caused these citizens to experience their intolerance as their moral and
intellectual limits; and helped to precipitate the discursive grounds for a new
national ideological formation.
In short, this chapter, like the next, is only obliquely a history of sexuality.
It examines the emergence of ‘‘sex’’ as a distinct act, of sexuality as a form of
desire, subjectivity, and identity, and of the puzzling ‘‘manner in which what
is most material and most vital in [bodies] has been invested’’ in indigenous
Australia.2 I hope to suggest how the superanimation of liberal discourse lifted
‘‘sex’’ out of local corporeal practices and to gesture toward the legal and cul-
tural consequences of this artifactualization. But the chapter does not examine
sex; instead it examines a feeling that radical interpretation chases, produces,
and aspires to incite: the feeling of a destabilizing indeterminate ‘‘something’’
that lurks beside and rattles liberal understanding; a teetering into the sublime
that this indeterminate something threatens and promises; and the deferred
ethics of alterity haunting the politics of freedom and cultural difference in
Australia. This chapter thus primarily examines what Spencer and Gillen were
chasing in the Arrente desert; what they found; what they missed, foreclosed,
and destroyed. And what, in foreclosing, they set in motion and what they
helped to weave into the fabric of national discourse. This chapter is, in short,

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 The Cunning of Recognition

an attempt to understand why one form of nationalism rather than another

developed in Australia, and how this form of nationalism figures a form of
social coercion as a moment of cultural recognition and translation.
Why do I examine the Arrente case, or, for that matter, why do I exam-
ine in the next chapter the 1936 Daly River case of so-called ritual rape? They
are, after all, simply two case histories among numerous colonial encoun-
ters that animated liberal reflective judgment in Australia between 1896 and
1936. I could fairly easily be accused of a somewhat haphazard methodology—
of grafting grand theories and social teleologies onto all but forgotten, triv-
ial, and nonrepresentative encounters. Worse yet, readers might wonder what
temporal, spatial, or social dimensions connect the two case studies when
actually they are separated by forty years and refer to two different Aboriginal
groups in two different social, ecological, and cultural regions and to settler
Australians across two very different periods.
A few preliminary responses are in order here. First, the two cases take up
the theme of the social productivity of radical alterity (the repugnant and re-
pulsive) and uncanny similitude from two different angles and aspects. This
chapter focuses on the question of how to read the colonial archive as well as
how to write a genealogy of the present in its shadow, a problem of herme-
neutics and historiography. I do not advocate a shift back to a critical theory
of reading from a critical theory of writing, but rather I suggest a regrounding
of Althusser’s insightful notion of symptomatic reading—reading ‘‘an answer
without a question’’—in a critical, pragmatically informed practice of histo-
riography.3
Second, the cases reflect two types of encounter between settlers and in-
digenous people and two ways in which these encounters affected national
and global understandings of Aboriginal Australia and Australian national-
ism. It is these two types and modes that interest me. Spencer and Gillen’s
account of the corporeal practices of Arrente men and women would have a
significant impact on how non-Aboriginal people inside and outside Australia
imagined traditional indigenous culture and society. The administrative and
juridical memos I examine in the next chapter would themselves reflect this
history, though they themselves would not have the same circulatory range or
impact. But the Daly River case suggests the variety of events and eventfulness
that provided the conditions of possibility for the emergence of state multi-
culturalism. The struggle among police, administrators, ethnologists, and in-
digenous men and women to fix the proper meaning of a practice—and fix
their own careers in respect to this positioning—is exemplary of the minor

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 The Vulva Thieves

encounters, personal struggles, and ethical dilemmas that constituted, and

constituted as compelling, the theoretical and administrative problems that
scholars, government officials, and other state citizens addressed in texts like
Spencer and Gillen’s Native Tribes of Central Australia and, later, A. P. Elkin’s
Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them, and still later, Mutant Mes-
sage Down Under; The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Labor’s Lot;
and Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland.
Finally, both chapters theoretically foreground, through historical and
ethnographic material, how the emergence of a broad multicultural perspec-
tive was subjectively, textually, and institutionally mediated. Thus I use these
two cases, on the one hand, to reflect on the expectations, exhilarations, frus-
trations, and tediousness of moments of ‘‘radical interpretation,’’ or the fan-
tasy of being in a moment of radical interpretation. On the other hand, I use
these cases to question a persisting liberal model of communicative ratio-
nality, perhaps best and most radically summarized by Jürgen Habermas’s
notion of ideal communicative action (communicative versus practical rea-
son) and Richard Rorty’s poetic proposition for liberal society, namely, that
liberal society treat as ‘‘true whatever can be agreed upon in the course of free
discussion and waving aside the question of whether there is some metaphysi-
cal object to which the result of such discussion might or might not corre-
spond.’’ 4
So let us begin.

OPENING VEINS

It is 1896. The desert heat is oppressive; the flies a constant annoyance on

mouth, nostrils, and eyes. Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen are camped just
outside of Alice Springs. Gillen had arranged for Arrente men and women
and their surrounding Aboriginal neighbors to gather nearby to perform a
repertoire of their rituals in exchange for food, tobacco, tea, and protection
from pastoralists and police. At the time of their research, Baldwin Spencer
was a zoologist and Frank Gillen a telegraph operator, but both men aspired
to be the intellectual heirs of Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt’s emergent
late Victorian discipline of anthropology in Australia. And so, every day they
took photographs, scribbled notes, and sat with now-nameless older central
desert men and perhaps some central desert women, who themselves sat and
struggled to answer the river of questions Spencer and Gillen directed at them
about the ceremonies they were performing.5

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 The Cunning of Recognition

At times Spencer and Gillen’s eyes must have wandered from their writ-
ing and passed over the distended, malnourished bellies of Arrente children
or the buckshot-scarred backs of Arrente men and women. When Spencer
and Gillen helped their Arrente informants map out their kinship relations
and marriage classes they must have heard full or fragmentary stories of the
epidemics, poisonings, and massacres that accounted for the dead ends of nu-
merous Arrente family groups. Gillen’s later letters to Spencer periodically
refer to this sexual and physical violence, a fact of frontier social life (as I’ll dis-
cuss in more detail below) in which he critically intervened.6 Their coauthored
work Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) also mentions the traumatic so-
cial and physical consequences of British settlement on Aboriginal society.
But the purpose of the text was not to explore the traumatic effect of British
colonialism, liberal bodily techniques and practices, pastoral capitalism, pri-
vatization, or Christian mortification on Arrente society, but rather to make
sense of Arrente practices as such.7 Thus, they sought—as had their mentors
Fison and Howitt—to excise ‘‘every last trace of white men’s effect on Ab-
original society’’ so that they might better get at Arrente practice or, perhaps
more precisely, the ideas that organized it.8
No doubt Spencer and Gillen were engaged in grueling physical and men-
tal work; at times the heat must have overwhelmed everyone. But they were
happy to sweat, to inhale flies, to stretch a cramped leg. They knew the un-
precedented nature of what they were witnessing.9 The corpus of central desert
male culture was unfolding before their eyes as ‘‘unspoilt Arunta [Arrente]
men’’ and their Aboriginal neighbors performed and described nearly every
one of their initiation, increase, and totemic ceremonies.10 Spencer and Gillen
hoped that the ethnography they wrote based on this field trip would become
a bestseller in Europe, the Americas, and Australia, as well as a touchstone
for ensuing generations of anthropologists.11 It did, and their names will long
be remembered for their work among the Arrente. In some deep and funda-
mental way, Spencer and Gillen made most social scientists Australianists, no
matter their geographical or theoretical bent, insofar as critical foundational
texts in structural-functionalism, structuralism, Marxism, and psychoanaly-
sis were all refracted through Native Tribes of Central Australia on their way
into public and private circulation and consumption.
To read Spencer and Gillen’s texts is to understand why audiences were so
captivated by them. As they detail the corporeal praxis, techne, and intensity of
Arrente ritual life, the reader glimpses something of the multiplex and intense
intercourses the Arrente maintained with one another and the animate land-

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 The Vulva Thieves

scape through elaborate and mundane techniques of rubbing, cutting, encas-

ing, burying, swallowing, washing, and severing body parts, ritual objects,
and ritual grounds. Few academics could imagine a better social site for test-
ing the powers of Western rationality. These ‘‘primitive savages’’ provided an
impediment against which multiple scholars and administrators could figure
and test their intellectual powers. These natives frustrated and attracted; in-
cited rage and respect, despair and regret. As Gillen would write to Spencer:
‘‘Dn them, they puzzle me and I doubt whether we shall even succeed in
learning much about them.’’ 12
The question how do we make sense of these practices was not only of inter-
est to academics but gained an international urgency in the context of debates
about whether or not the white Australian colony was mature enough to be-
come a sovereign Australian nation-state. How the indigenous was situated
within extant discourses of the wild and reasonable and the civil and savage
would affect the formulation of state policy in relation to Aboriginal per-
sons and white settlers. During the Federation Conference of 1890, Australian
Federalists like Sir Henry Parkes and Sir Samuel Griffith continually referred
to the moral and economic maturity of the Australian colony as grounds
for statehood, and they encouraged increased social and communicative net-
works between the colonies in the belief that the then current ‘‘want of knowl-
edge which one colony possesses of another’’ impaired the health of the entire
national body.13 Were the ‘‘crude cults’’ ascribed to the Arrente and other in-
digenous Australians and the carnal and economic arrangements between in-
digenous groups and settlers the private affairs of a society apart or were they
public matters of national import? 14 What were the shared symbolic bases for
rational communication and debate between indigenous and settler society
that might provide the grounds for a peaceful resolution of these differences?
Did the lack of a common language or shared moral universe between settler
and indigenous groups threaten the very notion of an Australian nation before
there was a nation in fact? As I discuss in the next chapter, indigenous subjects
were excluded from federal protection; indeed, they were barred from being
included in the national census. But the treatment of indigenous persons by
various colonies—especially by Queensland and the Northern Territory gov-
ernments—put at peril the unity notion of ‘‘we the people.’’
Throughout, Native Tribes and Northern Tribes address these national anxi-
eties, broaching the topic of the public secret of Aboriginal ‘‘marriage’’ and
suggesting (and modeling) the form that a modern moral judgment should
take in the scene of cultural alterity. Gillen, who was urged to run for local

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 The Cunning of Recognition

government in Victoria, was centrally involved in some of these public and

government arguments. In 1898, he advocated the establishment of a federal
Department of Aboriginal Affairs that would collect and record the customs
and beliefs of indigenous groups.15 But he opposed a proposed bill that would
regulate the ‘‘carnal’’ relationship between white men and ‘‘any female Abgal
or Half Caste’’ because he feared that such a bill would encourage false accu-
sations against whites who offended blacks or their white employers.16
As for intra-Aboriginal sexual practices, ‘‘yes,’’ Spencer and Gillen wrote,
it is true, ‘‘considerable license is allowed on certain occasions, when a
large number of men and women are gathered together to perform certain
corroborees. When an important one of these is held, it occupies perhaps ten
days or a fortnight; and during that time the men, and especially the elder
ones, but by no means exclusively these, spend the day in camp preparing
decorations to be used during the evening. Every day two or three women are
told off to attend at the corroboree ground, and, with the exception of men
who stand in relation to them of actual father, brother, or sons, they are, for
the time being, common property to all the men present on the corroboree
ground.’’ 17 But, ‘‘in regard to their character it is of course impossible to judge
them from a white man’s standard. In the matter of morality their code differs
radically from ours, but it cannot be denied that their conduct is governed by
it, and that any known breaches are dealt with both surely and severely.’’ 18
We should not move too quickly past these and other reflections on emer-
gent modern forms of national moral judgment. Statements like the ones
above register the propositional form that emergent moral standards would
take in the scene of customary difference and alterity and register the displace-
ment of older normative conventions. Simply put, the text is a dialogical regis-
ter of Spencer and Gillen’s assumption of the moral stance their readers would
take toward these acts: repugnance and attraction, repulsion and titillation.
Indeed, they specified some elements of this reaction as a perfectly natural
human response in need of a counternormative modern cultural pedagogy;
namely, modern men should judge the compulsory forms and practices of
other societies from the perspective of perspective.
To successfully incite readers to take up their positions (repulsion and rec-
onciliation) depended in part on a number of successful textual maneuvers. In
the first instance, Spencer and Gillen had to forestall the reading of their own
writing as simply sensational ethnopornography. In short, rather than being
repulsed only by Arrente practices, readers might be repulsed by the prurience
of Spencer and Gillen. Spencer and Gillen were well aware of the potential for

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 The Vulva Thieves

this representational and moral reversal. The debates between the ‘‘anthropo-
logicals’’ of the Anthropological Society of London and the ‘‘ethnologists’’ of
the Ethnological Society pivoted in part on the stance scholars should take
toward sex (how it should be treated and talked about); and the emergent
discipline’s relationship to a politics of respectability.19
Several of Spencer and Gillen’s colleagues provided graphically detailed
accounts of Aboriginal sex acts and were subsequently accused of trafficking
in pornography.20 Others used different textual strategies to signify the scien-
tific nature of their sexual discourses and thus protect themselves and their
writing as ethnoscientigraphia from similar interpretations that the material
was mere ethnopornographia. In treatises on circumcision and subincision,
W. E. H. Roth and Herbert Basedow included line drawings of Aboriginal
men and women engaged in sexual intercourse. But Roth placed an author’s
note at the head of the last chapter—suitably titled, ‘‘Ethno-Pornography’’—
of his ethnological study Ethnological Studies among the North-West-Central
Queensland Aborigines, which read, ‘‘The following chapter is not suitable for
perusal by the general lay reader.’’ 21 And Basedow drew on the metalinguistic
properties of code-switching—from English to Latin and German—to frame
his investigations as ‘‘scholarly.’’ 22 But this textual practice did not save his text
from the market in ethnoporn—his extraordinarily dry and dusty treatise on
subincision was reprinted along with Roth’s by a small, private New York pub-
lishing house specializing in ars erotica.23 Indeed, social scientific treatises on
Aboriginal sexuality emerged in and circulated through a textual field satu-
rated with fictional and nonfictional accounts of savage lives and times.24
By 1937, M. F. Ashley-Montague would observe that ‘‘such was the delicacy
of feelings of the correspondents to the editors that rarely were they able to
permit themselves to make more than the briefest references to those [sexual]
customs and beliefs which it was their habit to dismiss with some such cali-
ginous epithet as ‘disgusting’, or ‘bestial.’ ’’ 25 In his private letter to Spencer,
Gillen himself worries about how others will judge his accounts of Arrente
sexuality: ‘‘This is hardly the sort of subject to write about so fully in a letter,
old man, but I have drifted into it.’’ 26 However, once Spencer notes the scien-
tific value of such ‘‘unsavory material’’ Gillen promises to pursue its sense in
detail.27
Still, by and large, Spencer and Gillen stop short of graphically positioning
the Arrente in sex acts in their published writings. Instead, they use various
techniques of textual implicature to prompt readers to infer the positions and
practices of ritual sex. Forcing readers to draw their own inferences about

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what were the sex acts to which the elliptical passages referred at once and
the same time qualified the moral character of Spencer and Gillen (as men
being constrained by decent, proper, and scientifically oriented concerns)
while maximally expanding the possible referent of sex. In other words, by
conveying less information about the actual sex acts, Spencer and Gillen’s in-
creased the possibilities of what the sex acts might be.28 For instance, in their
more popular volume, Across Australia (1912), Spencer and Gillen describe the
Arrente as ‘‘naked, howling savages’’ engaged in bodily acts that were ‘‘crude
in the extreme.’’
Let us leave this textual field for a moment and ask instead what Spencer
and Gillen saw or heard that they thought could or should be described
as ‘‘considerable license’’ and ‘‘sexual intercourse’’ between ‘‘women’’ and
‘‘men’’? To answer, let me turn to the following passages that purport to de-
scribe exactly what takes place ‘‘when a large number of men and women are
gathered together to perform certain corroborees.’’ 29 The first passage is taken
from Native Tribes (1899); the second from Northern Tribes (1907).

A man goes to another who is actually or tribally his son-in-law, that is, one
who stands to him in the relationship of Gammona [mother’s brother], and
says to the latter: ‘‘You will take my Unawa [wife] into the bush and bring in
with you some undattha altherta’’ (down used for decorating during ordinary
corroborees). The Gammona then goes away, followed by the woman who has
been previously told what to do by her husband. This woman is actually Mura
[wife’s mother] to the Gammona, that is, one to whom under ordinary circum-
stances he may not even speak or go near, much less have anything like mari-
tal relations with. After the two have been out in the bush they return to the
camp, the man carrying undattha and the woman following with green twigs,
which the men will wear during the evening dance, tied round their arms and
ankles. There will be perhaps two or three of these women present on each
day, and to them any man present on the ground, except those already men-
tioned, may have access. During the day they sit near to the men watching
but taking no part in the preparation of decorations. The natives say that their
presence during preparations and the sexual indulgence, which was a practice
of the Alcheringa, prevents anything from going wrong with the performance;
it makes it impossible for the head decorations, for example, to become loose
and disordered during the performance.30

There are further, in addition to this particular time, other occasions on which
intercourse with women, other than those allotted to them, is allowed to the

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 The Vulva Thieves

men. It is very usual amongst all the tribes to allow considerable license dur-
ing the performance of certain of their ceremonies when a large number of
natives, some of them coming often from distant parts, are gathered together—
in fact on such occasions all of the ordinary marital rules seem to be more
or less set aside for the time being. Each day, in some tribes, one or more
women are told off whose duty is to attend at the corroboree ground,—some-
times only during the day, sometimes only at night,—and all of the men except
those who are fathers, elder and younger brothers, and sons, have access to
them. When an ordinary corroboree is performed, which often occupies two
or three weeks, the women are close to the ground, as there is usually noth-
ing sacred which they might not see, but in the case of sacred ceremonies they
are generally brought up during the evening. In the Arunta, when an ordinary
corroboree is in course of progress, an elder man will say to his son-in-law,
‘‘You go into the bush with my unawa and bring in some undattha altherta’’
(ordinary corroboree decorating material). The younger man then goes out
with the woman who is his mura, and to whom under ordinary circumstances
he may neither go near nor speak, much less have marital relations with, as
he does upon this occasion. The man and women return to camp, the former
carrying the down and the latter green twigs, which will be worn by the men
who perform the dance in the evening. When all is ready the women who have
spent the day with the men are painted with red ochre, and go to the lubras’
camp to summon the other women and children. The idea is that the sexual
intercourse assists in some way in the proper performance of the ceremony,
causing everything to work smoothly and preventing the decorations from fall-
ing off. In some tribes this sexual intercourse is much more noticeable than in
others.31

Critical understanding pauses over the meaning of the sentences: ‘‘The

natives say that their [women’s] presence during preparations and the sexual
indulgence, which was a practice of the Alcheringa, prevents anything from
going wrong with the performance; it makes it impossible for the head decora-
tions, for example, to become loose and disordered during the performance’’
and ‘‘the idea is that the sexual intercourse assists in some way in the proper
performance of the ceremony, causing everything to work smoothly and pre-
venting the decorations from falling off ’’? What might the Arrente men have
said and meant that Spencer and Gillen paraphrase as ‘‘it makes it impossible
for the head decorations, for example, to become loose and disordered during
the performance’’? In other words, what were the socially mediated networks

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 The Cunning of Recognition

of meaning and practice that makes the explanation ‘‘sexual intercourse pre-
vents decorations from falling off ’’ sensible? More particularly, why was it nec-
essary for Gammona and Mura to bring undattha altherta into the proximity
of this awkwardly phrased thing—‘‘anything like marital relations’’? We might
ask what sex refers to in this ritual context; whether sex is a category always
already independent of language and context, social relations and practices;
and, more narrowly, whether ‘‘sex’’ or ‘‘sexual indulgence’’ is the proper inter-
pretant of what Mura and Gammona did out of sight of Spencer and Gillen.
The point of this series of questions is to understand whether these rituals
were elaborate symbolic representations of male reproduction as Spencer and
Gillen suggest, and many subsequent anthropologists claim, or whether it is
possible to interpret the distinctiveness and value of these corporeal acts rela-
tive to some other set of acts and meanings. For instance, could sex be a minor
form of bloodletting?
Let me try to be clear. I have little doubt that Spencer, Gillen, and most
of their predecessors and successors took it to be self-evident that what they
saw (or heard about) on or off to the side of corroborree grounds was ‘‘sex’’
between ‘‘men’’ and ‘‘women’’; that when they and the Arrente pointed to
a ‘‘sex act’’ they were pointing to the same act and field-of-action; that this
act had a social syntax (men sexually exploiting women); and, finally, that
an indigenous gender hierarchy could be read off this social syntax. Indeed,
as had Fison and Howitt, Spencer and Gillen played a critical role in the de-
velopment of a modern social science of kinship and descent whose differ-
ence lay in integrating the acts into a broader ‘‘intersexual arrangement’’ to
use Fison’s phrase. That is, not only did they see sex, Spencer and Gillen and
their American, British, and French colleagues and students—from Morgan
to Radcliffe-Brown to Lévi-Strauss—sought to formalize these elaborate cor-
poreal intercourses into multiple models of heterosexually regimented fa-
milial organization (originally figured as kinship classification and marriage
classes). Out of their and subsequent researchers’ work would come the char-
acterization of kinship, marriage, and descent as universal and necessary core
features of tribal (and human) society.
But Spencer and Gillen saw and heard more than can be captured by the
‘‘mock algebra’’ of emergent studies of human social and sexual organiza-
tion.32 Indeed, they describe in some detail the corporeal praxis and techne
of Arrente ritual life and the manner in which, for their Victorian sensibili-
ties, these rough rituals bled into the brutish, bordered on the traumatic, be-
came at times indistinguishable from the lewd. Blood flowed from veins, sweat

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 The Vulva Thieves

material attachments sexual indulgence

(headdress to head) (men and women)

corporeal intercourse

figure 4. Attaching headdress to head.

from pores, words from throat. These secretions of the body were rubbed into
human bodies, ritual objects, and ancestral sites. Words and sounds, spoken
and sung, softly or at a deafening volume, communicated to and penetrated
into initiates and ancestral sites. Young initiates were encased in a wall of
human flesh as their bodies were cut, their teeth knocked out, their skulls bit-
ten. Arms, backs, chests, genitals, and other body parts were repeatedly punc-
tured or seared with fire and fire-sticks, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes
not. As Spencer and Gillen pile detail upon detail, European and Arrente so-
cially mediated semiotic orders begin to peel away from one another. The
more Spencer and Gillen describe exactly what took place and exactly how
central desert men described their practices, the greater the two orders of de-
notation and predication flayed apart (figure 4).
If Spencer and Gillen did not explicitly question the sexual referent of these
ritually elaborated corporeal discourses, their writings suggest some discom-
fort with the simple equation of Arrente and settler understandings of sexu-
ality. As Fison and Howitt argued for the Kunai and Kamilovai, Spencer and
Gillen argued that Arrente sexual acts were premised on marriage and the
family, although not in the British or European sense of these terms. Bronis-
law Malinowski, cofounder of British functional anthropology, would later
lament Spencer and Gillen’s ‘‘quite illegitimate silent assumption’’ that sexual
acts were diagnostic of the relevance of monogamous heterosexuality to cen-
tral desert people. He argued that although ‘‘the sexual aspect of family life is
very important, nevertheless, it is only one side of the picture, and that to out-
line this picture correctly, we may not exaggerate one side of it.’’ 33 Malinowski
did not, however, question the silent assumption that Arrente were engaged
in sex acts. He simply wished to mitigate the challenge that nonmarital, non-
normative sex posed to a universal family form built up from, he believed,
the natural intimate bond a man and a woman felt for each other and for
their children. Spencer and Gillen hardly questioned the self-evident nature of
this normative socially mediated embrace. They ordered Arrente sexual prac-

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tices in nested and ranked hierarchies of normative upper-class British sexual

values: ‘‘The first is the normal one, when the woman is the private property
of one man, and no one without his consent can have access to her, though
he may lend her privately to certain individuals who stand in one given rela-
tionship to her. The second is the wider relation in regard to particular men
at the time of marriage. The third is the still wider relation which obtains on
certain occasions, such as the holding of important corroborees.’’ 34
Although the above description of sex may seem rather pedestrian to con-
temporary ears, such descriptions of Arrente sociality were interlaced with
graphically detailed accounts of rites and customs most Australians did and
would find appalling. Indeed, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, a slightly
revised version of Native Tribes, opens with ‘‘a word of warning’’ that the
rituals described therein were ‘‘eminently crude and savage in all essential
points.’’ 35 This warning echoes a passage from Sir Henry Maine’s Ancient Law
(1864), which warned scholars that if not properly approached the ‘‘strange-
ness and uncouthness’’ of ancient social practices could lead to the annulment
of reason.36 To put it simply, the ethnographic texts of Spencer and Gillen
are not for the weak of stomach or mind. Nor can the challenge that their
representations of indigenous corporeal intercourses pose to liberal theoreti-
cal and national formations be easily resolved through the comforting lens
of sexual difference and gender masquerade.37 Arrente customary practices
really did shock and offend many British settlers, and not merely those who
saw and experienced scenes such as Spencer and Gillen saw or heard described
but also those who read about them in texts like Northern Tribes and Central
Tribes. Spencer and Gillen’s descriptions would have produced strong or weak
affective responses, but their responses would have been physical for many
readers—chills, palpitations, critical reflections, horror. Spencer and Gillen
knew the possible affective destabilization of their text, as did their contem-
poraries in Britain. And they registered their knowledge of the physicality of
textual reception in passages such as the one above in which they comment
on what should be the proper and improper forms, contexts, and purposes
of the judgments of modern man.
If Spencer and Gillen provided shocking, graphically detailed descriptions
of Arrente body techniques, they were not interested in these details in or for
themselves. This much charity we should extend to them: Spencer, Gillen, and
other Victorian ethnologists sought primitive sex not for the ‘‘sheer pleasure
of recounting the bizarre and eccentric,’’ nor for the capital profit this plea-
sure garnered in the marketplace (that is, in the capital-generating genres of

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 The Vulva Thieves

colonial memoir, travelogue, and ethnoporn), nor simply to make a name for
themselves and their disciplinary interests.38 On the contrary, Spencer, Gillen,
and their contemporaries were captivated, at least in part, by what gazing on
these acts of carnal spirituality seemed to provide a glimpse of—the idea and
experience of a shared human supersensible moral realm, a something that
linked what the Arrente called Alcheringa to what Europeans called Morality,
Customary Law, and Justice.
Counterintuitively, perhaps, descriptions of these sex acts were intended
to convey this supersensible moral experience across its textual mediation.
Rather than what impeded the development of a humanistic science of culture
and society, the impasse to reason presented by the ‘‘brutal and often revolt-
ing severity’’ with which the Arrente lawfully treated one another, along with
the judgment that these actions could be—indeed should be—considered
part of a single ‘‘lawful order,’’ were the grounds of the emergent sociology
of morality, and of sociology and anthropology more generally. These acts
presented ever more forcefully, if ever more precariously, the awe-inspiring
nature of the thing that the emergent science of man sought.39 The feelings
of repugnance and abhorrence that these acts produced in settler subjects
prompted a calibration of the difference between their and their indigenous
neighbors’ notion of the moral and good life, the just and right life. The
founder of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim, would posit that a general
sociological theory of religion was possible exactly and only through the
scholarly experience of two contrasting if not contradictory deontic systems.
Only by experiencing the horror of moral alterity could the science of man
sketch a sociology of morality itself, the real of human(e) society. The moral
repulsion of Westerners in the vicinity of the cults of ‘‘primitive’’ and archaic
peoples and the judgment of them as violations of human being confronted
the moral authority that these same practices had in the society itself. It was
in this hypermorally animated scene that reason was forced to—and writers
promised reason could—discover a ‘‘convergence,’’ a ‘‘horizon,’’ a great arc,
a superordinate realm, a metaphysical substrate, a final interpretant, a syn-
thetic a priori where a universal idea resided connecting these human orders
into human being, though wherever this idea abided it is nowhere that any-
one ever stood, a moment no one has ever experienced.40 This manifestation
of the Spirit of Man depended, of course, on settlers considering the Arrente
as human. And such a view is what Spencer and Gillen advocated.
We should not underestimate the intellectual stakes behind the gauntlet
thrown down by this neo-Kantian wager. The challenge was issued as a simple

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 The Cunning of Recognition

proposition and a simple interrogative to Victorian ethnologists and colonial

administrators: They are men. Are you man enough to know them? Both an-
swers could well be ‘‘no.’’ Victorians could fail in two obvious ways. First, Vic-
torian man might simply fail to understand primitive man, his practices and
their meaning and import. Researchers, state administrators, and private citi-
zens often tasted the bitter failure of their effort to understand ‘‘tribal’’ prac-
tices, to make sense of them without a nagging remainder exceeding the analy-
sis, teasing and tempting the mind, inciting counterargument. For instance,
Reverend Fison described as ‘‘humiliating’’ his inability to make sense of Ab-
original terms of reference. And although he remained ‘‘perfectly sure, that
there is a good reason for every one of the inexplicable terms’’ used to describe
‘‘inter-sexual relations,’’ he was also irritated and angry at the Aboriginal and
European men who he thought had deliberately impeded his understanding.41
Throughout his letters to Spencer, Gillen also referred to the frustration of
reason he experienced in the proximity of Arrente social and ritual orders.
Their impediment to his reason had to be confessed, it caused anxiety and
excitement, and it kept him awake at night animated by its puzzle.42
Second, in the end civil man might not be so different from colonized man.
Apparent differences might be little more than ideological conceit, as Freud
would quip, no more than the narcissism of minor differences—an uncanny,
and uncomfortable, similitude. The Northern Territory Times and Gazette sig-
naled this anxiety of identity in its defense of a police massacre of Aborigi-
nal persons living among or near the Arrente twelve years before the arrival
of Spencer and Gillen: ‘‘Justice is being sternly dealt out to the blacks in the
Northern Territory.’’ The information supplied by Inspector Beasley, which
we publish elsewhere, gives an account of the way in which proceedings were
carried on. Those who read the report will doubtless think that the trial and
execution was somewhat quickly dispatched, and that there was an element
of revenge about the affair which is inconsistent with our civilised notions of
justice. But the writer of the report insists upon the fact that notice was given
to the accused and the whole party was called upon to surrender. They may
or may not have understood the meaning of the warnings, but certainly it ap-
pears that the officer in charge did all he could to prevent the wanton waste
of life.’’ 43
Although we should not underestimate the gauntlet that rational under-
standing was forced to run in social contexts such as Spencer and Gillen’s
experience among the Arrente, we should also not move too quickly past the
real hope and optimism motivating the Enlightenment belief that clarity of

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 The Vulva Thieves

mind and language could release man from the force of internal and external
coercion, from the force of unfreedom itself. What a monstrously optimistic
fantasy: man might crawl out from the web of blind necessity through his
understanding of himself and others. Kant’s call for man to resolutely and
courageously make use of their reason in public took on a spectacular—and
specular—form in the colonial world as scholars faced the annulment of pub-
lic and private reason on the engwura grounds (the site for the final initiation
ceremony of young men). But the threat of reason’s euthanasia rededicated
ethnologists to the struggle.
Finally, we should not underestimate how deeply the wager of Enlighten-
ment understanding is embedded in modern sociology, anthropology, and
comparative law, in national and transnational political and public rhetoric,
and in the common sense of communicative reason. From Emile Durkheim
to Claude Lévi-Strauss to Pierre Bourdieu, to Donald Davidson and Richard
Rorty, sociologists, anthropologists, and liberal philosophers have leaned on
the idea, and proclaimed the faith that, as Lévi-Strauss argued, ‘‘there is a rea-
son in what agents do and that the human sciences work most effectively when
the ideas of a peoples are clear or are made so by the process of reasonable
reflection.44 The analytic philosopher Donald Davidson went a critical step
further by arguing that ‘‘if we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances
and other behaviors of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent
and true by our own standards, we have no reason to count that creature as
rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.’’ 45
If the utterances and behaviors of our fellow creatures are to be judged as
human (rational) only insofar as they meet our standards, then the gauntlet
thrown at our feet by Arrente practices is no less intimidating now than it
was during the lifetime of Spencer and Gillen. Arrente ritual practices have
not become less shocking or more palatable over time for either settler Aus-
tralians or Arrente. As contemporary Euro-American and Australian readers,
whether of a more or less radical or conservative bent, move through Native
Tribes and other documents in the settler archive they are likely to feel more or
less uncomfortable, more or less shocked. These readers will probably notice a
certain moral stance, perhaps framed as ‘‘uncertainty,’’ they are taking toward
certain represented acts. They might wonder: What effect would general pub-
lic knowledge of these practices have on general public support of Aboriginal
culture? Perhaps, if forced to refer to these texts these readers, now writers,
will use various citational techniques that allow them not to reproduce the
offending passage—a passage that offends the reader or their imagined audi-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

ence—but instead rely on indirect reference. Or, perhaps they will reproduce
verbatim Spencer and Gillen’s words, then try to frame and guide judgment:
That was then, this is now; from their perspective this makes sense.
Let the reader beware. Gillen noted in a letter to Spencer on 7 April 1902
that their description of the ‘‘death and burial ceremonies make interest-
ing if gruesome reading.’’ 46 I paraphrase here: Young male and female initi-
ates are encased in a wall of human flesh as their bodies are cut, their teeth
knocked out, their skulls bitten by objects and their flesh opened by other ob-
jects. Arms, backs, chests, genitals, and other body parts are repeatedly punc-
tured or seared with fire and fire-sticks, sometimes ‘‘voluntarily,’’ sometimes
not. Older men and young women—what most non-Aboriginal Australians,
perhaps many Aboriginal Australians, would probably consider ‘‘girls’’—en-
gage in ‘‘sex acts’’ with objects, sometimes the woman providing evidence of
what Spencer and Gillen understood as ‘‘consent,’’ sometimes not, often one
woman the sexual object of multiple male partners, or so Spencer and Gillen
describe the exchange. ‘‘Consent’’ being that without which freedom is diffi-
cult to imagine in a liberal framework, and thus without which coercion must
be assumed, the liberal reading subject will be bothered, irritated, or enraged;
again no matter their radical or conservative bent. To say, ‘‘but what is consent
or voluntarism in such a scene?’’ is not to solve the social problem but to de-
flect and disperse its effects. The same can be said for the attempt to disperse
the problem with textual technologies like footnotes and page references, el-
lipses and paraphrase.
Reason was not shocked solely by ritual. It reverberated against other reve-
lations; for instance, what should be made of the fact that these natives seemed
to demonstrate little interest in the conjunction of the carnal and spiritual;
that they did not experience the trauma they were producing in us? In the glare
of the Arrente sacred, the comforting narrative of the progress of liberal cul-
tural tolerance and understanding shows its crevices, fault lines, and wrinkles.
The question might be asked: What has changed since the days of Spencer and
Gillen? Have liberal subjects become more tolerant as the power of publicly
mediated understanding has progressed? Or have the people, practices, and
textual referents that irritate liberal understanding simply been footnoted or
deleted altogether? Is liberal understanding progressing, or are its disciplinary
effects?
Let us turn away for a moment from the glare of the contrast of these semi-
otic and social orders and, instead, return to the question of what Spencer and
Gillen witnessed from the perspective of the central desert men with whom

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 The Vulva Thieves

they spoke. Why did Spencer and Gillen assume that the acts they witnessed or
heard about were sex? If sex it was not, how did Spencer and Gillen come to be-
lieve they were seeing ‘‘sex’’ as such? As I explore these questions, I turn away
from the terminal bind of semiotically oriented linguistic relativism. Rather,
I want to focus on the function of power in the pragmatics of radical inter-
pretation in settler contexts. I begin to answer the above questions by turning
to the communicative conditions in which Spencer and Gillen gathered their
ethnographic materials.

‘‘THAT’’ DEMONSTRATIVE MOMENT OF ‘‘SEX’’

Let us examine the explanation that Spencer and Gillen gave for why the
Arrente engage in ritual sex: ‘‘The idea is that the sexual intercourse assists in
some way in the proper performance of the ceremony, causing everything to
work smoothly and preventing the decorations from falling off.’’ What could
this statement possibly mean?
I can begin by noting that whatever this sentence meant it is unlikely that
Arrente men produced it. According to one account, Baldwin Spencer arrived
in central Australia believing Frank Gillen to be a fluent speaker of Arrente,
only to find his ‘‘knowledge of Arunta (and several other Aboriginal lan-
guages) was in fact rather less fluent than Spencer had assumed.’’ 47 As a result,
when they spoke to Arrente men about their ritual practices, Spencer and
Gillen probably utilized utterances such as, ‘‘Why do you do that during your
rituals?’’ Or, they might have used a pidgin equivalent ‘‘What for thatem?’’ or
‘‘What for youfella doem thatem longa corroboree?’’ (Gillen provides various
examples of pidgin he reports hearing indigenous men speak in central Aus-
tralia, many of which refer to sexuality.48) As they asked these questions they
no doubt pointed to or diagrammed on paper, ground, or their bodies the
action Spencer and Gillen understood to be ‘‘doem sex.’’ Spencer and Gillen
may also have used an Arrente term they understood to mean ‘‘copulate.’’
It is unlikely that the Arrente men responded with a series of utterances
like, ‘‘that business now was done in the alcheringa. It was the same then. You
cannot miss a step if you do that business. You cannot make a mistake. The
headdress stays secure to the head.’’ It is more likely that they spoke a pidgin
version that in Gillen’s transcription might look something like, ‘‘that busi-
ness wefella must do em, em do same, em same longa alcheringa, em same,
from thatem em make em right, cant mistake, thatem make em properly longa
head.’’ These complex communications were entextualized as ‘‘sexual indul-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

gence, which was a practice of the Alcheringa, prevents anything from going
wrong with the performance; it makes it impossible for the head decorations,
for example, to become loose and disordered during the performance.’’
For the moment and for the sake of argument, let us agree that the Arrente
men said something like what Spencer and Gillen report and that what the
Arrente men said was ‘‘true’’ in the sense that they believed that the state
they described was a result of the acts in which they engaged.49 We can ask
then, in a loose way, not what makes the headdress stick to the head, but,
first, what makes the Arrente stick around to explain the rationale of their
action to Spencer and Gillen; and, second, what makes Spencer and Gillen so
interested in this rationale? To answer these two questions let me bring the
linguistic lens even closer and pause over what could be considered the most
minor, indeed, strictly speaking, the most meaningless of colonial commu-
nicative exchanges—the historical substitution of the lexical noun ‘‘sex’’ for
the demonstrative pronoun ‘‘that.’’ If ‘‘sex’’ secured headdress to head, it did
so only after ‘‘that’’ (or its English-based pidgin equivalents, ‘‘det’’ or ‘‘detem’’)
secured, and in the process refashioned, two very different semantic fields to
one another.50 At some point in time, whether before or after Spencer and
Gillen arrived in Central Australia, indexical signs like demonstratives and
finger pointing opened a coherent enough communicative channel between
Arrente and settlers. We can see this rough coupling if we treat the above sen-
tence, ‘‘sexual indulgence . . . ,’’ in its indexical signal capacity rather than in
its sense meaning. The indexical capacity of these utterances secures two very
different semantic realms of sense by first securing each semantic realm to an
agreed-on point of reference (to the same event, object, or field of action) be-
fore any actual or significant meaningful exchange or (re)alignment. In other
words, these indexes create the delicate semiotic bridges across which sense
and social meaning can be conveyed, and because of this are the prerequisites
for liberal goals of agreement, disagreement, and consensus. However, they
themselves remain, strictly speaking, neutral in relation to these meanings.51
I sketch out this indexical architecture in figure 5.
In real-time moments of radical interpretation, even these strictly speak-
ing non-sense indexical forms would have taken time to secure as an entity
of action was slowly, delicately detached from its local semantically and prag-
matically embedded field of action. Gillen repeatedly comments on the time
its takes to secure an agreed-on point of reference.52 Thus, figure 5 is pro-
foundly misleading, if ever so unintentionally. At first contact, or its imagi-
nary projection, understanding has yet to secure itself to sense or referent.

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 The Vulva Thieves

settler

degrees of divergence

Arrente figure 5. Meaningless indexicality.

Even non-sense presuppositional indexicality is not initially secure (if it is

ever finally secure) in moments of radical interpretation any more than is pre-
suppositional meaning because the point of reference, the thing itself, is not
yet (does not yet exist), because it is still embedded in two different fields of
denotation, predication, and practice (figure 6).
Meaning rocks. A back-and-forth indexical motion slowly detaches an
entity—a point of reference. It produces this entity, this point of reference
slowly draws in semantic meaning to provide the world with border, dimen-
sions, weight. In this case, Spencer and Gillen might have pointed to an action
and asked its purpose or meaning. The Arrente may have responded in such a
way that Spencer and Gillen realized that Arrente were referring to an action at
an oblique angle to their interests, and from this response narrowed their own
query. Or Spencer and Gillen might have thought their subjects to be lying.53
Back and forth, pointing and questioning, repointing and requestioning. At
our most generous, we can imagine Spencer and Gillen listening patiently, at-
tentively, and respectfully to how Arrente put things. And we can imagine the
Arrente men trying their best to explain their beliefs and practices to Spencer
and Gillen.
At this point my description may not seem so far afield from Richard
Rorty’s description of communicative action. After all, Rorty has argued that
‘‘what matters to the search for truth [is] the social (and in particular the
political) conditions under which that search is conducted, rather than the

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 The Cunning of Recognition

degree of extension

“that”

settler

t”
“de

n
tio
ex ten
f
eo
de gre

Arrente figure 6. Indexical extensions.

deep inner nature of the suspects doing the searching.’’ 54 In a context stripped
of force no communicative suspect can be found guilty of a crime of mis-
translation. But if we turn to the social and political conditions in which the
search for Arrente truth proceeded, we see that the conversations in which the
Arrente were engaged mock liberal ideals of a rational communicative event
excisable from its complex fields of force. This is an odd claim because Gillen
and Spencer seem to have gone out of their way to remove force from the
ethnographic scene. Certainly, they misled the Arrente men in serious ways,
promising the men that they would describe the ceremonies (only) to ‘‘two
oknirabata (men of influence) of south eastern Australian tribes,’’ who were
in fact Fison and Howitt.55 But in exchange for allowing them to record their
rituals, Gillen and Spencer offered the Arrente and surrounding Aboriginal
groups food and protection from police and settlers for the duration of the
ceremonies.
In addition, Gillen was well known to many Arrente and regional groups
as a settler who could be trusted to stem the worst of colonial violence. His-
torical descriptions of this violence are not for the weak of stomach or mind.
While stationed in a telegraph station in Adelaide in 1874, Gillen received
the dying transmissions of the Barrow Creek stationmaster who was under

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 The Vulva Thieves

fatal attack by local Kaititja men. Fifteen to fifty Aboriginal men, women, and
children, virtually an entire Aboriginal community, were shot in retaliation.
Shocked and appalled by the savagery of the white response, Gillen began
humanitarian efforts to protect the indigenous population soon after he was
transferred to overland telegraph stations in and around Alice Springs in
1875. He became locally famous for bringing to trial Constable W. C. Will-
shire, a notorious advocate of the severe treatment of the indigenous popu-
lation. Soon after Willshire was appointed mounted constable to the Alice
Springs region in 1882, rumors began of his gross physical and psychological
abuse of local Aboriginal men and women. By 1891 it is estimated five hun-
dred Aboriginal men, women, and children had been shot to death within a
three hundred kilometer radius of Alice Springs, well within the range of the
Arrente and their neighbors. Along with physically eliminating the indige-
nous population, Willshire sought to destroy the authority of Aboriginal men
and their law. Police archives record him forcing local Aboriginal women to
walk across men’s sacred grounds. By 1890, after collecting testimony from
Aboriginal men and women, as well as from Christian missionaries at the
nearby Hermannsberg Mission, Gillen charged Willshire with the unjustified
murder of local Aboriginal persons. Although Willshire was exonerated by a
Port Augusta jury, he left the area and never returned.
We see then that no matter how the Arrente responded to specific requests
from Spencer and Gillen for information, or to their general request to hold
their engwura near Alice, they were not simply speaking among themselves
or with other regional indigenous groups. They were attempting to com-
municate across significantly different semiotic orders under real-time, often
brutal, conditions of social, physical, and psychological domination, exploi-
tation, and humiliation. As they danced and talked, the Arrente and their
neighbors were in the midst of being physically exterminated, having their
ritual objects stolen, lost, or destroyed, and watching their lands be appro-
priated and, with them, their life-sustaining material and spiritual resources.
Gillen himself would come to understand the deadly implications of the white
theft of Arrente men’s ritual churinga (totemic objects): ‘‘Martin tells me—
this is between ourselves—that an old man out in his locality has been killed
for divulging locality of Churinga to Cowle—This upsets me terribly, I would
not have had it happen for 100 pounds and I am going to write Cowle strongly
about the Churinga business, there must be no more ertnatulinga robberies. I
bitterly regret ever having countenanced such a thing and can only say that I
did so when in ignorance of what they meant to the Natives.’’ 56 As they talked

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 The Cunning of Recognition

and danced in Spencer and Gillen’s presence, Arrente men introduced formal,
functional, and meaningful changes to these rituals and to the social relations
they diagrammed and entailed in response to these settlement conditions. In-
deed, as is well known, the form and function of the engwura performance
Spencer and Gillen organized and recorded was novel—never before had so
many rituals been performed together and never for the purpose of ‘‘dem-
onstration.’’ These questions were also novel in signaling the past tense of
Dreamtime: How would you have done it? How did you do it?
In this context, force can be said to have been removed from the scene only
in the most superficial and banal sense. Force was the very condition of com-
municative action, of practical reason. The Arrente would have been all too
aware that one aspect of colonial power was being bracketed by another equal
and opposing colonial force; that Spencer and Gillen were holding police,
settlers, and starvation at bay.57 Little wonder that the Arrente extended the
length of the event to several months rather than the few weeks Spencer and
Gillen had planned for. These significant inequalities of power provided an
incentive for the Arrente to orient their utterances, if ever so delicately, to
the semantic and pragmatic contexts in which Spencer and Gillen were em-
bedded and which they were creating. And it incited the Arrente to detach,
if in the beginning ever so slightly, a segment of their semiotic ‘‘life-world’’
and to use this segment as a means of building a somewhat coherent common
language between themselves and these European men (figure 7).
As the Arrente struggled to understand the referent of ‘‘that,’’ the multi-
functional effect of ‘‘that’’ slowly worked its way into the sense-making struc-
tures of Arrente lives—across the preexisting contested fields of Arrente so-
cial life. Spencer and Gillen were not the only people trying to decipher a
complex foreign semiotic system. Whether in their presence or out of their
range of hearing, we can minimally assume that the Arrente discussed what
Spencer and Gillen could possibly mean by their questions, what their ques-
tions suggested about European views of humans and their environments.
And it is likely that they discussed what they could and could not discuss with
Spencer and Gillen as a matter of ceremonial law and interethnic ‘‘etiquette,’’
and what practical information these formal and informal conversations con-
veyed about settler economy, police, and morality. Over time, the domain of
excluded improper talk would include the very actions Spencer and Gillen
were so fascinated by and were, I suggest, creating: ritual sex, sex in public, sex
out of the institutions of monogamous ‘‘marriage.’’ Arrente and other indige-
nous groups learned what that was and learned simultaneously not to discuss

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 The Vulva Thieves

“that”

settler
ce
en
rg

ve
di
of
degree

t”
“de

Arrente figure 7. Degrees of detachment.

that. Indeed, Gillen would comment on the quickness with which the Arrente
and other northern indigenous groups assessed white cultural assessments:
‘‘In doing work such as we are engaged upon one has to be careful not to let
the savage perceive that you disapprove of or disbelieve in his ideas for if he
once gets that idea into his head he will shut up like an oyster and wild horses
will not drag reliable information out of him.’’ 58
To be sure, Spencer and Gillen were hardly the only or even the first
pedagogues of sex in central Australia. Arrente men and women would have
had contact with white settlers since the early 1860s, nearly forty years be-
fore Spencer and Gillen carried out their research. The Macdonnell Ranges
running through Arrente territory were named by John McDouall Stuart as
he passed through the territory on a surveying expedition in 1860. And al-
though the white population was hardly formidable in the early years after
Stuart’s survey, its physical and psychological effects were formidable—as
they were intended to be in many instances.59 For instance, the missionar-
ies of the Lutheran Hermannsberg Mission, established in 1877, intended to
reshape the exteriority and interiority of central desert Aboriginal men and
women, including their linguistic practices, the results of which Gillen mer-
cilessly lampooned.60

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Over time and in the multiple and varied encounters that Arrente men and
women had with settlers, a particular corporeal act and its value in relation
to other corporeal acts would lay out social space and organize social rela-
tions not in terms of ritual and nonritual space, nor in terms of the corporeal
exchanges I will discuss in the next section, but rather in terms of notional
themes like the public and private, the intimate and economic, the secular and
sacred, the rational and passionate. Physical spaces and semiotically mediated
genres organized around ‘‘sex difference,’’ ‘‘sex acts,’’ ‘‘carnality,’’ ‘‘sin,’’ and
so forth would entail new aspects of the world of the Arrente. New gendered
and sexual subjects would be created through these organizing concepts and
through the institutions that helped to cohere and reproduce them, as would
be the space in which these subjects interacted. And, importantly, the semi-
otic architecture introduced would be introduced to a social field already itself
a field of contestation among and within various Arrente and non-Arrente
Aboriginal groups.
In these real-time social interactions that appears anew as a grammatical
grappling hook and an instrument of seizure as much as it does a means of
securing one semantic and pragmatic system to another. That is, a prelude to
semantic violence was proffered as the pragmatic means of escaping physical
violence, corporeal discipline, and governmentality. In this light the question
‘‘Why do you do that?’’ can be detached from its original context and rede-
ployed as a metalinguistic commentary on the act and orientation of transla-
tion in colonial contexts.
M. M. Bakhtin noted long ago what I am getting at here—namely, that
utterances do not simply express propositional content but instead presume,
predicate, and entail their contextual sites of occurrence. Utterances cite and
express a form of power that does not issue from within the semantic fea-
tures of the utterance, that strange mysterious force of illocution. Instead they
express the social forces that make communicative sense possible in the first
place. They are aimed and shaped, if ever so delicately, by the desires and ex-
pectations within or giving rise to a scene of communication. They can be
subtle desires like the desire to understand. Or they can be crude desires like
the desire to live. To live may well necessitate quick understanding. When I
said that indexes are neutral in relation to sense and social meaning, this did
not mean they do not express the social value of their production. Indeed we
can understand these indexes to be simultaneously signaling an emergent ob-
ject or field of action and expressing, or pointing to, the social source and
power of their production.

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Why should we pay attention to these delicate features of colonial commu-

nicative practices? I offer the following modest answer. By submerging into
the recesses of linguistic action we begin to locate the excitement and hor-
ror generated by efforts at radical interpretation. And in doing so we begin
to inch nearer to the thing Spencer and Gillen chased in the form of radi-
cal interpretation. Spencer and Gillen imagined, sought, and engaged a form
of thinking whose value lies in its overcoming a repulsion; a being thrown
back against itself; a being repelled. The repulsive in this sense animates in-
vestigation and excites reason insofar as it has not yet been cast into a de-
terminate outline, insofar as understanding has not completed its announced
task: comprehension. As long as that which radical interpretation seeks has
not yet made an appearance, possibility reigns. Determinate judgments are
postponed. A seemingly infinite progression of possible, if ever so delicately
differentiated, worlds present themselves. In the domain of this indeterminate
possibility awareness is heightened, the senses accentuated, attention fixed on
the most minute of motions. No object is self-evidently itself. This undattha
altherta might be either just the discarded remains of an Arrente fowl dinner
or the portal to the alcheringa.
Such excitement. Spencer and Gillen found themselves continually thrown
back onto themselves, faced with the ‘‘mysteries of Aboriginal life’’ and thrown
against the question of whether they would ‘‘ever succeed in learning much
about them.’’ 61 A superanimation of the mind made the time memorable, a
psychic memorial, worth telling, lingering over, and remembering. In a letter
to Spencer written years after their Alice Springs trip, Gillen wrote longingly
of their field research and his sorrow that ‘‘we could [not] live our Engwura
life over again,’’ though he noted ‘‘it was an anxious time,’’ in which there
was ‘‘always a danger of the thing bursting up.’’ 62 In other letters, Spencer and
Gillen remember the intensity of focused but frustrated thought, the exhilara-
tion of destabilized understanding, major and minor moments of misunder-
standing, and the anxiety of reaching and feeling the limits of their intellectual
capacities, of the prognosis of their ‘‘ever getting to the ‘why’ of things.’’ 63
There are two very different ways we can understand Spencer and Gillen’s
description of their subjective state in the engwura. We can understand them,
as George Stocking has, to be ‘‘confessing’’ an experiential state external to the
scene and goal of radical interpretation and cross-cultural communication—
in other words, that their anxiety was the by-product not the goal of radical
interpretation. Spencer and Gillen were saying that in spite of the anxiety and
no matter the feeling that they would never get to ‘‘the why of things,’’ the time

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was memorable. Or, we can understand Spencer and Gillen to be saying that
what made the time memorable was that they were forever deflected from the
why of things. The Arrente afforded for them the experience of an object only
existing in the deferred—Man, Humanity, something other than themselves
and the experience of their desires as particular, banal, and ordinary moments
in a desert.64
If we understand the memorial aspects of Spencer and Gillen’s engwura
experience in this way, then their experience of radical interpretation can be
understood as a form of, or akin to, trauma. By ‘‘trauma’’ I would not devi-
ate radically from the way that Cathy Caruth has defined a traumatic event;
namely, as an event in which excitations from the outside are powerful enough
to alter ‘‘the mind’s experience of time, self and the world.’’ 65 I do not intend to
be dramatic, nor to claim that all cross-cultural communication is traumatic
or that history is traumatic. Instead, I merely wish to unsettle a commonsense
liberal notion that liberalism figures corporeal and subjective trauma as bad,
to be avoided at any cost; as something external to liberal forms of self and
communal governance, to Aufklärung. Further, I want to suggest that by pay-
ing attention to this excitement we begin to understand what secured Spencer
and Gillen to the scene of radical interpretation as opposed to what secured
the Arrente. Spencer and Gillen chased a desire to be challenged but not un-
done; and what they demanded of their Arrente informants was to challenge
but not to undo them.
There is a final reason why I think we need to pay attention to these deli-
cate features of communicative action. Rather than assuming that the emer-
gence of shared meaning is a moment of cultural conservation, an Aufhebung,
we must ask whether radical interpretation’s relationship to alterity is one
of foreclosure, and whether it was the effect of this foreclosure that Spencer
and Gillen also felt and chased. Liberal theorists of cultural communication
sidestep the issue of what is both lost and set into motion in moments of
radical interpretation. They postpone or shunt a discussion of the here-and-
now conditions of communication into a future ideal context. Derrida put it
elegantly in his analysis of the ‘‘future modality of the living present’’ that be-
lies the liberal gospel; namely, that the de facto ‘‘good news’’ of its ‘‘effective,
phenomenal, historical, and empirically observable event’’ is always yet again
deferred in the form of ‘‘an ideal good news, the teleo-eschatological good
news, which is inadequate to any empiricity.’’ 66

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SEX AS A MINOR FORM OF ATTACHMENT

I have postponed long enough a direct discussion of what the Arrente men
might have said and meant by Spencer and Gillen’s paraphrase ‘‘it makes it
impossible for the head decorations, for example, to become loose and dis-
ordered during the performance’’; of the possible networks of meaning and
practice that makes the explanation ‘‘sexual intercourse prevents decorations
from falling off ’’ sensible; and of whether sex actually was on these ritual
grounds or any others. Of this much I think we can be relatively certain:
Spencer and Gillen lifted sex out of a field of ritual action complexly carnal
and corporeal and severely misunderstood by the rush to sex.67
To understand what may have been foreclosed in Spencer and Gillen’s de-
termination that Arrente engwura corporeality was ritual sex necessitates dis-
tinguishing between forms of corporeal and mental trauma that might have
been a vital aspect of Spencer and Gillen’s practice and those that might have
been a vital aspect of Arrente practice. In other words, we must attempt the
difficult. We must resist negatively valuing illiberal physical violations and
physical heteronomy (lost autonomy). We must resist imposing on Arrente
bodily acts extralocal values like ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad.’’ They were neither. Nor were
they ‘‘torture’’ or ‘‘self-shattering.’’ The ‘‘soul stirring’’ that settlers and their
metropolitan brethren felt when witnessing or reading accounts of casual or
violent and individual or group ‘‘sex’’ and ‘‘genital mutilations’’ depended on
ideas not in the scenes themselves. These feelings originated from the very
source that drove Spencer and Gillen into the engwura in the first place, and
that animated them to make sense of the ritual forms they faced.
When we bracket how Spencer and Gillen classified corporeal practices
and mythic narratives and concentrate instead on their descriptions of them,
the narratives they re-present take on a different focus. They foreground the
corporeal and ontological transformations that occur when a body is under a
heightened state of physical and mental stress or stimulation—at least from
the perspective of the Arrente men they talked to.68 Take, for example, the
myth of the Unthippa women. According to Spencer the Unthippa women
were said ‘‘to have sprung into existence far out in the Aldorla ilunga (the
‘west country’) from where they began their travel across the central desert,’’
dancing ‘‘all the way along.’’ The Unthippa women started their journey as
half-women and half-men, ‘‘but before they had proceeded very far on their
journey their organs became modified and they were as other women.’’ Their
account continues:

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Somewhere out west of the River Jay the women changed their language to
Arunta and began feeding on mulga seed, on which they afterwards subsisted.
Upon arrival at a place called Wankima, about 100 miles further to the east
their sexual organs dropped out from sheer exhaustion, caused by their un-
interrupted dancing, and it was these which gave rise to well-known deposits
of red ochre. The woman then entered the ground, and nothing more is known
of them except that it is supposed that a great woman land exists far away to
the east where they finally sat down.69

An emphasis on the transformations that engwura landscapes and beings

are subject to consequent of their extreme stimulation and stress is common
to the mythic genre throughout the desert region. This genre may be called
the ‘‘left behind’’ stories, the ‘‘plot’’ of which could be summarized as ‘‘they
came; they suffered enormous stress or experienced extreme stimulation; they
left behind a piece of themselves.’’ Indeed, in 1976 the minister of Aborigi-
nal Affairs elevated this narrative genre to a pan-Aboriginal cosmogony when
describing traditional Aboriginal cosmology in his second reading of the Ab-
original Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976:

Traditional Aborigines associate identifiable groups of people with particular

‘‘countries’’ or tracts of territory in such a way that the link was publicly re-
puted to express both spiritual and physical communication between living
people and their ‘‘dream time’’ ancestors and between the ‘‘country’’ as it now
is and the ‘‘ancestral’’ country which had been given its names, its physical
features, its founding stocks of food and water, and its owners and possessors
by the ancestors themselves. It is believed that ancestors left in each ‘‘country’’
certain vital powers that, used properly by the right people, make that ‘‘coun-
try’’ fruitful and ensure a good life for people forever. Everywhere there was a
plan of life—a good and satisfying life—based on an identifiable and unmis-
takable group of people forming a descent group or ‘‘clan,’’ living with relation
to an identifiable territory publicly recognised as the ‘‘country’’ of the group
because of the actions of the ancestors who had left in each ‘‘country’’ sacred
memorials—the totems and totemic sites of which we hear so much—as proof
of entitlement for, and to guide and discipline, their descendents.70

Extreme corporeal stress is not just issued in reports about the mytho-
history of the engwura. It is recreated in the Arrente rituals that Arrente men
showed Spencer and Gillen. In virtually all the Arrente rituals, Spencer and
Gillen describe totemic substances being forced into human bodies, human

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 The Vulva Thieves

substances into totemic bodies, and human substances into other human
bodies. The directional flow of substances described in myth is often reversed:
The substances the Unthippa women—and numerous others like them—left
behind are forced back into the human body. The force with which these
substances are inlaid into the body might appear quite weak to an outside
observer. That is, the violation and stimulation of the human body of ritual
action may not appear to be sufficient to cause any serious physical or psy-
chic disruption, and certainly are not sufficient grounds to create a traumatic
reaction.
For instance, in the witchetty grub Intichiuma (‘‘increase ceremonies’’ re-
lating to a specific food source, the grub), the ceremonial leader (the ala-
tunja) ‘‘takes up one of the smaller stones’’ that constitutes the witchetty grub
totem and ‘‘strikes each man in the stomach saying, Unga murna oknirra
ulquinna (‘You have eaten much food’).’’ 71 In a photograph of this event we
see a younger adult man, his hands behind his back and braced against the
ground. Kneeling, his torso is thrust out toward the senior man who is rub-
bing the witchetty grub stone against his chest. The Arrente believe, the au-
thors tell readers, that this action will ensure the plentiful supply of witchetty
grubs, a staple in the desert food economy. In a like manner, in the final stage
of the initiation of young men, churinga are brought out of a local storehouse
and are examined and redistributed among the men. During the ceremonial
handing over of churinga, ochre is rubbed over the sacred objects. The hand of
the young man who will be responsible for this sacred object is then ‘‘pressed
down on the Churinga [and] rubbed . . . up and down upon it,’’ while the
senior man ‘‘whisper[s] to him, telling him to whom the Churinga had be-
longed, who the dead man was, and what the marks on the Churinga meant.’’ 72
These ritual practices hardly seem to warrant the designation traumatic.
Churinga were not the only objects pressed into human bodies during ritu-
als. Fats, charcoals, ochres, blood, and sweat were rubbed into or injected by
initiates and their elders, again in ways that might not immediately appear to
the non-Arrente observer to warrant the characterization as traumatic. For
instance, ‘‘to promote the growth of the breasts of a girl, the men assemble
at the Ungunja or men’s camp, where they all join in singing long chants,
the words of which express an exhortation to the breasts to grow, and others
which have the effect of charming some fat and red ochre which men who
are Gammona, that is, brothers of her mother, have brought to the spot.’’ At
daylight the young girl, accompanied by her mother, is brought close to the
men’s camp. There ‘‘her body is rubbed all over with fat by the Gammona

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 The Cunning of Recognition

men, who then paint a series of straight lines of red ochre down her back and
also down the centre of her chest and stomach. . . . When this has been done
the girl is taken out into the bush by her mother, who makes a camp there at
some distance from the main one, and here the girl must stay until the ilkinia
or lines on her body wear off, when, but not until when, she may return to
the main camp.’’ 73 Spencer and Gillen discuss this action in purely representa-
tional or ornamental terms, figuring the body as a canvas on which the designs
slowly wear away. But we could also understand the men to be rubbing fat into
the young girl’s body in order to prepare her body to be able to absorb—or
embody—the costume and designs. In this view, bodily massages, incisions,
and ornamentation become a vital part of an Arrente’s corporeal substance
through absorption, slowly rearticulating its nature and the orientation of
the body from the outside in. If this was how Arrente viewed the events then
these seemingly mundane scenes may well have been extraordinarily intense
for the initiate, powerful enough to alter ‘‘the mind’s experience of time, self
and the world.’’
Arrente men and women sometimes used churinga and other materials and
objects to carve or impress the totemic designs into the body of initiates in
ways more recognizably traumatic.74 In one ritual, the thumbnails of Arrente
men were ripped off with an opposum tooth immediately after the men were
shown sacred ground designs. They were then lain on top of the sacred de-
sign while ‘‘eight deep close-set, wavy lines’’ were carved in their foreheads,
the blood of which was pressed into sacred objects associated with the design
and then poured on the ground design. The manner in which these corporeal
practices permanently orient the initiate’s body and mind to the ritual scene is
suggested by Spencer and Gillen’s observation of the mental state of a senior
man, Reraknilliga, who is recalling the ritual. Spencer and Gillen note that
when Reraknilliga ‘‘described what happened to him, he evidently retained
very vivid recollections.’’ 75
Not only were the ‘‘leftovers’’ of the traumatized bodies of engwura beings
forced into contemporary humans, as the last example suggested, human sub-
stances were forced into engwura object-beings. In a witchetty grub ceremony
‘‘the Alatunja [leader of the local group] begins singing and taps the stone
with his Apmara [soft wood seed carrier] while all the other men tap it with
their twigs, chanting songs as they do so, the burden of which is an invitation
to the animal to lay eggs.’’ 76 The substance pressed into the stone is language
(song). Singing to the stone penetrates the object; it is simultaneously a se-
mantic conveyance, a social act, and a bodily emission like other bodily emis-

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 The Vulva Thieves

sions—sweat, blood, spit, language, and genital fluids—all these substances

flowed out of human corporeal tunnels, the throat, veins, pores, vagina, penis.
These substances literally mixed with the engwura being in the design space.
During the emu ceremony, for instance, the ceremonial leader

and a few other men, amongst whom were his two sons, first of all cleared
a small level plot of ground, sweeping aside all stones, tussocks of grass and
small bushes, so as to make it as smooth as possible. Then several of the men,
the Alatunja and his two sons amongst them, each opened a vein in their arms,
and allowed the blood to stream out until the surface of a patch of ground,
occupying a space of about three square yards, was saturated with it. The blood
was allowed to dry, and in this way a hard and fairly impermeable surface was
prepared, on which it was possible to paint a design.77

Once again, rather than simply a primitive gesso, blood taken from the human
body comprises an integral part of the engwura being expressed and entailed
rather than represented on the ground—the human blood materially integrat-
ing, indexing, and mediating human and engwura corporeal and ontological
orders.
At this point we begin to see how the material intercourse between human
and engwura seems to have been a critical component of the general logic
of central desert initiation practices. Year after year, decade upon decade,
human substances and engwura substances were exchanged between and em-
bedded into each other. Blood lost during young men and women’s initia-
tion rituals—circumcision, subincision, menstruation, vulvation—was not
‘‘disposed’’ in ritual grounds, nor were other human bodily parts.78 Rather,
through the practices of burning, burying, soaking, singing, rubbing, sweat-
ing, smoking, being born from a place (erathipa) and sinking back into it at
death (ulthana), Arrente men and women came to share a corporeal substance
with the engwura earth, problemizing any simple distinction between human
and engwura bodies.
In a similar way to how engwura substances were forced into the human
body and human substances into engwura bodies, so human substances were
forced into other human bodies, a circle of exchanges that leads us back to
the public scandal of ritual sex. We return to this scene, however, with a new
set of questions, perhaps the most fundamental of which is who or what was
engaged in ‘‘ritual sex’’? The answer to this question is not clarified from the
perspective of Arrente grammar.
Some forty years after Spencer and Gillen journeyed to Alice Springs,

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T. G. H. Strehlow published the first full-length treatment of the Arrente lan-

guage (Aranda Phonetics and Grammar, 1944). T. G. H. Strehlow was the son
of one of the founders of the Lutheran Hermannsberg settlement. He grew
up among the Arrente and was a fluent speaker of their language. The pur-
pose of Aranda Phonetics and Grammar was to outline the major phonemic
and grammatical features of Arrente and, along the way, to dispel widespread
negative stereotypes about Aboriginal languages. But Strehlow is significantly
bothered (indeed, a bit scandalized) by one feature of Arrente grammar—
the absence of gender distinctions. He writes: ‘‘The Arrente nouns know no
distinctions of gender: masculine, feminine and neuter are all meaningless
terms to the Central Australian tribesman. Not even the common animals of
the chase are differentiated according to sex.’’ 79 According to Strehlow, the
Arrente do not merely lack gender distinctions in the noun phrases of their
language, but they ‘‘refused to acknowledge in [their] grammar the primal dis-
tinction of the genders,’’ a state of mind reflected in grammar that Strehlow
refuses to believe had always been the case.80 We must qualify the conditions
of Strehlow’s outrage.
It is true that in the Arrente language as currently understood, nouns are
inflected as agents or nonagents in given propositional contexts and are clas-
sified on the basis of the distinctions among human, animate, and inanimate
rather than on the basis of gender distinctions.81 But gender is not an absent
semantic feature. Once qualified as human or agent a noun phrase can then
be modified by the unmarked (orea, male), the marked (mala, female), and
two neuter forms. Arrente pronouns and kinship terms are marked by gen-
der as are ritual and developmental terms, designating the status and rank of
persons who have progressed past the crawling stage (figure 8).
Arrente classifications of noun phrases cannot tell us, however, what we
wish to know—namely, whether or not the Arrente thought that ‘‘human-
ness,’’ ‘‘animateness,’’ or ‘‘inanimateness’’ were essential qualities of subjects
and objects or ontological domains through which the ‘‘same’’ object tra-
versed. The ethnographic data suggest the latter condition was the case. Ac-
cording the Spencer, Gillen, Strehlow, and others, Arrente men and women
believed that their bodies were composed of various still-animate engwura
ancestors.82 In certain ritual contexts, human beings not only took on the
costume of totemic ancestors, they became those ancestors.83 We do not
know whether or not the human body was reclassified as an animate body
during rituals, nor whether speakers referred to performers as animated
engwura beings. But this much we can say with some certainty: at least two

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 The Vulva Thieves

eagle hawk

child
ratappa (first born)
meruwinja (after child changes color)
knera kunja (begins to crawl)
ambaquerka linja (begins to stand)

male female
ambaquerka (small boy) ambamaila (small girl)
worra arknunna putta (thrown in air) lumaliamaila (girl with new breasts)
worra ulpmerka (big boy) wunga (young married woman)
wurtja (back painted before circumcision) epairia (woman with children)
arrakurta (between circumcision and subincision) arragutja (woman)
atuakurka (after subincision) arragutja oknirrabata (old woman)
illpongworra (close of Engwurra ceremony) allgubbera (very old woman)
urliara (after Chaurilla ceremony)
atua oknirrabata (old man)

figure 8. The social history of sexual difference. Based on Baldwin Spencer, The
Aruntz: A Study of a Stone Age People, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1927), 582.

context-presupposing and entailing classifications (human and animate) of

the (human) body coexisted in the Arrente language. In a ritual space Arrente
speakers may have used the Arrente language in such a way that the former
may well have given way to the latter. The semiotic and linguistic entailment
of the Arrente body at least ‘‘remains indeterminate until one places it in the
framework of a context, where ‘context’ entails intersubjective contracts, on-
going discourse, and a horizon of background experience.’’ 84
I do not wish to reduce the event of engwura ritual to any of the above semi-
otic forms, even if these forms were relevant frames for the Arrente. Instead,
the engwura practices might be better understood as a total environment in
which older men’s physical weight, verbal intensity, and spectacular intricate
knowledge intimately and intensively enveloped the initiate, destabilizing the
prior cartography of his body and the integrity of his body as his or the body as
such. What body, where, and whose? Did the Arrente consider themselves as
most intimately in their selves, their skins? Did the surface of the body sepa-
rate them from the world, or provide a sensuous medium of contact with it,
a potential site of heightened mental and corporeal stimulation?
Spencer and Gillen, and other ethnologists of the period, provide sugges-

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tive hints. Clay designs are carefully rendered on young men’s bodies. Older
men take sweat from from their armpits and groins, massaging it over, around,
and into the young men’s body. Various totemic objects—churinga, each care-
fully covered with ochre, are pressed into the palms, bellies, backs, buttocks,
penises, and brows of the young men. Preparatory songs are sung, sometimes
soothingly, intimately into the ear of one boy, sometimes intensely, intimidat-
ingly, a deafening chorus bearing down on the young men huddled together.
Older stronger hands clasp young limps. The skin crawls. Adrenaline is pro-
duced. Awareness and the senses are heightened. A cut is made. Blood flows
from it, is collected in a shield, is buried. More churinga are pressed on the
wound; more men embrace and encase this intensified initiate surface and
stimulate the production of a formally differentiated interiority. As a young
man is being cut, other men and women are cutting deep wounds into their
own bodies, on their and their relatives’ backs and limbs. Or they are opening
and extending previous incisions, the length of the scar a spatial calibration
of ceremonial time, an indexical icon of human bodies becoming engwura
bodies. The young men do not move; they stare ahead; they listen or not to
the songs resounding in their ears. They are overcome by their environment.
All these corporeal practices fashioned and reoriented the body, fastening
it to a place, a memory, a people. Trauma may well have been the necessary
condition for the production of an engwura orientation, indeed an engwura
body. For trauma would turn mind and body again and again to the engwura,
sticking headdress to head. In other words, the interiority and exteriority of
the initiates’ body was remade in rituals, not simply symbolically but compul-
sorily, the body and mind returning to the scene not simply because the ideas
of the engwura are compelling in and of themselves, but because the body and
psyche were as a result of being compelled by the scene. These men are not
men any more than this body will ever be a singular human self again. Rather
than producing the homogenous collective consciousness of modernist ac-
counts, these rituals might well have fashioned a particular orientation to the
grounded condition of Arrente being—literally the geography of the engwura.
The rituals particularized persons and groups. Words, songs, hands, and flint
knives provided a new diagram of the psyche, the social, and the surface of
the body as the body was extended into the social, into the environment, and
was itself an extension of the social contours of that environment.
In this economy of the body, sex may have been just another form of attach-
ment, a fastening, a fascination; an incitement through intensity; a subjective
restructuring based on some engwura operation other than ‘‘sex.’’ Further, was

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 The Vulva Thieves

sex one form of incitement and attachment, or was it not in the above scenes
at all? Can we imagine a corporeal practice and discourse that would displace
‘‘sex’’ and replace it with another model of the body’s excitement based on
tunnels, flows, and intercourses through veins, vaginas, waterholes, tunnels,
throats, voices? What would the material and social stakes of this refashion-
ing be? It may not have been possible for Spencer and Gillen, or indeed for
us, to believe that sex was not sex; for them to believe that these other corpo-
real penetrations they witnessed actually reproduced human life, let alone for
them to believe that the Arrente men ceased being men in the ‘‘Dreamtime.’’
Perhaps these corporeal transformations still can only be ‘‘fantasment’’ and
‘‘metaphorique’’ for contemporary readers.85 If so, these interpretants stand
forever between the Arrente, Spencer, Gillen, and us.

CRISIS

The preceding discussion of Arrente corporeality is what makes anthropology

so ‘‘interesting’’ for its writers and readers—the cultural difference that an-
thropology conveys simulates our senses and sensibilities without dissolving
our deepest sense of our selves. The ‘‘ethnographic magic’’ lies in part in the
anthropological transcoding of moral horrors into reasoned/reasonable dif-
ference; that is, alterity into difference. All of what I have said is fairly under-
standable; and insofar as it is, my description entrenches the idea that cultural
translation occurs without loss or violence and supports the fantasy that we
can think our way out, that thinking is the way in and out. In the process this de-
scription reinforces the monstrous optimism of Lévi-Strauss: ‘‘Every human
mind is a locus of virtual experience where what goes on in the minds of men,
however remote they may be, can be investigated.’’ 86
But let the reader beware. Surely the precolonial meanings and techniques
of Arrente ritual have not been captured by the above description. I have
merely created a way of thinking about central desert ritual practices. And
my description is simply one small chapter in a history of chapters that have
returned to the scene snapped by Spencer and Gillen. And it is this return-
ing rather than the content of the return that might capture something more
essential about Arrente ritual corporeality for settler subjects and their en-
lightenment; namely, that it continues to provide a limit-experience for settler
understanding, an experience of something-I-know-not-what, a sublime ob-
ject forever refusing the enclosure of narrative.
Even if I had captured without remainder the true meanings of Arrente

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 The Cunning of Recognition

ritual practices, there remain in Native Tribes and Northern Tribes passages
that describe ‘‘things the Arrente do’’ that would be hard for a contemporary
reader to think her way out of. These passages suggest the whimsy of the opti-
mistic ‘‘I can move forward because I can think,’’ and suggest in what contexts
this whimsical statement is transformed into a declaration of cultural warfare.
Throughout these texts corporeal acts—‘‘sex acts’’—are described in ways
that continue to incite negative critical judgment. In the face of these acts, lib-
eral readers would experience an ‘‘ought,’’ a moment in which the micropower
of teleological thinking becomes apparent and presents us with an apparently
impossible impasse to liberal multicultural thinking. The ‘‘things’’ that pro-
voke the compulsory feelings of morality do not put morality ‘‘in limbo’’—
that ne’er-do-well nowhere; that bracket between heaven and hell. Rather
these ‘‘things’’ make morality appear, vitally. They make liberal readers ex-
perience the compulsory nature of their moral sense and obligation, even as
these same readers struggle to maintain their liberal ideal of cultural ‘‘toler-
ance’’ and ‘‘rationality.’’ This compulsory, visceral reaction was long ago noted
by Spencer and Gillen, who remarked ‘‘it is one thing to read of these cere-
monies—it is quite another thing to see them prepared and performed.’’ 87
Here I return to the questions with which this chapter began: How do we
develop an anthropological ethics of the colonial archive? What is being saved
through the textual form of deletion and ellipsis? What attaches itself to tex-
tual practices of respect? I myself have not quoted the disturbing passages I
allude to above, though this empty textual space is where I would have pre-
sented Spencer and Gillen’s description of sex because it seemed to me next to
impossible to get the points about the authority that moral hegemony exerts
on our citational practices across without these ‘‘amazing images.’’ And yet,
hovering over my reading and writing is the proviso of liberal multicultural
recognition of the Aboriginal customary as cited in the High Court decision
Edie Mabo v. the State of Queensland: ‘‘provided those laws and customs are
not so repugnant to natural justice, equity and good conscience.’’ Why would
the High Court insert this rider to their recognition of customary law as the
basis of native title? Why would these justices—or ordinary Northern Terri-
tory residents writing letters to the editor of the Northern Territory News—
think that some Aboriginal customary laws might be repugnant? I will exam-
ine both of these questions at more length in chapters 4, 5, and 6. Indeed, the
shadow that the colonial archive casts over every performance of Aboriginal
traditional culture, over Aboriginality itself, as a conceptual, identificatory
term, will haunt the rest of this book as it does indigenous lives.

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 The Vulva Thieves

Let me note here an obvious point: books like Native Tribes of Central Aus-
tralia have an artifactuality. Land commissioners, native title commissioners,
anthropologists, writers, and filmmakers read, refer to, and defer to such texts
as that which captured ‘‘unspoilt Arunta men.’’ The simple semiotic tech-
nology of the book’s table of contents and index allows any and every reader to
find practices and acts from which they would recoil in horror. In many ways
the colonial archive is more shocking now, supplemented and interpreted as
it is through mass-mediated representations of sexual perversion, child abuse,
posttraumatic subjectivities, sin, the soul. It is doubtful that my claim that
these women are not women, men are not men, would salve this wound. This
colonial archive makes a mockery of liberal claims about the progress of tol-
erance. The tolerance manifested by multicultural forms of liberalism has not
advanced appreciably. The state and its unwitting publics simply have de-
manded that someone delete what irritates them.
If I cannot present passages that would continue to horrify liberal readers,
how can I convincingly demonstrate how these same liberal subjects are now
haunted by the specter of historically mistaken intolerances, and by the sev-
ered grounds of any and every modal imperative? How can I produce in the
reader the impossible conditions of being rent by the two moral imperatives
of late liberalism: I must be tolerant of cultural difference; I must not allow
the repugnantly illiberal? If I cannot produce this effect then I cannot ade-
quately convey the impossible conditions of being an Aboriginal subject in a
multicultural state; namely, the demand that they span the contradictory im-
peratives of late liberalism and protect the liberal subject from experiencing
the (ir)rationality of their intolerance.

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 The phenomena which early societies present us with are not
easy at first to understand, but the difficulty of grappling with
them bears no proportion to the perplexities which beset us in
considering the baffling entanglement of modern social orga-
nization. It is a difficulty arising from their strangeness and
uncouthness, not from their number and complexity.
—Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law

The old printed record concerning Aboriginal custom is replete

with misunderstandings of the religious symbolism. Observers
vested mere externals—the vehicle or symbolizing means—
with intrinsic significances. Preconception usually ensured that
the attributed meanings were deprecatory, often odious. For ex-
ample, ritualized acts of sex, which seem usually to be but ec-
static means of symbolizing non-sexual things, were taken as
evidence of bestiality. Hence, probably, the view of the ami-
able Mr. Dredge, the early nineteenth-century protector who
described the Aborigines as ‘‘men of Sodom, sinners exceed-
ingly.’’ But the more recent Freudians have also given the sexual
symbolisms a grotesquely exaggerated significance.
—W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Religion, Totemism, and Symbolism’’

3 / Sex Rites, Civil Rights

INTRODUCTION

Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen were hardly the first settler Australians to
reflect publicly and privately on the ‘‘ritual sex acts’’ of indigenous men and
women. Nor would they be the last. They had long been praised and buried
when on 11 June 1936 the administrator of the Northern Territory of Australia,
Robert H. Weddell, sent an urgent telegram to the Commonwealth Depart-
ment of the Home and Territories in Canberra:

constable pryor from daly river arriving on 12th june with

6 aborigines charged with raping lubra [white slang, Aboriginal
woman] stop understand offence is more or less tribal custom
when female aboriginal walks on sacred ground reserved only
for males such female being required [to] have sexual inter-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

course with all and sundry stop more natives would have
been implicated but for the timely arrival of peanut farmer
harkins 1

Rather than praise the investigative promptness and moral sense of northern
police, the secretary of the Department of the Home and Territories (Interior),
C. A. Carrodus, reprimanded the police for their actions and implicitly threat-
ened their careers:

your telegram 11th june was chief protector consulted before

approval given for arrest of natives stop on information given
by you matter appears one in which there should have been no
police interference.2

In a strongly worded follow-up letter sent six days after this telegram,
Carrodus continued his criticisms of the northern police and the adminis-
trator: ‘‘It is considered that the action of Constable Pryor in arresting the
natives and bringing them to Darwin was at variance with the spirit of the
instruction given by the Minister and conveyed to you in my memorandum
of 10th February, 1936. It is also considered that steps should have been taken
to prevent the departure of Constable Pryor from Daly River with his charges
when details were known in Darwin.’’ 3 Carrodus said that the spirit of ad-
ministrative policy was clear. Neither settlers nor police should interfere with
‘‘more or less’’ Aboriginal practices where ‘‘tribal laws only are concerned and
where no white person is involved.’’ 4 Only those Aboriginal men and women
who were less rather than more culturally, racially, or spatially distinguishable
from settlers were to be subjected to state police, juridical, and welfare insti-
tutions, have their children removed; and have their employment and move-
ments restricted. The general administrative policy in which ‘‘tribal blacks’’
would be left undisturbed had been formulated in 1935 on the recommenda-
tion of a board of inquiry appointed by the Australian governor-general to
inquire into allegations of the ill-treatment of Aboriginal men and women by
Northern Territory patrol officers like Constable Pryor.5
These were but a few of the documents among many that passed between
state agencies about this case. Other memos argued the facticity, legality, prac-
ticality, and morality of the policy of noninterference that Carrodus cited.
Citations of this case and other similar ones also circulated outside the strict
confines of the state. With more or less detail, accuracy, and directness, popu-
lar and academic presses (newspapers, chapbooks, travelogues, memoirs, eth-

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

nographies) described and debated similar frontier events and the local and
national state policies meant to control them. Settler men and women who
witnessed, heard, or read about such events debated the meaning and right-
ness of Aboriginal practices and government policies in local bars, over do-
mestic kitchen tables, on horseback, and after church. From the textual debris
they left behind we can surmise they asked each other moral, epistemologi-
cal, and practical questions about the troubling status of ‘‘a nation within
a nation’’ and about how to include or exclude fairly and justly indigenous
people and practices in the relatively new Australian nation. How could a
modern, civil nation condone a state-sanctioned space of sexual immorality,
perversion, and violence? How could the indigenous population be integrated
into the nation and be given equal citizenship rights and responsibilities while
they maintained customs antithetical to civil society? And how could the state
enforce a policy that so clearly violated the commonsense limit of human right
and decency? If the state could not do so, was a period of mute, irrational force
the necessary physical and communicative first conditions for the emergence
of a morally integrated civil Australian nation? ‘‘Myall blacks’’ were by this
time understood to be abiding by customary law when they engaged in these
practices (the colloquial phrase used to refer to Aboriginal persons who had
not encountered settler society).6 Many Aboriginal women and men did not
know settler laws. Punishing indigenous groups for crimes that had no local
name might forever link Australian nationalism to the savagery of its birth.
In this chapter I examine the emergence of a new metaethics of Australian
nationalism in the field of indigenous and settler interaction in the 1930s and
40s. I ask how struggles over indigenous policy in the north helped to create
a new language of national consociation in the middle half of the twentieth
century. I pay particular attention to the material conditions and the material
conditioning of this emergence. And I argue that the ‘‘material’’ critical to
these discursive emergences includes aspirations and feelings and identities
and identifications, as well as the institutional structures of state and civil life.
My intent in this chapter is not to understand or adjudicate ritual sex as a
true or false moment of alterity, assimilable or not to liberal forms of nation-
alism. Nor is it to insinuate that the Daly River case—or cases like it—is the
ur text of Australian multiculturalism. Nor, finally, is it a judgment on ritual
practices.
Instead, in this chapter I intend to use the historical archive surrounding
this case to make three broad points about the genealogy of Australian multi-
culturalism. First, this case, and other cases like it, caused settler Australians

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 The Cunning of Recognition

to experience a nonpassage between understanding-based ideologies of jus-

tice and subjective-based ideologies of morality in the given time of constitu-
tional liberal democracies. Second, this type of experience was subjectively,
textually, and institutionally mediated. Failure to understand the social speci-
ficity of each of these forms of mediation and their interaction leaves us with
a very shallow account of the historical sociology of metaethical discourses
like multiculturalism. Finally, these cases suggest that this ideological and ex-
periential nonpassage—rather than dilemma or contradiction—was deferred
rather than resolved. Multiculturalism would not relieve the nonpassage but
simply figure its relation differently. Strictly speaking, then, this chapter is
genealogical in form and conceit. In it I do not seek to show multicultural-
ism lurking in emergent mid-century cultural relativisms, but rather I wish
to sketch one aspect of the condition of its emergence: the (still) unresolved
and irreducible tensions within liberal national settler ideologies in the con-
text of indigenous agency. The tension that lay at the historical ground of
multiculturalism, I argue, neither aimed at nor ended with the logic of exter-
mination but rather with what I will call a logic of a prohibitive interest—a
practical, and legal, form of ambivalence still apparent in the contemporary
law of recognition.7
Although in this chapter I am centrally concerned with settler experiences
of the nonpassage between understanding-based ideologies of justice and
subjective-based ideologies of morality, I continually situate this experience
in an actively responsive indigenous social world. This responsive indigenous
world, as I hope to show in more detail in chapters 5 and 6, faced its own ex-
perience of nonpassage between contested local deontic and epistemic forms
and the material institutions of national life. But, if I begin this chapter with
a concern about the material mediations of an emergent multicultural Aus-
tralia, I end the book with a concern about how a specific nonpassage be-
tween reason and morality was layered into Aboriginal worlds and how settler
fears became indigenous truths. The historical archive I seek to understand in
this chapter is also used by Aboriginal activists and their opponents in con-
tests over the authenticity of contemporary cultural heritage and land rights
claims.

ADMINISTERING SEX

The simple question of why C. A. Carrodus sent the telegram quoted above
recalls the observation of Jürgen Habermas that ‘‘institutionalized action’’

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

is always ‘‘the selective realization of cultural values under situational con-

straints.’’ 8 As secretary of the Department of the Interior, Carrodus was
charged with carrying out the minister’s Aboriginal policy in the Northern
Territory. This bureaucratic role, and the concomitant notion of the ‘‘proper
functions’’ associated with this role, safe-guarded his prose to a certain de-
gree from the potentially troubling discourses of morality and justice raised by
the policy. The form of his memo—a directive—reflects its institutional loca-
tion and frames Carrodus’s action as a simple (re)iteration of previously an-
nounced government policies that are, in turn, framed as previously agreed-
on interpretations of the constitutional status of ‘‘Aboriginal natives’’ within
the Australian Commonwealth. Figuring the state of ‘‘agreement’’ in the past
tense, Carrodus sought to stifle ongoing debate about the status of the policy
and of indigenous people under federal administrative law. He was, he could
say, simply doing his job.
The constitutional and common-law status of Aboriginal natives was, how-
ever, a matter of ongoing legislative, legal, and administrative debate, as was
the meaning of the seemingly transparent phrases ‘‘Aboriginal native’’ and
‘‘tribal custom.’’ The referential and interpretive indeterminacy of ‘‘Aborigi-
nal native’’ and ‘‘tribal custom’’ was indicated by the phrase ‘‘more or less’’
throughout the memos that Carrodus dictated—and, for that matter, also
throughout the memos, ethnographies, and editorials others wrote referring
to native customs. Why was the referential object of the Aboriginal customary
still indeterminate, perhaps indeterminable, in 1936? What did it matter that
no one could say exactly who was who, what was what; and that, in regard to
the Aboriginal question, everything was always modified as more or less?
Nothing in the 1901 Commonwealth Constitution, which set up the Aus-
tralian federation government and formally founded the Australian nation,
would suggest this referential trouble. The Constitution uses the phrases ‘‘ab-
original race’’ and ‘‘aboriginal natives’’ sparingly and does not mark them as
particularly problematic concepts. Two places mention Aboriginal persons:
section 51 (26), which excluded people of the ‘‘Aboriginal race’’ from the spe-
cial race power of the Commonwealth government; and section 127, which
excluded ‘‘aboriginal natives’’ from being counted in the census. Under the
1901 Constitution, states retained the right to formulate their own policies re-
garding Aboriginal persons within their territories, including the ability to
pass legislation excluding them from the franchise; something most states did.
Thus, although considered de facto British subjects, most persons classified
as ‘‘aboriginal natives’’ were not afforded full citizenship rights in Australia.9

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 The Cunning of Recognition

The few Aboriginal persons who did obtain the right to vote in South Aus-
tralia were effectively barred from the Commonwealth and state vote by the
Commonwealth Franchise Act, 1902, which enfranchised white women.10
In 1911, a year after the Commonwealth assumed governance of the North-
ern Territory from South Australia, the Aboriginal Ordinance further eroded
the social autonomy of ‘‘Aboriginal natives’’ through the office of Chief Pro-
tector of Aborigines (the act was significantly strengthened in 1918). The act
granted the chief protector authority over Aboriginal employment, move-
ment, marriage, and social intercourse; and it gave the position power as
‘‘legal guardian of every Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal child under the age
of eighteen years.’’ 11 It was under this act that between 1910 and 1970, 10 to 30
percent of children of mixed parentage were taken away from their Aborigi-
nal parents.12 The Welfare Ordinance Act, 1953 further authorized the govern-
ment to designate as its ‘‘ward’’ any person who by reason of ‘‘(a) his manner
of living; (b) his inability, without assistance, adequately to manage his own
affairs; (c) his standard of social habit and behavior; and (d) his personal as-
sociations, stands in need of such special care or assistance as is provided by
this Ordinance.’’ 13 As Alan Powell notes, though the ordinance applied equally
to all Territorians, in fact it was almost solely applied to Aboriginal persons.
Within a few years, 80 percent of the indigenous population had been de-
clared wards of the state, which they remained until 1963. In 1936, indigenous
Australians remained a legally defined disenfranchised subject population,
an unfree and unequal race within a nation founded on the liberal notion
of human freedom and equality. Their bodies, movements, intimacies, and
consumption practices were subject to state control.
The unproblematic way in which the Constitution mentioned ‘‘Aboriginal
race’’ and ‘‘Aboriginal native’’ is not surprising if we consider the performa-
tive nature of the text, which was meant to found, not administer, a nation.
The smooth functioning of the massive state apparatus that this performative
founded (what it did and demanded be done in the shadow of these words)
depended, however, on the administrators’ ability to differentiate the social
identities of national subjects and to allocate citizenship rights, resources, and
duties accordingly. Take, for instance, gender discrimination, which was also
being contested at the time. Should women have suffrage? Although types
and levels of citizenship based on gender were debated, the categorical and
referential clarity of the notions ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘man’’ were not. ‘‘Native’’ was
otherwise.
Between 1901 and 1905, the federal attorney general’s office referred to the

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

commonsense idea of racial difference as the ground on which social groups

should be differentiated, constitutional rights be distributed, and adminis-
trative policies be based. Put bluntly: people and rights were determined by
the same principle, a racialized notion of blood. In 1905, Robert Garran, the
secretary of the Attorney General Department, advised the government that
‘‘half-castes are not disqualified [from voting], but that all persons in whom
the aboriginal blood preponderates are disqualified.’’ 14 He argued similarly
two months later that the Immigration Restriction Act was intended to limit
racial rather than national groups. As a result, Joseph Bakhash, born in New
York, but with a ‘‘Syrian’’ parentage should be, and was, denied entry into
Australia.15 Racial identity was understood at the time to be fixed at birth
and altered only by generation-time—that is, miscegenous sex. Miscegena-
tion was thereby transfigured into a technology of national (racial) reintegra-
tion.16 So persuasive was the rhetoric stating that conflicts at the frontier could
be bred away that W. E. H. Stanner, an anthropologist who would play a sig-
nificant role in determining representations of Daly River indigenous ritual
culture, published an article in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1933 arguing
against miscegenation as an administrative policy: ‘‘Miscegenation is neither
escape nor solution. The attitude of most people towards the mixed-blood is
made up of vague sympathy, prejudice, and incomprehension. In the face of
this, any scheme of miscegenation cannot be regarded as even a partial solu-
tion [to the ‘Aboriginal problem’]. It also runs the risk of raising a wretched
border colony of lost souls.’’ 17
Stanner was right. Physical and cultural miscegenation presented admin-
istrators with more problems than it solved. Reading off the notes and queries
they sent, we find administrators continually returning to a general set of quo-
tidian but nonetheless nontransparent linguistic and epistemological ques-
tions about the referential confusion of the notion ‘‘native’’: What did ‘‘Ab-
original native’’ and ‘‘Aboriginal race’’ refer to and predicate? What made an
‘‘Aboriginal native’’ an ‘‘Aboriginal native’’ as such? If there were types of Ab-
original subjects or degrees of Aboriginality, should the entire cline be treated
in the same way? In concrete instances: was this an ‘‘Aboriginal native’’? Em-
bedded within such questions were formal distinctions among identity as a
formally coordinated differential system of signs; the characteristics or quali-
ties considered more or less vital to one or the other of these identity desig-
nations in one or another context; and the felicitous nature of each of these
identities and qualities from the point of view of state administration.
Citizenship was initially understood in racial terms, but over the course

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 The Cunning of Recognition

of the 1920s and 30s the means by which identity was determined was pulled
away from the means by which state rights, resources, and duties were allo-
cated. A number of Aboriginal advocates used a series of public scandals and
spectacles to detach citizenship qualifications from racial characterizations—
to make race an impractical grounds of citizenship and to substitute for race
an underdefined notion of civilizational achievement.18 For instance, the Ab-
original Protection League and the Aborigines’ Protection Association (apa)
staged a number of public protests calling for citizenship and economic rights
for civilized Aboriginal men and women. In 1938 in the background of frontier
massacres and violence, the apa sponsored a Day of Mourning held on the
150th anniversary of the white settlement of Australia.19 Grounding citizen-
ship in racial differences was characterized as a ‘‘baseless assumption’’; that
is, an interested justification for an irrational prejudice. Three years after the
above telegram was sent federal government policy reflected this more gen-
eral movement away from race and toward civilizational achievement as the
basis for citizenship rights. John McEwen, minister of the interior, announced
the government’s ‘‘New Deal’’ for Australian Aborigines, promising to treat
‘‘Aboriginal natives’’ in such a way as to raise ‘‘their status so as to entitle them
by right, and by qualification to the ordinary rights of citizenship, and enable
them and help them to share with us the opportunities that are available in
their own native land.’’ 20 The form and language of the ‘‘New Deal’’ was criti-
cally influenced by Adolphus P. Elkin, chair of anthropology at the University
of Sydney from 1934 to 1956, and also by C. A. Carrodus.21 By 1944, Elkin could
convincingly claim that all people had the capacity to ‘‘make progress towards
civilization [if ] a sound native policy designed with that end in view’’ were
formulated.22
Racial topologizing did not cease in the 1930s, nor cease to be relevant to
the reckoning of citizenship. What changed between 1905 and 1939 were the
discursive procedures by which the state could legitimately link race and citi-
zenship in its Aboriginal policy. Experts on ‘‘primitive people’’ still defined
human types in terms of racial characteristics, but they argued that a super-
ordinate human capacity for internally rational social and cultural systems
made all people potential candidates for modern citizenship. These same ex-
perts argued that citizenship should be hinged to nothing other than an Ab-
original persons’ achievement of (white) human civil culture. Permanently
denying the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship to a group of people
based on nothing but their racial heritage called into question not the civil
status of the primitive people but the modernity and civilizational capacity

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

of the white nation. Ten years after the first telegram was sent to Carrodus,
W. E. H. Stanner addressed a national radio audience, stating that ‘‘it would
give Australians a shock to know how often the fate of our blacks is flung up
against an Australian abroad despite our excellent record in New Guinea and
Papua. We are very widely thought of as a callous, hard-boiled people in such
matters. I have heard some awkward conversations between Australians and
Americans, Japanese, Italians, and others on matters of race policy.’’ 23
As part of their argument, Aboriginal experts insisted that all aboriginal
groups had their own civilizational type animated by general and rational so-
cial principles—the hallmark of human rationality—which provided their life
with meaning, purpose, and moral order. To this end W. Lloyd Warner titled
his influential 1927 ethnography of the north Arnhem Land Murngin people,
A Black Civilization, describing the purpose of his ethnography as ‘‘not only
to present the civilization of the Murngin in the description of the various
parts of tribal life, but to attempt to discover some of the general principles
which govern their social life.’’ 24 By 1936, most British-trained anthropolo-
gists, and the British administrators and police they trained, shared the gen-
eral sense that the social order of primitive society consisted of delicately bal-
anced local systems of heterosexual reproduction and its regulation—or, in
the disciplinary rhetoric, its prescriptive and proscriptive rules, forms, and
sanctions of kinship, marriage, and descent.25
According to the first and second chairs of anthropology in Australia, A. R.
Radcliffe-Brown and A. P. Elkin, this preexisting, fully rational, principled,
and meaningful indigenous social order made the government dependent on
anthropology. To begin to understand the indigenous social order, it had to
be apprehended in purely rational terms or, more exactly, apprehended from
the perspective of sympathetic reason.26 Although this argument was counter-
intuitive, Elkin argued that the willingness to understand the sense made by
ritual sex and violence provided the nation with a just and socially healthy
means for doing away with it. Such an understanding was something only an-
thropologists could provide; that is, it itself depended on the proper division
of social roles (especially a division among the faculties of scholar, administra-
tor, missionary, and police) and on rigorous training in interactional and tex-
tual methods—how to talk to Aborigines and how to create specific types of
texts, genealogies, moieties, ethnographies, and field notes. Only after anthro-
pological reason had established the rationale of Aboriginal social practices
and cultural beliefs through proper text-building practices could Aboriginal
culture and Aboriginal people be made practical for the modern nation; could

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the ‘‘strangeness and sordidness’’ of their native customs be transformed with-

out destroying the fabric of their civilization. In short, the fledging discipline
of anthropology in Australia leaned on the scandal of indigenous ritual sexu-
ality as the constitutive grounds of its own self-evident institutional neces-
sity—and life, since Australian anthropology was dependent on government
financial support.
Although arguing for a leading role of anthropology in the administration
of the indigenous population, Elkin, Stanner, and other mainstream anthro-
pologists sharply distinguished ‘‘understanding’’ proper to the academy from
the practical political and social ‘‘judgment’’ proper to civil man, the categori-
cal being more proper to national humanity.27 Understanding the diversity
of human culture and society may be the proper orientation and aim of the
faculty of anthropology, but, in the end, the human faculty of moral feeling
not only may but should curtail this understanding, driving it from the field
of practical action. In other words the ‘‘human’’ as a categorical imperative
of emergent modern nationalism could contain indigenous people but not all
their practices in civil society. In his landmark ethnography, The Australian
Aborigines: How to Understand Them (1938), Elkin wrote:

Any people whose history, tradition and beliefs are different from our own is
almost sure to have customs that seem strange and puzzling to us. We may
even feel that these customs are not so good as ours, that they are degrading
and should be abolished, but before we pass such opinions or act on them,
we must first understand what those customs are, the traditions and beliefs on
which they are based, the meaning which they possess for the individuals who
practice them, and the social function which they perform. But while such an
understanding undoubtedly makes another people’s customs less puzzling to
us, it does not necessarily commend them all, and we may still feel constrained
to use our influence or authority to have some of them abolished or modified.28

In the national brand of anthropology these men advocated, speculative rea-

son lacked practical autonomy.
What anthropologists had that missionaries, bushmen, and government
administrators did not, and thus what made the arguments and discipline of
Radcliffe-Brown and Elkin compelling to the degree that they were, was an
undisputed purchase on the discourse of scientific epistemology and method-
ology. This epistemological and methodological perspective promised a ratio-
nal ground for understanding Aboriginal practices, though not, we will see,
moral assessment. A sympathetic and rational orientation to the social prac-

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

tices and beliefs of indigenous groups differentiated absolutely anthropo-

logical expertise from all other competitors—including Aboriginal men and
women themselves.
In this spirit, Elkin ended an essay in the 1936 chapbook, White and Black in
Australia, with this practical blueprint for the civilizational imperative: ‘‘The
task of the missionary or other civilizing agent who desires, as he must do,
to change various native practices, is, therefore, very difficult, for it involved
his getting beyond the practices concerned to the secret sanctions involved,
and endeavouring through the old men, the custodians of native sanctions, to
modify or substitute fresh sanctions.’’ 29 The trouble with missionaries, A. P.
Elkin argued, was not their lack of good intentions, but their lack of a scien-
tifically oriented and trained understanding of Aboriginal ‘‘cosmology’’ and
‘‘philosophy.’’ As Elkin’s colleague W. E. H. Stanner would later put it, rather
than men of cosmology, missionaries saw only promiscuous women and ‘‘men
of sodomy, sinners exceedingly.’’ 30 Missionaries were right, Elkin argued, to
see ritual sex acts and some other customary sexual practices as antithetical
to the goal of Aboriginal citizenship. He himself made a similar argument in
a short text, Citizenship for the Aborigines. But, Elkin argued, missionaries
were wrong to confuse Aboriginal customs and cosmology with Aboriginal
sexuality. Aboriginal sex acts and Aboriginal customary law and ritual were
not identical, and Elkin promised that anthropology would demonstrate the
difference to Australian publics, missionaries, state administrators, and Ab-
original elders.31
It was a fantastic vision, really, and one that was outlined earlier by Bronis-
law Malinowski before the British Social Hygiene Council and the Board of
Study for the Preparation of Missionaries.32 If ritual sex was really about social
and cosmological reproduction, then Elkin and his legions of trained admin-
istrators could disambiguate sex from customary law without destroying the
fabric of Aboriginal society, and in so doing could produce a sanitized, sex-
free culture conversant with a tourist economy, a privatized native sexuality
conversant with Aboriginal citizenship, and a morally reintegrated nation.
Armed with their scientifically trained understanding, anthropologists would
sit with ‘‘tribal elders’’ and through critical rational conversation—the magic
of words rather than the machinations of force—persuade them to alter those
aspects of ‘‘social organization and custom’’ that were objectionable to civil
society. (Note: Most anthropologists never actually reached more or less tribal
people, but rather worked in leper colonies, on missions, or in government
settlements.) By focusing their notes and queries on local practices and be-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

liefs about sex and social organization, pursuing its meanings, contexts, types,
positions, and variations, anthropologists would persuade Aboriginal men
and women to devalue some of the ‘‘bad objects’’ of culture that, in critical
ways, anthropologists themselves were valuing by showing such intense inter-
est in them. Sympathy, nonprejudice, respect: these emotional stances would
provide the affective tools for establishing a bridge of trust between native
and anthropologist, an emotional architecture necessary for communicative
reason to proceed. Sympathy would dilate local culture to anthropological
and national persuasion. The ‘‘good objects’’ of sexual difference would re-
main; namely, familial organizations of sexuality as the basis of property, reli-
gion, and meaning understood through models of kinship and descent such
as patrilineality, matrilineality, cognation, ambilineality, and so forth.
At the same time that they debated with Aboriginal elders, anthropolo-
gists conversed with the national public, calming their fears, explaining away
the ‘‘strange and puzzling,’’ the ‘‘degrading,’’ and the disgusting of Aborigi-
nal social life, even while reassuring the public that these ‘‘bad objects’’ of
Aboriginal social life were being systematically eliminated. In both his mono-
graphs and his ‘‘practical’’ 33 tracts, Elkin extols his readers to remember that
‘‘puzzling marriage customs . . . objectionable to us’’ were ‘‘either practiced
by Europeans or by peoples of early historical times, for whose contribution
to civilization we have great respect.’’ 34 Reasoned analogy is not, however,
sufficient. Elkin further soothes the troubled reader by adding, ‘‘many im-
portant changes have been made in social organization and custom, and also
in the ceremonial life; but they have been made after consideration by the
elders, who are the custodians of law and tradition, and in time mythologi-
cal (that is, ‘historical’) sanction or authority has grown up to account for
that change.’’ 35 Yes, Aborigines’ civil progress depended on their acquisition
of Western forms of masculinity and femininity, but this transition must be
accomplished slowly and in a way compatible with local beliefs.
The affective technology of sympathy was not used as a persuasive tool
exclusively on indigenous subjects. Because anthropologists were people of
good will—people who could demonstrate a real sympathy, knowledge, and
passion for Aboriginal society—they could reassure the public that whatever
disciplinary protocol they advocated for Aboriginal society was advocated
humanely, tolerantly, and on its behalf. It would be just and moral. Sex is
(soon to be) nothing (to fear): anthropological understanding would provide
not only a rational explanation for Aborigines’ strange sexual customs, but
also a means for doing away with them and, thereby, doing away with a whole

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

host of horrors threatening the Australian nation’s claim to be a modern, civil,

and humane society.
These complex scholarly and national orientations created deeply dialogi-
cal ethnographic texts. As Elkin, his colleagues, and his students addressed
heterogeneous academic and nonacademic publics, they moved across dif-
ferent discursive registers, citing the voices of neutral and objective science,
of a horrified and traumatized public, and of their readers’ national desires
and shames. Insofar as they succeeded in convincing the public of the sci-
entific grounding of its good intentions, anthropology not only salvaged in-
digenous culture, but also saved the ideal of nationalism and dispassionate
reason from its miscarriage at the nation’s frontier, and instantiated itself as
the premier discipline of indigenous social life. The social price of a failure to
appreciate the proper roles of the faculties was high. Untrained interference
in local social processes, and, especially, interference in systems of religious
social sanction, risked unwinding the social fabric—the result of which was a
‘‘remedy worse than the disease’’; namely, the horrors of settler dysfunction,
including drunkenness, veneral disease, poverty.36 Throughout the first half of
the twentieth century, the Australian press published claims that Christianity,
the standard-bearer of Western colonialism, ruined rather than raised native
peoples.37
Even if anthropological understanding was constrained by moral judgment
rather than reason—a morality that aspired to be world historical and prac-
tically relevant—insofar as anthropologists figured their practices as dispas-
sionate social scientific assessments of indigenous practices and beliefs, and
insofar as they assessed Aboriginal beliefs as reasonable from a culturally in-
ternal perspective, they intensified the problem of administering national law
across civilizational boundaries. The anthropological view that indigenous
culture was rational, that it made sense, circulated in the mass media as in
this Northern Territory Times editorial: ‘‘One of the most fatal mistakes that
can be made in dealing with the blacks is to laugh at their secret superstitions
and beliefs [for] below the surface’’ is reason not irrationality.38 Public and ad-
ministrative debates ensued about the fairness and justice of trying ‘‘more or
less tribal’’ Aboriginal people under British law. These debates were grafted
on to earlier ones. As far back as 1837, the British House of Commons Select
Committee on Aborigines observed that expecting ‘‘wild natives’’ to observe
British law was ‘‘absurd,’’ and punishing ‘‘the non-observation of them by
severe penalties’’ was ‘‘palpably unjust.’’ 39 Based on what principle of fairness
and justice could an Aboriginal man be tried and condemned to death for a

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 The Cunning of Recognition

crime he has no language for or understanding of ? How could ‘‘full justice . . .

be done’’ and what did ‘‘legal justice’’ mean in a colonial context in which no
common language connected indigenous and settler communities? 40 When
Aboriginal persons were brought to trial for customary practices where no
white person was involved, the absence of a common language and practice
between settler and indigenous groups and the presence of a rational cultural
order within indigenous groups further blurred the line between force and
justice, trial and torture, civil and savage law, the frontier and modern nation.
Civil law was opened to accusations of barbarity. Because of this, sixty jurists
from the Northern Territory called on the Darwin Supreme Court in 1933 to
try Aborigines according to their customary laws where the offense was of a
‘‘more or less tribal’’ nature. To do otherwise would expose ‘‘white’’ law to
shameful charges of savagery, injustice, and inhumanity.
This nonpassage between justice and morality, and between rational as-
sessments and practical governance of cultural difference, irritated public dis-
course. And it demonstrated one manner in which indigenous subjects in the
north were nation-makers. Indigenous subjects prompted and moved pub-
lic debate. And, perhaps, in ways that still irritate the membrane of liberal
democratic nationalism. Take, for instance, the public exchange between Joe
Croft and W. E. Davies. Although Croft morally condemns Aboriginal men’s
ritual sex acts he also castigates the ‘‘authorities’’—not, as we might imag-
ine, for shielding these acts from state and private interference, but for failing
to shield other violent native customs. In reply, Davies suggests how liberal
anthropological models were being taken up and recirculated in the public
sphere. Here is the extract from Croft, followed by the statement by Davies:

‘‘The Old People and Their Tribal Affairs.’’ I maintain we should not interfere
with them. If we do we should start in Darwin. I can take the authorities to
the Compound and charge fourteen of the aboriginals with bigamy. Then I
can take them to the Daly River and charge aboriginals with cutting their fin-
gers off. Then we can go down to the McArthur and Roper River and charge
the natives with inflicting torture on young girls. This horrible rite is practiced
for the sole purpose of forcing maturity on girl children so the old men of the
tribes are kept supplied with wives. Just after this ordeal 10 and 11 year old
girls can be seen newly operated on like calves in a branding yard. Then I can
take the authorities further out to the Hubert River where natives perform the
surgical operation on the males which prevents any possibility of propagation.
Now I maintain that if these outrageous offenses are permitted by the aborigi-

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

nal in their tribal affairs the fights between them should be allowed and that
we of the English speaking race have not the right to interfere in their tribal
affairs.41

Sir,—In reference to the above I am writing more especially to acknowledge

Mr. Joe Croft’s suggestion. I shall ask the Rev. Mr. Warren to deal with the letter
at his discretion, or you may arrange an interview with him regarding his views.
I myself send my mite of explanation to your contemporary. Croft speaks from
a wide experience and there is a power of sense in what he says. I would not
agree with him in maintaining that no effort should be made to raise the ab-
origines of Australia above crude practices. To my mind the aim should be to
moralize or christianize the traditional customs and lore (without destroying
them) as has been done with other peoples and tribes. In the tribal stage the
‘‘individual’’ is non-existent and non-moral, Your and &c. W. H. Davies.42

SPECULATIVE SEX AND THE LIMIT OF REASON

It was in the context of the nonpassage between justice and morality and be-
tween reason and practical settler governance that academics and government
officials suggested a (usually three-) tiered system for the administration of
indigenous groups. In a letter to Carrodus about a related Daly River case,
the first director of Native Affairs in the Northern Territory, E. W. P. Chin-
nery, who had previously held the positions of government anthropologist
and commissioner of Native Affairs for Territory of New Guinea in 1924 and
1928, respectively, advocated the official adoption of the ‘‘Murray System’’ in
the Northern Territory. Chinnery described the Murray System as noninter-
ference with ‘‘relatively untouched natives who live more or less permanently
in remote areas, both inside and outside the reserves.’’ 43 In effect, national
space would be divided, not according to commonsense notions of the pub-
lic and private and state and family, but rather according to socially, if not
geographically, separated, functionally integrated national and subnational
(tribal) groups.
Put simply, Aboriginal groups would be distinguished on the basis of their
civilizational achievements. In practice this judgment was little more than a
measurement of an Aboriginal group’s proximity to the edge of the frontier.
‘‘Relatively,’’ ‘‘more or less’’: the emergent civilizational grounds for citizen-
ship rights and administrative policy did not do away with the uncertainty
of identity. Nevertheless, the idea was that, if treated scientifically, the struc-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

ture and function of primitive society would serve as an organic administra-

tive apparatus until ‘‘permanent Government stations have been established
within such areas and European ideas of law and order have been introduced
gradually by methods of peaceful penetration.’’ 44 Until that time, anthropo-
logically trained men and women would work the social alchemy of sympa-
thetic understanding.
The government policy of relative noninterference in the affairs of ‘‘more
or less’’ tribal natives who lived in ‘‘more or less’’ remote areas was not adopted
by government administrators simply because of its anthropological fash-
ion—although anthropologists studiously, and effectively, worked to make
their discipline indispensable to government deliberations. A hands-off policy
for more or less tribal groups had independent symbolic, economic, and bu-
reaucratic appeal. To begin with, the policy mitigated the symbolic and eco-
nomic costs of frontier violence, and it especially lessened the cost of police
patrols and patrol justice by lessening the occasion for settler violence. Settler
violence was in the news. In 1929 the Australian parliament published a com-
prehensive and scathing report on the atrocious economic, sexual, and social
degradations of white Australians.45 This report was prompted by Australian
public outrage over the massacre of Aboriginal men, women, and children
in the Kimberley region to the southwest of the Daly River, which circulated
across the regional press. In the Northern Territory, for instance, the North-
ern Territory Times reported that the author of the inquiry, J. W. Bleakley,
former Chief Protectorate of Aborigines in Queensland, saw indigenous per-
sons, not settlers, in need of protection, and recommended the protection
of ‘‘full-blooded’’ Aborigines from ‘‘contaminating . . . outside [white] influ-
ences.’’ 46 In the same year Bronislaw Malinowski published The Sexual Life
of Savages (1929), describing Trobriand Islanders as having ‘‘definite [sexual]
laws, stringent in their application and enforced by punishments’’ and ‘‘also a
sense of [sexual] right and wrong and canons of correct behavior not devoid
of delicacy or refinement,’’
The Kimberley massacre was hardly an anomaly. Memoirs and newspapers
described the treatment of Aboriginal men and women in terms that ‘‘no
earnest student of humanity can read without a shock of disgust, and a fer-
vent desire that some, at least, of the white ghouls may find retribution at long
last.’’ 47 Settler memoirs like Cattle Chosen (1926), Memoirs of Simpson New-
land (1926), and Life in the Bush (1939) told tales of frontier massacres and
ritual mutilations, as did anthropological memoirs such as Baldwin Spencer’s
Wanderings in Wild Australia (1928). In 1932, after carrying out research in

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

Western Australia, Ralph O’Reilly Piddington embarrassed the government

by describing in a newspaper interview specific ‘‘sexual violations of Aborigi-
nal women, beatings of Aboriginal men and women . . . [and] the misappro-
priation of government rations designated for aged and infirmed Aborigi-
nes.’’ 48 The Kimberley massacre, the Coniston massacre, the Forrest massacre:
the horrors of the frontier roiled public debate and threatened to turn Austra-
lian nationalism wild, revealing its native policy as motivated by nothing so
much as brute force and sexual predation, oriented toward nothing so much
as profit, abuse, and extermination—not rational communicative reason, not
social reform, not civil advancement.49
The idea of a self-regulating, self-reproducing native group also provided
to government and business an economically expedient excuse for the use of
Aboriginal men and women as a disposable labor pool.50 Although virtually
every Aboriginal person would have had some form of contact with settlers
by 1936, either directly or mediated by trade with neighboring groups, many
northwestern, central, and western desert groups maintained some relative
autonomy and some relative expressive difference (local language, dress, ritual
practice) from white populations. Employers used these commonsense in-
dexes of tribal function to justify their practice of paying Aboriginal laborers
meager rations, arguing that a worker’s extended Aboriginal family could for-
age for any extra provisions that might be needed during the work season and
during periods when no work was available.51 Governments likewise justified
paltry budgets for indigenous health, housing, and welfare by referring to the
fantasy of the tribal function. Even when government compounds (‘‘reserva-
tions’’) were established in the far north in the early 1940s, administrators
envisioned them as serving as ‘‘refuges or sanctuaries of a temporary nature’’
where ‘‘the aboriginal may . . . continue his normal existence until the time
is ripe for his further development.’’ 52 This all but free labor pool was critical
to capital accumulation in the north, where profit margins were thin at best,
especially during the global depression of the 1930s.53
Traditional expressive culture was emerging as the ground of a very dif-
ferent type of symbolic and economic value. In 1930, the Northern Territory
Times printed ‘‘A Plea for the Abo’’ in which it reported that the British As-
sociation for the Advancement of Science considered the ‘‘Australian aborigi-
nes as being among the most valuable living people for the scientific study
of the early history of mankind.’’ 54 Christian ministers echoed the argument
that ‘‘our aborigines are a national asset’’; and this theological imprimatur was
circulated in the national press.55 Aboriginal expressive culture (rather than

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 The Cunning of Recognition

Aboriginal people per se) slowly emerged as a national value, as something

that belonged to the nation and thus merited federal protection. Although
noting that the Commonwealth government had no constitutional authority
to intervene in state indigenous policy, in the shadow cast by these reevalua-
tions of indigenous worth, the Northern Territory Times called on the federal
government to provide state and territory governments with trained anthro-
pologists to study local people.56 In other articles, the Northern Territory Times
called on ordinary settlers to provide their own ethnographic insights on the
ways of ‘‘our Abo.’’ 57 Similar themes were sounded in short educational films
such as Art of the Hunter.58
Certified as world historic by such internationally recognized scholars as
Freud and Durkheim and by esteemed institutions like the British Association
for the Advancement of Science, Aboriginal culture lent Australia a symbolic
value and luminosity. Anthropologists were not the only settler subjects con-
verting this symbolic capital into economic capital. Two years after announc-
ing the scientific value of Australian Aborigines, the Northern Territory Times
ran a four-part series, ‘‘Smoke Signals from the Never-Never,’’ reporting on
the novel transformation of the rural economy from pastoralism to tourism.
In the serialized articles, the emergent voicings of a global cultural tourist
market can be heard: ‘‘Quite genuine old timers are neglecting the raising of
stock or giving it second place in the great new industry of shewing [sic] sight-
seers round. . . . For a few sticks of tobacco stone age savages will doff the rags
of civilization and perform weird rites in full panoply of feathers tuck on with
blood. Spears up-raised, they will charge madly down on the row of loaded—
cameras, and rejuvenated business men can take back irrefutable evidence of
the tough time they had against the blacks.’’ 59
Simultaneously an administrative technique and a fantasy of liberal appro-
priation, the Murray System promised a seamless and peaceful transition from
a state of national economic, racial, and civilizational separation to a lucra-
tive business of cultural commodification. As the frontier was absorbed into
the nation, Aboriginal people and their customs would gradually lose their
‘‘wildness.’’ No longer wild, Aboriginal men and women would no longer be
recognized as ‘‘more or less tribal.’’ The full force of state law would then be
extended in concert with the full benefits of citizenship and full panoply of
business initiatives. Until that time, the more indigenous groups maintained
the native customs that signified and were thought necessary to produce a
self-regulating Aboriginal group the less state and private capital had to be

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

expended to maintain and reproduce the Aboriginal labor critical to the ap-
propriation of Aboriginal lands and resources.
Far from ungrateful, many northern citizens praised Aborigines in the
reading republic of national newspapers, broadsheets, and books for their
generous contribution to private and national wealth. In 1930, the editors of
the Northern Territory Times celebrated the ‘‘generous kind-hearted loyal . . .
outback black [who] lightens the labour of the outback worker [and is] almost
indispensable’’ to the pioneer.60 These publicly oriented national testimonials
to the generous character of northern ‘‘tribal’’ Aboriginal men and women,
when properly treated, included prescriptions for maintaining this blessed
state of affairs that drew directly from emergent mainstream British anthro-
pological discourses.61 The object of public and administrative interpretation
was the appropriation of lands at a minimal cost; the means of acquisition
was the same sympathetic understanding anthropologists sought.
The addressee of these messages was neither the Aboriginal Australians nor
any specific Australian citizen. Nor were these texts instances of ‘‘mere’’ ideol-
ogy. They were the textual voicings of the good national subject addressed to
the same imaginary, semiotically figured, mass subject that many actual Aus-
tralian citizens desired as a counterfactual self to the shockingly real factual
actions and attitudes of their neighbors.62 Factual images of this specifiable,
and specifiably, bad national subject circulated beside these good images in
press and conversation. Insofar as Australian settlers successfully entailed a
sharp and clear division in textual space—the good and the ghoulish white
subject—they then sought to position themselves in respect to it. In other
words many, though not all, citizens desired to be the imaginary national sub-
ject they sought to entail in texts, to have been all along acting for the best
(or at least the betterment). Even if the ability of the militarily and economi-
cally powerful to take the territories of the weak might reflect nothing more
than the natural order of things, many settler subjects desired that this natural
order be issued in a civil register; to have taking be a form of gift bestowal;
and that the physical, moral, or social pharmakon of Western civilization be
medicine not poison.63
The attempt to write a portrait of a well-intentioned frontier and then to
identify themselves with it was an attempt to write over a violent, vicious
settler history that would not historicize itself and that seemed to produce
merely degrees of variation, more or less, among settler and indigenous prac-
tices. We should not take lightly the aspiration for some other national poetics

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 The Cunning of Recognition

than the pitiless pastoralism that inspired a tortured national meter, haunting
Australian nationalism with the horrible shapes and specters of its frontier
history.64 Take, for instance, this poem published in the Northern Territory
Times and Gazette:

A lubra fled with her screaming child through

the line of pitiless rifles.
And I galloped away to kill the two for their
lives to me were trifles.
As my horse strode after the dusky pair, like
beasts, I could heard them panting,
I shot them both as they fell fatigued, ‘neath a
light wood gently slanting.

We dug a trench in the golden sand where the

wattles skirted the river,
And we buried the slaughtered side by side and
left them to rest forever;
And those were the blacks who had speared my
sheep and maimed and destroyed my cattle,
And I reckon we slew them fair as fair that day
as soldiers in battle.

But in tortured dreams, when I fall asleep, I

can hear the lubras weeping,
And spectral blacks through spectral woods are
always toward me creeping;
And ever and ever they beckon me on to strange
and mysterious places,
Where, in fancy, I see their comrades lie with
the blood on their ghastly faces.

Like the miserly men who oppress their kind to

make heavier still their purses,
I walk through life a detested thing, and a mark
for a thousand curses;
And, although I feast on ambrosial fare and
imbibe my winy nectars,
I’ll be hunted down to my grave at last by
horrible shapes and spectres.65

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

The national haunting of white sexuality was not restricted to the poetic
public sphere. W. E. H. Stanner’s field notes provide some evidence of the per-
sonal and professional anxiety that white sexuality generated in the Daly River
region during the 1930s. Stanner remarks that during his fieldwork a local
farmer, Ridsdale, sometime slept with him because he was sure that ‘‘blacks’’
were going to murder him for ‘‘cohabitating with wife of Tuckerboy.’’ Stanner
continues, ‘‘many local whites in secret fear of natives. Various symptoms:
over cruel handling; fear of being too close with them; note what Byne boys
said on m[y] return from Port Keats through the Moill country (yet old Parry
is different). Great many men in bush seem to believe that they will ‘collect’ in
the end.’’ Stanner describes the relay of paranoia created by these frontier con-
ditions: ‘‘Will never forget fright when Ridsdale first came. I was asleep. He
crept down through shadows from his tent (just imagine that walk: in dark-
ness, thinking blacks were after him). I woke out of my sleep with dreadful
fright. Shall not lightly forget those few seconds. Might have shot him.’’ 66
These, in short, were some of the institutional, subjective, and discursive
constraints and values that shaped Carrodus’s telegram. When the custom-
ary practices protected were minimally dissonant with normative values, the
policy of noninterference in tribal customs where no white man was involved
meshed a maximal set of overlapping academic, administrative, and settler
aspirations. The state’s tolerance, even narcissism, of minor cultural differ-
ences reinforced the imperial fantasy that colonial appropriation was a form of
paternal recognition and gift bestowal, casting the settler nation in the role of
ward, protector, and pater; and casting liberal colonization as a ‘‘more or less’’
gradual and peaceful transition from savagery to civilization. In other words,
it reflected the real optimism of mid-century liberal humanism; namely, that
critical public conversation, premised on and oriented toward rational under-
standing, provided the means for a peaceful, progressively integrated society.
And, insofar as something that could be figured as progress did occur, this
fantasy reinforced public identifications with and idealizations of the white
Australian nation as a civilized nation. In these moments, the state seemed
little more than the political-administrative prosthesis of this nationalized
subject—the apparatus of its well-intentioned republic of good will.
But the tiered system of indigenous administration did not resolve the
nonpassage among reason, practical morality, justice, law, and administra-
tion. Although the policy may have made administrative, economic, and dis-
cursive sense, many non-Aboriginal Australians raised practical, legal, epis-
temological, and moral objections to it. They argued, as did mainstream

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anthropologists, that reason and administrative practice should be limited

by collective morality. For instance, in the Daly River case the question of
whether or not Constable Pryor knowingly transgressed department policy
quickly turned to the practical problem of implementing it. Informed of de-
partment policy, A. V. Stretton, superintendent of Northern Territory police,
wrote to Robert H. Weddell, administrator of the Northern Territory of Aus-
tralia, advising him that the directive was legally ‘‘too wide, covering as it does
capital crimes committed in settled areas’’ and practically unmanageable. ‘‘It
is also pointed out that if the Police Officer is compelled to wait for approval
from the Chief Protector before securing the offenders and witnesses, it will
probably mean that by the time such instruction is received offenders and
witnesses will have scattered over a wide area increasing the difficulties of ar-
rest where necessary considerably and involving probably hundred of miles
of patrol.’’ 67
If the vast frontier terrain made it enormously difficult to rearrest indige-
nous subjects once released, it also made it difficult to capture the civiliza-
tional meanings and origins, even more or less, of the practices they were
being arrested for. But when patrol officers asked how they were to know
whether or not a practice was more or less tribal, Carrodus dismissed their
epistemological concerns. In his memos, critical faculties and duties are pre-
sented as matters of professional competences, capacities, and sympathies,
and of proper bureaucratic technique. According to Carrodus it was not up
to an untrained patrol officer to determine whether an act they or others
stumbled on was ‘‘more or less’’ tribal involving ‘‘more or less’’ wild men
(though his repeated use of the qualification ‘‘more or less’’ iterated the central
crises these men faced). Police constables were simply required to take careful
notes from which other people would form critical judgments.68 Underlings
collect. Anthropologists assess. Courts make judgments. According to Carro-
dus: ‘‘The question of whether ritual rape and certain other rites and customs
should be suppressed is one which should be determined in the light of the
advice given by anthropologists or officers trained in anthropology. It is sug-
gested that the degree of civilization reached by the natives performing the
rites would be a material factor.’’ 69
Carrodus may have dismissed their epistemological concerns, but we
should not underestimate what was being asked of ordinary settler subjects—
those holding government jobs, designing and administering state policy,
plowing fields. Those like Constable Pryor had to decide quickly whether pea-
nut farmer Harkins had collided into the vibrant core of indigenous culture or

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

stumbled on the perverting effects, ‘‘more or less,’’ of a Christian colonialism

gone terribly awry. Was an indigenous practice part of the group’s precolo-
nial traditions? Or was it a response to the ‘‘type of white man’’ living in the
frontier, to Christian missionaries proselytizing across the outback, or to the
very laissez-faire entrepreneurs the policy was in large part designed to pro-
tect and support? More troubling is the question, at what point did a white
person become ‘‘involved’’? Was knowing that these things were occurring
in the back forty enough to involve a white man? Even if state workers were
to protect ‘‘more or less’’ customary practices, as a primitive administrative
means toward the eventual end of Western civilization, they had to make criti-
cal cultural and moral judgments on the spot which might have much wider
social ramifications—a murderer hung rather than set free; a rapist allowed
to wander at will; insurgents ready to mobilize the native population.
If these practical aspects of government policy were not troubling enough,
A. V. Stretton, the superintendent of police in Darwin, raised legal questions
about department policy, anchoring his criticisms in normative bureaucratic
distinctions among the administrative, legal, and police functions of the state.
While notifying all police stations in the Territory that they must abide by the
policy of the minister, Stretton pointed out the illegality of the directive in
a separate letter to the Northern Territory administrator.70 Carefully drawing
on the indirect function of speech to avoid any accusation of insubordination,
Stretton deployed the same discourse of proper state function against state
policy that Carrodus had deployed to uphold it: ‘‘I desire to direct Your Hon-
our’s attention to the fact that whilst I am prepared at all times to give effect
to instructions, in this case it is pointed out that the instructions are in direct
opposition to the Statute law which it is my duty to see is properly enforced.
It is suggested therefore that in lieu of the instruction an amendment of the
existing Statute law is desirable.’’ 71 The idea of zoning nonnormative sex and
nonstate violence might make administrative sense, might even be the just
thing to do. Nevertheless, it was unlawful.
Regarding matters of dominant legal interpretation of the time, Stretton
was right. While many courts questioned the justice of applying English law
to ‘‘wild’’ or ‘‘uncivilized’’ natives, time and again Australian courts and gov-
ernments would rule that as a matter of legal fact ‘‘Australian law, civil and
criminal, substantive and procedural, was to be applied to Aboriginals to the
exclusion of their own laws except in the rare cases where legislation made
specific provision to the contrary.’’ 72 Indeed, Commonwealth and state gov-
ernments established the office of aboriginal protector in the 1830s in lieu of

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 The Cunning of Recognition

state recognition of indigenous customary law and the establishment of native

courts.73 Carrodus was impeded by this dominant juridical opinion when he
replied to Stretton’s legal challenge by noting that the Aboriginal Protector
had the authority to decide if an Aboriginal person should be charged and
prosecuted no matter whether the crime was tribal or not, or involved a white
person or not. In response, a Northern Territory judge submitted a legal opin-
ion to the minister of the Department of the Interior that the policy breached
the proper separation of police and administrative powers: ‘‘Under the law as
it stands, it is the duty of the police to take immediate action with respect to
breaches of the law which come under their notice, without respect to colour
or race of the parties concerned. If it is desired that this position should be
altered, such alteration should be brought about by amendment of the law,
and not by Ministerial direction.’’ 74
Finally, whether or not the directive was constitutional, legal, or practical,
some opposed it simply on moral grounds. Acting Chief Protector of Aborigi-
nals W. B. Kirkland wrote that the criminal status of an Aboriginal practice
should not be based on its relative tribalness. If tribal practice was morally
reprehensible then it should be ‘‘suppressed.’’ Simple, principled, and just law
should give way to the collective moral foundation of the nation as should
the moral perspective of the natives. ‘‘Certain rites and customs of the ab-
originals should be suppressed and it may be argued that the only method
of suppression justifiable is the application of the white law. Notwithstanding
the opinion expressed in the Department’s memorandum of 18th June, it is re-
spectfully submitted that ritual rape is such a custom.’’ 75 Unlimited by moral
feeling, reason was like rape—a specter haunting governance in the frontier.
I could end this section with the final verdict in the Daly River case: the
Malakmalak men were found guilty and sentenced to jail in Darwin. But to
close the case at this point would be to repeat a national fantasy not to ana-
lyze it.

THE SUBJECT OF SEX

This brief history of the mid-century administration of indigenous people in

northern Australia reminds us that state policy is a complex voicing of the
immanent form and content of society. In the shadow of Marx, we remem-
ber that all voicings (social genres) are the debris of past standardizations of
space, people, and talk that makes communication meaningful in the here
and now. In this case, this debris includes constitutional texts, anthropologi-

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

cal texts, administrative memos, and juridical opinions and their complicated
national and transnational circuits, imaginaries, and desires. These genres, as
Bakhtin noted, are embedded in formal and informal institutions that dictate
the varying degrees of risk that varying types of people face breaking generic
frames.
But knowing these things about genre and context does not tell us why
genres are moved, invaginated, defended, or left exposed; why, for instance,
a Northern Territory magistrate took the time to write a note correcting the
legal assumptions embedded in Carrodus’s administrative memo. No genre
coordinates itself outside the field of interpretative practice. That is, knowing
that Carrodus’s telegram and policies were ‘‘the selective realization of cul-
tural values under situational constraints’’ does not tell us why particular men
and women emphasized rather than mitigated particular generic spaces; why
they bent the generic spaces and discourses of government, publicness, mod-
esty, law, and justice to change state policy and, in doing so, generated new
policies, rhetorics, and dispositions of national citizenship. The fact of the
loose coordination among the formal legal, administrative, and police arms
of the state is not sufficient to explain Stretton’s or Kirkland’s objection to
state policy—is not really an explanation at all. The incommensurateness of
practical, moral, and legal genres is endemic to national formations. Likewise,
statutes exist in liberal democracies that are rarely if ever enforced and that do
not become the site of social struggle and protestation; ditto administrative
policies that skate the thin edge of legality. Texts do not transform themselves
from the tacit to the tactical. Texts lay dormant until some person has a stake
in raising them or, perhaps less intentionally, until some person accidentally
moves them while trying to move something else.
In other words, people wield the law of genre against each other during
moments of what linguistic anthropologists call explicit and implicit meta-
pragmatic discourse; respectively, moments in which speakers, texts, or dis-
courses indicate to others how to speak or produce proper or improper social
forms and the means by which speakers, texts, and discourses signal a sense
of ending or beginning, of narrative form and flow and of the routine and re-
markable, and thereby indicate what we should do or say or act if we know
what’s good for us.76 We saw, for instance, in the grammatical debris of their
texts, Stretton, Carrodus, and Kirkland indicating to each other how to talk in
particular types of places with particular types of people; and saw how these
signals acted as indexical hinges, plotting contexts (this spacetime) into dis-
cursive types (this genre) into subject types (this social role)—and vice versa.

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 The Cunning of Recognition

Whether implicitly or explicitly these discursive frames indicated how each

of these men should calculate and calibrate the stakes, pleasures, and risks of
taking a certain stance in a certain type of formed space.
Any genre can be plotted into any other genre as a means of building new
provisional standardizations of thought, perspective, and expectation: a love
plot into a work plot, a sex plot into a math plot, an identity plot into a liter-
ary plot. Stretton, for instance, wielded a discourse of proper state function
against Carrodus’s own. Kirkland graphed a discourse of morality into argu-
ments about proper state function. But we must always remember that this
emplotment occurs within the social institutions of personal and group risk.
The social and economic risks people took criticizing government policy and
policymakers in the first half of the twentieth century were real and widely
known. Ralph O’Reilly Piddington was effectively banned from further re-
search in Australia after embarrassing the Western Australian government
with his allegations of specific settlers’ physical and economic abuses. His
blacklisting had a formative effect on how Australian academics couched their
criticism of the government.77 Bronislaw Malinowski was likewise subjected
to research and employment restrictions due to his outspoken views on colo-
nial life.
And here we see the difference between the conditions of agency for settler
and indigenous subjects. Their practices may have incited this governmental
anxiety. But very few indigenous men and women could play levels of state
bureaucracy against each other. Although they could not, specific indigenous
subjects and practices were nevertheless an immediate cause of governmental
fission. Even a superficial reading of the Daly River case suggests the provoca-
tive nature of the administrative policy before and after 1940. Carrodus de-
manded that Constable Pryor of Daly River either forfeit his job or hold back
the hands of peanut farmer Harkins. That he do no more than look on as the
‘‘female [was] required [to] have sexual intercourse with all and sundry.’’ The
internal stability of ‘‘wild natives’’ might depend on ‘‘the free exercise of their
native customs,’’ but the majority of white Australians understood sacred acts
of bestiality, ritual masturbation, same sex, and group sex as incommensurate
with a modern civil society’s understanding of sex and intimacy as a private,
normatively monogamous heterosexual affair. And the reading public had a
full fair of ethnopornographia to incite this understanding—textual repre-
sentations that as often as not had little to do with the attitudes or intentions
of any indigenous subject or group. The public and semipublic sacramental
sexuality of indigenous groups narrated in such salacious ethnographies as

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

Herbert Basedow’s The Australian Aboriginal (published in 1925 and reprinted

in 1929) conjured images of profound immorality, the absolute limit of a civi-
lized nation’s tolerance of cultural difference, even as this sexuality became
a source of public incitement and excitement, private capital, and personal
advancement.
What I want to understand, in other words, is not simply the discursive and
textual frames within which the policy made sense to the Department of the
Interior, nor simply that various people drew on genres and linguistic forms
to index various state functions and authorities, but rather what prompted
people like Stretton and Kirkland to act, to risk their economic livelihood
or advancement, by making explicit the ongoing incommensurability of state
policy and personal and national morality? And how to conceptualize the
agency of indigenous subjects in this field of risk. To answer these questions
in even a minimal way we need to examine how persons inhabited the policy;
how they experienced the mandate to carry it out, including their experience
of institutional mediations of their moral sense.
Let me summarize where we are. The difficulty the Daly River case posed
to liberal national democratic ideology was twofold. On the one hand, as I
discussed above, while most white Australians agreed that Aboriginal ritual
sex defied the ideal of a normative national collective morality, they quarreled
in administrative domains and in the critical public sphere about whether or
not this moral judgment should invalidate normative notions of justice and
right that ideally subtended state law and practice. On the other hand, the case
raised the question not simply of how to administer law justly across maxi-
mally heterogeneous cultural fields, but whether there was any meaningful
difference between indigenous and settler sexual morality and practice. The
real problem that ritual sex posed to many settlers was not its transparent
difference from white sexuality but the rending of that difference.
This is not to say that settlers did not experience something best described
as radical alterity. It is, however, to question its source and to demand a finer
differentiation in the meaning of subjectivity and agency. Alterity does not
uniquely refer to moments of experienced or understood maximal hetero-
geneity across socially or culturally differentiated groups (paradigmatically
found in colonial settler encounters), though we should not ignore or shy
away from the fact that fundamental differences do exist between real and
imagined means and modes of producing a good life. Even when such social
heterogeneity exists, what is experienced as radical difference is not interior to
the social forms themselves but exterior, so to speak, or emergent in the spaces

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 The Cunning of Recognition

of their intersection—what Georg Simmel called sites of contact.78 Moreover,

this experience may well create irresolvable cleavages not between the two
groups but within one of them, which had previously tacitly accepted and ex-
perienced itself as a collectivity. In this case, the intimate ‘‘we’’ of the nation
came precariously close to being refashioned as a collection of strangers who
turn not toward but away from each other. Likewise, the interior space of
the subject may be rent, the ‘‘I’’ of myself lost in the field of irreconcilable
moral injunctions. This is, I want to suggest, what occurred during events like
the Daly River case. Society and subjectivity were revealed to be a collectivity
that depended on the taken-for-granted, the tacit, the unexamined life. Once
again, indigenous agency is vital in understanding this movement, even if the
mode of motion is different from the settlers’ own.
To get at the source and dynamic of these rendings, let us turn to an ar-
chive of a police case compiled four years after the above ‘‘ritual rape.’’ This
case (‘‘Murder of Jesse’’) once again involved a group of Malakmalak men.
Rather than rape, the charge was the murder of a woman (‘‘Jesse’’) from the
‘‘Brinken’’ tribe after her alleged violation of sacred Kunapipi grounds. The
Daly River police officer at the time, Constable J. T. Turner, compiled a folder
consisting of two typed letters in which he outlined the case, a set of ‘‘con-
fessions’’ taken from the Malakmalak suspects, a map of the area where the
murder occurred, and an anthropological assessment. The anthropological
submission was written by Bill Harney, a staff member of the Native Affairs
Department, who informally trained under A. P. Elkin and who wrote, with
Elkin’s encouragement, a number of memoirs and travelogues about Aborigi-
nal and settler life in the Northern Territory. The popularity of these books
helped to establish him as a national radio personality.79
In his two typed submissions, Constable Turner provides details of the
psychological state of the Malakmalak men he apprehended (‘‘they both
seemed proud of their killing’’); the shocking nature of the material evidence
(‘‘I looked at the Shovel Spears in the hands of each and found them covered
at beyond Shovel Point with fresh blood’’); and the quoted motives of men
(‘‘That dead fellow Lubra and War-wool (Lubra) been walk on Sacret Groun
takem my things. . . . That two lubra been alonga my Sacret groun come back
from Chinaman takem my thing’’).80 The Malakmalak men are reported to
claim that the murder was the lawful outcome of the woman’s transgression of
sacred Kunapipi grounds. The ritual itself was said to have been introduced to
them four years previously by a Wagaman man—the same year of the above
‘‘ritual rape.’’ 81 But these same letters report conflicting testimony from other

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

Aboriginal groups. Another Brinken Aboriginal woman who had witnessed

the attack disputed the existence of a ‘‘Sacret Groun’’ in the area in the com-
pany of Brinken men who did not deny her claim.82
In his submission, Bill Harney provided a short ethnographic and com-
parative history of the ‘‘Big Sunday cult,’’ the colloquial term for the Kunapipi
(or Karwadi) ritual. Harney testified that ‘‘gang rape’’ and ‘‘murder’’ were
two customary penalties for the violation of men’s sacred grounds by unini-
tiated women.83 Harney argued that the sanctions were wholly within an an-
cient Aboriginal law. But he also noted that the rate with which they were
being used had risen dramatically because ‘‘contact with civilization tends to
make the native women disobey the laws and taboos of the tribe, and they
would pass over or near these taboo spots knowing they are protected by the
law, or the white people of that part, and so the natives seeing their greatest
weapon for law and order (increase, regeneration and clearing up of tribal dis-
putes) becoming useless by these women, become annoyed and use force.’’ 84
In Harney’s submission ‘‘contact with civilization’’ euphemistically figures a
host of material, sexual, and social exchanges occurring in the frontier, ex-
changes the Malakmalak men also note as relevant to their actions (‘‘come
back from Chinaman takem my thing’’).
Harney’s views about Big Sunday were influenced by emergent professional
anthropological perspectives on Kunapipi and related men’s ‘‘high cults.’’
Baldwin Spencer first described a regional variant of Kunapipi in 1914, de-
tailing its mythological dimensions and sexual imagery, but not mentioning
any ritual sex acts.85 It was not until 1937 that W. Lloyd Warner, a student of
the American anthropologist Robert H. Lowie and the British A. R. Radcliffe-
Brown, situated a full ethnographic account of Kunapipi in its broader mytho-
logical and ritual contexts. Based on his fieldwork from 1926 to 1929 among
the Murngin of Arnhem Land, Warner argued that the ritual use of sex was
both a legal sanction for the violation of the sacred ground and a part of
the sacred cult itself. Warner’s ethnography exemplified the means by which
anthropology deferred, rather than resolved, the sense of ritual sex. Loosely
following the lead of Emile Durkheim and Bronislaw Malinowski, Warner
cosmologized ritual as he desexualized sex, refashioning it as a symbolic, but
unpleasurable, part of ritual cosmogony. Warner argued that Kunapipi rituals,
and the Wawilak myth and ritual to which it properly belonged, were ‘‘fertility
rites’’ designed to ‘‘aid nature’’ in the reproduction of the conditions of social
life. Sex during these rituals was not about pleasure or violence. And it cer-
tainly was not an index of the Aboriginal male psyche—indeed, men had to

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 The Cunning of Recognition

be forced into practicing it. This is why, Warner argued, ‘‘the young man who
refuses to copulate with the woman in the fertility rite of Gunabibi is scolded
and told that he will be sick and make his partner ill’’ and that ‘‘scarcity and
sickness’’ were ‘‘likely to result.’’ 86
In the 1940s, the first students of A. P. Elkin, Ronald and Catherine
Berndt, followed up Warner’s initial studies. Ronald Berndt devoted a full-
length monograph (published in 1951) to the ceremonial and mythic com-
plex. Ronald and Catherine Berndt jointly authored another text on the sexual
practices and beliefs of Western Arnhem Land groups.87 In the latter mono-
graph, the Berndts supported Warner’s general view of sex and sexual mean-
ings in Kunapipi and his detachment of ritual meaning from ritual practice,
the referential and cosmological from the carnal and corporeal: ‘‘The sexual
content of [religious] dogma, as represented in its mythology and enacted
through ritual, is obviously extensive; but its basis of sex refers principally to
fertility and to the increase of the natural species, and not to eroticism.’’ 88
Perhaps the most radical attempt to displace sexual pleasure and violence
as the goal and referent of ritual sex was made by W. E. H. Stanner in his essay
‘‘Religion, Totemism, and Symbolism.’’ This essay was based on his fieldwork
in the Daly River and Port Keats regions in the early 1930s but was not pub-
lished until 1965, some thirty years after the Daly River cases were closed. In
this work, Stanner confronts and attempts to counter public perceptions of
Aboriginal ritual sexuality as erotic in nature or end. His aim was to distin-
guish between sex acts and customary law and ritual acts and ritual meanings.
To do this he differentiated the cosmological aspects of Aboriginal high cul-
ture from what he called its ‘‘vehicle or symbolizing means.’’ 89 According to
Stanner, from Aboriginal men’s perspective, sex was simply a symbolic tool,
one of a number of powerful and transformative corporeal and noncorporeal
actions and substances of which they chose to vehiculate their cosmological
values: ‘‘The vehicles or symbolisms are not themselves the symbols . . . the
things to which the symbols point are metaphysical objects’’; they are about
ontological questions such as ‘‘man’s being.’’ 90 Semen, sweat, blood, songs,
and clay penetrated initiates’ bodies and sacramentally reformed them into
ancestral beings.91 All these substances created intimate corporeal relations
between humans and landscapes, transferred ancestral powers, and conveyed
cosmological meaning. In other published and unpublished works, Stanner
further questions the inherent sexual symbolism of ritual paraphernalia. He
argues that in an indigenous context highly disturbed by European and Chi-
nese settlement, the ‘‘bull-roarer has come to signify the phallus, or has come

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

to be associated with sexuality’’ even though ‘‘ab initio . . . the business of the
bull-roarer is to roar’’ not to symbolize the phallus.92 In sum, sexual products
were merely one of many related bodily products. Sexual objects were equiva-
lent to, rather than the general equivalent of, these other bodily exchanges.
In portraying sex as merely an equivalent, Stanner enunciated the grounds of
a radical critique of the status of sex in the sex acts riveting the nation and
discipline.
Although Stanner deprivileged sex as the final interpretant of corporeal
and symbolic intercourses in indigenous society, he reestablished it as the
final interpretant of bodily and social exchanges in civil society. According to
Stanner, neither Aboriginal subjects nor Aboriginal cosmology (‘‘the Dream-
ing’’) could take their rightful place in Australian civil society unless a more
suitable vehicle than sex for symbolic locomotion were found. Citizenship
would elude Aborigines until cosmology and sexuality were separated and
properly relegated to their public and private domains. And, in so arguing,
Stanner privileged sex in relation to other corporeal substances and exchanges
in civil society and removed nonnormative (from the perspective of settler
society) sex from public and semipublic semiotic circulations. Stanner re-
confirmed commonsense civil distinctions among sex acts, publics, privates,
and sacramentalities rather than pursuing the difference of indigenous cor-
poreality and using it to critique dominant forms of intimacy and publicness
and, thereby, contributed to the slow reformation of the place and function
of sexuality in Aboriginal society. In a civil form, sex would become familial-
ized; would index the difference between the worlds of politics and domes-
ticity; and would be used to create families, clans, and territorial associations
through maternal and paternal ties. And ritual would be cosmologized.
W. E. H. Stanner did not, however, share Bill Harney’s confidence about
the origin of Big Sunday. In 1958, he reported that he had been ‘‘the first to
see this cult [Kunapipi] in operation’’ twenty-five years earlier in the Daly
River region, ‘‘since it had been reported by Sir Baldwin Spencer.’’ 93 In his life
history of Durmugam, a Nangiomeri man, Stanner described the spread of
Big Sunday services into the Daly River region. Durmugam was born circa
1895, about seventy miles from the Daly River police station. According to
Stanner, Durmugam remembered little about his early childhood other than
his father and mother dying in the local mines, ‘‘endless bloody fights between
the river and back-country tribes, and numbers of drink-sodden Aborigines
lying out in the rain.’’ 94 As a young man, Durmugam traveled throughout
the Daly River region and down to the Victorian River Downs district, a re-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

gion rife with tensions among indigenous groups about how to respond to
the encroachment of whites into their country. Older indigenous men and
women knew the stakes could be high. In 1884, just eleven years before Dur-
mugam was born, police and settlers led a massacre on and nearly wiped out
the Malakmalak after some members of this linguistic group and others at-
tacked and murdered several white miners. It was in the Victoria River Downs
district that Durmugam and other Nangiomeri and Wagaman men ‘‘came for
the first time into intimate association with an Aboriginal High Culture’’ and
were initiated into ‘‘the religious cult, Kunapipi.’’ 95 Durmugam traveled back
to the Daly River, playing a key role in the introduction of Big Sunday rituals
into the region during the mid-1930s.
Here we see emerging two very different types and modalities of indige-
nous agency in the Daly River area. On the one hand, the men Stanner worked
with used a technology of affect and dignity to persuade him of the sense of
their practices and to incite him to produce a new discourse of culture and
sexuality embedded in the real-time social politics of the frontier. On the other
hand, indigenous men and women struggled among themselves to create a
new internal discourse of resistance to settler encroachment. Indeed, in 1965,
Ronald Berndt would attribute the spread of the Kunapipi rite into the Daly
River region directly to the earlier 1884 massacre, arguing that Kunapipi lent
men the means for solidifying a counterinsurgency.96
Although Stanner disputed the specifics of Berndt’s argument, he generally
agreed with him that the culture Durmugam was initiated into was initialized
by settlers and reinitialized by local indigenous women and men. Stanner sug-
gests that peanut farmer Harkins did not arrive just in time to see the vibrant
core of Daly River culture passing into extinction, but rather to see the evo-
lution of men’s ceremonial life under the torsions of a Christian colonialism
gone horribly awry. The moniker ‘‘Big Sunday’’ provided an uncanny clue to
the origin of the ceremony for those who dared read it. Stanner confirmed a
nation’s worst nightmares—the ‘‘fertility Mother cult’’ sprouted up, like the
flu and venereal disease, in response to European settlement. The good and the
bad of this new high culture, Stanner claims, is the miscegenous progeny not
of bodies but of beliefs—capitalism, humanism, and Christianity perversely
folded outside themselves, mistranslated, misheard, or maybe heard all too
well. White men were always already involved in the murders and sexual as-
saults they witnessed because they had created the very practice that terror-
ized them. Stanner states:

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Before I had heard a word of Kunabibi I had been told that Angamunggi [All
Father] had ‘‘gone away.’’ Many evidences were cited that he no longer ‘‘looked
after’’ the people: the infertility of the women (they were in fact riddled by
gonorrhea), the spread of sickness, the dwindling of game among them. The
cult assumed the local form of a cult of Karwadi, by which the bullroarer, the
symbol of the All-Mother, had been known in the days of the All-Father. Kar-
wadi became the provenance of the mixed but connected elements which I
term the new High Culture.97

Stanner did not have to refer directly to the other form of sexuality haunt-
ing the frontier for his readers to understand who was responsible for the fact
that women were ‘‘riddled by gonorrhea.’’ As I mentioned above, Aborigi-
nal ritual sex was not the only frontier sex act making national headlines.
The sexual relations between white and Asian men and Aboriginal women
shocked and troubled the nation. The ‘‘half-caste problem’’ underscored the
potential injustice of punishing black men but not white men for their illicit
and illegal sex acts.98 Bill Harney, who had several female Aboriginal lovers,
scoffed at the suggestion that interracial sex could be regulated. ‘‘What then?
Walk around amid the budding belles in a fit of sexual repression, when all
the while they laugh at the ‘good one’ as a stupid fool? Not on your life! The
pioneer makes the country by using the gifts within it to his needs.’’ 99 In 1943,
this regional problem would become a national scandal with the publication
of Xavier Herbert’s critical account of the racial politics and hypocrisies of
northern miscegenation in his fictional account Capricornia. What surprise
then that northern newspapers published calls, if not for a public account-
ing, then for a mass public confession. Inserted into a public register, sex be-
came a public matter, reproduced within the textual strictures of public rea-
son—that public matters be about a hypostacized ‘‘we’’ released from ‘‘the
world’’ of interested social status, risking truth. In the Northern Standard Nan
Utarra remarked: ‘‘Each and everyone of us has a dual side to his make up—
ah’h’h. The side we would have the world believe us to be -a’h- and the side we
know ourselves to be—ah’h. F’r instance -a’h—take the question of the native
and his woman—ah’h—there’s hardly a man here -ah’h- who at some time
or other ah’h has not had dealings with them—ah’h. Yet the vast majority of
men -ah’h—would bury their heads very deep in the sand of Dugong Beach
-ah’h’h—should their progeny claim -ah’h—their natural fathers -ah’h.’’ 100
Many state employees were as appalled by white male settler sexuality as
by Aboriginal sexuality. In the same frontier where peanut farmer Harkins

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stumbled onto Kunapipi grounds, Constable Turner stumbled into army bar-
racks. In a memo to the director of Native Affairs dated 28 May 1942, Daly
River Constable J. T. Turner strongly protested military conduct in the Daly
River region. After military officers complained to Turner that they had con-
tracted venereal disease from local indigenous women, Turner ‘‘made en-
quiries and was informed by the Aboriginals that ‘the soldier men were no
good.’ Four had had connection with the one lubra, one after the other. ‘All
same Dog.’ One soldier finish another ‘jump alonga top same lubra.’ ‘Sol-
dier been catchem every lubra. Every night want lubra.’ ’’ Turner was ‘‘also
informed that some of these ‘selected men of this Independent Force’ had also
been having connections with young girl . . . but 13 years of age.’’ 101
Savage settler sexuality complicated epistemological, moral, and practical
aspects of state function, which most clearly were seen in trials such as the in-
famous case of Tuckiar v. the King. Heard in the Northern Territory Supreme
Court, the trial of the Woodah Island indigenous man, Tuckiar, involved his
murder of a police officer. Tuckiar spoke no English, and in the course of his
arraignment he confessed twice, the second time indicating he had acted in
self-defense after the police officer had repeatedly sexually assaulted his wife.
Tuckiar was sentenced to death after the presiding judge told the jury that
they should discount Tuckiar’s allegations of sexual improprieties because
they would denigrate the reputation of the dead police officer. In the midst
of public outrage, the conviction was eventually overturned by the federal
High Court. However, Tuckiar died en route to his home, and many scholars
speculate that he was murdered by settlers or rival indigenous men after being
dropped by the police just outside Darwin.102 Rather than what the North-
ern Territory judge would have liked, the absolutely imaginable possibility
that settler sex lay at the root of frontier violence destabilized verdict after
verdict. But even this determination was destabilized by the notion of native
calculation.
Constable Turner suggests how this might be in his police submissions
about the murder of Jesse. He begins by agreeing with Stanner’s general posi-
tion that Malakmalak men’s ritual practices have a settler origin and orien-
tation. In letters addressed to his superiors on 7 and 8 August 1940, Con-
stable Turner goes beyond simply describing the suspects and their murder
weapons.103 He adds what he considers to be critical sociological data—the
disturbing response of the ‘‘Mullick-mullick’’ men when he informs them that
they would be arrested for murder: ‘‘They both [the two Malakmalak men]
appeared nothing would be done [to them] in the matter and proud of the

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matter.’’ 104 More sinister yet, the ultimate target of the Malakmalak men’s
spears may not have been the Aboriginal woman killed. One of her com-
panions, targeted but merely wounded, was the former wife of an Aboriginal
police tracker, Bull-bull, who was using his office to protect his own sexu-
ality.105 ‘‘I may mention that this is the third murder of Lubras in this District
and the excuse has been by the Murderers this Sacred Ground, as they have
been or understand nothing will be done to them as considered a Tribal Affair,
and this Mullick-mullick Tribe have been known as Blood lustful Aborigi-
nals.’’ 106
For Turner, the Kunapipi ritual was nothing less than a cunning use
of a ceremonial masquerade for disciplining Aboriginal collaborators. The
Kunapipi ritual mocked the state’s ability to discern culture from conniv-
ance and was a testimony to the uncanny ability of Aborigines to take advan-
tage of the good intentions of settlers. These views were not Turner’s alone.
W. E. H. Stanner would himself describe the ceremonial leader of Kunapipi,
Durmugam, as an ‘‘agent provocateur of the Daly River’’ who used ‘‘knowl-
edge gained in court and gaol to instruct other blacks in the limits of police
power’’ and who was ‘‘adept in playing white against both white and black.’’ 107
When Constable Turner penned his remarks to Weddell he might have been
thinking of conversations he had or heard about others having with Stanner
in the 1930s and 40s. Indeed, throughout his writings Stanner foregrounds
the agency of Aboriginal men and women in refashioning their cultural be-
liefs and practices in the shadow of an often vicious settlement. But wherever
and however Turner gained his opinion, indigenous male rituals were for him
little more than the diabolical deceit of ‘‘Blood lustful Aboriginals,’’ their ‘‘ex-
cuse for rape and murder.’’ Aboriginal men’s high culture was on the rise not
because of the functional integrity, more or less, of indigenous society at the
frontier, nor for that matter because women had violated a new high cere-
mony, but simply because Aboriginal men ‘‘understand nothing will be done
to them.’’ 108
Constable Turner provides us with some evidence of the embodied nature
of the epistemological and moral dilemma that I am trying to understand
here. He did not simply face the problem of knowing whether or not the
Malakmalak men acted on the basis of little more than tribal law, nor whether
or not this action involved other white men. He and others faced the impos-
sible closure of rational knowledge and moral sense. And he experienced the
state’s complicity in his epistemological and moral dilemma; the dismissal of
his travail by state functionaries who did not face the problem entre-nous.

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Turner’s experience of his moral sense as subjected to an immoral state ma-

chinery is signaled by his grammar of subordination (may I ). But the pain and
anxiety of his position appears in the register of paranoia and official neglect
in other letters.109 But outside the state machine, Turner might well have used
another genre, entailing pubs and police headquarters as spaces of another
hypothetical imperative—Canberra should not dictate frontier policy when
they knew little to nothing about the real conditions of frontier life. If he did
so speak, he echoed similar positions being advanced in the regional press.110
What I am getting at here is the need to take seriously the corporeal me-
diation of state policy. Zygmunt Bauman and others have pointed out that a
bureaucratic form of moral mediation made the Holocaust possible. We might
deploy this insight in a related way. Turner complied with state policy. But
the disjunction between the policy and his embodied moral feeling, exacer-
bated during moments such as the ‘‘Murder of Jesse,’’ incited various forms
of speech in various contexts; and, insofar as it did, this disjunction incited
a discursive otherwise that circulated in the public sphere—a counterfactual
national normativity. We do not have to agree with Turner that face-to-face
encounters are truer forms of social being to be able to appreciate how these
various forms of textual mediation proliferated types of talk that reformed as
they moved across provisionally formed social space—letters oriented to pri-
vate consumption, administrative memos to superiors, or conversations with
mates in pubs, church, at work.
‘‘What have we produced?’’ When all is said and done, Kunapipi and other
variants of men’s high culture were neither local nor regional, neither indige-
nous nor settler. They were truly national rituals, international affairs, for
which neither anthropological theory nor national ideology was prepared. In
suggesting settlement’s implication in ritual rape, Stanner and others ripped
away the comfortable narrative that settler and indigenous societies were en-
gaged in a clash of values, had different systems of belief, morality, and value,
indeed, that there was any simple, morally grounded differentiation between
‘‘them’’ and ‘‘us.’’ Settler sexuality and settler immorality erased the clean line
between the ‘‘horrible rites’’ of native society and the quotidian practices of
settler society. Settlers did not just think, look, imagine, and feel implicated
in indigenous sex acts as critical judges, but they did this also as critical actors:
they knew it, they were the condition of it, they did no differently.
Once again I could close with a verdict. In 1940, an unidentified person
noted in the court records that, although the ‘‘Mulluk Mulluk’’ murderer was

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

found to have been ‘‘provoked’’ by the women’s ‘‘deliberate infringement of

native custom,’’ the ‘‘prisoner [was] found guilty.’’ 111 The judge sentenced him
to prison and ordered that the ‘‘tribal area [was] to be rid of the influence of a
recent introduction the Karawadte ritual.’’ 112 In the same year, C.A. Carrodus
modified government policy: ‘‘The Minister has now agreed to rescind the
ruling referred to in its general application. In future, the directive will only
apply in the case of relatively uncivilized natives who live more or less perma-
nently in remote areas, who are not under any form of permanent European
control, assistance or supervision, and who depend for internal stability on
the free exercise of their own native customs.’’ 113
But at this point it should be clear that Turner was hardly the only per-
son talking. Similar scenes were repeated throughout the northwest region
and beyond. Anthropologists were corresponding with missionary and gov-
ernment agents running the settlements in which they worked. These con-
versations created a wide field of inter-Aboriginal practice stretching to the
far north, including to the parents of contemporary Belyuen (Wagaitj). Bel-
yuen and neighboring land claims open this archive. That is, the case is never
closed. It just circulates in a different social space and time.
I should not have been surprised then to learn that not long after the Daly
River murder case was closed it reopened to the north of Daly River. The
small, understaffed Natives Affairs Branch hired Jack Murray and Bill Harney
to round up the Wagaitj camping throughout the Cox Peninsula and con-
solidate them on a new inland government compound, Delissaville. Harney
was appointed soon after as the temporary acting superintendent of the com-
pound. He and Murray became fast friends, and this mateship was no small
part of the reason why Murray was appointed superintendent of Delissaville
soon after Christmas 1941. Although Jack Murray did not collaborate with any
famous anthropologists or write popular memoirs, he did leave behind sev-
eral daily journals and a trail of administrative memos and letters that suggest
some of the personal and practical travails he faced administering state in-
digenous policy, as well as the personal and practical travails of Wagaitj men
and women deemed his wards.
In his journal and personal letters, Murray does not appear to have been
an unusually harsh or intolerant man for his time. And he seems to have
had a rather average interest in local mythic and ritual life. Anthropologists
(including A. P. Elkin), royal dignitaries, war correspondents, public radio
producers, international ballet stars—all trooped through Delissaville (later

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 The Cunning of Recognition

called Belyuen) documenting Wagaitj expressive culture, kinship and mar-

riage customs, and ritual and myth, more of which I will discuss in chap-
ters 5 and 6. Murray notes their activities with a similar set of brief remarks
embedded in his notation of the administration of the settlement—digging
latrines, planting cassava, repairing motor engines.

(Thur May 14th 1942)

Had a visit from two war correspondents who made some recordings of natives
singing and dancing also Mr. Sweeney stopped & went away with same party,
taking Jacky Wola & Tommy Immabul with him for a few to help round up
lepers.114

(Sun Feb 14th 1943)

Had young man’s initiation ceremony Military from West & party of officers
came to watch same

(Sun April 18th 1943)

[missing text] man Tommy Burradjup was circumcised [missing text] of rations
arrived.

Little about local ritual activity captures the writerly attention of Murray. He
neither encourages nor discourages informal camp corroborees, young men’s
initiations, or mortuary rituals. Amid this dense cultural traffic, Murray spent
his time motivating local men and women to work in camp gardens and seek-
ing relief from his own boredom and isolation.115
Murray’s writerly passion centered on the war effort (organizing a Black
Watch, patrolling the coastal waters for downed Japanese and American
pilots) and on the sexuality of his wards (Aboriginal men ‘‘pimping’’ female
relatives, Aboriginal women making ‘‘liaisons’’ with undesirable European
men on the peninsula).116 The sex of his wards made Murray’s life meaningful,
pulled it from the mire of the everyday, the grinding of routine, boredom. We
should not, therefore, be surprised that Murray’s interest in Wagaitj culture
is pricked when he is told that a number of local men were making ‘‘Sunday
business . . . demands . . . on three girls’’ under the influence of visiting Daly
River men. If what Turner knew about Big Sunday was gained from Stanner,
then what Murray knew he probably learned from his mate Bill Harney over
beers at Delissaville or from Wagaitj women themselves who appear as stra-
tegic partners in a complex local intra-Aboriginal political field.117 What we
know is that Murray quickly intervened, calling in the Darwin police and a

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local missionary whom Stanner had also encountered at the Daly River and
at Port Keats.118 But when the missionary requested that Murray send one of
the women across the harbor for questioning, Murray responds by citing ad-
ministrative role and protocol: ‘‘Re sending Alice Bruck Bruck over to Darwin
for these matters ‘we’ want to clear up. Personally, I consider any matter con-
cerning this girl are matters that also concern this Dept, and therefore should
be dealt with by the Dept or some person authorized by the Dept.’’ 119 In the
end, the Daly River men were sent back to the Daly River mission, and the
local men were exiled to a distant Aboriginal settlement.120
But Murray never mastered the sexual activities of his wards. In 1942, when
the Japanese bombing of Darwin began, the Aboriginal men and women sta-
tioned at Delissaville were forcibly relocated to Katherine. Here, once again,
Murray learns that ‘‘blackfella business’’ has or is about to be started up.121
And once again Murray tries to suppress the practice by relocating the men
he considers the main instigators. This time, however, Murray’s supervisor,
Vincent White, intervenes, sending a strongly worded memo to Murray criti-
cizing him for interfering in tribal customs: ‘‘The removal of these two natives
to Alice Springs has caused considerable trouble here . . . [the male leader’s]
place in the Wargite tribe is such that the old men deem him to be important
and indispensable in the excercise of tribal ceremonies, so essential to sustain
the community during its period of exile in Katherine.’’ 122
From the textual fragments he left behind, we cannot say for certain
whether or not Murray bitterly reflected about his treatment by his superiors
to his friend Bill Harney or others. If he did, it would hardly be surprising not
to find such bitterness and frustration in the official memoranda he sent to
his supervisors. Even Stretton carefully couches his criticism of state policy in
a polite register. But the minor literatures that Murray, Turner, Stretton, and
others produced strongly suggest that answering the question of when a white
person was involved was neither simple nor simply an academic concern. The
ability of Aboriginal men to get away with sex and murder at least frustrated,
if it did not humiliate, Turner, Murray, and many other mid-level government
employees. The fact that their agency was impaired—that their ability to ma-
nipulate the state apparatus was impeded by strategically minded indigenous
men—may well have made their blood boil and soured their view of many of
their fellow white citizens. Of course white people were involved! They knew.
They watched, listened. They were constrained from acting. And, insofar as
they were, they were symbolically blackened.

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 The Cunning of Recognition

THE ARCHIVE OF SYMPATHY

The lure of anthropological reason seems clear. Eliminating the sex haunt-
ing the nation through critical understanding promised not only to bolster
liberal ideology at a moment of its seeming demise, but also to lift it up (Auf-
hebung) to a new tolerant form. But in their progressive call for the extension
of citizenship to civilized natives, anthropologists and liberal government ad-
ministrators and settlers initiated a double termination. Insofar as civilization
was an execution, something to be carried out, conducted, and conduced, this
movement, on the one hand, detached indigenous persons from their local
social and cultural practices and, on the other, inscribed in a national archive
this disciplined culture and social order as the authentic space of a (disgraced)
indigenous Australia.
The trouble is that anthropologists, if not missionaries and government
employees, did not want to get rid of sex or violence simply, absolutely,
and without trace. The ambivalence of anthropology was exemplified in
A. P. Elkin’s work. Perhaps reflecting his dual career as rector in the Anglican
church and professional ethnologist, Elkin evidenced a very conflicted moral
assessment of indigenous social organization and cultural belief because of
its use and configuration of gender and sexuality. According to Elkin, men’s
ritual treatment of women caused them to ‘‘live in terror’’ and to exhibit a
sexual laxity that was easily put to immoral use by whites and Asians.123 Thus,
no more and no less than Fison and Howitt and the wider protectionist com-
munity, Elkin was in a deeply conflicted relationship to the perceived gender
and sexual economy of Aboriginal ceremony. Back and forth Elkin went, chas-
tising the narrowness of the public’s horizon of sexual normativity, even as
he reassured that same public that ‘‘the worst’’ of these practices have passed.
After viewing the forms and queries of these settler encounters, the tempta-
tion is to see two European worlds in the northwestern Top End region. Some-
thing distinguishes the practices of social workers, government, and capital-
ists, bushwackers and ethnologists. For instance, one could distinguish the
focus of missionaries, government officials, and capitalists from that of eth-
nologists, government officials, writers, and filmmakers studying Aboriginal
‘‘traditions.’’ The focus of the former seems more on the management of the
Aboriginal social self to the end of transforming that self through work and
belief. The latter seems, in contrast, to be focused on the Aboriginal man-
agement of social life in and of itself; that is, for knowledge’s sake. Thus, on
one hand, we see whites managing black social relations and, on the other,

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 Sex Rites, Civil Rights

whites studying black social management. But by now we should see this as
temptation indeed. For these worlds existed in the same real spacetime and,
in critical ways, were interested in the same thing—gathering social data and
modifying social relations—and relied on each other for the collection and
processing of information and for critical interventions in social praxis.
These government officials, missionary ‘‘zealots,’’ ethnologists, bushwack-
ers, and capitalists produced a saturated but uneven field of forms and queries,
of cultural interventions and evaluations, through which indigenous women
and men moved and maneuvered. The memos, camp rolls, clan and kinship
designations, and so forth compiled by camp supervisors, medical nurses,
and doctors, and the interests and disinterests shown by a host of other per-
sons in local indigenous cultural practices, are the past from which indigenous
and nonindigenous men and women draw and evaluate contemporary local
traditions. Some of these lists and queries survive. Some were never written
down. Some are remembered on scraps of paper. Others are remembered by
older women and men at Belyuen, Daly River, and Port Keats who have pub-
lished their own stories and who have told me and a host of others about their
memories of the sexual history of whites and blacks—the latest white men
and women working in the thoroughly saturated field of ‘‘field notes,’’ many
of which lie scattered in boxes on the floors of my offices.
Throughout the long duration of this inquiry, Aboriginal women and men
have received neither a ‘‘yes’’ nor a ‘‘no’’ to their cultural practices. They have
instead encountered a prohibitive interest in their traditional practices. On
the one hand, even by the overt prohibition of certain social practices and
ceremonial complexes missionaries and camp supervisors were likely to in-
clude a gesture of interest in these same practices. Demands that Aboriginal
persons transform sexual and erotic components of ritual practices, abandon
polygamy and marriage between much older men and younger women, came
via some understanding of those same practices, even in the simple sense of
understanding to what they referred. This understanding might be purely in-
strumental (seen as the best means of accomplishing a social transformation)
or purely accidental (the ‘‘against which’’ the prohibition becomes legible),
but in either case it wrote over the prohibition with interest.
On the other hand, interest in traditional social practices and ceremonial
complexes frequently included some form of prohibition. Often this prohibi-
tion was an overt act of repression. Some aspect of a social practice or cere-
monial complex was considered ‘‘repugnant,’’ recorded in field notes but sup-
pressed in practice and in field reports. Ethnologists had many reasons for

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 The Cunning of Recognition

these overt acts of suppression. Some scholars seemed to think that it was in
the interests of Aboriginal persons to emphasize the philosophical versus the
erotic or sexual side of ceremonies—even though ritual uses of gender and
sexuality were considered traditional components of Aboriginal (read: male)
‘‘high culture.’’ Others, following the lead of Fison and Howitt, seemed to
think that the sexual ‘‘perversions’’ they witnessed in ritual and social orga-
nization were an effect of colonial contact and, therefore, excisable from dis-
cussion of precontact traditions. Still others documented, to the best of their
knowledge, the linkages between culture and sexuality. This latter group of
scholars would probably not have considered their work an act of prohibition.
But if we examine the syntax of their query, the past tense of their interest
writes over the present with historical time: How did your parents do it? What
were the old ways?
On the final hand of this grotesque body are the lawyers, police officers, and
anthropologists who now scour the national archive to defend contemporary
indigenous persons by authenticating a contemporary practice as customary.
In June 1980, G. M. Borders, a solicitor defending a Port Keats man against the
charge of rape, sent W. E. H. Stanner an inquiry about whether the ‘‘passing
[women] amongst the men’’ was a tribal custom carried out among groups
living near Port Keats.124

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 What troubles me most is an attitude of mind that could come
to prevail amongst white Australians: a feeling of irritation ap-
parently based on a conviction that we are saddled with the re-
sponsibility for problems not really of our making, and by their
nature probably insoluble. The underlying thought is twofold:
no one now alive has hurt the Aborigines or their legitimate
interests, and no one contemplates deliberately doing so.
—W. E. H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming

Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard, a conservative elected

in 1996, has rejected the demands of Aborigines for a formal
government apology for past mistreatment as well as calls for
a civil rights treaty. Today’s march started from an intersec-
tion near his official water-front residence, but Mr. Howard did
not join the gathering. The Reconciliation Council acknowl-
edges that its own extensive research shows majority support
for Mr. Howard’s position. The surveys show 58 percent oppose
special rights for Aborigines to reflect their historic position.
Some 62 percent reject an apology now for previous wrongs,
some fearing retrospective compensation claims.
—‘‘Australians March in Support of Aborigines,’’ New York
Times, 29 May 2000

4 / Shamed States

COURTLY RECOGNITION

In 1992 and 1996 in the cases Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland and The
Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, the Australian High Court considered
reasoned arguments and passionate pleas that it decide decisively the legal
status of traditional indigenous native title in the modern multicultural state.
But supporters and opponents of state recognition of native title, including
the members of the High Court, did not confine their rhetoric to a strictly legal
discourse. They moved between two different registers, a legal language of
national and international precedent, sovereignty, rights, and fiduciary duties
and a moral language of national history, memory, responsibility, and com-
passion. Some of the historical origin and texture of these registers was pre-
sented in the preceding chapters.

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 The Cunning of Recognition

In the years that followed the 1992 Mabo judgment, Australian subjects sent
themselves a national postcard addressed to the general question of historical
accountability: How should Australian nation-building be remembered and
from whose perspective? What would this nation-building look like from the
perspective of Aboriginal history? Would it seem a bloody, illegitimate ordeal,
a rotten deal forged on the back of blind prejudice and material greed? In-
deed, should the eventfulness of colonialism be figured in the past tense? Did
colonialism happen or was it happening? In the present, could the nation—
or each and every person within that nation—be responsible for events of the
past? And could responsibility be decided decisively in the manner of a court
case? Could copping the sins of the past liberate the present from that evil,
or would it create new problems—opening, for instance, the state’s coffers to
reparation claims? On radio and television, in beer and parliament halls, in
newspaper columns and among columns of cheering and jeering demonstra-
tors, in the midst of the Hanson scandal, the Stolen Generation scandal, the
Native Title debates, and the Republic referendum: public pundits, parliamen-
tarians, and other citizens debated a new counterintuitive model of national
cohesion registered in these two High Court decisions. They argued about
whether a patriotic nationalism could arise from the sackcloth and ashes of a
public accounting of a nation’s shame and about what the implications of this
new form of nationalism on statutory law and private and public property
was. Not even the question of whether Australia should remain a part of the
British Commonwealth seemed to matter to Australians as much as negoti-
ating the truth and place of their shame. As Meaghan Morris has noted, ‘‘if a
popular national debate was underway by the mid-1990s, then Mabo, rather
than the monarchy, was its focus.’’ 1
Finding native title amid national history was, therefore, not simply a
juridical task. It was a national referendum, a litmus test, on whether Aus-
tralia would finally recognize and take responsibility for a population who
had suffered, and continued to suffer, from the dominant national dream.
But if, as I will suggest, courts and publics do not blame shameful events on
bad people but on the good intentions of good people, how are the good in-
tentions of present people protected? As courts and public lament the long
history of bigotry and malice masked as rationality and public reason, how
do they negotiate the dilemma of capturing real justice in real discourse and
narrative time without prompting the appearance of the same interpretant
hovering over native title or criminal law judgments. This judgment is just
(unless[although] . . . it may appear retrospectively as repugnant or shame-

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 Shamed States

ful). How, in short, do court justices side-step the problem of accounting for
justice in the breach and shadow of the court’s own repugnant and shameful
history?
I am moving here from the perspective of the cynical subject as discussed
by Peter Sloterdijk. I want, however, to shift away from a discussion of the
cynical forms of subjective inhabitations of the law, not because they are un-
important but because they miss a hard stone in the kidneys of liberal multi-
culturalism. These forms suggest that liberal subjects know the particular
interests hidden behind liberal ideology, but perpetuate it through an ironic
or cynical stance toward it (a postideological world in which people know
what they are doing and do it anyway). Therefore, instead of following a dis-
cussion of original forms, I want to build on the work of Slavoj Žižek, Gayatri
Spivak, and Jacqueline Rose, who note that the ideals of liberalism are not
about knowledge and its exposure to truth and revelation, but about the fan-
tasies necessary to act in a liberal society and how these fantasies are protected
and projected into social life through specific textual practices.2 The critique
of liberalism does not begin with where it fails or where subjects know or do
not know this failure, but rather where it seems to be succeeding.
In centering primarily on an analysis of the texts and contexts of the Mabo
and Wik decisions, I seek to understand the role that the discourse and af-
fect of shame played in making an expansion of legal discriminatory devices
seem the advent of the law of recognition or a rupture of older models of
monocultural nationalism and the grounds for national optimism, renewal,
and rebirth. I pay close attention to one aspect of national life, the justificatory
discourses and functions of the Australian High Court and its genre-specific
features. By situating these two decisions in broader national and transna-
tional discourses of postcolonialism and multiculturalism, I try to account
for the captivating nature of this specific juridical stance on national life.3 I
hope to demonstrate how liberal legal subjects manage to protect themselves
through narrative devices, in the moment of discrimination, from the experi-
ence of future negative judgment; how they are able to be optimistic, to believe
that this time they’ve gotten it right, that this time history will be ruptured,
and that this will be remembered as a time of social enlightenment. I also
discuss the political and social implications of the liberal desire to escape, as
individuals or as the authors and proponents of social projects, the uncon-
ditional of the future perfect proposition: ‘‘We will have gone on record as
having spoken and felt our times (lines) in ways and domains we never would
have imagined.’’ ‘‘We will have been wrong.’’

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 The Cunning of Recognition

At the onset, it is useful to remember several very general points about

‘‘native title.’’ Native title is a legal concept from British common law refer-
ring to a type of beneficial title or ownership. Native title is distinct from the
radical title the Crown claims at the moment of colonization (concomitant of
sovereignty). From the perspective of the High Court, neither Mabo nor Wik
concerned the sovereignty of the Crown, but rather only whether indigenous
Australians had this form of title and what it was grounded in, and thus what
could extinguish it. But note: Aboriginal Australians did not have native title
prior to English settlement. Whatever practices and beliefs organized indige-
nous bodies and lands prior to settlement, these were not the thing we now
call ‘‘native title.’’ Moreover, aspects of the recognition of native title touched
on in this chapter are particular to Australian national law and state history,
although they are embedded in and address, explicitly and implicitly, interna-
tional law and world history. The history and consequence of Australian forms
of native title recognition differ from other states, which recognize this con-
cept as legally binding. Some of these differences emerged as national courts
struggled to rectify emergent common law precedent with emergent com-
monsense social standards. In Australia, for example, native title is seen as
grounded in the customary beliefs and practices of indigenous people, be-
cause by the time native title was recognized the anthropological concept of
customary law (as discussed in the last chapter) was a commonsense truth.
Thus, today native title in Australia can be extinguished if the genealogical
and occupancy relationship to land is severed and, in addition, if the custom-
ary beliefs and practices of the group claiming native title are severed more
or less. In the United States and Canada, legal proof of native title rests on
demonstrating a genealogical connection to the original owners of the land
and continued occupancy or use of the land not on demonstrating a cultural
continuity with these original owners. This legal grounding of native title re-
flects nineteenth-century notions of usufruct. But although the law of recog-
nition is not grounded in the performance of cultural continuity in the United
States, it is supplemented by public accounts of the justice of granting ‘‘spe-
cial rights’’ to native Americans who appear to be too culturally and socially
like nonnative Americans. Finally, in Brazil courts demand some proof of dis-
tinct cultural difference as the grounds for the legal recognition of customary
native title rights and interests. The indigenous people of Brazil face the ques-
tion of the commonsense meaning of difference. But they are not compelled
to demonstrate an unbroken connection between contemporary beliefs and
practices and the beliefs and practices of their genealogical ancestors.

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 Shamed States

LEGAL DISCRIMINATION

In Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland (hereafter Mabo), the nation-state’s

highest juridical body considered a case from a representative of ‘‘a people’’
in whose vicious colonization the common law was implicated and whose
continuing structural impoverishment was widely discussed in national and
transnational public spheres. On behalf of a Torres Strait Islander group,
Eddie Mabo claimed that his native title had never been extinguished and,
therefore, that he and his group retained proprietary rights over their land.
Up until this case, the Australian court had rejected the claim that indigenous
Australians had had sufficient social organization and the proper cultural be-
liefs to have evolved property interests (native title) in Australian lands at the
moment of colonization.4
In a defining moment of nation-time, on 3 June 1992 the court broke with
tradition in a six-to-one decision that overturned the doctrine that Austra-
lian was terra nullius (a land belonging to no one) at the point of settlement,
and decided instead that Aboriginal Australians had and had retained native
title interests in the law. Where the Australian state had not explicitly extin-
guished native title, Aboriginal Australians had and still held that title if they
maintained the traditional customs, beliefs, and practices that created the
substance of its difference. The judicial majority argued that it was no longer
tolerable to make sovereignty contingent on representing native people as ‘‘so
low in the scale of social organization’’ that it is ‘‘idle to impute to such people
some shadow of the rights known to our law.’’ 5 Indeed, they argued that the
manner in which such representations had been used in legal theory to carry
colonial dispossession into practical effect constituted ‘‘the darkest aspect of
the history of the nation.’’ 6
In response to the Mabo decision, public pressure, and its own political
strategy, the Labour government passed in 1993 the federal Native Title Act,
which legislated the mechanisms by which indigenous groups could claim
land based on their native title rights to it. The Native Title Act translated
aspects of the High Court decision into statutory law, and in the process ac-
knowledged the validity of native title but demanded, as the condition of its
recognition, that claimants establish their descent from the original inhabi-
tants of the land under claim, the nature of customary law for that land, their
continued allegiance to that customary law, and their continued occupation of
the land. Liberated from its shameful legal history, law could be returned to a
more pure form of judicial judgment. The charge of native tribunals would be

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 The Cunning of Recognition

merely to adjudicate, at the ‘‘level of primary fact,’’ whether or not native title
had disappeared ‘‘by reason of the washing away by ‘the tide of history’ and
any real acknowledgment of traditional law and real observance of traditional
customs.’’ 7
The justices could have limited their decision to the case at hand—whether
these particular people (Eddie Mabo and this group of Torres Strait Islanders)
had native title interests in this particular land. For the court to do so, how-
ever, a majority of justices would have had to sign, name by name, onto the
savage conditions to which most Australian indigenous people were histori-
cally and are still subjected, conditions broadcast globally by multinational
and transnational organizations like the United Nations, Amnesty Interna-
tional, various nongovernmental indigenous organizations, mass media like
cnn World News and the New York Times, and major cultural figures like
the musician Sting. And the court would have had to sign away the rele-
vance of the nation’s highest juridical power to the social welfare of its most
discriminated-against people, leaving their fate to state largesse or their own
political acumen. And, from most social and economic indicators, their fate
was dire. In the Northern Territory in the mid-1990s, 60 percent of Aborigi-
nal Australians earned between $1,000 and $9,000 per year. Nationally, in-
digenous unemployment hovered around 35 percent. Not only was economic
space fragmented based on individual race and settlement history, national
generational time was out of joint, a disjunction that would have significant
ramifications for a culturally based law of recognition. In the mid-1980s, gov-
ernment agencies reported that the average life expectancy of indigenous Aus-
tralians was only 52 years. By 1998 it had inched up to 57 for men and 62
for women.
In 1992, six High Court justices would not cast their names into a current
of legal history now widely understood to be propelled by racial and cultural
intolerance. Writing that the common law was shamed by its racist history
and the gaze of the international community, the justices took the occasion
to alter fundamentally the conditions of Australian sovereignty. They chose
to sign their name under the signifier social justice and to differentiate this
new version of justice from an older version to which the same common law
had subscribed in settlement times. In other words, in these justices’ hands
the common law was represented as the fertile inner kernel of justice that
a selective reading of precedent could release from the inert husks of racial
prejudice. The justices relied on the great optimism and utopianism of the
common law, which holds that good judgment will in theory always emerge

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 Shamed States

from the archive of precedent.8 This belief licensed these justices to use the
very tools that had legislated and institutionalized racial and cultural preju-
dice to free national institutions from that prejudice without performing an
ideological critique of the institutions themselves. And here, the High Court
marked its deep commitment to liberalism, implicitly declaring that good in-
tentions and good precedents are sufficient to make institutions good versions
of themselves.
It is here that we come face-to-face with several fundamental questions
about liberal law and its public imaginary. What allows the court such opti-
mism about the rightness, or goodness, of its present judgments given the
history of past shameful judgments that it reviews and laments? And what
allows this confidence to circulate and mobilize public optimism about an
obtainable if future-oriented unconflicted national gain? After all, time and
again jurists are confronted by evidence of good intentions gone awry, insti-
tutionalized optimisms about a good society that led to or were, when viewed
historically, acts of harm or evil. We know, for instance, that at least some if
not most administrators who formulated and carried out the forced removal
of indigenous children from their parents did so with the best of intentions
for their ‘‘wards.’’ And this is but one example—the colonial law of sover-
eignty is certainly another. As the justices in Mabo noted, not colonial evil but
misguided colonial prejudices distorted the root good of the common law.
But isn’t present judgment also liable to such distortions, as situated in the
future perfect, ‘‘We will have been wrong’’? As new moral, philosophical, and
religious understandings emerge from the proceduralisms of democratic dis-
cursivity—public reason—the law is continually forced to reflect on the trail
of its own, albeit unintentional, bigotry, prejudice, and malice; and forced to
expunge discursively this malice from the common law without implicating
the common law in the production of that malice. Equally difficult, the court
must sometimes construct a convincing difference between the good of con-
stitutional and common law principles and the misguided, even repugnant,
acts able to make themselves at home within those principles. Thus was its
task in deciding the constitutionality of the Aboriginal Ordinance of 1911, the
Northern Territory legislation responsible for producing a large portion of the
Stolen Generation. The court ruled that although Territory law had ‘‘autho-
rised gross violations of the rights and liberties of Aboriginal Australians,’’
these gross violations did not abrogate any constitutionally recognized rights
and duties. Of what type is constitutional justice when repugnant acts and
social harms are not strangers to it? For whom or what does this Constitu-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

tion operate? These and other questions circulated in public discourse in the
build-up and aftermath of the rulings.9
Given this history of the mistaken identity and forced cohabitation of
harmful acts and good intentions, we might ask how the court achieves any
convincing optimism about the social trajectory of its own and the nation’s
present good intentions, such that the law becomes a site of optimism both for
itself and for the very nationalized communities who have suffered from it;
and such that it is understood as a practice that could repair a torn life, pull a
people out of structural impoverishment, breath life into fathers, uncles, and
grandfathers past their mid-fifties, or prevent children from passive and active
acts of suicide?
We can begin to answer these questions by noting that neither the High
Court justices nor those who supported their decision relied simply on the
supposedly universal principles of justice embodied in the common law. They
also relied on national passions and affects organized around the imaginary
of a shamed and redeemed nation. The High Court argued not only that the
common law could not tolerate the racist foundations of terra nullius, but also
that law and liberal democratic states were shamed by their continued ad-
herence to what the court called the ‘‘ ‘barbarian’ theory underpinning the
colonial reception of the common law of England.’’ 10 The justices and the
Labour Party of Prime Minister Paul Keating, which supported the ruling,
argued that ‘‘the fiction of terra nullius’’ was a racist, humiliating betrayal of
the good that the common law and liberal democratic state was, sought to
be, and represented to the nation. Past uses of cultural discrimination were
held up as shameful, though excisable, cancers on the root good of the com-
mon law. In short, the precedent of the common law’s shame or virtue came
to figure national history, critical national aspirations and diversions, and
national morality. And hegemonic national history and consciousness came
to be figured as the archive of precedent.
In sum, the court was engaging in and helping to define public debates over
the proper affective response of the nation to its settler past. It was not alone
in this project. For instance, an editorial in The Australian asked readers to
consider whether shame or guilt was the proper and most nationally produc-
tive emotional response toward Australia’s indigenous groups.11 In so asking,
the editorial reiterated and fixed the social location of the normative citizen
as Anglo-Celtic. The addressee of the editorial, the community of anxiety it
engaged, remained a loosely defined ‘‘Anglo-Celtic’’ who, like the writer, was
forced to (re)think its ‘‘whiteness’’ against colonial history and contemporary

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 Shamed States

regional realignments of states and capital in the Asia-Pacific. The editorial

anchors public debate in the High Court majority decision.12 ‘‘With justices
William Deane and Mary Gaudron, the matter was put as clearly and truly
as it could be. The dispossession of the Aborigines was ‘the darkest aspect’ in
the history of Australia. It had bequeathed us a legacy of ‘unutterable shame.’
While this legacy remained unacknowledged and unrepaired in law, the spirit
of our nation was diminished.’’ 13 According to this editorial, to be Australian
necessitated not a ‘‘collective guilt over the dispossession of the Aborigines’’
but an ‘‘embeddedness’’ and ‘‘implication’’ in the nation’s history ‘‘in a way
outsiders or visitors cannot be.’’ Pride in national achievements, such as that
felt by the nation for the soldiers who fell at Gallipoli, is no better suited for the
task of nation-building than shame at national wrongdoings.14 What is crucial
is that the state, law, and public collectively engage in the pride and shame
occasioned by historically specific and nationally differentiated colonial and
civil rights struggles. An embeddedness, implication, and engagement in the
nation’s historic brutality toward its colonial subjects is rewritten as the neces-
sary condition of nation-building in late modern liberal democratic societies.
It is the crucial affective element in the definition of its borders, interiors,
discourses, imaginaries, and identities.
A very similar invocation of national renewal through collective acts of
mutual implication is found in the 1999 parliamentary debate over the pas-
sage of the ‘‘motion of reconciliation.’’ Stimulated by repeated appeals for a
national apology for the wrongs done to indigenous peoples, and under con-
siderable political and public pressure, Liberal Coalition Prime Minister John
Howard agreed to a motion written by Democratic Party Senator Aden Ridge-
way, an indigenous Australian, reaffirming the ‘‘wholehearted commitment to
the cause of reconciliation between indigenous and nonindigenous Australi-
ans as an important national priority for Australians’’; acknowledging that the
‘‘mistreatment of many indigenous Australians’’ represented ‘‘the most blem-
ished chapter in our international history’’; and expressing ‘‘deep and sincere
regret that indigenous Australians suffered injustices under the practices of
past generations, and for the hurt and trauma that many indigenous people
continue to feel as a consequence of those practices.’’ 15 Howard’s regret care-
fully avoided the performative of a state apology, a speech form that could be
used as grounds for reparative claims and that could turn the recognition of
the past harms into the redistribution of present economic goods.
While citing aspects of the High Court’s decision (darkest history, most
blemished chapter) Howard explicitly rejected all attempts ‘‘to embroil’’

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 The Cunning of Recognition

the Australian people ‘‘in an exercise of shame and guilt,’’ describing most
settler atrocities as ‘‘mistakes’’ and assigning these mistakes to a past in
which ‘‘the overwhelming majority of the current generations of Australi-
ans’’ had ‘‘no personal involvement.’’ 16 Of course, his forceful rejection of a
shamed state and national people only incited the movement of just such a
debate.17 National newspapers opened editorial space to various visions of
national regret and renewal, foregrounding, for instance, author and poet
David Malouf ’s call for the nation ‘‘to rethink the strong note of self-pity in
our reading of our beginnings and ask ourselves if it, too, does not belong to
our contemporary culture of complaint.’’ 18 But although rejecting the poli-
tics of shame and guilt in his address to parliament supporting the motion
of reconciliation, Howard foregrounded the positive national consequence of
affective purges, as had the Mabo justices. Indeed, as Howard himself noted,
his support for the motion of reconciliation pivoted on the ‘‘measure’’ of in-
digenous ‘‘commitment to the essential unity of the Australian nation’’ and on
the measure to which the motion itself was issued not on behalf of indigenous
Australians but of national pride and national achievement.19 Confronting
the uglier, blemished bodies that nationalism wasted was intended to deepen
and extend national pride and pleasure; not unlike the manner in which, for
Richard Rorty, the external cry of the pained other purifies liberalism. The
articulate pain of the other simultaneously allows the liberal subject to feel
herself or himself to have been unintentionally causing wrong and to be con-
stantly moving to rectify that wrong. Likewise, a confrontation with the ugly
underbelly of national history constitutes the beauty of national time:

The Australian achievement, as I said, is of a scale that should make all of us

proud. This country has achieved enormous things. This country has won itself
great repute and great credit around the world. Just as we as a nation are en-
titled to draw pride from the triumphs and the achievements of Australians,
so we must in a completely unvarnished fashion confront both dimensions of
our national story. We must not only confront and embrace the dimensions
which give us pleasure and pride and a sense of achievement and a sense of
satisfaction but also confront the uglier parts of our national history.20

Kim Beazley, Labour opposition leader, countered the liberal tense of colonial
history, referring to the Royal Commission report on the Stolen Generation
(Bringing Them Home): ‘‘What I read about were events and institutions in my
life—my life—and people who had been in those institutions in my house—
my house. But, if you go through dates and places and times, you see that

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 Shamed States

that report takes us well into the 1970s. . . . We are dealing not with far past
history; we are dealing with contemporary history.’’ 21 But in no less dramatic
terms did the Labour opposition place the fate of Australian nationalism in
a shared achievement of mourning, holding out to the imagined publics of
its national address a renewed national optimism as the desired end to their
honest ‘‘atonement.’’ 22
In this way we see that the High Court decision and public statements sup-
porting it, from the Left and Right, leaned not only on images of the shamed
national subject, but also on images of a national subjectivity now fully con-
scious of its past mistakes. Their statements continually referred to a repaired
social body, to an equitable society, and to a tolerant nonracist white sub-
ject made possible through the verdict of Mabo and the passage of the Native
Title Act that was the legislative response to it. Court judgment and legisla-
tive act would be the political testament to the good intentions of the state
and its normative publics. Repairing the law and national attitudes would
rupture the nation’s legacy of racial and cultural intolerances. These repairs,
however, were primarily made to the torn images and institutions of Anglo-
Celtic Australians—the real addressees of the court. That is, the High Court
and its supporters constructed their legal act as a journey to a promised land
in which the possibility of social discrimination would cease because good at-
titudes and good legislation would repair the unnatural deformations of the
law’s good intentions and, thereby, those of the state and its normative citi-
zens. The potential radical alterity of indigenous beliefs, practices, and so-
cial organization was not addressed. Instead the court decision and the pub-
lic discourse surrounding it urged dominant society on a journey to its own
redemption, leaning heavily on the unarguable rightness of striving for the
Good and for a national reparation and reconciliation. The problem is that
discrimination was not exiled from the law, nor the source of intolerance
banned from public forums. Court and public reserved the right to sanction—
to discriminate against—any practice considered repugnant to common law
and public values and to discern when a social or cultural difference has ceased
to function as a recognized difference as such. Let me elaborate.

TIDES OF HISTORY

The court’s invitation to the nation to enter history anew in a refreshed and
cleansed version of a persisting, unchanged ideal image of itself was not ex-
tended to the indigenous subjects around whom it organized its shame. I

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 The Cunning of Recognition

noted above that the court found that Aboriginal Australians retained their
native title interests in land if they retained the traditional customs, beliefs,
and practices that created the substance of their difference and if these cus-
toms were not repugnant to the common law. This dual ‘‘if ’’ curtailed the
history-bearing capacity of indigenous tradition, making the legal standing
of Aboriginal traditional customs, beliefs, and practices more limited than
might be suggested by the language of the court. On the one hand, in this
particular decision, the court stated that Aboriginal traditions could change
and adapt to new circumstances but that they had to embody and perform
the ideal of ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘locality.’’ 23 The High Court held that ‘‘when the
tide of history has washed away any real acknowledgment of traditional law
and any real observance of traditional customs,’’ the foundation of native title
disappeared and native title rights were extinguished.24 As if merely substi-
tuting the notion of culture for an older version of race, the court argued that
if Aboriginal culture interbred with another ‘‘heritage’’ to some underdefined
degree, it forfeited these rights. On the other hand, some traditions, some fea-
tures, and some practices of ‘‘customary law’’ were and remained prohibited
under statutory and common law: ‘‘The incidents of particular native title re-
lating to inheritance, the transmission or acquisition of rights and interests
in land and the grouping of persons to possess rights and interests in land
are matters to be determined by the laws and customs of the indigenous in-
habitants, provided those laws and customs are not so repugnant to natural
justice, equity and good conscience that juridical sanctions under the new
regime must be withheld.’’ 25 Do we read these ‘‘limits’’ as simply rhetorical,
minor moments in a major judgment, or as an essential discursive architecture
of multiculturalism? Two recent native title claim decisions suggest how these
legal judgments throw indigenous subjects between the whirlpool Charybdis
of distinct culture and the monstrous Scylla of repugnant culture.

The Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v.

the State of Victoria (1998)
The Yorta Yorta Land Claim was the first of the major native title claims to
come to trial.26 Thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, Justice Olney, who presided
during the trial, reviewed at length the evidential requirements for proving
native title rights and interests. Reading across court and parliamentary law,
he began his written decision with the judgment of Justice Brennan in Mabo
that the origin of native title lies in traditional law and that the continued
existence of this title depends on the degree to which present descendants ac-

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 Shamed States

knowledge and observe this law. Four avenues of inquiry present themselves:
(1) Are the people claiming native title the descendants of the original occu-
pants of the land? (2) What are the nature and content of traditional laws
currently acknowledged and observed? (3) What connections to land and law
have been maintained? and, (4) Are the rights and interests claimed under
native title recognized under the common law of Australia? 27
Charged with evaluating the measure to which culture had been frozen or
been flooded, Olney faced the problem of adjudicating in a field of judicial
metaphors. How does one measure cultural tides, their ebbs and flows? How
is the demand to assess cultural drift made practical? These questions lay at
foreground in the Yorta Yorta claim. The land in dispute lay in the northern
hinterland of Melbourne. The claimants consisted primarily of persons most
non-Aboriginal Australians would describe as urban Aborigines. The Yorta
Yorta claimed to hold unbroken strands of Aboriginal law passed down from
generation to generation. But their concerns about and language of spiritu-
ality and country, and ecology and pain, struck many non-Aboriginal ob-
servers as stretching the credibility of the notion of cultural distinctiveness.
To what should Yorta Yorta present-day claims about their cultural traditions
be compared? It was not to the oral histories the Yorta Yorta told that Olney
turned, but to the colonial archive; especially the nineteenth-century writ-
ings of the ethnologist Edward Curr. It became for him the commonsense
repository and transparent referent of real tradition. Temporally closer to and
politically removed from the present scene, the colonial archive could and did
function as the neutral measure of contemporary social being. Archival texts
would interpret and value oral texts: ‘‘The oral testimony of witnesses from
the claimant group is a further source of evidence but being based upon oral
tradition passed down through many generations extending over a period in
excess of two hundred years, less weight should be accorded to it than to the
information recorded by Curr.’’ 28 What then was noteworthy culture as per
Curr as per Olney? Consider these extracts from Yorta Yorta:

But, though there was no government, there were certain important practices
among the Bangerang which deserve to be called laws. Some of the principal of
these had reference to the transfer of the young from one class to another (par-
ticularized hereafter), the knocking out of teeth, making the ornamental scars
on their backs, breasts, and arms, and restrictions with respect to food. There
were also others which had reference to females. In the latter case only did in-
fractions occur with some frequency, on which occasions, as I have already

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 The Cunning of Recognition

noticed, the persons aggrieved, when they chose, made their complaints pub-
licly in the camp, and publicly vindicated their rights, the offender being often
constrained by custom to go through the ordeal of having a certain number of
spears thrown at him, and so run the risk of death or wounds in satisfaction
for injury done.29

It appears that in the Bangerang society the role of women was subservient to
men. Curr records that in domestic life man was ‘‘despotic in his own mia-mia
or hut’’ . . . that children belong to the tribe of the husband . . . and that prior
to the coming of the whites the Bangerang, as a rule, ‘‘enforced constancy on
the part of their wives, and chastity on their unmarried daughters.’’ 30

Olney found these traditional corporeal disciplines to be too sharp a contrast

to the contemporary ecospirituality of the Yorta Yorta. And, what matters in
legal hearings is not what matters to the people but what matters to the law.

The applicants readily concede that they and their forebears have long since
ceased to observe traditional practices in relation to initiation or to perform
other ceremonial activities which are frequently, in other Aboriginal societies,
indicative of spiritual attachment to the land.31

Preservation of Aboriginal heritage and conservation of the natural environ-

ment are worthy objectives the achievement of which may lead to a more ready
understanding and recognition of the importance of the culture of the indige-
nous people but in the context of a native title claim the absence of a con-
tinuous link back to the laws and customs of the original inhabitants deprives
those activities of the character of traditional laws acknowledged and tradi-
tional customs observed . . . a necessary element of both the statutory and the
common law concept of native title rights and interests.32

What matters to the juridical sensibility of cultural distinctiveness is not,

however, merely what jurists publicly cite from the record, but what they read
but do not necessarily repeat. In his seminal text Coming into Being Among
the Australian Aborigines (1937) M. F. Ashley-Montague noted, in unwitting
foreshadowing of commissioners like Olney, that the colonial ethnologies of
R. Bough Smyth, G. Tapin, J. D. Woods, and E. M. Curr were in many ways
invaluable compilations of knowledge relating to the Australian Aborigines,
representing ‘‘almost the sole attempts to record in some sort of systematic
way something of the manners and customs, the folklore and linguistics, of
the aboriginal tribes.’’ And yet, Ashley-Montague also notes that these texts

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are replete with allusions to social practices that provoke such delicacy of feel-
ing that writers could only describe them with ‘‘some such caliginous epithet
as ‘disgusting’, or ‘bestial’ ’’ or would only allude to ‘‘horrible rites’’ with the
vaguest of descriptive content.33 These social practices are of the sort that con-
temporary High Court and tribunal justices would likely continue to consider
repugnant to common law and public sentiment.
Reading Yorta Yorta culture transparently off this colonial archive, Olney
reads the graphic accounts of indigenous practices which captivated the settler
imaginary—perceived instances of rape, forced female child marriage, initia-
tory bodily mutilation, retaliatory spearing and beatings—and he reads allu-
sions to other practices so repugnant that civilized language expires in their
company. This elusive, at times repugnant, textual ground is the performative
mirror of contemporary Yorta Yorta culture; it is the real toward which courts
drive claimants and against which they judge them—a real beyond words,
in this case because their repugnancy impales symbolic representation. Thus,
unsurprisingly, Olney found that the native title rights and interests of the
Yorta Yorta had been extinguished through lack of maintenance of beliefs and
practices giving these rights their content. The Yorta Yorta suffered from the
discomfort of the cultural uncanny in a multicultural state. The case is under
appeal.

Hayes v. Northern Territory (1999)

Unlike the Yorta Yorta, the Central Australian Arrente people represented
under the native title claim of Hayes v. Northern Territory did not present Jus-
tice Olney with the problem of distinguishing degrees of cultural difference.
He does note at the beginning of his decision that the evidence presented
before him would have to demonstrate ‘‘what laws, customs, practices, and
traditions, stretching way back, are still acknowledged and observed’’ and
whether these laws, customs, practices, and traditions are ‘‘integral to a dis-
tinctive culture’’ or ‘‘only a description of how people live’’ or once lived.34
Still, Olney seems quite satisfied that the Arrente maintain a distinct cultural
law that squares with standardized accounts of ‘‘the Dreaming,’’ an account
he himself summarizes in the following way:

The course of creation consists of the spontaneous awakening and movement

of ancestral figures, beings with supernatural and human-like qualities and
typically associated with specific types of animals, plants, or other natural phe-
nomena (totems). . . . Apart from creating the landscape itself and the forms of

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 The Cunning of Recognition

art associated with it, the ancestors also brought into existence all the other fea-
tures of contemporary human existence—hunting and gathering, the making
and use of tools, rules of kinship, language and dialect variation, and so on.
Collectively, and in conjunction with totemic beliefs and ceremonial action,
all these features may be glossed in English as the Law. While the Law is often
narrowly defined in terms of ceremonial activity, it may also be construed as
a more general system of rules and regulations through which people define
their rights and interests.35

When Olney cites real Aboriginal customary law he is citing not only
Arrente history but the textual presuppositions of that history mediated by
Australian anthropology and Aboriginal politics, its mass cultural circulation,
and its juridical precedents. In other words, Aboriginal law is the collectivity
of a minimal number of commonsense coordinating features—kinship, cere-
mony, and hunting and gathering. As a nonlocal supertext, secreted within
legal, popular, and legislative texts, it is dense and complex, a distillation of so-
cial theory and professional norms. But this is the real text of Aboriginal cus-
tomary law: the conditions of its stereotypical iterability, of its deep citational
possibility and institutional allegiance. The textual density of such descrip-
tions are what allows ceremony and initiation to be ‘‘indicative of spiritual
attachment to the land.’’ Feeling this exterior textual law supporting the in-
terior interlocutionary texts he heard, Olney found that the Arrente retained
the type of customs that give native title its content. But he also found that
native title rights gave claimants the ability to exclude only other Aborigi-
nal groups from their lands. Non-Aboriginal groups could continue, or could
begin, to use Arrente lands without compensating Arrente people.
In what sense, however, could Olney recognize the law of the Arrente even
if it were their law he saw? On the one hand, even when Olney and other
jurists recognize contemporary Aboriginal beliefs as traditional in origin and
substance, they themselves do not believe the beliefs that provide Aborigi-
nal law its content and form. Aboriginal beliefs are legally productive not
because they are perceived to be ‘‘true’’ but in large part because they are
untrue, unbelievable, and thus truly distinctive and different—the type of
thing to which the contemporary law can demonstrate a liberal reconcile-
ment. In a very different setting, the analytic philosopher W.V. Quine uses
‘‘native’s outlandish rites and beliefs’’ to ground his insight that radical com-
munication should ‘‘maximize the psychological plausibility of . . . attribu-
tions to the native rather than the truth of the beliefs attributed.’’ 36 It is exactly

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 Shamed States

their measurable distance from western-based truth-generating epistemolo-

gies, the substance and proceduralisms of public reason, that makes this law
not merely a description of how people live.37
On the other hand, other forms of difference may all too rapidly switch to
an all too recognizable truth repugnant to the law. Remember that custom-
ary law has never been a recognized part of Australian common, statutory, or
criminal law, neither before nor after Mabo.38 Some of the same ‘‘traditions’’
Olney reads off the historical archive as indicative of customary law and spiri-
tual attachment to the land in the Yorta Yorta claim and the Arrente claim are
prohibited in the contemporary Australian criminal code. Which is to say that
the very practices that provide robust evidence of the continuing existence
of traditional law, so vital to the proof of native title and land rights cases,
may be grounds for criminal prosecution. In its review in the mid-1980s of
the possibility of reconciling Aboriginal customary law to Australian crimi-
nal law, the Law Reform Commission reiterated this fundamental opposition
of common law (and public morality) to repugnant social practices citing as
examples Aboriginal practices of polygamy, spearing, child marriage, gender-
based physical abuse.
Criminal courts are periodically presented with cases that query the dis-
tance between forms of justice within ‘‘indigenous customary law’’ and forms
of justice under criminal and common law—thereby opening the process to
questions about fairness within a multicultural nation. In Barnes v. the Queen
(1997), for instance, the court refused bail to an Aboriginal applicant charged
with the manslaughter of another Aboriginal man. The Aboriginal man had
requested, through his counsel, to be released on bond in order to return to
the indigenous community, Lajamanu, to receive traditional punishment for
his acts. The applicant’s counsel described to the court the content of tra-
ditional punishment for murder in terms not foreign to Edward Curr’s own
description of the Bangarang: ‘‘Spearing of both of the applicant’s legs four
or five times, using sharp and shovel-nose spears; punches with fists to the
applicant’s face and chest; blows to the applicant’s head and back with the
use of large heavy wood boomerangs; and similar boomerangs being thrown
at the applicant, who would have a small shield with which to protect him-
self.’’ 39 The court found that bail in this case would be an unlawful act—the
tacit authorization of an assault intended to kill or cause grievous harm to
the victim. As Max Weber and others have noted, intentional acts of grievous
bodily harm remain the legally sanctioned privilege of the state.
Critical reflection on indigenous law does not merely occur within the

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 The Cunning of Recognition

juridical field, to borrow a phrase of Pierre Bourdieu’s. But these cases do pro-
vide critical discursive grounds and language for public debate about fairness,
cultural difference, and evil. Cases like Barnes v. the Queen circulate in the
mass-mediated public sphere, reanimating already existing archives of public
memory, prejudice, and sensibility, inciting public debates about what indige-
nous law, ceremony, and culture are really all about and whether the nation
and its institutional bodies should protect, enhance, or support them.40 They
continually reopen the question of who and what ‘‘we’’ are and are as a nation;
where ‘‘their’’ customs, beliefs, and practices fit in; and on what basis and in
what contexts ‘‘we’’ can judge ‘‘them.’’
Whether merely different or either too uncannily similar or starkly repug-
nant to state law, Aboriginal culture is hardly indifferent to the nation that
consumes it. Ritual group sex, murder, certain marriage practices, and geni-
tal operations shame the common law and the nation’s core values. These
Aboriginal traditions have no legal standing; they are allowed to exist only
as nostalgic traces of a past, fully authentic Aboriginal tradition. As traces,
neither fully forgotten by law or public nor ever fully present to them, these
prohibited practices continue to haunt all contemporary representations of
Aboriginal tradition, casting an aura of inauthenticity over present-day Ab-
original performances of their culture. In other words, although the court may
engage history, Aboriginal Australians express at their own risk their engage-
ment with the democratic form of capital and governance within which they
live; the memorial forms of their own histories; and their ambivalences toward
and debates about these traditions, identities, and identifications. Even at the
moment of their inclusion into the liberal multicultural state imaginary, spe-
cific indigenous histories, memories, and practices are irrelevant. Instead,
these diverse and sometimes fragmentary elements have to be reformulated
to fit the uneven terrain of common and statutory law, criminal codes and
common values.
That the court confined its ruling to a legal recognition of only those tradi-
tions not already prohibited by common and statutory law in no way seems to
have cast a shadow of doubt around the common law’s claim that in the Mabo
decision it recognized the value of Aboriginal law to native title.41 But it was
still faced with the difficult job of separating the common law and Aborigi-
nal law at the historical moment when cultural interchange defined the global
system; when anxieties about national identity, status, and power dominated
public discussion; and when an older means of distinguishing cultural types
was widely held to be racially intolerant. If a group’s culture is to be the object

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 Shamed States

of juridical inquiry, then laws, cultures of law, and cultures that have pro-
duced systems of law have to be theoretically separable and the act of separa-
tion must signify a (post)racist practice. Gone, the court claims, are the days
when the other’s law could be univocally deemed ‘‘barbarian’’ and discarded
as legally irrelevant. For the state to base contemporary social policy and law
on such colonial frameworks exposes it to international charges of racial and
cultural intolerance.
The techniques of cultural discrimination established by the court have
a fairly straightforward structure. First, they separate and make relative Ab-
original and non-Aboriginal cultural systems even while establishing a formal
relationship of value among types of Aboriginal cultural performance. Next,
they differentiate the site from which European-based and Aboriginal legal
systems obtain their value and seek their telos. And, finally, they bind the at-
tainment of native title rights to the successful judicial performance of this
fantastic separation, origination, and destiny.
The court’s achievement of a commonsense (post)racist separation is in
part an effect of the recursivity of pronominal reference. By referring to the
shame of ‘‘our’’ law and ‘‘our’’ nation and the good of recognizing ‘‘their’’
laws, ‘‘their’’ culture, and ‘‘their’’ traditions, the court is able to cite and en-
trench an understanding of the nation as confronting its own discriminatory
practices and facing up to and eliminating a dark stain on its history even as
it reproduces the nation as Anglo-Celtic and ‘‘ours.’’
The former Labour Prime Minister Paul Keating’s public statements sup-
porting the legislative implementation of the Mabo ruling mirrored the court
in critical ways. In a speech commemorating the Australian launch of the
International Year for the World’s Indigenous People, Keating trumpeted the
‘‘historical . . . reconciliation’’ between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Aus-
tralians and announced his government’s intention to use Mabo to establish
‘‘a prosperous and remarkably harmonious multicultural society.’’ 42 Accord-
ing to Keating, this ‘‘socially just,’’ new multicultural society could be pain-
lessly achieved with no serious costs or losses for ‘‘Australians’’—that is, ‘‘we’’
non-Aboriginal Australians.43 Moreover, it would not challenge, threaten, or
set into crisis the basic values of Australians (including ‘‘our’’ right ‘‘to en-
joy beaches and other recreation areas, including national parks’’ 44). Recon-
ciliation and the socially just, new multicultural society to which it would
be a testament simply meant ‘‘acknowledging’’ and ‘‘appreciating’’ Aboriginal
Australians and providing a ‘‘measure of justice’’ for them.45
Lest we think his position the idiosyncratic discourse of the center-Left,

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 The Cunning of Recognition

Liberal Coalition Prime Minister John Howard, who deposed the Keating
government and firmly rejected its multicultural policy, similarly distributed
nationalism across racially inflected pronominal indexes. In his 1999 parlia-
mentary address supporting the motion of reconciliation, Howard voiced his
imagined nation: ‘‘We say to the indigenous people of our community that
we want you in every way to be totally a part of our community. We want
to understand you. We want to care for you where appropriate.’’ 46 Like the
High Court and mass media, Keating and Howard, in their public addresses
and policy papers and across the political and social spectrum of Australian
political leadership, framed the legal dilemma of Mabo and historical dis-
crimination as a symbol of the moral dilemma that multiculturalism posed
to Anglo-Celtic Australians—the ‘‘plight of Aboriginal Australians continues
to be our failure’’ 47 and the common law and the social and judicial values
under threat are ‘‘ours,’’ as is the cultural system into which Aboriginal law
(their law) is being accommodated.48
The deictical field the court cites and iterates (‘‘ours’’ and ‘‘theirs’’) to sepa-
rate Australian and Aboriginal laws and cultural practices makes it possible,
even expected, to differentiate the sites from which these ‘‘legal systems’’ ob-
tain their value and seek their telos, and to represent this differentiation,
this cultural discrimination, as a nondiscriminatory project. For instance, the
court confidently states that native title obtains its value from its ability to
signify fixity, stasis, and resistance to a historical dialectic: ‘‘Native title has
its origin in and is given its content by the traditional laws acknowledged by
and the traditional customs observed by the indigenous inhabitants of a terri-
tory.’’ 49 In contrast to native title, common law’s value arises not from a fixed,
locatable territory but from its historical dialogue with elite international in-
stitutions. As opposed to the origin and telos that it assigns native title, the
court locates the preeminent value of common law doctrine in its ability to
‘‘reflect’’ a historically progressive dialectic of nationality and internationality
and, in reflecting this dialectic, to embody truth and justice. It is in this puri-
fied air that the history, culture, and social worth of Australia (and Western
humanism more generally) is said to originate and proceed; only the common
law’s own history threatened the legitimacy of its present and its future: ‘‘If it
were permissible in past centuries to keep the common law in step with inter-
national law, it is imperative in today’s world that the common law should
neither be nor be seen to be frozen in an age of racial discrimination.’’ 50
But noting this pronominal play does not directly answer the question of
what allows the court its optimism, what allows it to cast out historical knowl-

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 Shamed States

edge, that they, like their predecessors, live in prejudicial time, that such is
merely the condition of social discourse? Turning to the Wik court helps to
illuminate the internal textual techniques by which law is saved from its own
advanced forms of discrimination, keeping the repugnant in the other, while
assigning past repugnances to the history books. The internal textual prag-
matics I describe is not the entire means of cultural discrimination. But it is a
vital part of what opens law to a positive articulation with broader discursive
fields.

WICKER MAN

The question before the court in The Wik People v. the State of Queensland
(1996) was whether the granting of a pastoral lease necessarily extinguished
native title.51 The Wik decision was crucial to indigenous land aspirations be-
cause the vast hectares under pastoral lease were those parts of Australia where
Aboriginal beliefs and practices stereotyped as traditional are most likely to
be found.52
In answering the question of whether pastoral leases extinguished native
title, members of the court remade Australian national law in recognizable
ways. They argued that as the British law took ‘‘seed’’ in colonial soil, statute
law adapted to its new material and social conditions. Certain ‘‘archaic’’ con-
cepts receded slowly into the twilight of historical memory. Other ‘‘novel con-
cepts’’ and ‘‘fictions’’ were grafted onto the common law. Pastoral leases were
an example of a novel concept of property arising from the specific nature of
Australian settlement. Other novel concepts included the removal of Aborigi-
nal children from their parents, the outlawing of certain indigenous marriage
and ritual practices, and the forced internment of indigenous people on mis-
sionary and government settlements. All of these benevolent and malevolent
adaptations of British law to the social and spatial history of terra Australis
made Australian common law Australian in content, quality, and form. All the
good and all the bad were part and parcel of what distinguished and delimited
the Australian legal tradition.53
Although Australian law’s specificity was said to be derived from this his-
tory of good and evil, the court claimed that only the good designated the real
being of the common law. To distill this good they leaned on a liberal legal
apparatus—specifically the distinction between common and statutory law
in accordance with the traditionally understood separate origin of judiciary
and legislative law in liberal democracies. That is, they not only separated the

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 The Cunning of Recognition

origin and telos of black and white law, but distinguished the different ori-
gins and ends of common and statute law. The justices argued that statutory
laws were creatures of parliament and, thus, popular will. As a result, ‘‘there
is nothing to suggest that it was necessary or convenient’’ for statutory law ‘‘to
conform to the common law.’’ 54 Their legislative origin enmeshed statutory
law in the political life of the nation and gave voice to the prevailing prejudices
of public opinion.
At the time they were passed, these legislative creatures may not have
been considered repugnant by members of the judiciary, but that too can
be accounted for by the perverting power of public opinion.55 After all, Wik
suggests, judges are social creatures too. But these prejudiced, though well-
intentioned, people are not the common law. It lies outside them and can
be intuited from the iterative trace of a Good discernible not in but through
actual human writings. If, for instance, state and federal legislation once al-
lowed the forcible removal of children from their parents, this law reflected
the political and social beliefs of the time not the ideals of the common law,
even though, at the time, justices themselves would have considered these laws
just and right, and aimed at the social good. How did the Mabo and Wik deci-
sions and their public mediations inspire a nation to see themselves as acting
fairly and justly in forging a new (post)modern settler ideology? Or, if com-
mon law is not in persons or even in the context of the writings, but in some
felt perduring formal aspiration within these texts, what is that form? What
is its aspiration?
We can begin to answer this seemingly simple question by examining the
repeated assertions of the court that native title is not of the common law and
the common law is not of native title.56 Note, as example, a passage first from
Mabo, then from Wik:

Native title has its origin and is given its content by the traditional laws ac-
knowledged by and the traditional customs observed by the indigenous in-
habitants of a territory. . . . Native title, though recognised by common law, is
not an institution of the common law and is not alienable by the common law.
Its alienability is dependent on the laws from which it is derived.57

This Court, established by the Constitution, operates within the Australian

legal system. It draws its legitimacy from that system. Self-evidently, it is not
an institution of Aboriginal customary law. To the extent that native title is
recognised and enforced in Australia by Australian law, this occurs because,
although not of the common law, native title is recognised by the common law

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 Shamed States

as not inconsistent with its precepts. This does not mean that, within its own
world, native title (or any other incidents of the customary laws of Australia’s
indigenous peoples) depends upon the common law for its legitimacy or con-
tent. To the extent that the tide of history has not washed away traditional laws
and real observance of traditional customs, their legitimacy and content rest
upon the activities and will of the indigenous people themselves.58

In these and other textual moments the High Court seems to acknowledge
the formal equivalence and independence of customary and common law.
And, notably, these moments are what captivate public attention, are deemed
noteworthy and quotable; that is, detachable from the stream of public dis-
course and reinserted with a specific density as ‘‘quoted speech’’ in other legal
texts and public media. In statements like ‘‘legitimacy and content rest upon
the activities and will of the indigenous people themselves,’’ readers sense that
the justices are treating the laws equally; that they are being fair and epito-
mizing liberal tolerance. But I want to suggest that what they sense is a meta-
linguistic form subtending these discursive tokens—it is the form that seems
detachable. We are not of them and they are not of us is abstracted by readers
into the form ‘‘x is not of y’’ and ‘‘y is not of x.’’ These forms are then made
equivalent by a further abstraction into ‘‘a is not of b.’’
At these levels of textual abstraction, the particular and competing con-
tent of Aboriginal and European customary laws is bracketed and, instead,
a textual token of formal equivalence is at the foreground. The compelling
nature of this token derives from its articulation to the problem faced in liberal
multicultural law and nation; namely, how to reconcile, fairly and justly, insti-
tutions and ideologies of abstract citizenship with difference, of equal oppor-
tunity and structural discriminations in fields of competing cultural injunc-
tions—especially when some of these differences are experienced as moral
imperatives. In other words, in the midst of technical juridical language, the
court writes and readers hear the reassuring form of classical liberal demo-
cratic citizenship buried in the rubble of national cultural differences. It is the
survival of this subtending liberal formation—not the actual content of tradi-
tional law or native title—that Beazley and the public find so necessary, even
inspirational.
In actual legal fact, no more than did the Mabo court does the Wik court
consider the Australian common law and Aboriginal customary law to be
equivalent, formally or substantively, in power, reach, or authority (nor, prob-
ably, would most non-Aboriginal Australian citizens, if asked). Any attempt

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 The Cunning of Recognition

to posit a relation of identity between the two laws is not only absurd, but
self-evidently so. Switching genres from law-talk to parental-talk (‘‘because [I]
said so’’), a member of the Wik court, Justice Kirby, outlined a clear hierarchy
of legal enforceability. It is ‘‘self-evident,’’ writes Kirby, that although Aborigi-
nal customary law is an institution of the common law, the High Court ‘‘is
not an institution of Aboriginal customary law. . . . Theory accepted by this
Court in Mabo was not that the native title of indigenous Australians was en-
forceable of its own power or by legal techniques akin to the recognition of
foreign law. It was that such title was enforceable in Australian courts because
the common law in Australia said so.’’ 59 The court locates the source of this
propositional power—the performativity of ‘‘Australia says so’’—in colonial
history. Colonialism happened. ‘‘It is too late now to develop a new theory
of land law that would overthrow the whole structure of land titles based on
Crown grants into confusion.’’ 60
We should pay heed to how a naturalized hierarchy of moral and legal au-
thority is reestablished at the very moment common and customary laws are
being formally equated. Remember: an invisible asterisk, a proviso, hovers
above every enunciation of customary law: (provided [they] . . . are not so re-
pugnant). This proviso interprets specific instances of cultural practices and
indexes the monoculturalism of multicultural tolerance in liberal settler soci-
eties. For, although the court demands ‘‘real acknowledgement of traditional
law and real observance of traditional customs’’ as the basis for a successful
native title claim, real customary being must be free of any sense of a repug-
nant that would ‘‘shatter the skeletal structure’’ of state law, that would pro-
voke an affective relation to a cultural or social otherwise, an experience of
fundamental alterity. The cunning of recognition lies exactly in this play of
the parentheticals: Be (not) Real; Be (not) Alterior.
But the High Court is not exempt from the very problem it poses to Ab-
original subjects: the dilemma of capturing real justice in real discourse and
narrative time without prompting the appearance of the same interpretant
hovering over native title or criminal law judgments. This judgment is just
(unless[although] . . . it may appear retrospectively as repugnant or shame-
ful). As courts cite the vast historical trail of their own mistaken bigotry and
malice, they open themselves up to a reading of their present judgments as
little more than dumb repetitions of the past. They face, in short, the problem
of how to account for justice in the breach and shadow of their own repug-
nant, shameful history. It is useful, therefore, to examine in some detail the
ways the Wik court spans the breach of history it cites and widens.

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 Shamed States

We begin by noting that the High Court has written copiously on the rela-
tion between native title and the common law (distinct and hierarchical), on
the form native title must take (more or less traditional), and on the type of
traditional practice excluded from recognition (the repugnant). It has done
so, however, without ever saying what the real content of the customary, the
good, or the repugnant is. Quite the contrary: the Mabo and Wik decisions
refuse to mandate the content of the customary or the repugnant, couching
this refusal in an ideology of recognition and patient listening.61
Rather than defining the content of social goods or evils, the court relies
on commonsense understandings of them as formally distinct and discernible
states, the former the ultimate and true aspiration of law and nation, the latter
that beyond which acceptable cultural difference cannot go. The recognition
of difference starts at the doorstep of the customary and stops at the abyss of
the repugnant. But the substance of the repugnant and the good are to be an-
nounced or to be debated in the open forum of the public sphere. What is not
to be debated is whether or not the repugnant and good are; whether they are
distinct states; and how they are related to the common law.62 The court takes
the answers to these questions to be self-evident: moral codes change but the
repugnant, whatever it is, is and is always presumed to be a stranger to the real
being of the common law. No matter that the common law is, or usually is,
concerned with fact and reasoned argument—justice in a more modest and
narrow legal sense. And, no matter that the common law’s origin may come
from a set of now archaic social beliefs and practices. Nevertheless, its ulti-
mate end is undeniably and commonsensically principled justice, because this
is what legal scholars and the public say it desires—and desire it to desire.
Forming and distributing social goods and evils across temporal and so-
cial space depends on a complex set of temporal, aspectival, and metaphori-
cal framings; that is, these are the textual productions, textual sources and
scaffoldings that hold desire’s form and ideology’s optimism in place. The
court’s use of alluvial metaphors—frozen and flooded cultural fields—helps
illuminate how these textual sources of desire and optimism work. Take the
following few examples from the Mabo decision.63

them: The common law can, by reference to the traditional laws and customs
of an indigenous people, identify and protect the native rights and interests
to which they give rise. However, when the tide of history has washed away
any real acknowledgment of traditional law and any real observation of tra-
ditional customs, the foundation of native title has disappeared. A native title

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 The Cunning of Recognition

which has ceased with the abandoning of laws and customs based on tradition
cannot be revived for contemporary recognition.64

The traditional law or custom is not, however, frozen as at the moment of

establishment of a Colony. Provided any changes do not diminish or extinguish
the relationship between a particular tribe or other group and particular land,
subsequent development or variations do not extinguish the title in relation
to that land.65

us: If the international law notion that inhabited land may be classified as terra
nullius no longer commands general support, the doctrines of the common law
which depend on the notion that native peoples may be ‘‘so low on the scale of
social organisation’’ that it is ‘‘idle to impute to such people some shadow of
the rights known to our law’’ can hardly be retained. If it were permissible in
past centuries to keep the common law in step with international law, it is im-
perative in today’s world that the common law should neither be nor be seen
to be frozen in an age of racial discrimination.66

As before, we see the court switching between a veneer of formal equiva-

lence and a substructure of definitive hierarchy. Compare the statements ‘‘the
true being of their culture adjusts in time’’ and ‘‘the true being of our culture
adjusts in time’’ is translated ‘‘as their law adjusts to history it looses its true
being’’ but as our law adjusts to history it gains its true apotheosis. The au-
thorizing temporal frame of customary law is a past-perfect ideal form. The
authorizing temporal frame of common law is a future-perfect ideal form. But
we also see how the court uses tense, aspect, modality, and pronominal in-
dexes to figure ‘‘knowing’’ as a temporal and social location distal from the
here and now of their production of the truth. The law was mistaken then.
Those justices were enmeshed in a set of social prejudices. In positioning past
justices as mistaken, the court positions itself as knowledgeable about the mis-
take—and thus on its way out of this moment of intolerance. In other words,
Wik and Mabo rely on pragmatic features of language to frame the failures of
real justice in real time as past-tense problems of past-tense people.
The pragmatics of textual intolerance allow the court to acknowledge mis-
taken judgment in juridical history even as it incites a future-oriented amnesia
about present judicial judgment. These linguistic coordinating agencies fore-
stall two other obvious interpretations of how every judgment of intolerance
will appear in the future: First, they will have been wrong at this exact mo-
ment from the perspective of future time, but they will have judged anyway.

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 Shamed States

And they will have framed their judgment as a compulsion (‘‘we must make
a judgment no matter its contingency’’). And, second, they will have been
compelled by and will have based their judgment on nothing more than the
agentless will of the commonsense discourses and everyday powers of ‘‘our
time.’’ They will have acted on behalf of an abstract machine whose organic
qualities they cannot now see. Not surprisingly, the jurists back away from
any such clear metarepresentations of what they are in fact describing.
But if the court forestalls its own fall into the breach of history, it does so
by pushing Aboriginal persons over the cliff. In actual given instances of his-
torical time, if the court feels ‘‘repugnance’’ it understands it to be generated
from, or be an essential part of, Aboriginal customary practices rather than
understanding the feeling of repugnance to be generated from the discursive
mandates and contradictions of liberal injunctions. The Good and the Just,
whatever they are, are: they are . . . they remain; . . . their remainders are the
private abstract capital of the common law. When past statutory laws or com-
mon law decisions are in contradistinction to contemporary standards of the
Good and the Just and the Decent and Right, their authors, not the common
law, are claimed to have been mistaken—retrospectively repugnant. Sacrific-
ing justices, lawyers, and politicians—being willing to be placed on the bier
of the past, a grand conflagration—is the necessary means of abstracting the
Thing that is common law and then safeguarding this abstraction from the
long, soiled history of its usage.
Telling the story this way highlights why the Mabo and Wik decisions are
generally considered to have aligned common law with the lofty ideals of Aus-
tralian multiculturalism. The willingness of the court not only to recognize
the fact that an ancient law predated the settler state but to acknowledge that
the legitimacy of this law came from ‘‘its own world’’ seemed to usher into
national time a truer, deeper form of liberal multiculturalism. But telling the
story this way also highlights the textual ideology necessary to produce good
common law and to distribute its repugnant history across time and social
space. The syntactic plays I have diagnosed in the Mabo and Wik judgments
are, therefore, not so much the games of bored theory as the necessary textual
procedures of harried law. The common law justices lean on such linguistic
props as the future-perfect ‘‘will have been’’ to orient their and their readers’
interpretation of the failed ideals of the nation. They elide and incite an elision
of the time and space of justice for the time and space of linguistic form. So
confused, these linguistic features critically organize and distribute common-
sense feelings and languages of who and what is responsible for the ongoing

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 The Cunning of Recognition

structural conditions of social discrimination such that Kirby can write: ‘‘To
the extent that the tide of history has not washed away traditional laws and
real observance of traditional customs, their legitimacy and content rest upon
the activities and will of the indigenous people themselves.’’ 67
These discursive and textual features of legal judgment incite specific so-
cial practices. They dictate that every time an Aboriginal group performs its
local traditions in order to substantiate a native title or land claim it is drawn
into playing out the conditions and limits of multicultural law in late modern
democracies. First, multicultural law demands that a discriminable (distinct)
cultural difference be presented to it in a prepackaged form. In this case, in-
digenous performances of cultural difference must conform generally to the
textually mediated imaginary of Aboriginal traditions and more specifically
to the legal definition of ‘‘traditional Aboriginal owner.’’ But this demand for
a preformed cultural difference generates second-order demands—in main
a demand for the law to be cautious and suspicious of the indigenous tradi-
tions presented to it. This suspicion is inscribed in the heart of the law’s form
and purpose: ‘‘The nature and incidents of native title must be ascertained
as a matter of fact by reference to those laws and customs’’ and ‘‘must not be
repugnant.’’ 68 To ascertain cultural difference, the law demands that the Ab-
original suppliant face and speak to it. And the court looks at these suppliants
speaking to it, not speaking among themselves where their ‘‘true’’ beliefs and
feelings are imagined to be expressed. In other words, in a juridical setting,
indigenous people are not a representative of objective cultural difference, but
rather a membrane of cultural difference, a membrane that could be hiding a
fullness of difference or an absence thereof—hiding a black face, a white face,
or a face whose color and/or culture cannot be discerned and totalized.69
The already abandoned or hidden artifacts of a previously disciplined in-
digenous practice haunt every performance of cultural difference. Genital
operations, retribution killers, and ritual group sex always draw the law’s eye
toward a nostalgic but disciplined past, making it just ever so suspicious of
the authenticity of present traditions. No Aboriginal subject and performance
before the law escapes this suspicion. All irritate it because all mark the law’s
limit: the impossibility of achieving what it imagines is possible but is not,
a form of legal cultural performance not oriented to power, not already an
alterity whose internal composition is the hybridized history of colonial iden-
tifications, prohibitions, and incitements and continued postcolonial prohi-
bitions and desires.

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 Shamed States

Even if a form of pure cultural difference untouched by and not oriented to

state colonial history did exist, the law itself negates the discursive and affec-
tive productivity of its legal agency. For the law must be able to comprehend
the cultural narrative presented before it, be able to encompass it in its under-
standing of what is ‘‘indicative of spiritual attachment’’ in Aboriginal society
even as it experiences this narrative as other than the cultural narratives it com-
monsensically understands as its own (or our own) cultural narratives. This
is the aporia of the cultural difference the court iterates and faces: resist being
(Australian) for me / do not resist me; to discriminate against you is not to
discriminate socially / to discriminate against you is to discriminate socially;
to understand you is to suspect you are me (Australian, engaged in history) /
to not understand you is to suspect you are not (human; Australian). As if
using post-Fanonian theory as a handbook, legal practitioners in actual land
claim cases produce not quite black / not quite white subjects before the law.70
Finally, every native title or land rights case must bear the burden of
national anxieties it cannot solve. The law is not simply scrutinizing local
traditions, their genealogy and trajectory, but the meaning of recognizing
every particular traditional performance in terms of national aspirations. In
seemingly remote land claim hearings, national fantasies, frustrations, and
anxieties flood legal interpretations; unfix critical reading; catch actors up in
imaginaries of national redemption and national shame, national tolerance,
and national intolerance; and lead the eye to a sublime object. In doing so,
they distract national critical consciousness from the law’s actual aim: the re-
subordination of Aboriginal society and law vis-à-vis European law and so-
ciety.71
I always pause here. Publics and politicians were moved by the High
Court’s breathless moral confidence. The justices wrote as if they were circus
performers, able to walk suspended in analytical air, cutting the ropes to cul-
tural discrimination while confidently walking along them. The court marked
all previous discriminations as ideological without casting doubt on their own
eschatological evocations of the Good Society toward which their discrimi-
natory practices aim. It is as though they truly believed that their discrimina-
tions would resist history, that their acts represented the lifting of necessity
and the allowance of freedom. The present can be good, even if the past was
bad. Their good intentions, unlike those of the justices who sat before them,
would resist the relentless unfurling of discourse. And it is as if the repetitive
failure of past eschatological images never decreases the power these images

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 The Cunning of Recognition

hold over the present: the New Deal, the New Society, the New Left, the New
Right, the New Covenant. All seem to fix critical thinking, on the Left and on
the Right, on the abjected and civilized and redeemed. What is it about this
moment in national time that allows the law to incite national and subaltern
memory on behalf of a new collective self-understanding in a way that makes
the rewriting of history seem a recognition of and accounting for that history;
that allows the (re)entrenchment of cultural discrimination as a technology
of state power; and, as if these were not enough, makes this new technology
of state power seem like a means of liberating subalterns from the state?
The answer demands that we break the ideological frame of the court itself.
We need to hinge the High Court’s claim that the common law was shamed by
its own racist history and an international legal gaze to other national mortifi-
cations of state, capital, public and counterpublic realignments and struggles.
The law’s ability to distract the eye depends not only on the internal textual
dynamics of legal decisions and proceedings, but on the broader discursive
fields (discussed in earlier chapters) that make these discursive techniques
performative. The court itself points to these broader horizons of discourse—
the gaze of the international legal community—as the essential ground of
its own actions and readings. In particular, we should pay attention to the
justices’ concern that the Australian common law be brought ‘‘up to date’’
with other ‘‘civilized,’’ first-world Euro-American nation-states that had long
ago recognized the mutual compatibility of native title and the state’s radi-
cal title.72 But what is at stake in Mabo is not simply a nation’s shame at its
past as a colonizer. At stake is its future. Will the historical significance of the
Australian nation be that it bore an impotent Western humanism, a barren
liberal democracy, the only ‘‘white’’ nation on earth unable to produce wealth
and status—‘‘the good life’’—for its citizens? Will it bear the shame of em-
bracing forms of abhorrent social practices that lie outside civil decency or of
discriminating against mere cultural difference?
When Mabo and Wik are placed in these contexts, native title appears as a
fetish of national anxieties about the status, role, and future of the Australian
nation and helps explain the widespread public debates resulting from the
judgments. Native title condenses and stands in for Australian aspirations for
first-worldness (symbolically white, Euro-American) on the margins of Euro-
American and Asia-Pacific domination, with the Aboriginal subject (indige-
nous blackness) standing as the material to be worked over for the nation to
maintain its place in (Western) modernity, an organic barometer of national
redemption. The court’s use of the shamed Anglo-Celtic Australian fixed the

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 Shamed States

ideal image of the nation as a white, first-world, global player in the national
imaginary.
Mabo’s politics of shame, is not, however, simply a nightmare about the
nation’s marginality. Instead, shame allows the law to perform the adjust-
ments necessary to recuperate its authority and values in a ‘‘postideological’’
(post)colonial moment. By ‘‘postideological’’ I do not mean to suggest that
capital and state relations are now transparent. Rather I mean to point to a
characteristic of the contemporary moment, in which a feeling, shame, dis-
places arguments over power, hegemony, and social contradiction. Shame’s
political pleasure, its sublime politics, lies in conjuring an experience ‘‘be-
yond ideology’’ in a moment saturated with ideological readjustments of state
discrimination.
When the court evoked a shamed nation whose redemption depended
on an acknowledgment of past wrongdoings, it accomplished what a mere
change of law could not. It created a focal point beyond politics for both busi-
ness and subaltern antagonists of the state and the law’s multicultural project,
the former who might see the project as too radical, the latter as too reformist.
The fantasy of shame and reparation created an experience of intimacy—inti-
mate holding, intimate understanding, intimate knowledge—between those
who control access to and those excluded from critical rights. Right-wing
business leaders, who opposed the decision, had little recourse but to return
the court’s own rhetoric as a preideological barometer of national well-being.
So, for example, a coalition of business interests emphasized the shame of a
white nation forced into an unnatural structural adjustment by a nonwhite
coalition of transnational and subaltern groups. Rather than manipulating
other nations, as a true first-world nation would, Australia was like those other
nations in being controlled by international forces unknown.73
Subordinate groups and the Left, perhaps surprised by the public pseudo-
recognition of their position, were seduced toward the headlights of the law—
supporting the judgment and the legislation that was modeled on it. In other
words, by deploying a weapon once effectively wielded by the weak (sub-
alterns, colonial subjects, African American civil-rights activists, feminists,
gays and lesbians), those who controlled access to resources and rights were
able to bind oppressed groups more tightly to the state and to looking to state
law as the site from which a nondiscriminatory politics could proceed.74 They
did so not by refusing to accept the shame, but by embracing, foregrounding,
and using it as a source of identification for their political projects. They did
not simply trumpet the good of state law but lamented its villainy, as if the

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 The Cunning of Recognition

state were not a part of its own institutionality. And in doing so they showed
how institutions are claimed to have feelings and how these feeling institutions
translate liberation struggles against them into their own legitimation.75

CONCLUSION

The juridical struggle to formulate a legally valid multicultural form of com-

mon law provides a particularly important perspective on late liberal forms
of power. Legal decisions bring into sharp relief the disjunction between ide-
ologies of recognition and the practices and pragmatics of the distribution of
rights, materials, and institutions. In the first place, law is one of the primary
sites through which liberal forms of recognition develop their disciplinary
sides as they work the hopes, pride, optimisms, and shame of indigenous and
other minority subjects. The law is a significant site where local languages
are diverted into juridical languages, atrophying imaginations of alternative
forms of collective action. Second, Australian legal multiculturalism is exem-
plary of late modern liberal understandings and institutionalizations of dif-
ference and alterity. In this liberal imagination state apparatuses, as well as
its law, principles of governance, and national attitudes need merely be ad-
justed to accommodate others. Dominant subjects do not need to experience
the fundamental alterity of, in this case, indigenous discourses, desires, and
practices or their potentially radical challenge to the nation and its core insti-
tutions and values such as ‘‘democracy’’ and the ‘‘common law.’’ Likewise, the
state administrators and normative publics can imagine that their experience
of radically other cultures and practices can be unhinged from their experi-
ence of horror and abjection. Alterity is not seen as a threat or challenge to
self- and national coherence, but is seen, instead, as compatible with an in-
corporative project, ‘‘an invitation to absorption.’’ 76 And, finally, no one must
examine the injunction on indigenous subjects to stage for the nation this
sublime scene—not too much and not too little alterity. In this liberal imagi-
nary, the now recognized subaltern subjects would slough off their traumatic
histories, ambivalences, incoherencies, and angst like so much outgrown skin
rather than remain for themselves or for others a wounded testament to the
nation’s past bad faith.77 The nation would then be able to come out from
under the pall of its failed history, betrayed best intentions, and discursive
impasses. And normative citizens would be freed to pursue their profits and
enjoy their families without guilty glances over their shoulders into history,
or the slum down the block.

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 Shamed States

These new legal models of the multicultural nation and its citizenry have
not displaced classic liberal models of the state and citizenship, nor do many
state and public spokespersons intend them to. These older models of citizen-
ship continue to inform state function, public discourse, and individual feel-
ings about what is right and wrong to demand from the state and its normative
publics. Australian courts have always had and continue to reserve the power
to discriminate—and to discriminate against—those social and cultural dif-
ferences considered harmful to individual citizens or the nation’s so-called
core values. Rather than displacing this classic disciplinary power, Australian
legal multiculturalism has added a new dimension to its function. The courts
have recognized the state to have both the right to sanction ‘‘harmful’’ social
practices and identities, to sanction cultural difference, and the right to dis-
cern when a social or cultural difference has ceased to function as a difference
as such. The courts, in other words, have expanded the state’s discrimina-
tory powers, not restricted them. The court is now empowered to prohibit
and to (de)certify cultural difference as a rights- and resource-bearing iden-
tity. Yet Australian state apparatuses and public discourses continue to ground
citizenship in abstract juridical identities supposedly neutral in relation to
social identities, identifications, and practices. Once the state decertifies an
individual or community, once it no longer recognizes the form of cultural
difference they possess, these persons and communities are ‘‘liberated’’ back
into the community of abstract citizenship.
In the end, Mabo and Wik are no more about Aboriginal people, their
laws, and customs than are mass cultural objects like Mutant Message Down
Under. Nor do the Mabo and Wik courts pretend to be about actual Aborigi-
nal people, their laws, or their experiences of injustice, corporeal trauma, and
genocide. These decisions are, instead, about the linguistic and textual me-
diations necessary for the continual coercions of liberal law to seem either a
temporary confusion of those people administering it or a moment of cul-
tural misrecognition. In other words, the Mabo and Wik decisions are about
protecting and advancing Australian common law principles. And this, in the
end, is also what the liberal law asks Aboriginal subjects to do.

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 The people themselves believe that they
are descendants of certain great spirit
ancestors whose names and deeds are
well known; they arrived at identified
places and they moved about the land
doing various things at various places.
Whether or not they were the creators of
the physical world, they were certainly
the ordainers of the system of life which
the Aboriginals accept.
—Milirrpum v. Nabalco Pty Ltd.

5 / The Poetics of Ghosts: Social Reproduction

in the Archive of the Nation

DEATH RITE FOR MABALANG

In this chapter I describe the attempt of a group of Aboriginal women and

myself to translate an audio tape of a death rite held in 1948 in order to exam-
ine how indigenous members of the Belyuen community experience, grapple
with, and try to produce a legally and morally felicitous form of locality. This
production often means they must articulate local social processes, which
they themselves at times contest, with the federal law of land rights and cul-
tural difference. In other words, I try to show how these women, and other
Belyuen women and men, make their community a socially viable place as
they engage the legal and social forms within which they live, along with the

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 The Cunning of Recognition

archived memorial forms of their own histories, the national and transna-
tional circulations of these forms, and their own ambivalences toward the tra-
ditions held in the historical archive.
Insofar as they demonstrate these issues, this chapter and the next return
to the central themes explored in chapters 2 and 3 but from an ethnographic
perspective; that is, the disciplinary nature of the archive in the context of lib-
eral discourses of difference and morality. How do Belyuen persons at once
orient their discursive, emotional, and corporeal natures toward the state’s
definition of the traditional Aboriginal person at the same time that they
ghost this being for the state and sustain their own social imaginaries? In this
chapter, I concentrate in particular on liberal approaches to sexuality and
social organization because of the central role they play in land claim and
native title deliberations. To this end, I first examine in some detail two Bel-
yuen modes of territorialization, the descent and ascent of physical substances
through everyday and ritual practices. I then embed these local processes in
larger-scale processes of cultural and legal recognition, specifically, how the
law of recognition continually refers to local bodily practices as (and converts
them into) instances of heterosexual (human) and nonheterosexual (spiri-
tual) forms of community-building.
At this point I should briefly say how I am using the terms ‘‘local,’’ ‘‘local-
ize,’’ and ‘‘localization.’’ A number of scholars have recently attempted to
model the extralocal nature of localities, not the least of whom is Arjun Ap-
padurai in his groundbreaking volume Modernities at Large.1 These scholars
have noted that the nominal form ‘‘local’’ differs from the verb forms ‘‘local-
ize’’ and ‘‘localization’’ on the basis of the two suffixes, which signal the man-
ner in which a local is produced; that is, how a nominal abstraction, the local,
is manifested or projected as a specifiable state. Emphasizing the processes by
which locals are produced allows scholars entry into the pragmatics of social
production and reproduction that seem at the surface transparent processes
of self (and social) revelation and disclosure. Rather than reveal what local so-
cial structures are, I ask how they are produced, under what constraints, and
by what technologies of affect, force, and discourse. As should become clear,
I am arguing that structural and semantic approaches to textual meaning are,
in fact, part of the process by which a local is produced as an abstraction that
the law of recognition can apprehend. And I am arguing that this abstrac-
tion of the pragmatic life of social texts is a critical moment in which national
ideologies are localized.
These moments are especially troublesome for indigenous subjects. In-

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

digenous persons face the demand that they desire and identify in a way that
just so happens, in an uncanny convergence of interests, to fit the national
imaginary of the traditional Aboriginal person. With the help of lawyers and
anthropologists like me, they face the task of making the incommensurate
discourses, desires, and imaginaries of the nation and its subalterns and mi-
norities arrive at a felicitous, although unmotivated, end point. If they slip,
if they seem to be opportunistic, to be speaking to the law, public, or capital
too much or not enough or in a cultural framework the public recognizes as
its own, they risk losing the few judicial and material resources the state has
made available to them.
I also circle around the conversation I had with a group of Belyuen women
about a sound recording as a method for demonstrating that the places where
the public rhetoric of national support meets the local production of so-
cial communities are often nondramatic, quotidian, in nature. They include
verandas, shopping malls, and shady trees. Although ordinary, these places
are critical to how local beliefs and feelings are shaped into opinions about
who is responsible for present-day social maladies, such as the state’s failure
to curb the excesses of capital and to provide equitable health, housing, and
education; and how the failures of public sympathy, state institutions, and
lawful forms of property become the failures of local people to maintain their
‘‘culture.’’
A quick caveat. This chapter does not distill, through the alchemy of the
social sciences, an authentic if skeletal indigenous tradition still operating
across the Darwin Harbor. Quite the contrary, it highlights the contested
nature of the production of locales within and between specific indigenous
and nonindigenous social networks. Moreover, although I emphasize Belyuen
processes of localization and territorialization under the shadow of the Ab-
original Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976, other Aboriginal groups
working within its framework are no less, if differently, engaged in such pro-
cesses.

DEATH RITE FOR MABALAN AND THE DESCENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

6 July 1996, Belyuen. As if conspirators in a political intrigue whose histori-

cal measure had yet to be determined, we huddled around my small tape
recorder under the veranda of the Belyuen women’s center: Marjorie Bilbil,
Ester Djarem, Gracie Bitbin, Alice Djarug and her daughter Patsy-Ann, Ruby
Yarrowin and her daughter Linda, and I. Marjorie, Ester, Gracie, Alice, and

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 The Cunning of Recognition

Ruby were the critical remainders of the language and history of the com-
munity; their daughters were beginning to ‘‘pick it up’’ in the local colloquial
creole. Alongside this tape were a collection of academic and popular writings
from the 1930s to the 1960s, most importantly the works of the anthropologist
A. P. Elkin, who I discussed in chapter 3, and of Colin Simpson who wrote
several short, popular accounts of the ancestors of these women. On the audio
tape in the recorder that lay in the center of our loose circle was a recording
of a kapug (a mourning rite held a year after a death colloquially known as a
rag-burning ceremony) held at Belyuen in 1948 when these older women were
young adults, my age, Patsy’s age, Linda’s age.2 The kapug had been held for
Mabalan, Ester Djarem’s deceased husband’s first wife. Several wangga were
sung during the kapug; wangga are a regional musical genre in which song
and dance are accompanied by didjeridu and clapping sticks. We had heard
that Mabalan’s brother, Mosec Manpurr, could be heard on the tape singing a
wangga referring to the Belyuen waterhole as a durlg (totemic Dreaming site).
Why did these women and I care that Mosec might have received this type of
song text from a nyuidj (an ancestral spirit) emerging from Belyuen durlg?
For events like the one in which we were engaged, Betty Bilawag would
usually have been with us. Her absence was especially marked because Mo-
sec Manpurr and his brother Ginger Moreen were Bilawag’s first and second
husbands. On this day she was too sick, suffering through the last stages of res-
piratory failure, confined to a portable electric respirator, slowly dying from
the fluids daily dripping into her lungs related to (as spokespersons of tobacco
companies like to say) but not proven to be caused by the cigarettes she still
smokes, and certainly exacerbated by a lifetime spent by wood-burning fires.
By the time I begin writing this chapter in 1998, she will have drowned in the
viscous mucus invading her lungs and the secondary infections resulting from
this condition. Her closest friend and cousin (or, at that time, colloquially, her
‘‘wife’’), Maudie Bennett, the sister of her two late husbands, died from the
same condition in 1990. As in other interiors of the first world, at Belyuen the
national statistics of indigenous ill health are embodied in people, material-
ized corporeally. Poverty leaves its mark, mottling most people with the scars
of endemic streptococcal sores and exhausting some people with diarrhea,
diabetes, kidney failure, and other degenerative diseases that alter body chem-
istries and change mental faculties. Many of those people who survive bear
the physical and psychic mourning scars of generations of dead and dying.
As the papers of Elkin and Simpson were kicked about by dry season
winds, those of us sitting on the veranda heard the footsteps of Ester Djarem’s

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

older sister, Agnes Alanga, rustling the grass around the east side of the
building. Agnes Alanga is dead, but her nyuidj (spirit, ghost) often visits the
women’s center when we go there to discuss ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘traditions’’ or to
hold women’s ceremonies. She was the ceremonial leader of local women’s
ritual (‘‘women’s business,’’ in the colloquial) before she died of kidney failure
in 1994, a cause of death then all too common in the community. At Belyuen,
as elsewhere in the Daly River coastal region, human bodies not only physi-
cally ‘‘absorb’’ and express their material conditions, they are also thought
to be absorbed into the physical environment in the course of both every-
day and ritual practices. The substances of human bodies—sweat, language,
blood—are continually seeping into surrounding soils, waters, and air in the
countless ritual and quotidian interactions that make up a person’s life. In this
extraordinarily literal way Agnes has become a part of the countryside, has
been attached to this place and to those of us who survive her and are drawn
to this place in part to be near her.
Agnes’s specific identity will persist while those of us who knew her re-
main alive—the rustling we hear will bear the name of a person we knew;
a proper noun (a rigid designator) will tether sounds to a specific face, to a
set of memories, to marks she left in the landscape, to the things she used.3
As we die this specificity will slowly dissipate, mediated by local speech prac-
tices such as the avoidance of the proper names of recently deceased persons.
Over time, we will witness a reversal of how a name comes to represent, in
the words of Charles Peirce, ‘‘pretty fairly what it would mean to an acquain-
tance of the man.’’ 4 But the meaningfulness of the rustling will not vanish if
people remain who, although knowing nothing of Agnes, know nevertheless
‘‘some nyuidj this place.’’ Perhaps in the future people who hear a similar rus-
tling of grass will attribute the sound to the nyuidj of a once-living woman,
but will no longer be certain who this woman was. In other words, the rustle
of grass will no longer indexically signal a particular person, though it might
continue to signal a more generic relation—‘‘my grandmother,’’ ‘‘his ances-
tor,’’ ‘‘her family.’’ Possible future listeners may forget the humanness of Agnes
altogether and instead attribute the sound to the nearby Belyuen durlg, sug-
gesting that the Belyuen durlg sent a nyuidj here for some reason.
Similar processes of abstraction and rereferentialization have occurred
elsewhere in the region. In the coastal country south of Belyuen, at a site called
Yirrkunwana, an old woman nyuidj walks around the coastal mangrove and
in the jungle with her two dogs—one brown, one black with a white nose (or
so some people describe these dogs). People disagree about who she once was,

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 The Cunning of Recognition

if she was ever human, if Yirrkunwana is her name or the name of the site,
and if she is part of the story for a dog Dreaming (durlg) track in the area.
No matter the position they take on these issues, most Belyuen who discuss
Yirrkunwana delicately qualify their remarks by mood, tense, or evidential
markers: ‘‘werra’’ ‘‘yi’’ ‘‘before’’ ‘‘must be’’ ‘‘might be but I never been there.’’
In a like manner but a different situation, once every memory trace of
Agnes’s particularity might have vanished. Having been transformed into
a nyuidj, Agnes might have been transformed into a durlg or durlg-related
being; namely, an ancestral presence related to a Dreaming (totemic) site be-
longing to a particular group of persons in the logic of a clan.5 Geographical
space might have become inlain with the form of Agnes—her movement to
and from a place. In losing her particular identity she might have become a
type of durlg—Alanga durlg—structurally equivalent to Belyuen durlg.
These transformations of Agnes Alanga, or of Yirrkunwana, are not the
result of faulty mental faculties or a dysfunctional culture. They are the re-
sult of local processes of semiosis; how sign-activity is locally understood
and practiced and its effects on social life.6 Of particular importance is the
local avoidance of proper names and an injunction against using the name of
the recently deceased, even their European names. Those who share a Euro-
pean name with a recently deceased person change it. Michael becomes Adam,
only later to become Tony. Now, however, some archived signifying potential
Alanga as ‘‘Agnes’’ the younger sister of ‘‘Chapata’’ and daughter of ‘‘Chun-
buk’’ and ‘‘Moorambil,’’ will persist unless every last copy of this page burn
in a historically unimaginable conflagration. Until then this page will remain
as an archived potentiality, dormant until someone finds and reads it years
or decades from now. And, into the fire must go not only this book but also
Colin Simpson’s Adam in Ochre, which describes Agnes as bearing the Ab-
original name ‘‘Allunga’’ and as having ‘‘learned some hymns at the mission,
where she is called Agnes.’’ 7 And into the fire also must go Elkin’s essay ‘‘Ngira-
wat,’’ which describes ‘‘Alanga (Agnes) and Mada (Ruby)’’ Yarrowin as having
a ritual relationship based on a shared name (a ngirawat relation); and into
the fire must go any video and audio tape that Agnes’s children and grand-
children might own of her kapug. And not only these audio and video tapes,
but also the master tapes recorded by the ethnomusicologists Allan Marett
and Linda Barwick and the linguist Lyz Ford and their memories and all the
archived references they have produced of them.
We were not preparing for a book and recording barbecue, however. Quite
the contrary; we gathered to mine the archive of memory held in this tape to

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

bolster their territorial claims over the lands, islands, and waters surround-
ing the community. It is very uneven terrain. Let me begin with its most local
contours. Off in the grass to the left of us lay the ashes of some nondescript
half-burnt logs, the remainders of various women’s ceremonies slowly seeping
into the surrounding soil. Under them are the ashes of numerous other fires.
The ground behind the adult education center slopes away to a creek. In Colin
Simpson’s popular travelogue Adam in Ochre, he describes this mythic land-
scape: ‘‘[it was] a creek with a very deep waterhole. Every Waugeit knew that
in that waterhole Beluin [Belyuen] once lived, Beluin the Rainbow Snake.’’ 8
Simpson’s work was first published in 1951, the same year that the minister for
the Territories, the Honorable Paul Hasluck, counseled the nation not only to
tolerate but to take full ‘‘enjoyment’’ of the traditions of its indigenous ‘‘full-
bloods.’’ 9 In the same section of Adam in Ochre, titled ‘‘Mosek’s People,’’ Simp-
son described how the ‘‘Waugeit’’ attempted to drive the first white settler,
Benjamin Cohen De Lissa, off the sacred Belyuen Rainbow waterhole and
how De Lissa fired off flares to drive the ‘‘Waugite’’ off his sugarcane farm.10
‘‘Mosek’’ refers to Betty Bilawag’s first husband, Mosec Manpurr.
A. P. Elkin, the second chair of anthropology in Australia who conducted
fieldwork in the community, also mentioned the Rainbow Snake Dreaming as
important to the Wagaitj—and Mosec as an important ceremonial leader—
in his 1950 essay ‘‘Ngirawat, or the Sharing of Names in the Wagaitj Tribe,
Northern Australia.’’ Rather than refer to the location of the Belyuen Dream-
ing (or durlg), as Simpson did, Elkin refers to the role the Rainbow Snake
played in annual local Inawana (Big Sunday) ceremonies. The Wagaitj held
these Inawana ceremonies to ‘‘ ‘call up’ Waran [another Dreaming site on the
northwest coast] and all the dorlks’’ until the ‘‘Government told the old men
not to hold the ceremony any more, because natives from other parts work-
ing in Darwin blamed this ceremony, performed by almost local natives, for
any sickness or other ills which befell them.’’ 11 These Big Sunday ceremonies
were the same ones that Harney, Murray, and Turner helped the government
suppress, as discussed at the end of chapter 3.12
‘‘Waugeit’’ (now Wagaitj) is a term from the Batjemal language referring
to the coast and to coastal people. Since the settlement of Darwin in 1869, it
has been a common way of referring to the Aboriginal groups living along
the coastline stretching from the Cox Peninsula—where Belyuen is located—
to Cape Dombey. Elkin believed that ‘‘Wagaitj means beach people, and in-
cludes three, and possibly four, linguistic groups.’’ 13 The four groups he men-
tions in his essays and field notes are the Kiyuk, Wadjigiyn, Amiyenggal, and

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 The Cunning of Recognition

Marriamu. Most Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal persons would now supple-

ment his coastal register with two other linguistic (or ‘‘new tribal’’) groups—
Mendayenggal and Marritjeban. As for the peninsula on which Belyuen is
located, Elkin described it as having been ‘‘formerly the country of the Laragia
(Larrakia) tribe, which is now nearly extinct. Its survivors are coalescing with
one of the Wagaitj groups, the Wadjigiyn.’’ 14
In modern kinship terminology, Wagaitj, Wadjigiyn, Kiyuk, and so forth
are ways of referring to different kinds, levels, and amalgamations of regional
descent structures. To what a ‘‘descent group’’ refers is a matter of some dis-
pute within the anthropological community. In Australia, at the time of my
fieldwork in 1996, this definition of descent had considerable play: according
to Roger M. Keesing, descent is ‘‘a relationship defined by connection to an
ancestor (or ancestress) through a culturally recognized sequence of parent-
child links.’’ 15 The relationship defined by these parent-child links is the pre-
suppositional grounds for a number of other social relations—for example,
property, affect, ritual, and economy.
Charles Peirce might consider the kinship diagram a nice example of ex-
treme abduction. The referential truth of descent, and the elegance of its mod-
eling, seems beyond the necessity of justification. Figure 9 and the others that
follow are examples of descent forms, in these cases, patrilineal and cognatic
forms of descent. These diagrams seem to rely on nothing more than two very
simple and seemingly indisputable facts of human being—sex difference and
generation (heterosexual reproduction). Of course, figure 9 itself has a his-
tory. In 1910, the British psychologist W. H. R. Rivers announced a major
methodological breakthrough in the study of ‘‘savage’’ societies.16 One of his
students, Radcliffe-Brown, the first chair of anthropology in Australia who
did fieldwork in the Daly River region, would argue that all social organiza-
tion extended from the kernel of kinship, a father, mother, and their children.
According to this perspective, all societies narrow or expand these two ‘‘so-
cial facts’’—sex and generation—to create the various features of social rights,
duties, and responsibilities that comprise the skeletal order and function of
society. These social facts are often encrusted with linguistic and cultural ma-
terial. In the instance of patrilineal descent (in figure 9), an Aboriginal group
may ‘‘phrase’’ descent as determined by the passage of a durlg (or, extralocally,
a totem, sacred site, or Dreaming) through the father line—or may say that a
Dreaming is ‘‘picked up’’ from fathers or grandfathers, which is usually under-
stood as saying the totem is passed down through the male line.17
The locality of this group, what makes it a local descent group, derives

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

female

male

marriage

descent

membership
in patriline
patrilineal descent

female

male

marriage

descent

membership in
cognatic group
cognatic descent

figure 9. Patrilineal and cognatic descent.

from the nature of certain types of durlg Dreamings—the fact that durlg are
located in a specific place.18 Belyuen, for instance, have durlg—dog, whale,
devil, stingray—that connect them to various territories along the coast south
of the Cox Peninsula. Various combinations of durlg groups also refer to lan-
guage as shared among themselves. Wadgigiyn, Kiyuk, Emi, Mentha, Mar-
riamu, and Marritjeban are terms referring to a collection of durlg groups
sharing the materiality of language, which, like durlg, passes down or is picked
up from the fathers (figure 10). The local descent group is thus a complex
indexical symbol, anchoring people to places and to each other.
The social implication of this diagrammatic argument was clear to Claude
Lévi-Strauss. The atom of kinship was not the father, mother, and children
as Radcliffe-Brown had proposed, but those persons and the other father, the
uncle who provided the means for exchange between two groups and thus for
the emergence of culture qua culture (figure 11). The principles of affinity—
generalized and restricted exchange—were added to sexual difference and

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 The Cunning of Recognition

long yam

magpie goose ordinary dog

figure 10. Patriclan and estate with symbols of marriage, consanguinity, and
descent inverted.

generation as the necessary presuppositional grounds for a complex unfold-

ing of human social organization and symbolization. Words, women, goods:
these were possible only after the addition of the uncle.
All of the ideas above, of course, were at the time the subject of heated
anthropological debate. Were Australian Aboriginal territorial groups based
on principles of descent or affinity? Were all Australian Aboriginal territo-
rial groups based on the estate model? Were Aboriginal men and women,
according to L. R. Hiatt, ‘‘automata machines following tribal law in every-
thing they do,’’ or were they people with politics? 19 In either case, demon-
strating the regular and rational family-based grounds of territoriality was
critical to the rhetorical emergence of land rights in Australia. Specifiable in-
digenous people owned specifiable lands and had specifiable principles for
the management of its resources and its title. This process of abstraction was
the necessary condition of territorial recognition within the property regimes
of the state.20
And yet the classical literature was also replete with references to indige-
nous forms of localization—a different question to the ahistorical framework
of the ‘‘local.’’ Reporting on Gidjingal territoriality in the mid-1960s, Hiatt
noted that the Gidjingal and their neighbors sometimes abandoned their es-
tates and became ‘‘permanently associated with a unit in another locality. . . .
The descendents retained their group identity but displayed little interest in
the land of their migrant fathers.’’ These groups attached themselves to a

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

exchange

figure 11. The atom of kinship.

local Dreaming site through the process of identification with it, and came to
be considered from it in a ‘‘company relation’’ with the descent groups that
predated them.21 Over time the two descent groups came to share the same
Dreaming. Elkin likewise reported changes of territorial association and iden-
tity in the Cox Peninsula region. In ‘‘The Complexity of Social Organisation in
Arnhem Land,’’ for instance, Elkin noted the then-remarkable anthropologi-
cal fact that a high incidence of ‘‘meeting and mixing’’ among the Wagaitj re-
sulted in the ‘‘fluidity of [land-owning] boundaries, and even changes of clan
countries.’’ Indeed, Elkin characterized the entire coastal region comprising
the countries of the Wagaitj as socially dynamic and fluid rather than socially
static, countering ‘‘the textbook description of local organisation.’’ 22 Elkin
did not explain the principles that determined how or why these changes of
land-owning boundaries and clan territories occurred other than to observe
the fact that an Aboriginal person could change ‘‘his local group or horde by
residence or initiation or both.’’ He did, however, provide a clue to the under-
lying processes through which residence and initiation became productive
of territoriality in his discussion of the two major forms of totemism in the
region, durlg and maruy, so-called cult totemism and conception totemism
respectively.
What provided the mechanism of this social transduction? Why was it
persuasive? Or, asking the same questions in a somewhat different way, how
did local processes of abstraction and particularization intersect with these
anthropological models? To address these questions, let me return to the
veranda.

PRAGMATIC DESCENT

We had gathered on the veranda of the Belyuen women’s center to listen to an

event that occurred in 1948. Some of those recorded in ‘‘Death Rite for Maba-
lan’’ would be featured in other national broadcasts. Tom Barradjap would
eventually become the senior songman and men’s ceremonial leader for the

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 The Cunning of Recognition

region and, as such, be featured on a 1980 segment of the abc television show
‘‘Nationwide Report,’’ about the progress of the Kenbi Land Claim. The Kenbi
Land Claim had national significance because of its proximity to the city of
Darwin, the only major white settlement in the Northern Territory at the
time (with a population then of approximately sixty thousand). The abc tele-
vision special shows Tom Barradjap seated on a coastal Dreaming site, Ngal-
wat, where Belyuen young men are taken as part of their initiation rites. He
speaks a language the audience is not expected to understand. The reporter,
Murray McLoughlin, translates for the show’s imagined public: ‘‘This old man
is speaking of the importance to Aboriginal people of the land now known
as Cox Peninsula and of the importance of breeding places about here. He is
mourning the destruction and desecration of the land and those places signifi-
cant in his culture which occurred since white occupation of this Top End of
Australia.’’ Other Belyuen men and women are shown performing a wangga,
and three are broadcast speaking to McLoughlin: Roy Yarrowin, Ruby’s since
deceased husband; John Singh; and Olga Singh. Three non-Aboriginal per-
sons speak: Maria Brandl, the senior anthropologist for the aboriginal claim-
ants at the time; Paul Everingham, then chief minister of the Northern Terri-
tory; and John Isaacs, the Labour opposition leader. (Figure 12 presents one
of the standard representations of the regional landscape inlain with the kin-
ship and marriage relations of some of these men and women and with some
of their totemic, clan estate, and language affiliations.)
‘‘Death Rite for Mabalan’’ was broadcast in 1948 on Australian national
radio as part of ‘‘The Australian Walkabout Show.’’ It was narrated by the
same Colin Simpson who, three years later, included a modified version of the
event in his Adam in Ochre. Allan Marett, the same ethnomusicologist who
videotaped the kapug of Agnes Alanga Lippo (and whose fine research on
wangga provides the basis of much of the discussion in this chapter 23), found
the recording at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Is-
lander Studies in Canberra as he worked in the sound archives of Alice Moyle,
another ethnomusicologist who worked among the Wagaitj in the 1960s.
Moyle recorded several Belyuen performing wangga in other contexts, in-
cluding Tom Barradjap and Billy Mundjimainmain, Marjorie Bilbil’s father’s
brother. Marett informed the Northern Land Council and me of his discovery
that the now-deceased Mosec Manpurr, Mabalan’s elder brother and Bilawag’s
first husband, sings a Belyuen wangga at the very end of the broadcast ‘‘Death
Rite for Mabalan.’’ Why was this archival fact of interest? I begin to answer
this question with another: What is wangga?

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 ly River
Da

figure 12. Affinal relations in the Daly River Region, 1850–1950.

From The Cunning of Recognition by Povinelli, Elizabeth A.. DOI: 10.1215/9780822383673

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 The Cunning of Recognition

As noted in general terms earlier, wangga refers to a regional musical genre

in which song and dance are accompanied by didjeridu and clapping sticks.
Wangga are public songs, openly sung in a variety of ritual and nonritual con-
texts. A songman composes a wangga text typically either out of material pre-
sented to him by a nyuidj while he is Dreaming or out of the ordinary events
of daily life. Nyuidj who present songs to songmen may be a specific human
ancestor known to the singer (often the songman’s own teacher), or may be
the humanlike manifestation of a nearby durlg. Elkin alluded to this latter
form of text acquisition in his essay ‘‘Ngirawat.’’ He observed that after his
initiation ‘‘a young man is taken by his father to visit his dorlk center and is
told the myth connected with it. Perhaps he too will dream a song about it.’’ 24
Songmen also inherit specific song texts and inherit or are given the right by
their human relations to compose songs for an area.25
Although men publicly authorize other men to sing their song texts and to
compose and sing songs for specific territories, durlg-associated nyuidj rather
than humans act as the ultimate authorizing agent of song composition. In
the case of nyuidj-authorized wangga, the nyuidj not only signals the right of
the composer to compose songs about a country but also signals the ancestral
composition of that country. In other words, the appearance of a nyuidj in a
place ‘‘says’’ something about the durlg ontology of the place by acting as an
indexical hinge between human and durlg ontological realms. I use the indefi-
nite modifier ‘‘something’’ purposely because although the indexical hinge
between human and durlg domains is present in the act of wangga composi-
tion and song, the meaning of this hinge necessitates higher-order arguments
of a type I discuss below.
For those steeped in a Western narrative tradition, analyzing wangga may
disappoint them, may seem to them a meager, minor literature. Wangga may
even exasperate them, because the songs may seem to be minor literatures
needlessly embedded in complex syntactic structures and impenetrable lin-
guistic registers.26 When viewed from the perspective of semantic and narra-
tive sense and meaning, wangga threaten to reward laborious analytic effort
with little return. Not much seems to be there. Wangga usually consist of only
a few short sentences, whose morphological structure has been ‘‘tangled-up’’
or ‘‘twisted’’ in Belyuen terms. In linguistic terms, normative syntactic struc-
tures have been purposively violated in order to force listeners to reconstitute
the message by rearranging morphemic units if they want to make sense of
the text.
But perhaps the negative evaluation of the song genre results from ap-

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

proaching wangga from a narrative and semantic perspective. As much as

wangga are sense oriented, they are technically and precisely non-sense ori-
ented. By non-sense I refer merely to how Belyuen understand the perfor-
mative, indexical, function of wangga. The linguistic code of wangga is not
simply, or perhaps not even primarily, a vehicle for expressing sense-meaning;
it does not simply or primarily convey a narrative about a place. Rather in the
act of composition and singing, wangga construct an architectural space of
sorts among the ontological realms of singer (and his extendable kin), the ter-
ritory commonly associated with the language of the song, and the territory
to which the song refers. It entails a space in the act of composition and per-
formance. From one perspective, the spatial form (social, geographical) that
every wangga lays out is neutral in relation to its sense and social meaning.
This space simply becomes present in the act of singing. But in being present,
this laid-out non-sense space can be (note: may not be) drawn into social
work by social agents who, often unknowingly, regiment these actualities into
higher-order social meanings and who then make broader arguments about
the social consequences of these meanings—the how, who, when, and where
of proper action.
All this becomes clearer when we look at an actual wangga composed for
the region and, more specifically, at the semantic and pragmatic features that
structure receptions of it. Along with clarifying local semiotic practices, look-
ing at an actual text begins to answer the question of why these women and I
cared that Mosec might have sung this type of song about Belyuen. Let us take
as example a wangga that Billy Mundjimainmain sang about the island Du-
wun, which is located off the Cox Peninsula and within the area under claim.
The first six ‘‘lines’’ of the Duwun song are in nyuidj mal (spirit language).
The first two lines of the untangled Duwun song are:

dagan mele dagaldja

dagan mele mele

dagan brother dagaldja

dagan brother brother

‘‘Dagan mele dagaldja’’: most Belyuen say that nyuidj language is impene-
trable, untranslatable. Rather than a vehicle for semantic meaning, nyuidj mal
indexes a quality of djewalabag—the cleverness of men, and women, who
can understand and speak these words. Evidential and ontological markers
index the origin and authorizing agency of the song—this song came from

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 The Cunning of Recognition

nyuidjalag, a quasiparallel ontic realm that djewalabag, ‘‘clever persons,’’ ac-

cess through dream and song, as did Billy Mundjimainmain, and as might
have Mosec, who the 1948 radio broadcast stated ‘‘is also a djewalag.’’ 27 Rather
than diminishing the authority of the nyuidj or singer, the semantic opacity
of nyuidj language intensifies it, signaling the ontic reality of nguidjalag while
maintaining its epistemological impenetrability to all but those who have the
nature of djewalabag.
The indeterminate content of the nyuidj message is complemented by the
indeterminate status of the vocalization itself. Is ‘‘dagan mele dagaladja’’ an
instance of reported speech (game, ‘‘he said’’ nonfuture)? Are we who sit and
listen to taped recordings of this song hearing about an event or hearing the
event itself—are we hearing Billy Mundjimainmain engaging in an instance of
(sung) reported speech or are we hearing the nyuidj singing, we in the dream
with the songman hearing what he heard? 28 The tense of game, nonfuture, in-
fluences the undecidability. The answers to these questions cannot be secured
or settled once and for all, especially when wangga are performed within a
locally determined context in which norms against direct interrogatives are
in place (say, against asking, ‘‘what that meaning?’’). Two different problems
present themselves. First is the problem of interpretation. What the songman
sings and what he intends to convey are understood to be potentially two very
different things. The best songmen are understood to encode a secret, or sev-
eral secret, levels to their song text. Second is the problem of performance and
performativity. Even if a songman is presumed to be the medium of a nyuidj,
in every specific instance someone could claim that he failed to achieve this
role. In any case, it is not the definitive answers to the above questions per se
that is important here, nor even the possibility of saturated context, but rather
that these are conditions of and for argument: the possibilities that the inter-
sections of these two ontological orders, human and nyuidj, provide for the
making of human sociality, corporeality, and meaning. To understand these
possibilities we need to return to the poetics and grammar of nyuidjalag.
While most Belyuen and their regional neighbors say that nyuidj language
is semantically impenetrable, embedded in this language are local human lin-
guistic nominals and particles, most typically kinship terms and phatic and
emotive particles. For instance, the first two lines of the Duwun song con-
tain a possible kin address, mele (brother), which then figures a set of social
relations between the nyuidj and the singer and, via the songman, between
the nyuidj and listeners. Kinship literally extends out from the initial address
into the audience of listeners and potential listeners. Extending outward with

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

these kinship relations are other social identities—linguistic, estate, clan af-
filiations, ceremonial. An entwining of these multiple identities ensues, cre-
ating ‘‘tracks’’ or ‘‘footsteps’’ that can be followed and infused with other so-
cial meanings, obligations, and identities (see figure 13).
Even when a wangga text does not present an explicit kinship relation be-
tween singer and nyuidj, the understood address of the nyuidj to the song-
man and the formal arrangement of other semantic orders metapragmatically
constructs a formally meaningless but coherent and cohering apparatus into
which meaningful arguments can be inlaid and, more abstractly, a feeling of
the concrete integrity of an alternate worldly authority produced. We have
already seen how the linguistic code of the wangga structures spatial and so-
cial relations. Other linguistic functions build into the wangga other semiotic
orders into which meaning is laminated. For instance, in the next four lines
of the Duwun song the poetic function of the particles karra and yagarra co-
here and regiment the nyuidj utterance into segmentable units (-arra), while
maintaining listeners’ attention (the phatic particle ‘‘Hey!’’), and orienting
their emotional states (the emotive lamentative particle ‘‘Oh no!’’). In other
words, the poetics of particles orders the text into higher order segments and
thus a nyuidj syntax as such.29

karra, nyele wewe

yagarra, nyele wewe
karra, nyele wewe
yagarra, nyele wewe

Hey! nyele wewe

Oh no! nyele wewe
Hey! nyele wewe
Oh no! nyele wewe

This pseudosyntax makes the text feel coherent even though sense mean-
ing cannot be extracted from it, and it makes it seem durable and detachable
from its local context even though its coherence depends on that local context.
The wangga can be experienced as something from somewhere nonhuman—
if, of course, the listener can interpret the various indexical orders built into
its structure. Meanwhile, the meaning of nyele wewe remains a placeholder,
inciting speculation and motivating contextualized and contextualizing in-
terpretations. For instance, when discussing this text, women and men have
asked themselves: What might the nyuidj have meant? Why did it appear at

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 j
vid
Ny
duwun
Belyuen

)
er”
oth
“br
le (
memundjimainmain
Duwun
iyn site: Laragiya or Wagaitj
language: Emi, Batjemal, Laragiya
⁄

jig
uk

d
kiy

Warambu
wa

site: Nadidi
“mele”
Warambu
ele

Kilili Mundji Nguidj

)m

Marriamu Marritjeban Marritjeban Laragiya-Emiyengga

Marrijeben
er”
h
rot

Nuki
(“b

Da (daughter)
ly Ri Marritjeban
ve
r
Billy
Mundjimainmain
u
am
ri
ma

figure 13. Ghostly territorializations.

From The Cunning of Recognition by Povinelli, Elizabeth A.. DOI: 10.1215/9780822383673

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

Duwun? Why did it appear at that moment? To Billy Mundjimainmain? As

I argued above, these pragmatic features of the text provide the grounds on
which meaningful and persuasive arguments can be made about the social
relationship between a social group and a place, and about the ‘‘true’’ sub-
stance of a person and, by extension, her kin. In other words, these songs are
simultaneously referential, argumentative, and performative acts. But, if this
is so, the felicity of these text acts depends only in part on local understand-
ings of evidence and judgment—their institutions, scenarios, and sceneries. It
also depends on distally produced and institutionally mediated demands for
how evidence and judgment should appear, demands that are now part and
parcel of local processes of localization. That is, state laws like the Aboriginal
Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act are one of the contexts entailing the
ways these texts are excavated. I will come back to this point in more detail
later, but here let me remind readers of the conversations found at the end of
chapter 1 in which the question of what counted as a real kinship relation in
the context of land claim hearings threatened to redefine, narrow, and block
processes of local social negotiations.
The propositional and performative potential of wangga is clear in the
final four lines of the Duwun song when for the first time a human language,
Emiyenggal, is used exclusively. This code switch is accompanied by a shift
in person, from first to third person, and with this shift a movement from a
poetic reliance on nyuidj mal to evidential markers (-yi). That is, the poetic
structure of the Duwun song emerges out of the evidential particles of the now
foregrounded, linguistically demarcated composer. Through these evidential
markers, Billy Mundjimainmain makes a specific claim about the authenticity
of the reported event, his right to sing about the event and the place where it
occurred, and the truth value of the authorizing nyuidj: Listen! It happened.
I was there. Nyuidj was over there. You just heard im.

karra game yi
karra duwun ngana yi
gidji dhatdhat mandha ya
karra game yi

Hey! he sang [it happened]

Hey! Duwun I went [it happened]
crawl sit a song away there
Hey! he sang [it happened]

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 The Cunning of Recognition

The geographical referent, Duwun, appears only in this final segment of

the wangga, and with it appears a potential ordering and anchoring of specific
persons in specific mythic and geographical spaces. Before I briefly suggest
how this might be, I should note that the identity and status of geographical
referents can be no better secured from culturally mediated processes of re-
memorialization and rethematization than the identity and status of nyuidj
events—such as was the case for Agnes Alanga discussed above. Mundjimain-
main, for instance, simultaneously refers to a person, Billy Mundjimainmain,
and to a place, Mundjimainmain. So does Duwun. Therefore, like personal
references to Agnes Alanga Lippo (‘‘Alanga there’’) might slowly be trans-
formed into geographic referents (‘‘that place Alanga is there’’), so might those
to Mundjimainmain. And vice versa. Some Larrakia say Duwun refers to a
female ancestor of theirs and link themselves to Duwun the place through
the common name. Other Aboriginal persons say Duwun is ‘‘just a place.’’ In
other cases, a personal name derived from a site name has been lifted up from
that geographical referent and moved to another geographical place through
the movement of the person who was given that name. In any case, the persua-
siveness of any particular claim emerges from the multiple ‘‘tracks’’ the person
making the claim can muster—residential, linguistic, affective, ceremonial,
and so forth.
This is the invaginatory nature of arguments—every claim about the refer-
ent of a proper name must be anchored in some evidentially accepted archive
of memory, practice, and action and must be attached, if ever so delicately, to
whatever new texts and contexts exist at the time the argument is being made.
And every effective argument becomes the ground condition for new argu-
ments. Even if people all agree that a nyuidj did give this wangga to the person
Billy Mundjimainmain at the place Duwun, this agreement only stands as the
grounds for an infinite series of questions and arguments: Why did a nyuidj
give Billy Mundjimainmain a song about this place in this language? What
does it indicate about the two sites, Mundjimainmain and Duwun, about
the countries associated through Mundjimainmain the person, his estate, the
code of the song, and Marritjeban and Emiyenggal lands and peoples? Who
has rights to this song and, thus, responsibilities for this place? Not that the
best argument always prevails, or even usually prevails; sometimes the most
persistent and consistent arguments figure the scene.
This said, the geographical referent ‘‘Duwun’’ reveals and builds into the
Duwun wangga a still more elaborate scaffold on which arguments about
the spiritual status of this place and this person are built, arguments such as

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

the country in which Duwun is found ‘‘speaks’’ Emi; the country has absorbed
Emi people, or Mundjimainmain was secretly Larrakia; the entire territory
stretching from Nadidi to Duwun is somehow related, is somehow Wagaitj.
Particular persons like Marjorie Bilbil can use the geographical and social ar-
chitecture of this wangga to move backward in time and space, tracing her
relationship to Duwun-the-place through her father’s brother’s relationship
to this nyuidj, reconstituting the substantial nature of her body in the process.
Rather than through heterosexual reproduction in the first or even last in-
stance, corporeality and territoriality is (re)produced through the intercourse
of the living and the dead, the textual and corporeal. If, that is, people remain
who know how to read the semantic and pragmatic codes embedded in songs
like Duwun, and if these cultural practices of interpretation are themselves
embedded in contexts that afford them performative force. In other words,
although these semiotic practices may be rooted in local understandings of
the corporeal exchanges between human and durlg ontologies, and although
they may provide a basis for the production and reproduction of human lin-
eages, families, and bodies, their social felicity now depends as much on the
archive of the nation, legal precedent, public record, and state law as on the
archive of local ritual and face-to-face persuasion and incitement.
With this in mind let me return once again to the question I raised above.
Why did these women and I care that Mosec might have received this type
of song text from a nyuidj emerging from Belyuen durlg? And, as impor-
tant, what transformed our interest into an activity, laborious at times? What
prompted us to abandon whatever other pressing or passing concerns clut-
tered our lives, to meet under this particular veranda, and to concentrate on
translating wangga songs from an old, scratchy tape?

LEGAL DISSENT

‘‘Aboriginal’’ means a person who is a member of the Aboriginal race

of Australia.
‘‘Aboriginal tradition’’ means the body of traditions, observances, cus-
toms, and beliefs of Aboriginals or of a community or group of Aborigi-
nals, and includes those traditions, observances, customs and beliefs as
applied in relation to particular persons, sites, areas of land, things or re-
lationships.
‘‘traditional Aboriginal owners’’, in relation to land, means a local de-
scent group of Aboriginals who:

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 The Cunning of Recognition

(a) have common spiritual affiliations to a site on the land, being af-
filiations that place the group under a primary spiritual responsibility for
that site and for the land; and
(b) are entitled by Aboriginal tradition to forage as of right over that
land.30

There seems to be a very obvious answer to the questions posed at the end
of the last section—the ethnomusicologist Allan Marett thought that a trans-
lated version of the Belyuen wangga might provide the Belyuen useful evi-
dence to support their land claim. The Belyuen had recently decided to put
themselves forward as the nonexclusive ‘‘traditional Aboriginal owners’’ of the
land surrounding the community under the Aboriginal Land Rights (North-
ern Territory) Act, 1976 (hereafter lra).31 In a very simple sense this is why
the women and I had gathered: to be recognized as the ‘‘traditional Aboriginal
owners’’ (a term of statutory law) for the land under claim, the Belyuen and
their lawyers and anthropologists needed to convince a land commissioner
that they satisfied the specific requirements of the lra; namely, that they were
a ‘‘local descent group’’ who have ‘‘common spiritual affiliations’’ to a site on
the land that place them under ‘‘primary spiritual responsibility for the site’’
and for the land.32 The lra not only enacted a textual limit to the form of
an argument, the legislation also established a number of regional land coun-
cils charged with administering Aboriginal land claims. In 1995 I was asked to
act as senior anthropologist for the Belyuen by the Northern Land Council,
having worked with the community since 1984.33 It was my job to demon-
strate the anthropological basis for this thing called a ‘‘local descent group.’’
What, then, is the meaning of the juridical concept of local descent group?
At the time the Kenbi Land Claim was first submitted in 1979, three land
claims had been heard under the auspices of the lra. In his very first land
claim report, the first land commissioner, Mr. Toohey, accepted the argu-
ment by W. E. H. Stanner that all traditional Aboriginal societies reckoned
the descent of territorial rights through the father and father’s father (patrilin-
eality), and that an Aboriginal person could belong in a full sense to only one
local descent group and thus to only one territory. For Stanner the patrilineal
‘‘totem’’ (durlg) acted both as a symbol (or emblem) of clan solidarity and as
an index of the proper territorial location of a social group. As it descended
from father to children, the totem functioned as an indexical hinge between
human group and the place where the totem was located. Stanner understood
the transmission of the totem to be a fairly straightforward heterosexually

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

mediated process by which the sign passed from father to children (with adop-
tion understood as analogous to heterosexual reproduction). In short, Toohey
recognized as a matter of legal fact a (disputed) anthropological model of
indigenous land ownership—the patrilineal clan-estate group.
In so accepting this academically mediated model of indigenous social
organization, Toohey instantaneously cast all other means by which ‘‘tra-
ditional Aborigines associate identifiable groups of people with particular
‘countries’ ’’ as distortions of or supplements to the heterosexual machinery
of human descent.34 Ties to country based on corporeal exchanges discussed
above and in earlier chapters—quotidian experiences of living in and moving
through space and nonquotidian events of conception, ritual, death—were
excluded as the legitimate major means by which local descent groups could
be formed, or, if formed, found to be legally felicitous territorial groups. The
spiritual and material relationship that Aboriginal men and women had to
land, to the dead, and to the unborn was reduced in the last instance to the
heterosexual reproduction of blood, symbolically narrowed and demarcated
by the patrilineal totem. But this anthropological model also provided the
persuasive means to sway a court and public to recognize indigenous land
rights. From 1976 to the time of this writing, forty percent of land in the
Northern Territory has been granted to indigenous groups under the auspices
of the lra. 35
Prior to the 1989 Kenbi hearing a number of land commissioners had rec-
ognized a restricted form of ‘‘spiritual descent’’ as satisfying the lra require-
ment that claimants be a local descent group.36 In the Nicholson River Land
Claim report (1985), for example, Justice Kearney stated that ‘‘ ‘descent’ is not
limited to biological descent; it means socially recognised descent.’’ 37 Kear-
ney was satisfied that ‘‘descent from a common mythic ancestor is a principle
of descent deemed relevant by the claimants and sufficient with their other
ties to constitute’’ a finding of traditional Aboriginal ownership.38 However,
in contrast to the Belyuen case, the majority of the claimants in the Nicholson
River claim were members of human descent groups (patrilineages or matri-
filiates to a patrilineage). Only two claimants, Ned Dambambat and Brady
Bates, were said and found to be claimants based on moiety classification,
ritual responsibility, and, critically, descent ‘‘from the same mythic ancestors
as the other members of these groups.’’ 39 That is, spiritual descent supple-
mented human descent as the primary mechanism of group construction—
it did not determine it.
The land commissioner who followed Kearney, Michael Maurice, similarly

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 The Cunning of Recognition

accepted the concept of spiritual descent as a supplemental mechanism of

inclusion to the major human descent group.40 However, in the Ti Tree re-
port (1987) Maurice refuses to accept spiritual descent—the ‘‘assertion that
the claimants gain membership into the local descent group through descent
from Altyerrenge (Dreaming) ancestors’’—as the primary principle on which
the local descent group was formed.41 In the Ti Tree claim, not only were the
descent lines by which claimants were said to gain rights to country expanded
by ‘‘an additional qualification for membership of the local descent group:
‘spiritual descent’, was asserted and claimed to be of more importance than
any of the four genealogical links.’’ 42 In other words ‘‘spiritual descent was set
apart from the descent from human ancestors . . . and was given a priority
in defining the land of the traditional owners.’’ 43 For Maurice this belief was
simply inconceivable.
Although having restricted ‘‘descent’’ to include only heterosexual repro-
duction (and its symbolic equivalent, adoption), since 1979 land commis-
sioners have moved significantly away from viewing the ‘‘local descent group’’
as a strict anthropological concept to viewing it as an ordinary concept and
phrase.44 Toohey himself would reverse paths in his 1981 Finniss River report,
stating that the land commissioner should base his understanding of recruit-
ment into a local descent group ‘‘on a principle of descent deemed relevant by
the claimants’’ not on anthropological theory or debate. Land Commissioner
Michael Maurice also argued that legal judgment should be oriented to local
beliefs when he stated in his 1985 Timber Creek report: ‘‘It is [a] religious bond
with the world . . . that the Parliament has endeavored to recognize by its defi-
nition of traditional Aboriginal owner with its three elements: family ties to
land; religious ties; and economic rights, i.e., to forage.’’ 45 The most generous
reading of this legal genealogy would understand these land commissioners
to be attempting to liberate indigenous practices of local descent from the
vice grip of anthropological theory. And yet the commonsense family of land
claim legislation remains the classical lineage model developed and refined
during the heyday of British structural functionalism. This lineage model has
not been displaced but merely expanded to include a more diverse set of filial
principles—matrilineality, ambilineality, and cognation.46
But even these expansions had yet to occur in 1979. Not surprisingly, then,
the 1979 Kenbi claim book stated that the traditional Aboriginal owners of
the Cox Peninsula and Islands were the seven surviving members of a small
patrilineal clan group, the Danggalaba. Danggalaba is a Larrakia term in most
accounts used to refer to a crocodile Dreaming (durlg) on the northwest coast

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

of the Cox Peninsula. The Belyuen refer to this same durlg as Kenbi. According
to the authors of the Kenbi land claim book (1979); before European settle-
ment, the territory, or ‘‘estate,’’ of the Larrakia-speaking Danggalaba clan may
well have included only a small northwest section of the peninsula, a claim
later disputed by a number of Larrakia claimants. As surrounding patrilin-
eal estate groups died out, were killed, or moved away from the area as a
result of the settlement of Darwin, their estates were gradually absorbed by
the Danggalaba. At the same time that the Danggalaba clan was slowly ab-
sorbing abandoned Larrakia estates, various Wagaitj clans were moving up
from their southern estates onto the increasingly depopulated Cox Peninsula
to avoid settler violence in their southern countries and to take advantage of
the white settlement of Darwin. As did Elkin, the authors of the 1979 Kenbi
claim book represented the Danggalaba and Wagaitj as slowly coalescing—
marked by the authors’ decision to title the claim book The Kenbi Land Claim
rather than The Danggalaba Land Claim. Like all good legal narratives the
Kenbi claim book did not overly complicate the case it advanced. The authors
make no mention of any of a number of historical records referring to the Cox
Peninsula and surrounding islands as Wagaitj country.
Even though they deleted these countermappings, the authors of the Kenbi
claim book did something remarkable for the time. They suggested not only
that the land commissioner expand the basis of land ownership to include
one-step matrifiliates (rights to a person’s mother’s country, though not to
a person’s mother’s mother’s country) of the Danggalaba clan, but also, and
more radically, that he recognize the Wagaitj people living at Belyuen (De-
lissaville) as belonging to and owners of the country under claim on the basis
of what they considered to be a wholly different model of corporeality and
sociality than that of kinship and descent. The authors observed that it was
evident ‘‘that people associated with the claim recognized more generalized
connections to country than those of patrifiliation.’’ 47 They emphasized the
rights and obligations the Belyuen Wagaitj had accrued to claim lands on the
basis of their historical, ceremonial, and birth relations to the country; that is,
forms of attachment altogether outside a lineage-based model of descent. In-
voking Stanner, the authors argued that in the extreme conditions of colonial
depopulation ‘‘Aboriginal life . . . crossed a threshold . . . [where] the regime
was so harsh that estate-range distinctions were near or at a vanishing point.’’ 48
What replaced the estate-range was a territoriality based on ceremonial, birth,
death, and name ties to the land.
In so arguing for the expansion of the basis of land ownership from hetero-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

sexual reproduction to other forms of corporeal intercourse between human

and durlg ontological orders, the authors of the Kenbi Land Claim pro-
vided an anthropological foundation to the public statements of the Wagaitj.
On 12 September 1973, Ginger Moreen, Tom Barradjap (Mosec’s younger
brother), and Rusty Moreen (Agnes Lippo’s older brother), chaired a meeting
with Justice Woodward, who was investigating if and how federal legislation
should be drafted to recognize the land rights of Northern Territory indige-
nous groups. In this meeting senior men are recorded telling Woodward that it
was ‘‘alright’’ for the Wagaitj and Larrakia to own this peninsula together, and,
moreover, that the peninsula should be part of a larger land grant including
their southern coastal territories.49
Thus it was relatively unsurprising at the time that on 29 July 1975 and
17 December 1975 the Larrakia and Wagaitj Belyuen proposed that two claims
be lodged over the peninsula, one of which covered the far northern section
where several important Larrakia durlg were said to be located. Imabulg, the
father of Olga Singh and the senior resident Danggalaba man, was named
trustee. Another claim would be lodged over the rest of the peninsula and
held in trusteeship by the ‘‘Delissaville Council.’’ 50 At this point in time, local
sentiment seemed explicitly opposed to territorial claims based on Western
models of human descent: ‘‘At a meeting it was said that singling people out
according to their father and mother divides people. Where land is concerned
they would prefer as a community to state, with evidence, their relationship
to the claim area and their interests in it.’’ 51
These proposals were written, however, during the initial drafts of the lra
when it appeared that the federal legislation would provide multiple bases for
lodging an indigenous claim. In its final form, however, the lra stipulated
that to be found to be a ‘‘traditional Aboriginal owner’’ a person must be a
member of a ‘‘local descent group.’’ 52 It was in this legislative context that the
authors of the Kenbi claim put forward the smaller Danggalaba group as the
‘‘traditional Aboriginal owners’’ of the claim area.
Several legal challenges postponed the hearing of the Kenbi Land Claim
until 1989. Most of the initial indigenous claimants had died by then (and cer-
tainly by 1995 when it was reheard)—ten years is a fifth of the average lifespan
of Aboriginal men and women. This issue presented a grim vital statistic with
political significance—opponents of the claim could count on the debilitating
physical and mental health effects of poverty on the claimants. By the time the
Kenbi claim was finally heard for the first time, three of the seven members of

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

the Danggalaba patriclan had died, as had numerous other key Wagaitj infor-
mants. So many Wagaitj and Larrakia men and women had passed away that
the senior anthropologist at the time, Michael Walsh, compiled a list of dead
he lodged into the legal record as ‘‘Kenbi Necrology.’’ Of the four survivors of
the Danggalaba patriclan, a senior man had suffered an incapacitating stroke
while dancing wangga for a young men’s initiation ritual at Belyuen; a senior
woman who lived in Darwin had publicly ceded her rights to the Belyuen; a
junior woman had died; another junior woman expressed no interest in the
land claim; and another junior woman knew little about the country, although
she expressed a desire to learn.
If historical time had reduced the Danggalaba patriclan, political time had
increased the resolve of urban-based Larrakia women and men to consolidate
an identity-based political and social program. Having suffered through the
long history of state welfare practices (many urban-based Larrakia or their
parents were part of the Stolen Generation; placed in foster homes because
of their biracial heritage) Larrakia men and women living outside the claim
area took statements such as Elkin’s that the ‘‘Larrakia tribe’’ was ‘‘now nearly
extinct’’ not only to be wrong, but to be a dangerous conflation of racial and
cultural being and identity. In 1983 the Darwin-based Larrakia Association
was founded and, around the same time, a ‘‘group of urban Larrakia wrote
to the nlc [Northern Land Council] seeking to be added to the list of claim-
ants.’’ 53
The lra, however, demanded more than a simple list of claimants; it
required that a specific social configuration be produced—a local descent
group. Agreeing to represent the larger Larrakia group, the Northern Land
Council abandoned the Danggalaba patriclan as the claimant group in 1989
and, instead, advanced a much larger descent group, the ‘‘Larrakia language
group.’’ The Larrakia language group was said to be composed of multiple lin-
eages—the families of anyone who identified as Larrakia, could demonstrate
he or she had a Larrakia ancestor, and wished to be a part of the claim.
In order to be legally recognized as a traditional Aboriginal owner, how-
ever, it is not sufficient just to be found to be a member of a local descent
group; claimants must also demonstrate ‘‘common spiritual affiliations’’ to a
site on the land that place them under ‘‘primary spiritual responsibility for
the site’’ and for the land. At the time of the hearing only a handful of Larrakia
lived on the peninsula. The Belyuen Wagaitj were the ceremonial leaders for
the country and were considered most knowledgeable about the land’s spiri-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

tual and material features. Because few people within this larger Larrakia
group knew the cultural and economic contours of the land under claim—an
unknown number had never visited the area before the claim commenced—
lawyers acting on behalf of the Darwin-based Larrakia and the Belyuen de-
cided that the Belyuen Wagaitj would lead the evidence as ‘‘custodians’’ of the
land and its spiritual heritage for the Larrakia.
In 1989 I was conducting my dissertation field research and helping with
the running of the claim. By 1998 I was testifying in court about my recollec-
tion of why, in the middle of the 1989 hearing, the Belyuen were put forward
as traditional Aboriginal owners in their own right and, when put forward,
why they were presented as three Wagaitj ‘‘boxed-up language groups’’ (the
Kiyuk-Wadjigiyn, the Emi-Mentha, the Marriamu-Marritjeban) rather than
as a single Belyuen local descent group, the way they had been presented in
the 1995 hearing.

prof. povinelli: No, it was probably not correct to call it a Marriamu/

Marritjabin [Marritjeban] language group because, in fact, it’s only a num-
ber of what I would call patrilineal fragments of all patri-clans and certainly
not the entire Marriamu/Marritjabin [Marritjeban] language group. There
are a number of lineages that didn’t appear then—no, didn’t appear then
and don’t appear now [as part of the claimant group].
mr. keely: Why was it characterised in that three double-named group way
in 1989. Why was it advanced and packaged in that manner?
prof. povinelli: It was decided, in the middle of the claim, that these new
groups would be—that the Belyuen would be advanced, or the Wagaitj—I
think there are various ways in which they were described—would be ad-
vanced as a claimant group and then the question was how they should be
advanced, what model of descent.
What we were going to say was that the local descent group of the people
then—you know, and again I’m using language that people used then and
that I would not use—of the people who so clearly demonstrated common
spiritual affiliations and primary spiritual responsibility for the place, for
the area under claim.
I said, ‘‘Well, they say they’re all joined up,’’ but I didn’t have the time,
nor was my research at the time, focused on teasing out that, what I would
now call a cognatic descent group. So rightfully, I think, in some ways we
had a day to put this together—
mr. keely: A single day?

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

prof. povinelli: Maybe two. I mean, it was really quite short. I forget. I
mean, I actually forget the details how long it was, but it was—I think it
[was] just [two days].54

When the 1989 hearing was over, the fourth land commissioner, Justice
Olney, found that no traditional Aboriginal owners existed for the land under
claim. Based on his reading of the juridical, legislative, and anthropological
archive, Olney argued that Stanner’s earlier model of strict patrilineal descent
was the correct model of traditional descent. According to Olney no one sat-
isfied the requirements of the lra: the Larrakia language group was an infe-
licitous form of descent; the Danggalaba patriclan had only one member who
demonstrated primary spiritual responsibility for the land (and one person
did not make a ‘‘group’’); and the Belyuen expressed ‘‘very little enthusiasm’’
and ‘‘generally lacked conviction’’ about their status as claimants.55 In rela-
tion to the Wagaitj claim, he and others were bothered by two facts; first,
‘‘the various [Wagaitj] family groups who are put forward in this claim have
common spiritual affiliations with sites elsewhere than on or near the claim
area and in some cases continue to actively maintain those links by visiting
their countries.’’ 57 More troubling to some was the fact that Belyuen seemed
to base territoriality to southern countries on principles different from those
on which they based their ties to the peninsula.58 Second, the Wagaitj resisted
using the phrase ‘‘traditional Aboriginal owners’’ to refer to their relationship
to the land under claim. What had happened between the early 1970s and
the late 1980s such that the Belyuen Wagaitj could be described as express-
ing ‘‘very little enthusiasm’’ and ‘‘generally lack[ing] conviction’’ about their
status as claimants?
I had five years to mull over this question before the Kenbi Land Claim was
scheduled to be reheard in 1995. In the interim, the Supreme Court overruled
the grounds of Olney’s decision, referring to the mandate that the land com-
missioner base his findings of local descent on principles deemed relevant to
the claimants.56 In 1995, an even larger number of Larrakia were once again
forwarded as the traditional Aboriginal owners. The criteria for membership
remained similar to that in 1989, but the anthropological model of descent
changed. The Larrakia were now said to be a cognatically defined ‘‘new tribe’’
rather than a ‘‘language group.’’ The practice of the hearing also changed.
In the first hearing, the Belyuen were afforded a preeminent status as those
who were the knowledgeable people about the land and who held ceremo-
nial knowledge for the claim lands. During the second 1995 hearing, lawyers

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 The Cunning of Recognition

representing most Larrakia believed that members of their claimant group

would have to prove their own independent knowledge about the claim lands
to be recognized as ‘‘traditional Aboriginal owners.’’ Once again, but this time
in the middle of the 1996 claim, the Belyuen asked their legal counsel to ad-
vance them as the nonexclusive ‘‘traditional Aboriginal owners’’ for the Cox
Peninsula and surrounding islands. This time, however, they insisted they be
presented as ‘‘Belyuen, all same, together.’’
When the Kenbi claim was reheard in 1995–96, yet another land commis-
sioner, Justice Gray, not only was faced with deciding what were the recruit-
ment principles deemed relevant by the claimants (what constituted a ‘‘local
descent group’’ locally) but he also had to contend with competing, often
hostile, claims by groups with significantly different cultural knowledges and
sociological practices.60 The Belyuen claim angered many Larrakia. They be-
lieved the Belyuen were trying to steal their country, a country theirs by a
Dreamtime mandate, or as some put it, a ‘‘blood-right’’ whereby blood de-
scent from a Larrakia ancestor gave them ownership rights to Larrakia land
irrespective of the density of economic or ceremonial practices in relation-
ship to it. The Larrakia claim angered some Belyuen who believed many of
the ‘‘town Larrakia’’ to be too genealogically and socially removed from the
country and its ‘‘Aboriginal culture’’ to be ‘‘for it’’ in a way superior to them-
selves.
By the time new lawyers arrived in 1995 to discuss the rehearing of the
claim with Belyuen, most people sitting in the meeting hall had heard all they
had to say before, had watched history unfold, and had grown up or old with
the Kenbi claim. The problems these lawyers outlined had been outlined by
other lawyers when the claim was first run and rejected in 1989–90, and, be-
fore that, when the claim was first being prepared in 1974. So many lawyers,
so many anthropologists, so many research consultants had reviewed these
problems that the Belyuen and I sometimes passed the time in the oppressive
heat remembering all their names and telling stories about their personal pas-
sions, sexual predilections, legal styles, fashion, and eating habits: ‘‘Beth tell
the time when . . .’’ ‘‘Wulgamen [old lady] Nuki tell the time when. . . .’’ We re-
viewed who among the Belyuen had talked in the last hearing or had gone on
the endless proofing sessions, who had panicked before the ‘‘hard look’’ of the
white lawyers and land commissioner, who had stumbled with the elaborate
tape-recording apparatus, pinning the microphone upside down or thinking
that it amplified rather than simply recorded and so mumbled inaudibly. We
talked about people who had been crippled by shame and fear because of their

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

lack of knowledge, their poverty, their nonstandard English. We noted who

had died fighting for this land, who had given up, who was still going. Who
the Belyuen were as a community and as a set of individuals was now to some
significant degree a fold of the practices, identifications, and discourses of the
Kenbi claim.61

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

I brought with me to our meeting at the women’s center not only the vari-
ous archival materials mentioned above but also a copy of the genealogies I
had made based on senior Belyuen women and men’s repeated urging that
I line up the families from Marriamu side to Kiyuk side, coast way in order
to demonstrate how they had become one family, all Belyuen. If the social
history of the Belyuen is examined from the vantage point of marriage alli-
ances between durlg groups, a relatively delimited ‘‘family’’ does emerge from
the multiple and multiply determined histories of sexual reproduction. This
history supports Belyuen description of themselves as ‘‘one family’’ and illu-
minates why the men who sat with Woodward wished to lodge one large claim
over the coastal lands stretching from the Cox Peninsula to Cape Dombey.
Based on what the men and women I have worked with remember, between
1850 and 1950 marriage consolidated (‘‘joined up’’) proximate estates within
a linguistically defined territory, followed by proximate language territories,
then, through the marriages of Betty Bilawag and Mosec Manpurr, the sis-
ters Agnes Alanga and Ester Djarim and the brothers Tom Lippo and Tom
Barradjap, and Maudie Bennett to Tom Imabulg, the two ends and middles
of this coastal landscape. Figure 14 presents a sketch model of this process.
It is a mistake, however, to view the figure as regimented by heterosexuality
or that which the diagram diagrams to be heterosexual descent—although it
is perfectly reasonable to describe them as a local descent group. That which
the ancestors of present-day Belyuen figured and cohered was not so much
sexual as textual in nature, a diagrammatic abstraction made possible by so-
cially mediated understandings of spatial proximity, directionality, and seri-
ality; that is, reproducing a group in the local context is primarily a matter
of textuality not sexuality. Like the Duwun wangga reveals, and provides a
basis for, arguments about the spiritual status of places and person (a prag-
matically entailed architectonic palimpsest if people remain who know how
to read and manipulate its pragmatic codes) so the semiotically mediated ter-
ritory subtending these kinship and marriage diagrams reveals and provides

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 Point
Dombey
b
a
c
1850s
d
i

Daly River
1920s
j g
e
1940s f

h
k

Peninsula
Cox
l

basis of social solidarity dates territories

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
durlg estates 1850 a–h

language groups 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 1900 a–h

Wagaitj 1920 i–k

3 9
1 11
1940 z

Belyuen maruy

Belyuen durlg

figure 14. Textual transformations of territorial organization in the northwest coastal

region, 1850–1940 (durlg into maruy).

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

the basis for understanding how to initialize, punctuate, and serialize the syn-
tax of alliance. This spatial architecture of sexuality is not the only architecture
(nor even the most important) for building a human component into country.
But, like the felicity of the Duwun wangga, the felicity of these territorialized
kinship diagrams now depends as much on the legislative and public com-
monsense status of ‘‘the family’’ abstracted from space as on the possible local
semiotic architectures embedded in them.
It is a mistake, I think, to understand the fact of this large cognatic group
as explaining how contemporary Belyuen came ‘‘to be.’’ Indeed, lawyers and
anthropologists opposing the claim did not consider it sufficient explanation.
Anthropologists representing other groups argued that the information in
figure 14 was an artifact of the land claim process. If, opponents argued, one
listened to the Belyuen describe how and why they belonged to local claim
lands, one would hear the Belyuen referring to their conception (maruy) from
the Belyuen waterhole, to their life history in the area, and to their ceremo-
nial obligations, not to the history of their biologically human descent. In
other words, the entire cognatic apparatus outlined in figure 14 only becomes
‘‘local’’—Belyuen—on the basis of maruy, conception beliefs. Land Commis-
sioner Michael Maurice found this argument inconceivable in the Ti Tree
claim. He returned as a lawyer representing a Larrakia group during the sec-
ond hearing, still unconvinced. In the following he cross-examines a Belyuen
claimant during the 1995–96 hearing.

mr. maurice: Wadjigiyn, Kiyuk. You said that the people who belong to this
country are the Belyuen and those three kids. Is that right? Why do those
three kids belong to this country?
trevor bianamu: Well, they follow their mother’s footsteps, and their
grandfather.
mr. maurice: Why do the Belyuen belong to this country?
trevor bianamu: Well, they born here, raised up here. Been living all our
life here.62

Opponents to the Belyuen claim argued that ‘‘the Belyuen’’ were not really
Belyuen as such but a cluster of presumptively patrilineal clan groups whose
real estates lay south of the claim lands. Maruy and durlg were said to be
contrastive and qualitatively different types of territorial markers.63 Nor were
critics wrong in their observations that neither the social organization of the
Belyuen nor their relation to the Cox Peninsula is reducible to an ahistori-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

cal, spatially abstracted diagram of heterosexual reproduction. Indeed, geo-

graphical time was critical to the formation of the Belyuen as such.
The marriage alliances diagrammed in figure 14 emerged in the context of
two contingent geographical conditions: on the one hand, the coastal orien-
tation and geographic proximity of the southern estates, and, on the other,
the government consolidation of the Wagaitj onto the Delissaville reserve. It
was onto these semiotically mediated spatial and temporal architectures, built
by the ancestors of the Belyuen, that contemporary Belyuen, their lawyers,
and I built a new supertext of their groupness and locality. This supertext
depended on the Belyuen belief that the ‘‘Wagaitj’’ had been reformed into
‘‘Belyuen’’ through their maruy relation to Belyuen durlg. This argument de-
manded an understanding of durlg and maruy as simply temporal charac-
terizations of formally equivalent concepts. Simply put: every durlg descent
group is a maruy relation extended through the bodies of the next generation.
And, it demanded understanding the transformation of maruy into durlg as
always already a part of the traditional Wagaitj culture.
Thus, although Elkin would write that older Wagaitj men in the 1930s
stated of their children: ‘‘ ‘Got no other dorlk or maroi for these, because they
down here’ (that is, interned at Delissaville),’’ 64 by 1979 the senior members of
the Danggalaba clan and of the Belyuen would refer to a Belyuen maruy as the
basis of Belyuen territorial rights and obligations. The authors of the Kenbi
Land Claim quoted Topsy Secretary: ‘‘We asked her (on 28 February 1979) if
she approved of a joint claim by people from a number of linguistic and dia-
lect groups to the claim area and she replied, ‘Yes, because they all were born
at Delissaville. No matter that they Ami, Manda, Wadjigiyn, Kiyuk, they born
at Delissaville.’ ’’ 65
The structural elegance of the transformation of the southern Wagaitj into
the Belyuen through the spatiotemporality of durlg and maruy was mirrored
in the historical emergence of the form, location, and orientation of Bel-
yuen men’s and women’s initiation rites. Edmund Leach’s argument that ritual
should be ‘‘regarded as a statement in action’’ of the social organization of
a community seems a particularly appropriate point to remember.66 As the
southern Wagaitj increasingly understood their children to be the maruy of
Belyuen durlg, they reoriented their initiation practices away from southern
territories and toward the waterhole.

mr. keely: All right. How central is this waterhole to the region?
harry singh: Very important in relation to initiates, young men’s ceremony,

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

their—after taking to Ngalwat, which is the manta ray Dreaming they are
brought back here and washed in this particular waterhole here.
mr. keely: All right. So they wash her; do they wash in the salt water too?
harry singh: Yes. Taken there first and brought back here.
mr. keely: And what notion do the group here believe in as far as sweat is
concerned? Can you explain how it works?
harry singh: Very strongest part of that washing ceremony introduces that,
the sweat that goes back to the dreaming, gives them protection when
they’re travelling, if they happen to travel by boat or out hunting there, so
that sweat is very important in that respect.
mr. keely: When you bogey [bathe] in the waterhole, does your sweat just
stop here or does it travel?
harry singh: No, it travels.
mr. keely: How does it travel?
harry singh: Travels through that, the hole, the tunnel underground.67

mr. maurice: Yes, if they come from somewhere else, how do you say those
ancestors of yours were traditional owners for this country?
marjorie bilbil: Well, they been here living long time, they participated in
cultural, doing culture, all those things. Can I say something?
mr. maurice: Yes, please.
marjorie bilbil: I’ll put it this way: If Tommy Lyons was gone, and there
was no Wadjigiyn, Mandayenggel, Amiyanggel, Marriamu, Marritjabin
[Marritjeban] people, we wouldn’t have that culture for our children.
mr. maurice: Well, which culture are you talking about?
marjorie bilbil: Belyuen. Belyuen people.
mr. maurice: Does that culture come from Tommy Lyons?
marjorie bilbil: No, it’s past, buried and finished.
mr. maurice: Passed from whom?
marjorie bilbil: Old Tommy Lyons has gone.
mr. maurice: Passed it on?
marjorie bilbil: No, he has gone and our people then took it over and—
mr. maurice: What did they take over?
marjorie bilbil: Songs, telling stories about places, about all this Cox
Peninsula, teaching us.
mr. maurice: Yes. Who did they take it over from?
marjorie bilbil: Well, they been here long enough, all them Wadjigiyn
people.

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 The Cunning of Recognition

mr. maurice: Yes. Who did they get it from? You said they took it over; who
did they take it over from?
marjorie bilbil: Our people had their culture like, like Wadjigiyn, Manda,
all those different language, all came one, together, as a family group.
mr. maurice: Oh, I see. So is that culture which they brought from those
other countries which they originally came from?
marjorie bilbil: No, here, at Belyuen, yes.
mr. maurice: Here. Well, who had that culture in the first place?
marjorie bilbil: Everybody.
mr. maurice: Who do you mean by everybody?
marjorie bilbil: Everybody that live here.
mr. maurice: Yes. Are you talking about the six language groups that now
live at Belyuen, are you?
marjorie bilbil: Yes.
mr. maurice: But before they came here, who had that culture?
marjorie bilbil: The Larrakia and that old Tommy Lyons.68

But the ritual immersions to which Harry Singh, Marjorie Bilbil, and others
refer are not simply symbolic statements. They are also corporeal acts, repeat-
ing and extending the physical intercourses between the ontological order of
Nguidjalag and Belyuen such that Marjorie Bilbil can say that the ‘‘culture’’
to which she is referring is Belyuen in nature, form, and orientation.
At this point, it should be fairly obvious why we had gathered to translate
the Belyuen wangga that Mosec sang at the end of ‘‘Death Rite for Mabalan.’’
We were hoping that the Belyuen wangga will contain a text that we can re-
form into a diagram whose shape would present an argument of a specific
order and magnitude as suggested in figure 14.
If we, along with Allan Marett, had hoped that the Belyuen wangga would
provide an unambiguous narrative or diagrammatic account of how the
Wagaitj had been transformed into the Belyuen through the authorizing
agency of a ritually invested relation between nyuidj, maruy, and durlg, we
were to be sorely disappointed. After laborious work, and with Allan Marett’s
and Lyz Ford’s additional research, the Belyuen song of Mosec Manpurr
emerged as:

karra nyele wewe

yagarra nyele wewe
karra ngadjanung bende
be ngave ngave ngave ngave ya

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

karra nyele wewe

yagarra nyele wewe

Hey! nyele wewe

Oh, no! nyele wewe
Hey! for me now
Oh! I go, I go, I go, I go away there
Hey! nyele wewe
Oh, no! nyele wewe

The wangga did not provide in the text even the clear extensions of locale
and kinship that the Duwun song had. On the tape Mosec Manpurr can be
heard telling Colin Simpson and the nation that Belyuen gave him the Belyuen
song in a dream (‘‘I give you one song I get from Belyuen. Belyuen been give
me this one song in dream’’). But Belyuen is not named in the text; nor is any
particular territorial relation between the place Belyuen and the people Bel-
yuen narrativized; nor is any specific kinship relation between Mosec and Bel-
yuen mentioned; nor is any grammatical marker indicating definitively who
said ‘‘be ngave ngave ngave ngave ya.’’ Karra! Yagarra! Worse, ‘‘Death Rite for
Mabalan’’ ends rather than begins with the Belyuen wangga. The first wangga
heard on the tape is a lamentation of dislocation sung by the last member of
a Emiyenggal durlg group, Bitop, an elderly man interned on the Delissaville
settlement.

theme ngaburru
ngama nganitudu nu
ngaburru nu
theme ngana nthi mala
ngana nthi

Where did I come from

How will I track
my way back
How will I to go there long way
I go back somewhere

Even if Belyuen or Bitop had sung to our desire it is unclear at this point
whether his tune would have been recognized within the framework of the
lra for several reasons. First, as noted above, although Toohey eventually
reconsidered Stanner’s narrow definition of the ‘‘local descent group,’’ this ex-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

pansion of the legally recognizable ‘‘family’’ did not displace a human hetero-
normative notion of descent and reproduction but merely speciated its form.
The third land commissioner, Justice Maurice, who would eventually serve
as legal counsel for the Laragiya tribal group during the 1995 hearing, would
close the door on attempts to displace human descent with spiritual descent.
In any case, the wangga now appears in the shadow of another, forebod-
ing ritual space that deauthorizes it, that resignifies it as a legitimate mode of
territorialization. Long before we convened on the Belyuen veranda, anthro-
pologists had differentiated ‘‘individual songs,’’ which wangga were under-
stood to be, from clan songs and cult songs. Clan songs, but especially cult
songs, lay in a doubly restricted archive. They are part of the historical archive
discussed in chapters 2 and 3, a domain of a superanimated prohibitive inter-
est, of men’s ‘‘high ceremonies’’—Big Sunday and other services. These songs
represent for nonindigenous and many indigenous people, the real ‘‘hard law’’
of Aboriginal culture. This real law drags local tradition from local condi-
tions and inserts it into other national and transnational frames. In his expert
evidence, Allan Marett was asked several times to comment on ‘‘accepted’’
anthropological distinctions and rankings of song genres in relation to ter-
ritorial claims. For example, Mr. Dalrymple refers Marett to Alice Moyle’s
research conducted in the 1960s.

mr. dalrymple: I’ll come back to that in a little while. You’re familiar with
Doctor Alice Moyle’s works on Aboriginal music and song?
prof. marett: Yes.
mr. dalrymple: Now she presents a fairly uncomplicated division of Ab-
original music into types, doesn’t she? . . . I’m not trying to say that this is
a simplistic division but it certainly does characterise the songs into indi-
vidual songs, clan songs, and cult songs.69

The fact of an anthropologically accepted ranking of song genre lessens

the local practice of localization, no matter that the clan songs these lawyers
seek are recognized as having been ‘‘buried’’—that is, formally ended through
local rituals. And, remember, some of these so-called cults and cult songs
were stopped because of government intervention. But, although gone (‘‘past,
buried and finished’’), these other ghost songs echoed throughout the hear-
ing. These terrifying spectral images resignify wangga as soft law, as a precur-
sor to the real thing, taunting this court as it had that of a previous generation
with glimpses of what it truly desires—a superceded but still signifying an-

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

cient society shimmering there just beyond settler time and emergent national
history.

mr. dalrymple: As regards the use of wangga in initiation ceremonies,

would you agree that the way that they’re used is as a precursor for the ini-
tiation itself ? Something that happens earlier on, developing up towards
the more formal initiation ceremony itself ?
prof. marett: Yes, that—in my experience that’s the case.
mr. dalrymple: And it’s purpose is to set the stage in an open and public
way?
prof. marett: Well, I do suggest that it is rather more than that, than simply
setting the stage in a rather public way.
mr. dalrymple: I’ll leave that.70

THE FAILURE OF THE LOCAL

For the last time I return to the question I posed above: Why did we care
about the tape recording sitting in front of us? Is it enough to refer to the
fact of the law and instrumental reason to explain why we sat at the Belyuen
women’s center struggling to make sense of this vast, fluttering archive? The
force of liberal law is, I think, more insidious and cunning in its processes of
ensnarement. As we waited for tea water to boil and for the tape to rewind, the
women who I sat with meditated, as they often did, on the consequences of
failing in our discursive endeavor, of ‘‘being wrong,’’ of ‘‘not fitting the law,’’
of making ‘‘mistakes.’’ As she often did, Marjorie Bilbil asked me whether, in
the event that they failed to convince the land commissioner that they were
the traditional owners of the land, the entire community would be sent to
southern countries. From these women’s perspective, this seemingly fantastic
communal apocalypse is not so far-fetched. Soon after the Japanese bombing
of Darwin in 1942, the government transported the community to reloca-
tion camps in Katherine. Closer to the present, these women have watched
other communities displaced in the wake of lost or disputed land claims. The
Wagait dispute, the Kamu and Malakmalak dispute, the Kungwarakang and
Maranunggu dispute: these are the well-known names of current, bitter intra-
Aboriginal arguments, arguments battled out in courts and bush camps, over
what a ‘‘traditional Aboriginal owner’’ entails, over who are the ‘‘proper’’ tra-
ditional Aboriginal owners for specific regions.
In other words, it is not simply the fact of the law’s existence that explains

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 The Cunning of Recognition

why the women and I sat on the veranda of the women’s center. Rather, the
anxiety that material and social insecurity generates drives these women into
a legal process, attaches their hopes to a legal text and practice, to juridical
forms and abstractions, and influences the syntax of their language of suc-
cess and failures. The structural nature of local poverty provides other in-
centives for moving toward the law. What happens if we fail? When asked
by a lawyer why she and her family did not ‘‘pack up and go back’’ to Bana-
gula and Mabalan, two sites in Emi and Wadjgiyn country, Ruby Yarrowin
dryly answered, ‘‘Only birrrrrd that place, only pig, only pig and birrrrrd boss
that place today.’’ Those who were present laugh when they remember the
story, savoring the long, drawn-out onomatopoeic soaring of Ruby Yarrowin’s
‘‘birrrrrd.’’ But they also ponder the implications of Ruby Yarrowin’s answer.
How will they live in a place without hospitals or houses, without plumbing,
electricity, or roads during the long wet season? Where would Betty Bilawag
go, chained as she is (was) to a respirator? Can they point to these needs and
desires in a claim hearing without deauthorizing their status as traditional
Aboriginal subjects? What would happen to ceremony for this land?
But the functional force of the law depends not merely on material moti-
vations. It also depends on ordinary human emotions and desires to be rec-
ognized as having personal and social worth and value. Ruby Yarrowin, Ester
Djarem, Alice Djarug, Marjorie Bilbil, and Gracie Bitbin were as eager to listen
to ‘‘Death Rite for Mabalan’’ in order to test their own hermeneutic skills as
to secure their and their children’s material future. They remembered Mosec
as a djewalabag, a ‘‘clever man,’’ a man steeped in sacred law. They remem-
bered national and international celebrities and media traveling to Belyuen to
record his singing and dancing.71 They shared camps, food, argument—his-
tory—with him. And they remembered other things, things not recorded on
tape—for example, their parents’ cleverness in joining up and fitting together
the disparate, often disputing groups thrust together at Delissaville. These
women who sat with me sought to derive value for themselves in a similar
way, piecing together black and white land and law, people and countryside,
in order to build a people into a place. And they measured their own personal
worth in part against their skill in doing so.
And me? I also measured my worth against this vast national archive,
against my anthropological skills, against my guilt for not having devoted
more time to genealogical analysis in 1989. I worried that my suspicion of a
model of social anthropology has harmed the women sitting before me, that
the model of land tenure I planned to propose may have serious negative

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

ramifications on other claims in the region; that I will fight the legal hege-
mony of one anthropological tradition only to install another. But I do not
simply worry, I also want. As much as these women want to be the thing, a
local descent group, on which their and the imagined futures of their families
depend, I want to give it to them—in part so that I can repay a debt, in part
because I wish for them to recognize my value, in part so that I was the one
who finally figured out the great Kenbi puzzle. All these noble and banal de-
sires drive me like them deeper into legal forms, values, processes. Sure, I also
attempt to refigure the parameters of national law, but as I am more or less
influenced by these legal forms, more or less distracted by the social diagrams
I am able to extract from historical processes, I am more or less worried about
the social reality of this thing, this cognatic descent group, these two principles
of land tenure—durlg and maruy—that I have lifted out of the multitude of
corporeal intercourses, human intimacies, and social travails that compose
Wagaitj-Belyuen histories.
But even these necessarily ordinary desires cannot account for why we turn
to this tape, why we seek our argument in Mosec’s song, in the archive of
the nation. To understand why we turn to an archived localization returns
us to a matter of law if not a matter reducible to the law—the procedures
for constituting valid, unmotivated, and objective evidence in liberal state
contexts, the discursive forms that validate argument as truth. Two points
seem relevant. First, one often-unarticulated condition of legally felicitous
evidence is that the principle operating to determine the social group must
itself be determinate in two specific senses: first, that the principle of group
cohesion and membership must allow anyone to be able to determine the
group on the basis of that principle and to determine it in such a way that a
judgment of ownership is uncontestable, certain, concrete, decontextual—in
short, monumentalizing abstractions.72 (Leave that business of cleverness; of
‘‘line-im up,’’ ‘‘might be something.’’ Just tell us what it is now.) Second, while
a number of land commissioners have recognized the flexibility of Aboriginal
tradition, the Australian High Court has ruled that ‘‘the governing descent
principle in operation in a particular group’’ cannot be ‘‘changed by them at
whim so as to fit the circumstances of a land claim.’’ 73 Thus, we sit and face
the archived past because we need someone other than ourselves to repeat
what we desire, but someone whose words cannot be tarnished by the present
because they are unmotivated by the present, by our desires to be worthy, to
live. Karra! We point to the Belyuen wangga, to Elkin, to Edmund Leach, to
all those who never would have imagined this claim, or us. Gameyi (‘‘he said,

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 The Cunning of Recognition

it happened’’). This tape was there (-ya). Yagarra! In other words, we alienate
our practices through a national archive in such a way as to make our mo-
tivations mysteriously disappear, and make the diagrams we produce appear
detachable from the very context that produced them, to be the unmediated
force of a subjectless history of tradition.
But even if the law recognized spiritual descent as a principle of descent
deemed relevant by the claimants, the bureaucratic nature of the land councils
might find it difficult to reconcile this form of territoriality with its legislative
mandate to negotiate contracts and capital endeavors on Aboriginal lands.
Land councils are charged with passing out royalty payments and negotiat-
ing multiyear contracts with small business and multinational corporations.
What type of contract would emerge at the interstices of capital and Belyuen
social space? And what of other social institutions now constituted on the
basis of the commonsense machinery of the local descent group? After all,
the local descent group is no longer merely an anthropological object, or fact
of law. Today, this conceptual object provides the skeletal structure of pro-
gressive policies of welfare distribution, health care, and housing. The local
descent group is now, no matter whether it was not then. Finally, the hyper-
pragmatic nature of this text makes figuring the interpretation of it as ‘‘dis-
interested’’ difficult. This disinterested figuration is, however, essential to the
manifestation of truth in Australian courts of law.
Because there cannot be an interested subject writing Aboriginal history,
opponents of the Belyuen claim repeatedly dragged this subject into court,
especially during the expert evidence of Allan Marett. Again and again, law-
yers representing other Aboriginal groups tainted his interpretation of the
territorial significance of wangga by linking it to present-day Belyuen per-
sons. The pragmatic nature of wangga—the lack of a recognizable narrative
and semantic content and structure—deauthorized its viability for produc-
ing a locally socially felicitous place. Take, for example, questions that Blowes
and Dalrymple put to Marett.74 Dalrymple refers to a local wangga about a
buffalo dancing at Benindjila, now the site of tourist resort on the northwest
coast of the peninsula, where the wangga is sometimes performed. As with
Marett, most Belyuen women and men have described the buffalo to me as a
nyuidj. But the wangga does not specify the buffalo as either ‘‘normal’’ animal
or nyuidj. Blowes refers to the Belyuen song we have been trying to translate.

mr. dalrymple: If in fact—if it were, in fact, the case that this buffalo song
is about a buffalo hunt in the vicinity of Benindjila, then while certainly it

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

has a geographical reference, it wouldn’t indicate any particular spiritual

attachment to country, would it?
prof. marett: No, but all the information that—well, let me backtrack a
minute. One has to be—one has to be aware of the fact that with almost all
Aboriginal songs there are levels of exegesis. What I would suggest is that
the hunting level, which is the level that gets tied up with the presentation of
the songs to tourists, is actually very much—what Catherine Ellis actually
calls a ‘‘false front.’’
It actually obscures what is the real meaning of the text, which I have
absolutely no doubt about, having spent a lot of time talking about this text
with people who have rights to sing it. The real—the real meaning has to do
with the appearance of the buffalo as a nguidj. The buffalo is not a normal
buffalo, the buffalo was a nguidj. So it’s you know—
mr. dalrymple: And that’s very much the understanding that you’ve de-
rived.
prof. marett: Mm.
mr. dalrymple: Is the understanding that you’ve been given in the recent
past, is that right?
prof. marett: Yes, that’s the—within the last year.75

mr. blowes: I won’t take that one any further. On page 11, you begin—you go
through the text to page examples. The first reference you had at example
one was about Mosec Manpurr’s song of the—for the Belyuen waterhole.
Take you to the text of that song. The transcribed portion of the song reads
in its entirety ‘‘as for me, I’m going back now.’’
prof. marett: Yes.
mr. blowes: And I think elsewhere you said—you referred to on page 5 to
the same wangga, and you made reference there to Elkin. So when did you
get this information from Ruby Yarrowin and others that you refer to there?
prof. marett: Last year.
mr. blowes: Last year, when?
prof. marett: July. Or possibly August.
mr. blowes: Now the song itself doesn’t refer to the Belyuen waterhole.
prof. marett: No.76

Anxious and fascinated we turn to and are transfixed by this thing in front
of us, its spinning sprockets and thin brown tape, and the song Mosec prom-
ises to sing. Maybe he will sing a song undermining what we claim. But maybe,
just maybe, Mosec will sing a song Belyuen gave him for us, a song that will

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 The Cunning of Recognition

make our present desires ‘‘traditiona’’: before all this, before us, before. The
reader now knows the outcome: what the songs actually were, what we are. He
disappointed us. The songs were disappointing. We disappointed ourselves.
The description of Mosec, of these songs, of ourselves as disappointing sug-
gests the delicacy with which local affective structures are embedded in pub-
licly mediated judgment. These songs did not disappoint or upset us. They
were disappointed. They were upset. They were transformed into a quality,
a mood, produced as a site of failure, not simply by the explicit demands of
statutory law but by subtler expectations about how narratives should work
through elaborated decontextualizable semantic content, rather than multi-
level contextualizable pragmatic form. And the more these women identify
with this cultural product, the more they are not only disappointed by the
wangga but are disappointed in themselves. Like the text itself, they are pro-
duced as a site of failure no matter their extraordinary resilient histories, no
matter the mental and physical labor that these histories, these texts, and they
themselves represent.
By wishing Mosec had sung otherwise, in digging up and translating the
texts, these women and I were not just gathering ‘‘proof ’’ that what we say is
true. We were not simply engaged in an evidential adventure. Instead, we were
engaged in the delicate processes by which local identities are constituted and
mediated by the coercive politics of liberal recognition, its technology of the
archive, its institutions of force and desire, simple desires like to live and be
recognized as being worthy and having personal and social value. In other
words, we were engaged in the delicate extensions and reenforcements of lib-
eral legal ideology—that formal and informal legal hearings are primarily
dispassionate, objective, noncontextual judgments of social facts rather than
the primary means by which social facts are produced. In this rather ordinary
archival moment we see the dual processes by which, at once and the same
time, translocal law and material structures work in and through local per-
sonal passions and optimisms even as the conditions of their translocal nature
are erased.
The extraordinary delicacy with which local protocols for evidential claims
are worked through state protocols for evidence should not blind us to the
power of liberal law, to the cunning of current forms of liberal recognition.
These simple desires and dramatic coercions lodge the social machinery of
heterosexuality into local structures of language and corporeal practice, dis-
placing other forms of corporeal intercourse as infelicitous, failed social at-
tachments. To pay attention to these delicate restructurings is not to deny

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

the mediating nature of the local, but merely to acknowledge that these deli-
cate calibrations occur in vastly different and multiply structured regimes
of power.
The irony of Olney’s evaluation of the Belyuen claim in 1989 as generally
lacking in conviction derives from his assumption that the source of this lack
is local and traditional, that the truth of local social history can be read off this
lack. Instead, the Belyuen reluctance, their ‘‘very little enthusiasm,’’ is an accu-
rate reading of the hegemonic force of heterosexual descent in the determi-
nation of national justice, citizenry rights, material restitution, and subjective
constitution.

EPILOGUE

theme ngaburru
ngama nganitudu nu
ngaburru nu
theme ngana nthi mala
ngana nthi

Where did I come from

How will I track
my way back
How will I to go there long way
I go back somewhere

Of all the wangga on the tape, ‘‘Death Rite for Mabalan,’’ Bitop’s wangga was
particularly hard to hear and translate. A few days after we listened to the
tape, I took many of these same women to Darwin to shop. In the afternoon
I went to a meeting at the Northern Land Council. When I returned in the
evening to pick up everyone, Marjorie Bilbil told me that while she was shop-
ping she heard Bitop singing a clearer rendition on a tape being played in a
nearby store. Perhaps, she suggested, I could buy it so that we could study it.
Because I was worried how Bitop’s lamentation of dislocation would play in
court, I did.
Bitop’s song is reproduced as ‘‘Nomad,’’ the feature first track on a tape
whose title is also Nomad (see fig. 16). The tape consists of a collection of
indigenous Australian, African, and Native American spiritual texts, mixed
and synthesized with contemporary percussion instruments and produced in
1994 by Australian Music International and Yalumba Music, with production

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 The Cunning of Recognition

figure 15. Australian Aborigines: An Aborigine performs the ancient skill of making fire.
(Courtesy of Murray Views, Gympie, Queensland.)

and distribution centers in New York City and Melbourne. In the liner notes,
the producers state, as had their predecessors in the 1930s, their ‘‘gratitude . . .
to early explorers, missionaries and others who loved the Aboriginal people
and saw a richness in their law and tradition. Without these people, a wealth
of cultural heritage would have been lost forever.’’ The music on the tape is
‘‘dedicated to the support and rebuilding of the Aboriginal culture so that it
can be free and respected in the ‘modern world.’ ’’ 77
There is something wonderfully clear about these embracing frames. The
unique sounds and rhythms of the didjeridu are no longer merely constitutive
of a settler modernity, a new multicultural form of nationalism, but the circu-
lation of transnational capital. As business, nation, and law chase economic
capital, national fantasy, and global humanities, they grind out ever more arti-
facts, archives, and histories through which locals and capital will emerge.
When I began this chapter by describing the women sitting on the veranda as
the ‘‘remainders’’ of local culture I used this term advisedly. What was once
the nation’s cultural debris is now the local’s cultural mines. These women
are the last fluent speakers of Emiyenggal, Mentha, and Wadjigiyn—the lan-
guages of the wangga. But the very linguistic expertise that these women will

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 The Poetics of Ghosts

use to unlock the riddle of the Belyuen wangga shines a bright light on the
tenuous, even scandalous, nature of their land claim. Emi, Mentha, Wadjigiyn,
Marriamu: these are languages of countries to the south. Most anthropolo-
gists, lawyers, the interested public, and Aboriginal persons believe that the
historical ‘‘language’’ of this country was Larrakia.
As we drove back to Belyuen we listened to Bitop sing accompanied by
hybrid New Age and techno rhythms. Later, on 30 May 1999, flying back to
Belyuen, this same song played on the Qanta Airline intercom. This pirated
version of ‘‘Death Rite for Mabalan’’ never appeared in court nor did a post-
card showing Ruby Yarrowin’s father performing the ancient skill of making
fire (fig. 15). But these texts do provide the cultural capital that can be trans-
formed into economic capital by businesses who mine the national archive
for reasons other than my own or those of the Belyuen women.

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 August 19th [Tennant Creek] Bar. 28.870 Aneroid
II00. A.T. 72. Cloudy, overcast and like rain [sic]
until 11 a.m. and then the sun shone again. Spent day
with niggers. Completed extension of table of rela-
tionships and recorded a tradition about a certain
pelican about which I shall have something to say
later on. The gentleman here depicted is one of our
staff, . . . a first rate fellow, called Thanmaru, whose
only fault is that he would dearly love to be a white
man with the consequence that he is a little ashamed
of some of his tribal customs and would therefore like
to tone them down. In doing work such as we are en-
gaged upon one has to be careful not to let the savage
perceive that you disapprove of or disbelieve in his
ideas for if he once gets that idea into his head he will
shut up like an oyster and wild horses will not drag
reliable information out of him.
—Frank Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, ‘‘My Dear
Spencer’’

6 / The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

Throughout the transcript of the Kenbi Land Claim readers encounter the
comment, ‘‘restricted women’s session.’’ This metatextual ellipsis indicates
that the conversational time of the text has been foreshortened, that the reader
faces an abridged version of the public record as it points to and characterizes
the portion of missing text as secret, (indigenous) female. The conversation
has not been lost to the archive of history. Conversational time and text have
merely been relocated to the Northern Land Council and other authorized
spaces, a supertext produced that includes a manila envelope stamped ‘‘for
women’s eyes only’’ in which lies the restricted evidence. Elsewhere and re-
stricted in circulation, the restricted text remains a formal part of the public
record of the Kenbi Land Claim and, formally, part of the transcript of the
Kenbi Land Claim. The public does not, however, have access to this missing

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 The Cunning of Recognition

portion of the transcript. Similar ellipses refer to men’s restricted evidence

and are found in virtually every contested land claim heard in the Northern
Territory and in many native title claims heard throughout Australia.
These techniques for constructing a public transcript can seem odd given
a general set of liberal ideals concerning the public sphere and civil society.
Benjamin Lee has argued, for instance, that in its ideal form, modern civil so-
ciety is to be governed by two principles: ‘‘The first is that all deliberations
that affect the people should be accessible to public scrutiny. The second is
what [Michael] Warner has called a principle of negativity. The potential va-
lidity of what one argues stands in negative relation to one’s self-interest; the
more disinterested a position is, the more likely it is to be universally valid and
rational.’’ 1 It is certainly true that interestedness is the emergent ground of au-
thoritative claims in some identity-based movements. In the United States, for
instance, some people will say that experience should determine the authority
of a statement. Still, both principles circulate in legal hearings and public de-
bate. And to them should be added a third; namely, that in certain contexts
principled public debate ought to give way to a collective moral sense, and not
only should public debate give way but collective moral sense should be pro-
tected from the procedures of critical reason. From the point of view of this
principle, the aim of public reason is not understanding, let alone agreement,
but the sequestering of some often inexpressible (moral) thing from reflexive
judgment. In other words, in its ideal form civil society continually invokes
three ordering principles often in tension with one another: public scrutiny,
individual disinterest, and collective moral limits.
In this chapter I address the fate of Aboriginal belief in the shadow of these
principles. I return to Belyuen men and women’s attempts to construct and
interpret the archive of traditional local social organization. How do they pro-
duce ‘‘true beliefs’’ about their traditions in light of these three principles and
the application of them in multicultural law? To answer this and other ques-
tions I seek a sociology of belief ascription. I do not seek so much the referen-
tial content of beliefs, nor the correspondence between belief ascription and
truth. Instead I seek the manner in which belief is formed as believable, true,
and accurate, and the manner in which the believable is hinged to national
senses of justice and the justifiable distribution of rights and material goods.
I ask therefore a set of simple questions: how do various indigenous people
produce beliefs that are judged to be true? Why must they do so? How does the
demand that they produce true beliefs place indigenous persons at the grind-

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

ing point of competing and irresolvable public injunctions? For example, how
do they creatively navigate the public and legal injunction that on the one
hand they make public all material that is essential to public matters, and on
the other hand they demonstrate a loyalty to local customs including those
that prohibit the public discussion of certain matters? Likewise, how do they
make their beliefs seem justifiably linked to the redistribution of public goods
when, if put into practice, some of these beliefs violate state law? In this discur-
sive environment what is true? How can one tell what is believable, believed?
What is seen as fabricated, a lie? What are the material consequences of telling
or not telling secrets? How much alterity can various social actors bear and
in what contexts?
To be sure, the transcripts of the Kenbi Land Claim are not the only texts
pockmarked by elliptical references to conversations that lawyers, anthro-
pologists, and activists have had with indigenous men and women about un-
speakable beliefs or inexpressible feelings. My own notebooks are littered with
encoded conversations (names deleted, changed, or encrypted to safeguard
certain people and places) and with references to other notebooks with simi-
larly encoded interpretive enclosures or to other archived and published ma-
terials. They are minor discursive monuments to my and my interlocutors’
sense that certain beliefs must be protected from the public record and from
public circulation. Some of these other beliefs, however, cannot be found in
the texts I have produced because I do not refer to them, not even by elliptical
references. Moreover, indigenous men and women at Belyuen and through-
out Australia have their own conversations and leave behind their own texts in
the form of notes, audio tapes, and drawings. They rely on local conventions
for indicating ellipses and encrypting texts to safeguard or exclude portions of
their conversations, thoughts, and practices. One safeguard is to cease speak-
ing, to burn or bury material to insure that it will never be found again. And,
of course, ellipses occur in another sense throughout the texts. The mean-
ing of utterances is heavily context-saturated; a portion of the conversation
or scene necessary to interpret an utterance will by necessity be missing in
retrospect, another inserted. (Of course, context exists itself only as a phan-
tasmatic stable background; it is itself a stabilized effect of the here-and-now
social processes of negotiated entailment.)
Indeed, no direct correlation exists between the archive of traditions and
the interpretation of the communicative intention of the original builders of
that archive when it comes to discerning the traditional history and beliefs

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 The Cunning of Recognition

of an Aboriginal group. In other words, the referential text is of a separate

order from the interpretative text and this difference becomes socially mean-
ingful in Aboriginal struggles for recognition. The lack of explicit reference to
cultural materials or practices in my or others’ texts may be said, retrospec-
tively, to indicate the secret-sacred or otherwise sensitive nature of material
and practices. In this sense even the most surface-level explicit text can be
opened out into other texts and contexts. The controversy over the claim of
some Ngarrindjeri women that sacred sites existed in the seas over which the
Hindmarsh bridge was to be built hinged exactly on this problem of reference,
predication, and intertextuality.2
In April 1993 Binalong Pty. Ltd. was granted a contract to build a bridge
between Goolwa and Hindmarsh Island in South Australia. In October of the
same year, a group of Ngarrindjeri women sought to stop the construction of
the bridge in order to protect sacred women’s sites said to be threatened by its
construction. They appealed for protection under the Aboriginal Heritage Act
(1988). The federal minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs,
Robert Tickner, reviewed the claim and issued a twenty-five-year building
ban. The developers, then in liquidation, appealed the ban to the federal court,
which quashed Tickner’s decision. Accusations that Ngarrindjeri women had
fabricated the stories about sacred women’s business sites began circulating in
the press in 1995. Soon after, other Ngarrindjeri women denied the existence
of any women’s sacred sites in the area. A Royal Commission was then ap-
pointed by the South Australian government and it published, on 19 Decem-
ber 1995, a report stating that the whole ‘‘women’s business’’ had been fabri-
cated. The Royal Commission relied heavily on anthropological research done
by earlier anthropologists in the area, especially the work of Ronald Berndt
and Catherine Berndt, which did not mention the existence of women’s ritual
business or sites in the area.
Those who sided both for and against the claim that a sacred site existed
in the Hindmarsh area argued about how to interpret the absence of histori-
cally documented references to these sites. Did the absence of references to the
women’s sites in the written archive mean that they did not exist (the women
had fabricated their evidence); that the sites were so sacred that Ngarrindjeri
women had refused to discuss them with anyone until now; or that the an-
thropologists with whom they had discussed the sites had carefully excluded
the conversations from their texts? If women’s business did exist, how could
Ngarrindjeri women publicly discuss its content and maintain its sacred status

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

as for women’s eyes and ears only? Hindmarsh Island was just the latest of a
series of national public debates about what Francesca Merlan has described
as ‘‘the limits of cultural construction.’’ 3
In order to understand the social and subjective throes into which belief-
and obligation-based reparative legislation place Aboriginal persons and
communities it is helpful to distinguish among the concepts of the inexpress-
ible, the unspeakable, and the indeterminate. I use the term ‘‘inexpressible’’
to refer to a felt orientation to some social or ideational state. The linguistic
notion of propositional attitude certainly captures aspects of the inexpress-
ible in ways useful to me here. A propositional attitude includes all statements
with verbs denoting belief, doubt, intention, and the like, including inten-
tional attitude-ascribing locutions of the type ‘‘believes that’’ and ‘‘intends
that’’ and intentional attitude-ascribing locutions of the type ‘‘believes of.’’
The inexpressible refers not to the referential content of the statements, but to
a second-order experiential relationship to them. A speaker might say some-
thing like, ‘‘I believe that children should not be abused.’’ But if asked why,
all subsequent explanatory statements (‘‘because I believe that . . .’’) are pro-
visional in the sense that, in the final moment, the explanatory ground is an
inexplicable sense-feeling, whose phenomenological type can be character-
ized as a moral feeling but whose referential content cannot be characterized
without loss.
The inexpressible should therefore be distinguished from the ‘‘unspeak-
able.’’ In the following, the unspeakable refers to instances in which something
can be described with a perfectly reasonable degree of accuracy, but can never-
theless not be described because of explicit social prohibitions, whether these
prohibitions are legal, religious, or personal in nature or whether they are
local or nonlocal in origin. Both of these terms are distinct from the notions of
‘‘indeterminacy’’ and ‘‘incommensurability.’’ 4 Scholars in the philosophy of
language have used the term incommensurability to refer to a state in which
an undistorted translation cannot be produced between two or more deno-
tational texts. Indeterminacy is used to refer to the condition in which two
incompatible translations (or ‘‘readings’’) are equally true interpretations of
the same text. In these contexts, deciding which interpretation of the text is
the more accurate cannot be based on evidence in the text, but must be found
elsewhere, say, what we believe about the integrity of the person who wrote
or interpreted the text. This seems to be a good place to start.

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 The Cunning of Recognition

‘‘I’M DIFFERENT’’

We can begin developing a robust sociology of belief and obligation ascrip-

tions and their role in redistributing material goods and social rights in multi-
cultural Australia by noting two typical ways that philosophers have distin-
guished belief ascriptions from truth ascriptions. A person can assess another
person’s beliefs to be true, or she can hold a more circumscribed view that
the other person truly believes her beliefs even though what she believes is
‘‘glaringly false,’’ as W. V. Quine put it.5 Analytic philosophers have argued for
decades whether it is reasonable to take a charitable interpretation of the belief
worlds of others and whether the belief worlds of others are largely true. From
a sociological perspective, legal and social judgment seem to conform more
closely to a weaker version of the notion of radical communication; namely,
that in multicultural contexts state courts and normative publics need merely
believe that the culturally other truly believes what she says, and can leave
to the side questions of the immediate or ultimate truth of her belief.6 In the
practice of land claims, for instance, lawyers and land commissioners, if not
the legislation itself, require Aboriginal claimants to explain the principles on
which their social organization and spiritual beliefs are based as a prerequi-
site for the acquisition of state-based rights and goods. Why are you what you
are or claim to be? Why must you do what you do or claim you should do?
What does it mean? What is it for? As long as indigenous persons’ accounts
of their beliefs and practices are relatively coherent and the content is about
‘‘culture’’ rather than ‘‘morality,’’ their beliefs might be, strictly speaking, non-
sense to nonlocal Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal participants and yet still be
legally persuasive.
Toward the end of chapter 2, I noted that it is unlikely that Baldwin Spencer
and Frank Gillen believed that the ritual acts they witnessed actually repro-
duced human life, let alone that Arrente men and women ceased being men
and women in the Temps de Rêve. These local beliefs remained for them (as
they remain for most non-Aboriginal subjects) phantasmatic or metaphor-
istic. Various Aboriginal claimants in the Kenbi Land Claim described a simi-
lar set of fantastic beliefs. Take, for instance, the Belyuen proposition that
they were born from a durlg (Dreaming ancestor) that lives in a local water-
hole (Belyuen); that this birth-relationship (maruy) fashioned their bodies
and sweat from the material of that Belyuen dreaming; that their ceremonies
center on this belief; and that when they die their spirits (nyuidj) return to
that waterhole.

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

mr. young: Okay and are there Aboriginal people who belong to this country,
the Cox Peninsula and islands?
leslie nilco: Yes.
mr. young: Yes? Who?
leslie nilco: The three kids and all the Belyuen people right through.
mr. young: Well, why do the Belyuen people belong to this country?
leslie nilco: Well, they’re born from the waterhole. All our sweat went right
through out the dreamings. We’ve been to ceremonies.
mr. young: Your sweat is throughout the dreamings and you mentioned cere-
monies. Okay. You were telling me about one of those ceremonies before,
you were going to tell me about burn’em rag. You know that burn’em rag
ceremony?
leslie nilco: Yes.
mr. young: What does that do? Sorry, I’ll withdraw that. When do you have
burn’em rag ceremonies?
leslie nilco: When someone passed away.
mr. young: Yes, and what does that burn’em rag ceremony do? What’s it for?
What’s the reason for burn’em rag ceremony?
leslie nilco: That’s for the spirit, you know, when your family passed away
and the spirit keeps coming out to the kids and all that and all your sweat
goes back to the waterhole and then goes out to the dreamings and all that
and you know that your—talking probably let the dreamings know that
you have gone away.7

We might ask: How does the unbelievable nature of these indigenous beliefs
constitute and authenticate the believers as bearers of a legally felicitous cul-
tural difference? When do ascriptions of the fantastic veer into ascriptions of
the fabricated? How do these Aboriginal subjects navigate the shores of the
unbelievable and the fabricated?
Most anthropologists would consider Leslie Nilco’s statements a local vari-
ant of a widespread indigenous belief in the spiritual impregnation of women
by totemic child spirits; colloquially, a belief in conception dreaming.8 Since
Spencer and Gillen published Native Tribes of Central Australia (1898) the
self-evident nonsense of this belief from a Western point of view captivated
scholars and publics and inspired extended debate about whether indigenous
people knew that a form of heterosexual sex (‘‘intercourse’’) made babies and,
if they did not, what this implied about their (primitive) mentality. Carefully
couching his example of Christian mentalities in the past, W. Lloyd Warner

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 The Cunning of Recognition

reminded scholars and the public in A Black Civilisation (1927) that the ‘‘rela-
tionship existing between the primitive men of north-eastern Arnhem Land
and me as a field worker would be the same as that of the traditional visi-
tor from Mars who might have come to study the Puritans of Massachusetts
in colonial days. Had he asked Cotton Mather or any other member of the
community ‘where babies come from,’ he would have discovered that they
came from heaven and that God sent them and that it was the special duty of
the church to look after them. He might be told that the stork brought them
and discover totemic ‘spiritual conception.’ ’’ 9 In short, according to Warner,
totemic beliefs were not an index of indigenous persons’ lack of physiological
knowledge nor a sign of their primitive mentality, but rather a mark of their
cultural interest in locally defined, sociologically significant structures: ‘‘The
ordinary savage is far more interested in the spiritual conception of the child,
which determines its place in the social life of the people, than he is in the
physiological mechanism of conception.’’ 10
What matters at this point is not the specific content of indigenous con-
ception beliefs, nor how anthropologists and publics debated the sociological
and subjective implications of these beliefs, but rather how, in having conver-
sations with Aboriginal subjects on this topic, a host of settler subjects dem-
onstrated to indigenous Australians the meaningful linkages Europeans made
between belief ascriptions and truth ascriptions, rationality and humanity,
humanity and citizenship. Warner traced the territorially dispersed track, and
interactional density and intensity, of these communicative practices. In the
same book, he quotes a passage from Spencer and Gillen in which the use of
adjectival intensives (‘‘firmly,’’ ‘‘time after time,’’ ‘‘always’’) indexes the degree,
range, and persistence of their inquires: ‘‘We have amongst the Arunta, Lu-
ritcha and Ilparra tribes, and probably also among others, such as the Warra-
munga, the idea firmly held that the child is not the direct result of intercourse,
that it may come without this, which merely, as it were, prepares the mother
for the reception and birth also of an already formed spirit child who inhabits
one of the local totemic centers. Time after time we have questioned them on
this point and always received the reply that the child was not the direct result
of intercourse’’ 11 (my emphasis).
Spencer and Gillen were hardly the only settlers circulating the intensity
of public and academic interest in local conception beliefs. Anthropologists,
pastoralists, missionaries, police, and other figures of colonial settlement held
formal and informal conversations with indigenous persons throughout Aus-
tralia. Warner is himself compelled to ask the Murngin a similar set of ques-

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

tions with a similar degree of intensity in order to counter popular public

beliefs in the primitive mind and more firmly and convincingly ground his ar-
gument for a ‘‘black civilization’’: ‘‘An occasion arose in which I could inquire
directly of certain old men just what the semen did when it entered the uterus
of the woman. They all looked at me with much contempt for my ignorance
and informed me that ‘that was what made babies.’ ’’ 12 Again, the content of
the conversation about human sexuality and physical reproduction is less im-
portant here than how, in the long process of having these conversations,
settler Australians communicated to indigenous Australians, in the logic of
prohibited interest, that a specific coordination of the unbelievable and the
true mattered to whether and how they were accorded full status as rational
human beings and national citizen-subjets. Indigenous persons opened, in
turn, a wedge of doubt about the limits of the possible in any actual settler
world, forcing scholars, administrators, farmers, and pastoralists to inspect
their own beliefs, or more minimally, to be irritated not only by the thought
but by its practical implications.
Similar conversations could be heard at Belyuen throughout the mid-1980s
and the 1990s, but with one modification: Belyuen women and men often
queried the belief capacity of nonindigenous persons. For example, when in
the course of the Kenbi Land Claim hearing a legal counsel for some of the Bel-
yuen, Jessica Klingender, became pregnant, local Belyuen women reckoned
the child to be from the Belyuen waterhole. After I returned to Belyuen from
a visit to Melbourne to see Jessica’s then-small son, I was asked by some Bel-
yuen women whether Jessica knew her child had a maruy from the waterhole
and whether she could believe that such a thing could be true. Could she?
Did she have the capacity for belief ? To be sure, ascribing a conception rela-
tion to a person is analogous to ascribing a kinship relationship to a person—
it binds the resources of persons to local communities and is thus a type of
instrumental reason. But this explanation is interpretively seductive and re-
assuring, exactly insofar as it brackets the question that the Belyuen women
raise: the capacity of settler belief and its implications on the way others evalu-
ate them. Did Jessica have the capacity for mental and physical conception?
If not, what did she think about their beliefs? How was she able to represent
them in court?
Given the long duration of this conversational form perhaps we should
not be surprised that contemporary indigenous persons regiment beliefs that
they know appear unbelievable to others, or to themselves in the company of
others, to concrete but amazing aspects of modernity. To explain to land com-

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 The Cunning of Recognition

figure 16. Nomad, Australian

Music International. (Courtesy of
Australian Music International
Inc., 253 West 18th Street, Ground
Suite, New York, New York 10011.)

missioners, anthropologists, and themselves how the Belyuen (durlg) Dream-

ing communicates to other durlg in the region, older men and women often
describe as a telephone system the underground Dreaming tunnels (kenbi)
connecting certain durlg. Belyuen-the-durlg communicates to other durlg
through underground tunnels. Belyuen travels through these underground
‘‘cables’’ ‘‘ringing up’’ other Dreaming-sacred sites in its reach, telling them,
‘‘Hey these are my kids. You must not harm them. You must take care of
them.’’ Belyuen-the-people communicate to this durlg environment through
song, ceremony, and other bodily practices. During evidence given in 1996,
Marjorie Bilbil used the concept of the telephone to describe to Mr. Young
how the Belyuen waterhole communicates to other Dreamings in the region.

mr. young: Can you tell the Judge how ceremony is for dreamings?
marjorie bilbil: When we have ceremony, we just come here and give bath
to younger boys and younger girls. Their sweat goes to the fresh water first
and then they go down to the salt water. We take them down to the salt

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

water and their sweat goes through the salt water as well goes to all those
sites that I have called today.
mr. young: All the sites you’ve called?
marjorie bilbil: Yes, it’s like a, say, when their sweat’s gone through those
sites, it’s all Belyuen now. Those people going to send this message back
like a telephone; they going to ask this fella here. They’ve got to say ‘‘Where
these kids from?’’ and this old man going to say ‘‘This is all from Belyuen’’
and they’ll be right, they won’t get sick or anything like that.
mr. young: All right. You mentioned the kids coming out of the waterhole
from that old man Belyuen. Is there some ceremony for that? For that old
man, that old Belyuen?
marjorie bilbil: Oh yes, when we have ceremony we pay respect back to
Belyuen when we have ceremony for girls or young men.
mr. young: Who do you pay respect back to?
marjorie bilbil: Belyuen.
mr. young: What for?
marjorie bilbil: For what he have done, like all the girls, like us mob, or
our younger ones like today, they got children, they’ve got their children
from that waterhole.
mr. young: So is it that you’re paying respect back because you’ve got the
kids out of the waterhole, is that what you’re saying?
marjorie bilbil: Yes, yes.13

These short exchanges generate ethnographic and legal support for the
Belyuen claim insofar as the beliefs that inform them can be described as
having a cultural specificity and directionality. The telephone is embedded in
a specific tropic field through which I and Belyuen women and men think
about the meaning, truth, and efficacy of their local beliefs and practices. Bel-
yuen is the subject-force of the interlocutionary moment, and the Belyuen
community’s social power is ‘‘measurable’’ in terms of the nodal reach of its
lines, not only in terms of the homogenized space between them, but also in
the eruption of ‘‘Belyuen power’’ at a distance.
In other words, western technology, its global reach, is a metaphor for
locality. Marjorie Bilbil figures the Belyuen in a dislocated location, in a
strange trajectory that has led her and her community’s self-identity and so-
cial relations to be most meaningfully expressed through that blue Belyuen
waterhole. The Belyuen draw on technology not for itself but for themselves.
We who represent them do not push or question too hard whether Belyuen

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 The Cunning of Recognition

and kenbi are telephones and telephone wires, so that the case focuses on the
nature of their believing rather than on the nature of the beliefs themselves.
Not questioning the metaphorical status of the metaphor we can use these ex-
amples as prima facie evidence of the resistance of local culture to the global,
and fit Belyuen into stereotypes embedded in the Aboriginal Land Rights
(Northern Territory) Act, 1976 (lra) and in the Native Title Act, which bor-
rowed much of its language from it. In the reinterpreted world of the Mabo
decision, the trajectory of the local I have just sketched—outward from the
local to enclose nonlocal ‘‘foreign’’ objects—can reinforce the romance of
native fixity and mythic thinking and the bent of the law in rewarding local
resistance to change. Of course, all of us engaged in this complicated commu-
nicative event rely on culturally hybrid communicative technologies to miti-
gate the legal effects of the dislocated location that Marjorie Bilbil describes.
These communicative technologies include faxes, email, and telephones that
coordinate strategies across continents and communities; their ability (and
my ability) to find a legal language of persuasion; and the Belyuen water-
hole’s ability to communicate the sweat and spirit of local people into regional
claim lands.
But the reality of any of these technologies is not at issue. Rather what is
being calculated is whether the Belyuen believe in what they describe; whether
they organize their actions on the basis of these beliefs; whether these beliefs
may be said to be ‘‘local’’; and what these local beliefs are said to be capable
of producing. This last point is critical. Even if the contents of the beliefs are
local, their legal felicity depends on the discursive environment into which
they are placed. At a minimum, local beliefs are intelligible as local only in-
sofar as they are embedded in a widespread, longstanding, and well-known
anthropological and public debate about the ‘‘strange’’ nature of Aboriginal
beliefs about human reproduction and ceremonial practices and insofar as
they are embedded in ‘‘conceivable’’ arguments.
For instance, as I noted in the last chapter, one of the key questions put
to the Belyuen case was whether or not spiritual descent was capable of ful-
filling the requirement that traditional Aboriginal owners be a ‘‘local descent
group’’ and whether it was ‘‘conceivable’’ on the part of expert anthropologi-
cal witnesses that Belyuen could maintain a tenure system based on human
descent for one territory and on spiritual descent for another territory. Take,
for instance, Peter Sutton’s evidence about the Belyuen (Sutton was testifying
on behalf of a Larrakia group opposing the Belyuen claim):

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

I’m not suggesting that it (spiritual descent) couldn’t be a social and land
tenure formation that people arrive at some time. It’s conceivable that a coastal
group in north Australia could change its land tenure system from the an-
cient type that I’ve been talking about, or its more or less natural children, the
cognatic descent group, et cetera, et cetera, with a language identity, a strong
interest in descent as a pathway in to tenure and the rest of it. It’s conceiv-
able that they might relinquish that kind of system and go for another system.
It’s much less conceivable to me that they would still have their hearts in both
at the same time for a long period, or indeed, I would find them very, very
difficult to put together.14

In large part the difficulty for Sutton in conceiving the Belyuen claim was its
seeming disparity from the anthropological literature on kinship and descent
and his own experience in other Aboriginal communities. Justice Maurice,
who would work with Sutton on the Kenbi Land Claim, also viewed spiritual
descent as an inconceivable basis for a local descent group in the Ti Tree Land
Claim. The inconceivability of the claim in that case pushed Maurice to ques-
tion its source and status as outright fabrication or naïve misunderstanding.
Questions about fabricated culture take us directly back to judgments
about believability and belief ascriptions, but with an additional qualification
of the person’s or group’s character. We can simply accept as true that it is in-
conceivable that indigenous people would use, and believe in, two land tenure
systems (or two components of one land tenure system, as argued in the pre-
vious chapter) or that they would believe in spiritual conception. But, if we do
not accept this as true, then Sutton’s and Maurice’s commentary suggests that
the legal felicity of the unbelievable is constrained by the social use to which it
is put, and by another, always lurking, discourse of interestedness. Interested-
ness acts as metapragmatic interpretant, a switch-point of sorts, transforming
the unbelievable into the fabricated (the untruthful). In land claims, ascrip-
tions of interestedness play in a complex, racially inflected social terrain.
Aboriginal subjects are usually portrayed as disinterested truth-tellers,
whose beliefs are manipulated by well-intentioned, though overly invested,
anthropologists.15 In Ti Tree, for example, Maurice strongly intimates that ar-
guments of the primariness of spiritual descent did not come from local claim-
ants, and did not refer to their actual beliefs, but rather came from esoteric and
naïve anthropological arguments and rivalries: ‘‘It seems that the research-
ers may have taken too literally a set of very complex metaphorical references
and this having resulted in considerable confusion about meanings.’’ 16 But the

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 The Cunning of Recognition

evidence for the metaphorical status of these beliefs returns Maurice and his
anthropological consultant, John Avery (who would also serve as the anthro-
pological consultant to the land commissioner on the Kenbi Land Claim), to
the anthropological and legal record. Avery and Maurice cannot believe that
it is possible to believe in physical descent from a Dreaming—let alone that
such could be the basis for a community of people—because the accepted
views of anthropological social theory preclude it; because social-scientific
notions of parsimony reject it; and because prior cases had not been formu-
lated on this basis. For Avery only the fact of kinship-mediated heterosexual
reproduction can clarify the scene: sex makes generations; kinship and de-
scent principles form these generations into social types; and spiritual con-
ception supplements these when they falter. Of course these ‘‘facts’’ of kinship
are the grounds of longstanding anthropological debate. But having been ac-
cepted as the proper way of viewing spiritual descent in the Ti Tree claim, this
proper reading can be cited in subsequent cases like Kenbi as the generally ac-
cepted view. The novel is, after all, the anathema to good law. It is what must
be denied in the scene.

mr. riley: And in recent times, say in this area, there has been—when I say
‘‘this area’’, I’m talking about the claim area—there’s been perhaps a move
away from looking at strict patrilineal descent because of the exigencies of
the times?
prof. povinelli: No, I think that misrepresents a land tenure system in the
area and I tried yesterday to give my understanding of the land tenure sys-
tem. One aspect, one component of which was the transmission from the
father to the children of a durlg substance; what we summarise as blood.
That’s one—that’s one component of the land tenure system.
mr. riley: And this is—
prof. povinelli: And I imagine you don’t want me to go on.
mr. riley: No, I certainly don’t want you to. This is what you describe, I think
elsewhere, as a sort of a new concept that you’re putting forward?
prof. povinelli: A new concept? No.
mr. riley: You wouldn’t call it that? Well, a radical concept?
prof. povinelli: No.17

The novelty of alterity is not the only limit to good legal reasoning in the
politics of recognition: cultural similitude becomes an uncanny difference to
the law. In cases in which the racial and class background of an indigenous
claimant veers toward the sociological profile of mainstream non-Aboriginal

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

Australia, the claimants themselves can become the magnet for charges of
interestedness—their beliefs liable to being transcoded as fabrications. The
difficulty of safeguarding the unbelievable from resignification as the fabri-
cated in the (de)authorizing shadow of miscegenation and class is suggested
by a comparison between Belyuen and Larrakia beliefs in cultural telecom-
munication.
In a 1955 essay on Arnhem Land music, A. P. Elkin described the Nguidjalag
as referring to a perduring mythological realm that Wagaitj people (including
the Belyuen) access through ceremonial songs and practices. Ritual events act
as communicative technologies with the Nguidjalag insofar as they ‘‘expressed
and strengthened the bond between the individuals and group on the one
hand, and with their country on the other hand.’’ 18 Forty years later, an urban
Larrakia family, the Fejos, tried to describe their spiritual relationship to the
land under claim by referring to a different communicative technology: their
family’s Christian evangelicalism, esp, and the New Age spirituality. In swel-
tering heat, on the northern coast of the Cox Peninsula with Darwin visible
across the harbor, the sound of Qantas airplanes often thundering overhead,
and a crowd of fifty Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal men and women sur-
rounding him, Wally Fejo told the land commissioner about ‘‘Larrakia . . .
spirituality’’ and how through this spirituality he learned about sacred sites
in the claim area.
Wally Fejo was the spokesperson for his family and a well-known and re-
spected minister who headed Nanggalinya, a missionary training school in
Darwin. During a long personal and family history, he described his chang-
ing Christian evangelical beliefs and practices and, among other metaphorical
associations, likened the Larrakia and Hebrew diasporas. At one point he de-
scribed having ‘‘within my life span, a lot of mountaintop experiences, a lot
of valleys, a lot of creeks, and a lot of hurt feelings.’’ 19 One of the mountain-
top experiences he described was of ‘‘telecommunicating’’ with now-deceased
Belyuen and Larrakia:

I don’t want to talk for too long. I’d like others to express their story as well but,
might I go quickly yet slowly. I came over to Delissaville many times as a young
person between the age of 18 and 25 for many reasons. And that was part of my
search and putting down on paper as well as keeping it in my mind the kind of
depth of spirituality Larrakia people’s spirit have. I’ve been amazed, I’ve been
amazed at what eventuated. I—some of the people who here today, who’ve
met me more who’ve come to my place or we somehow, somehow even prior

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 The Cunning of Recognition

to that we’ve been thinking of each other. And that’s the kind of relationship
and telecommunications that we have. You know, we’ve—Telecom [a phone
company] have come so far, technology, but we’ve had it years and years.20

On cross-examination, a lawyer representing Fejo and his family as part

of the Larrakia group pressed him to be more site-specific, a specificity com-
monly understood to be required by the lra’s definition of traditional Ab-
original owners. He asked Fejo whether specific now-deceased Larrakia men
had told him about specific sacred sites in the claim area. Wally Fejo answered
that they had not taught him ‘‘in a verbal way in which you and I are talking
now.’’ The deceased men didn’t teach him the names of places or the mythic
stories about places. They ‘‘didn’t point out and say, look, here’s the demar-
cation, this is New South Wales, this is the Northern Territory. . . . No we had
a better way of communication, as well as of teaching.’’ 21 These better ways
were evangelical and telepathic.
Wally Fejo’s sister, Christine Fejo King, led the women’s side of the family’s
evidence. She told the land commissioner that her ‘‘special job,’’ her ‘‘spiri-
tual role,’’ for the Fejo family was ‘‘recordkeeper.’’ She then described sacred
places she believed existed by referring now and again to a ledger-like set of
books she held in her lap. At one point, heard by all in the background, Mirella
Fejo urged her sister Christine King to tell the land commissioner about a
seance they had held in which they called forth spirits of the dead. Telling
Mirella she would have her turn to talk, King continued her evidence. On
cross-examination, Tony Young, a non-Aboriginal lawyer hired by the North-
ern Land Council to represent the Belyuen, asked King whether she thought
that dangerous sacred sites existed on the Cox Peninsula, sacred sites past
which or over which one could not travel. ‘‘Yes,’’ she answered. In an attempt
to demonstrate the primariness of the Belyuen’s responsibility for the claim
lands (again something demanded by the lra), Young proceeded to ask King
whether she knew where the sites were located or how to treat them; and if
she did not know would she be dependent on the Belyuen who did:

christine king: I was told but I can’t tell you on a map. I don’t know the
names. But I was told that if I went there, I would feel that it was wrong.
mr. young: I see. So, do you believe that if you went to one of these dangerous
places, you might be in danger, or other people might be in danger?
christine king: You don’t—you go there, and the back of your hair, neck
on the back of your hair stands up. It’s—, you know.22

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

A ripple of laughter and snorts passed through some of the non-Larrakia

audience after that last ‘‘you know.’’ King turned to Young and said that her
feelings and beliefs were like his, like something he himself would know, like
how we all ‘‘get a feeling.’’ The intimacy of the mimetic knowing she and
Young experience dissembled the scene of cultural difference. The land com-
missioner, lawyers, anthropologists, and some Aboriginal subjects could not
feel the specific membrance of alterity authorizing multicultural rights. In-
stead, they felt themselves to be abject, to be what must be purged from this
scene of law. The metaphoricity of all moments of translation dissolved too
fundamentally, and the law was forced to see too clearly its own and the colo-
nial handprint in the scene. It is the indigenous telling settlers ‘‘we share the
same feelings’’ that made whites uncomfortable, that prompted the audience
to question the presence of an authentic indigenous difference. This mimetic
knowledge made the scene a tense moment of the cultural ‘‘difference’’: it is
you seen in me who is making yourself uncomfortable.
During her turn, Mirella Fejo took up the theme of ghosts and the speak-
ing dead and deepened the abjection and shame of settler modernity. She
began by saying, ‘‘I just have one thing really of importance that I want to
tell the Judge.’’ 23 This was that the Fejos had ‘‘a gift’’ on ‘‘the spiritual side.’’
They can speak to the dead: ‘‘I really don’t care what anybody says about see-
ing ghosts or talking to ghosts or spirits or whatever you want to call it, but
I do.’’ 24 When pushed by her lawyer to be more site-specific—to relate her
powers to the land under claim—Mirella Fejo spoke of Aboriginal women’s
ceremony. She had earlier introduced a null relationship between such cere-
mony and her family’s powers: ‘‘We have a gift in that we can speak to the
dead. I talk with my uncles and my grandfather often. They come and visit.
Now, I’m not a ceremony woman. I have never gone through any ceremonies,
but they come and visit, not only me, they come to my sisters.’’ 25 In cross-
examination, Mirella Fejo embedded her ceremonial beliefs in the language
of the lra (‘‘spiritual affiliation’’) and in Jungian-inflected notions of ‘‘four
elements’’:

In regards to women’s ceremony, as I said before, talking to the spirits of the

ancestors, I’ve never gone through a ceremony but I am aware that, to have a
proper women’s ceremony, you have to have the artifact or whatever it is, to
go ahead and have a proper woman ceremony. You just can’t have a women’s
ceremony like that. That’s certain—you’ve got to have the spiritual affiliation,
you’ve got to have the medicine man there. There’s certain things. There’s four

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 The Cunning of Recognition

elements that have to be there in place for you to have a proper ceremony. Now,
where it all is, I don’t know.26

Finally, Jessica King, Christine King’s daughter, took the microphone.

Merely a teenager, surrounded by her extended family, she said she wanted
to describe to the land commissioner her special relationship to her guard-
ian bird, the sea eagle: ‘‘I have a special relationship with a creature in this
country. It is a bird. And it is my guardian and I follow it because it’ll take
me to safe places. And wherever I go it will guard me. . . . And I also found
that I can talk to the bird like I’m talking to you now. And I can understand
what he says to me back. And if I concentrate I can hear everything he says in
detail.’’ 27 Mimicking the young girl, the lawyer for the government opposing
the claims of all the Aboriginal groups prodded her to say more about her
strange abilities. As she did comments from non-Aborigines on the scene re-
ferred to ‘‘New Ageism,’’ ‘‘earth mothers,’’ and ‘‘crystal culture.’’ Other moans
and voices of censure stopped the cross-examination. This censure was not
simply prompted by the horror and shame of witnessing a Northern Territory
government lawyer bait a young Aboriginal woman, but by the evidence itself.
In other cases, the claimed beliefs of witnesses were more directly challenged
as pure fabrications.28
With Jessica King’s evidence, we might say that the simulation and drift of
signs of indigenousness have reached profound proportions. It is as likely that
the cultural images and referents she relied on came from places like Santa
Fe, books like Mutant Message Down Under, and films like The Last Wave
as from the land under claim. As such, the ‘‘cultural obscenity’’ of the evi-
dence, as one non-Aboriginal person put it, was its ‘‘posture’’ as local, as ‘‘Ab-
original,’’ and, in the climate of competitive Aboriginal claims, as generating
rights superior to those of the Belyuen based on nothing but a human descent
link to a Larrakia ancestor. But at another level this reappropriation and re-
deployment of a cultural signifier, a hybridization of cultural hybridity, is a
profound meditation on the meaning of urban Aboriginality’s relation to its
traditional localities under the disciplinary surveillance of settlement history
and state governance. That is, there is a deep truth to these beliefs as a genre,
as a stitching together of incommensurate national discussions of indigeneity.
Like Belyuen telecommunications, Fejo telecommunications are profoundly
local mediations on the conditions of the local in transnational times no mat-
ter what their inflection or origin in New Age and pop psychological forms
of spirituality.

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

We see in these two brief examples how jurists interpret law as a demand
that cultural beliefs be intelligible (that they be like known and accepted prin-
ciples of Aboriginal social organization and culture) but not too believable
(the difference remains the mythopoetic); that they lie within a set of preexist-
ing legal frameworks but not be oriented to them (opportunistic, interested).
In other words, the local must be translatable into a certain form and a certain
content, but it must speak the truth of itself for itself even though speakers
know other laws and agencies are sitting not far away ready to discipline
any enunciation that strays ‘‘too much’’ toward or against the nonlocal. ‘‘Too
much,’’ ‘‘by and large,’’ ‘‘more or less’’: these are the strategic nonmeasures,
tracked throughout this book, that have defined the state’s relationship to
Aboriginal ‘‘traditions’’ since settlement. And these nonmeasures continued
to haunt, bracket, and qualify local cultural traditions. But we also see how
this evidence stresses the generic enclosures of the law—how in struggling
against the law’s enclosures indigenous men and women continually pry it
open. Trapped between too much and not enough cultural difference, Bel-
yuen and Larrakia dilate preexisting parameters of the law and make legal
practitioners uncomfortable handling it.
The difficulty the Larrakia and the Belyuen faced figuring their beliefs in
the right mode of unbelievableness has been and is being faced by other urban,
suburban, and rural indigenous people througout Australia. In this case, Bel-
yuen and Larrakia must both find a way of making the incommensurateness
of local and state-mandated discursive and corporeal beliefs seem coherent
and commensurate but not opportunistic. Belyuen understandings of maruy
(conception), ngunbudj (sweat), and nyuidj (ancestral spirits) are a locally
produced reaction to the historical contingencies and brutalities of the colo-
nial period. The Belyuen use these concepts to rearticulate people, places, and
bodily inhabitations—desires, dreams, and aspirations. But, at the same time,
they and I work to articulate these discourses and embodiments in response
to the state demand that they be in relation to specific laws, social policies, and
state identities and, simultaneously, erase any suggestion that these cultural
beliefs are an opportunistic being for these laws, policies, and identities—and
erase, yet again, any local traditions sanctioned by statutory and common
law. Larrakia men and women likewise work with lawyers and anthropolo-
gists to make modern culture not appear as a mutant message in a court of
recognition.

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 The Cunning of Recognition

THE COMPULSIVE

In land claim contexts, the believable is articulated to the fabricated (negative

valence) and to the unbelievable (positive valence) not only on the basis of the
degree to which the discursive forms of beliefs and the believers differ from an
imagined non-Aboriginal mainstream, but also on the basis of a calculation
about the degree to which an interior disposition matches an exterior propo-
sitional claim. In simple terms, land commissioners and other jurists must
decide whether indigenous subjects believe what they say and whether they
are likely to act on those beliefs. The demonstration of such an attitude (in-
terior and dispositional) is demanded by legislation that links material repa-
ration to true belief—that is, to obligation. The lra requires, for instance,
that traditional Aboriginal owners ‘‘have’’ (a form of ‘‘be’’) common spiritual
affiliations to a site on the land, and that these affiliations be of a type that
‘‘place’’ a collectivity under a primary spiritual responsibility for the site and
the land.29 It also requires the land commissioner to assess the ‘‘strength or
otherwise of traditional attachment by the claimants to the land claimed.’’ 29
Although the land commission is required by law only to assess the strength
of attachment claimants have to the land, in legal practice most land commis-
sioners assess the strength of attachment claimants have to their beliefs, which
are seen to constitute the grounds of their attachment to place. Thus, under
this piece of legislation supplicants before the law must present evidence in
such a way that others can calibrate the degree and intensity to which their
belief is experienced as a necessary (binding), or merely a potential (possi-
bility), source of action. Put another way, claimants must produce belief in
such a way that someone else can calibrate the compulsive hold that the belief
has on them and, by extension, the collectivity they represent. In short, the
law mandates a story about interiority. And the most robust evidence of the
interiority of belief is compulsion.
For instance, in his Timber Creek Land Claim report, Commissioner
Michael Maurice noted that the ‘‘essence of spiritual affiliations to sites is, of
course, a system of beliefs about those sites, about the nature of man, and
about his relationship to them. They are beyond proof in any conventional
sense; but in any event, the nature of Aboriginal religion perhaps like any
other, is that proof is everywhere—no inquiry is necessary.’’ 31 With the phrase
‘‘beyond proof in any conventional sense’’ Maurice describes the conventional
means by which he arrived at his sense of the truthfulness of the claimants.
He calibrated the degree of similitude between what claimants said and what

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

they did; or, more precisely, what claimants said and did within his range of
observation: ‘‘Whether people possess the necessary beliefs is largely a matter
of impression. I have dealt with my impression of various key figures in this
claim; it remains only to round it off by saying that the claimants whom I had
a chance to speak to and observe satisfied me that they had strong spiritual
affiliation with the sites on and around the claim area.’’ 32 As an aside, Maurice
evokes the type of difference that designates true cultural beliefs—the curi-
osity of embodied customs: ‘‘Curiously, the claimants did not seem to mind
us walking on and around the graves of their relatives behind the pensioners’
camp.’’ 33 The curious nature of the claimants’ actions serves simultaneously
to index their difference from Maurice’s culture and the degree to which their
statements could be said to index an internal disposition: ‘‘Perhaps this was
explained by Duncan who, in response to the question, ‘Those people who
are buried here, are they still here?’, replied, ‘Only bones. Spirit gone.’ One
cannot, I suspect, divorce the mysticism concerned with country from the
mysticism concerned with other aspects of life. Each is part of a total religious
culture.’’ 34 The orientation of law to the compulsory degree of local belief was
continually evidenced in the Kenbi Land Claim hearings.
10 October 1996: several lawyers and I arrived at Belyuen early in the morn-
ing toward the end of the presentation of Belyuen traditional evidence for
the Kenbi Land Claim. During traditional evidence, Aboriginal women and
men sit day after day in front of a land commissioner, a sizable contingent of
non-Aboriginal lawyers, anthropologists, staff, and other Aboriginal people,
describing the sacred geography of the land that they are claiming; the prin-
ciples of marriage, birth, ceremony, or descent that organize them into a land-
holding local descent group for and from this land ‘‘according to Aboriginal
traditions’’; and the customary sacred laws that place them under a sacred
obligation to maintain this land and its laws.
Throughout the Kenbi Land Claim hearing, lawyers asked junior and
senior Belyuen men and women if there remained a traditional, ritually sanc-
tioned law for the claim lands; if the Belyuen were obliged to act according
to this law;—if it was a ‘‘hard law’’; if violation of this hard law would result
in physical punishment; and if such punishment occurred inside or outside
ritual contexts. Day in and day out most senior and junior members of the
Belyuen answered in the affirmative to all these questions. The law remained
in the land and in the people who in turn remained under an obligation to
keep the law going generation after generation. Punishment for violating the
law could happened anywhere, at any time, but was especially likely to occur

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 The Cunning of Recognition

in men and women’s ritual business. No one asked for or provided details of
the specific form that this ritual punishment took in open public segments of
the evidence. An exchange between a lawyer representing the Belyuen, Tom
Keely, and one of the Belyuen claimants, Alexander Nilco, can stand as typical
of these exchanges:

tom keely: Yes. Now do the people who look after the dreaming sites in this
country, can they stop doing it?
alexander nilco: No, they still running, I think, still going.
tom keely: Under your law though, are they allowed to stop or do they have
to keep going?
alexander nilco: No.
tom keely: They keep going.
alexander nilco: Keep going.
tom keely: That law, there’s an Aboriginal law that applies to the way people
behave in this country?
alexander nilco: Aboriginal law.
tom keely: And how do you get to be inside that law?
alexander nilco: Can you explain again?
tom keely: Is there a way—is there something that happens to Aboriginal
people as they grow up that puts them inside that law?
alexander nilco: It’s pretty hard there.
tom keely: Okay, perhaps it’s a bad question. But, when you go through
ceremony, what does that do for you? Do you have to follow the law, follow
that ceremony?
alexander nilco: You got to follow the law, yes.
tom keely: Okay, and what happens if you don’t follow the law?
alexander nilco: Well you get punished for that, from our side, Aborigi-
nal law.35

As this brief exchange suggests, claimants are pressed to assert and cali-
brate—to make a judgment about—their own internal subjective states and
those of others in a variety of past, present, and future possible worlds. In
effect, witnesses are pushed to lace their testimony with a minor philosophy
of the ought.
Analytic philosophers and linguists have sought to determine the logical
and semiotic principles expressed in European languages by mood and modal
terms such as ‘‘ought,’’ ‘‘must,’’ ‘‘may,’’ and ‘‘might,’’ and in non-European
languages by various lexical, grammatical, or prosodic markers that semanti-

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

cally express judgment, evidence, obligation, capability, and commitment.36

This interest in the logical and semantic structure of mood and modality has
provided us with a rich comparative understanding of how languages allow
speakers to express varying levels of commitment to a statement or action.
But although languages provide speakers with the delicate means for cali-
brating and asserting the obligation, knowledge, belief, and capacity of sen-
tient and nonsentient beings toward various states, conditions, and events, it
is not language that demands that witnesses deploy these various linguistic
technologies. Lawyers seeking to aid or impair claimant cases urge speakers
to draw on these grammatical, prosodic, and lexical features of language to
fine tune their characterizations of past, present, and future states of being,
about the beliefs and obligations that will be or have been incumbent on per-
sons in these states—these other possible, probable, even improbable worlds.
In other words, languages provide the delicate means for calibrating and as-
serting obligation but institutional structures pressure Aboriginal subjects to
make constant and rapid judgments about others and themselves.
This is not to say that Belyuen women and men do not judge or are not
capable of judgment, nor that they do not calibrate their own and others’ be-
liefs and compulsions based on their own intensional and extensional worlds.
As an example, take the explicit and tacit attitudes that various Belyuen ex-
pressed in the Kenbi Land Claim about the compulsory quality of their rela-
tionship to the land under claim. I am not interested here so much in the cul-
tural logic of embodiment they describe, but rather in the stance the Belyuen
speakers take toward their obligations. The inability of persons to leave a place
or a people—their compulsive return—signals for many Belyuen their proper
being from and for a people and place. Indeed, a critical index of the proper
person for and from a Dreaming site and its general territory is the pattern
of human movement—the movement of bodies, desires, and language.

mr. maurice: Can you tell me how do you get to be an owner for this country?
alice djarug: We know for Belyuen people, we know this Belyuen.
mr. maurice: What happens if someone from Belyuen moves away and they
maybe go down to Port Keats and has children and lives down there.
alice djarug: No.
mr. maurice: They’re not an owner?
alice djarug: Mm. They can’t leave this Belyuen.36

mr. young: Who taught you the dreamings on this country, the Cox Penin-
sula and the Islands?

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 The Cunning of Recognition

betty bilawag: Well, my husband.

mr. young: Which husband was that?
betty bilawag: First husband, Mosec.
mr. young: Now, these dreamings on the Cox Peninsula and the islands we’ve
been talking about over the past few days, who looks after those dreamings?
betty bilawag: All the Belyuen. Us mob got to look after them.
mr. young: Does ceremony look after country?
betty bilawag: Yes.
...
betty bilawag: We got islands, we got to look after them. Kids come and
go them camping. I’m going camping. My mother sitting down here going
camping. We still going to look after them. We go down to the beach, camp-
ing, weekend, take down kids with us. We got to teach them down, grand-
children. And I know I can stop to Milik and my kids don’t want to leave
that country. Me, I can’t leave that country myself.37

Freedom from corporeal compulsion is not the ground of a local ethics of

territoriality. Particularly instructive is the request of Robert Blowes, legal
counsel assisting the Larrakia, to Betty Bilawag, a member of the Belyuen, that
she evaluate the type of obligations she, her children, her deceased mother,
and other Aboriginal persons had, have, and will have to the country and its
Dreamings. (From a non-Aboriginal perspective, Banadjirr and Ngalgenbena
were the classificatory grandparents of Betty Bilawag, who was about seventy
years old when she gave the following testimony.)

mr. blowes: All right. And what about some of these old people we have been
talking about yesterday and today. Might be that—first we started with,
sorry, Mr. Keely started talking about Banjidjirr [Banadjirr] and Ngalgen-
bena and people like that. Were they owners for this country?
betty bilawag: No, they were just stopped, staying here all the time, you
know. See, people who look after this country, we’ve have got to stay in Bel-
yuen and we look after this country and dreamings. We got to look after
dreamings else it’s gone and we know that dreaming gone so.
mr. blowes: So, you’ve been looking after country?
betty bilawag: Yes. And kids, all the boys, they can’t get away. They got to
look after the dreaming Mother got to look after them, kids and dreaming
and the way we walk around. It’s really our country back long way. We been
keep it for Larrakia people but I don’t know. Larrakia people don’t know
this country. I know. I just must be know, but others—

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

mr. blowes: Some Larrakia people know this country?

betty bilawag: I don’t know.
mr. blowes: Well, like Raelene?
betty bilawag: Yes, Raelene know, Zoe.
mr. blowes: Some of your family, like Patrick Briston?
betty bilawag: Yes, that’s my family and my sister’s kids, Alice Briston.
mr. blowes: They know.
betty bilawag: Might be they know but he don’t know much, because I
know him. And kids know too, this country.
mr. blowes: Which kids?
betty bilawag: Briston. They always come down here camping on weekend,
they always come back. But the others, I never see them. Nobody knows
this country, I think. I know.
mr. blowes: Is that all you wanted to say about that?
betty bilawag: I don’t know, but must be they know some. Alice know this
time. I showed them this country. I said, your grandfather country and your
father’s country, I said to them, but other people don’t want to come back
and look after the place any way, camping, no. They don’t want to come,
I don’t know why they never come back. I said, ‘‘why?’’ And they don’t
like it.38

We can account for Belyuen statements like Bilawag’s (‘‘They don’t want
to come, I don’t know why they never come back. I said, ‘why?’ And they
don’t like it’’) as political in the most instrumental of senses. Bilawag uses the
lack of an action-based commitment to claim lands to assert an internal atti-
tude toward that land and thereby underscore the illegitimacy of the Larrakia
claim. But if we extend the same charity to Bilawag and other Belyuen that
we extend to other Aboriginal groups testifying in this case, not to mention
the lawyers and anthropologists aiding them, then she is, at least some of
the time, trying to reconcile her beliefs and knowledges about the relation-
ship between her territorial heritage and her present-day compulsory terri-
torial practices to the territorial aspirations and practices of other Aboriginal
people. And, significantly, she is attempting to reconcile beliefs and practices
within the genre-specific requirement of a legal hearing. In other words, when
placed within the communicative environment of the lra and other belief-
and obligation-based pieces of state legislation, the Belyuen struggle to make
sense of the strange fact that people who claim to own or be for and from
a country do not exhibit any compulsion to return to it. This in light of the

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 The Cunning of Recognition

fact that the Belyuen perceive themselves as unable to leave the country from
which they were born, even as they find themselves also returning to their
southern countries. Why? What accounts for this discrepancy? What is the
basis of their attachment?

mr. young: They [the Larrakia] take this country?

ruby yarrowin: Yes.
mr. young: Yes. Why is that?
ruby yarrowin: I don’t know. Bit hard.39

‘‘Why’’? In Emiyenggal, Ruby Yarrowin’s first language, ‘‘why’’ translates

the term eminu, which can also be translated as ‘‘what from’’ or ‘‘what caused,’’
with the suffix -nu a purposive, future deontic marker. What compelled you to
do this? You will be compelled by what? When asked these questions in rela-
tion to the land claim, Belyuen men and women provide multiple reasons for
why they are bound to the claim lands and its ceremonies. Sometimes people
will answer, ‘‘We think for this place and come back’’; sometimes, ‘‘No mat-
ter we try go away can’t.’’ If pushed, they might add that they cannot leave
the country because they have ‘‘always been living’’ there; because their par-
ents passed on to them maruy from the Belyuen durlg; because their parents’
spirits (nyuidj ) are still in the land; because their ceremony is there. At still
other times, in answer to the origin of their obligation to remain in the land,
to abide by ‘‘our side, Aboriginal law,’’ Belyuen speakers will simply refer to
the ‘‘Dreaming.’’
Such citings of the Dreaming refer less to the content of a cultural order
than to the fact of its compulsory obligation. The Dreaming, a lexical (nomi-
nal) item, acts like a modal ‘‘must.’’ To be sure, they might say that they must
keep the law going to keep the land going. But most Belyuen do not say that
they obey the law because they understand its rationale or the social, moral,
and ethical principles underlying it. They are compelled to obey because it
is the law and it is ‘‘still running . . . still going.’’ And it is still going because
people still feel they must . . . or should. Certainly, persons learn more as they
progress through ceremonies, as they constantly intercalate ritual and quo-
tidian knowledges. But to explain the reason for the compulsion of the law,
they refer to the fact that the deepest law is compulsion. To be Belyuen as such
is to be compelled to be as such, to find oneself in the returning, again and
again to particular places, practices, people; in the knowing that one should be
doing certain things—returning, staying—even if one is not; or in the being
bothered by the fact that one is not. Indeed, finding the proper place of the self

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

through observing one’s compulsive, patterned, actions interprets the truth of

all proper connections—affective, linguistic, legal, territorial, and practical.
At this point, it would seem that I have retreated to the high water mark
of modernist representations of primitive subjectivity—the logical necessity
of totemism as described by Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss.

When Stewart asked a native to which division the bull [totem] belonged, he
received, after a moment of reflection, the following answer: ‘‘It eats: it is Boor-
twerio,’’ i.e. of the tea-shrub clan, which probably comprises all grassland and
herbivores. But this is very probably an ad hoc explanation to which the black
has recourse in order to justify his classification to himself and to reduce it to
general rules by which to be guided. Quite often, moreover, such questions
take him unawares, and he is constrained, in answer to everything, to invoke
tradition.40

Two points. First, early modernist ethnological accounts sharply distin-

guished so-called primitive allegiances to cultural forms from civil allegiances
to the same. They engaged in what Lévi-Strauss would later call an archaic
illusion. Following Lévi-Strauss’s general insight if not his model, I have
elsewhere argued that all subjects of discourse are subjected to some law of
compulsion, although its location, form, and content are liable to historical
change. This is to say little more than what critical western social theory has
already described as doxa and hegemony.41 The terms doxa and hegemony,
and the theories supporting them give speakers the sense of having contained
the spread of nonfreedom, of coercion, even though the terms cannot and
do not pretend to describe the content of the domains to which they refer.
The hegemonic, the real, the doxic, and related terms create a feeling of free-
dom through a referential practice as tautological as the Dreaming, justice,
and freedom. All these nouns do is name and point to modal feeling—the
inexpressible thing that binds our actions.
The distinction then between Belyuen and Enlightenment stances toward
compulsion is not the fact of its presence or absence in subjectivity but the
manner in which this fact qualifies social practice. A surface reading of En-
lightenment liberalism might find a Western abhorrence of the compulsive,
contrasting sharply with Belyuen attitudes toward the same. After all, as
humanists creep closer to the categorical imperatives of everyday life—the in-
expressible of modal feelings rather than the speakable of social proposition-
ality—they inch ever nearer to the conditions that negate liberal definitions of
freedom. But Enlightenment rationality, and the state and public institutional

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 The Cunning of Recognition

structures that have risen up with them, in practice, if not in ideology, abhor
the compulsive only in certain contexts. There are many situations in which
politicians and publicans refer to moral compulsion (moral sense) as the basis
of freedom or freedom’s restriction. In personal or state-mediated encoun-
ters with the deontic, the facility and bravado of Enlightenment manifestos
for liberty or death dim.
Second, subjective compulsions are state mandates. As I mentioned earlier,
the legislative language of the lra requires the land commissioner to take
into regard ‘‘the strength or otherwise of the traditional attachment by the
claimants to the land claimed.’’ 42 The subsequent Native Title Act requires
the register of native title claims, and also requires the tribunal that eventu-
ally hears them, to assess whether or not the claim group continues to ‘‘hold’’
the ‘‘traditional laws’’ and ‘‘traditional customs’’ that subtend native title ac-
cording to the state.43 A claim is, therefore, maximally legally felicitous when
claimants exhibit a maximal compulsory relation to land and its law—when
they ‘‘hold’’ the land and law without question, abide by it for little reason
more than because it is.

THE SECRET

All the above calibrations of legally mandated difference and obligation have
referred to instances in which an indigenous person seems to be referring to
culture rather than morality, or to cultural practices considered morally neu-
tral. When the traditional practice being described seems to non-Aboriginal
listeners to be about morality rather than culture (that is, when the compul-
sory nature of indigenous law strongly conflicts with the compulsory nature
of settler law) the explanations that claimants give about why they believe can-
not simply be sensible. They must also seem true, right, just: human(e). The
Belyuen themselves, and Keely and myself as their apologists, can present ex-
planations of local moral systems that are coherent and recognizable as such,
are socially productive and recognizable as such, and yet still be considered
to be mere justifications for immoral—worse, abhorrent—practices. How do
indigenous persons discuss the customary when it is prohibited, or consid-
ered abhorrent, especially when their livelihood and the livelihood of their
social networks seem to rely on this discussion? In what ways does the law’s
emphasis on difference push claimant culture toward the secret thing lurking
in difference and sequestered from the public under the sign of ‘‘the secret’’?
In these moments the inexpressible sense of moral compulsion changes the

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

form in which the speakable is spoken. That is, something strange happens
to sense when a person is forced to speak and write about the abhorrent in
the genre of the unspoken.
10 October 1996, approximately 7:30 a.m.: Because the ferry from Darwin
had been delayed, we were behind schedule and worried that the land com-
missioner and his entourage would arrive before we had time to speak with key
senior men and women who had recently flown in from Port Keats (Wadeye),
an Aboriginal community to the south of Belyuen. Tom Keely wished to speak
to Alexander Nilco and Paul Smiler in particular. To maximize our time, Keely
and I decided to separate. I would speak with the elder women, he with the
elder men. Having finished talking with the women, I walked over to the house
where Keely had gone. As I approached the driveway, a Toyota troop carrier
rapidly backed out and then drove quickly away. The brother (I will call him
Fred) of the man whose driveway I was about to enter was driving and was
clearly upset. As I turned back into the driveway, Alex Nilco stumbled out
of the yard. Against his forehead he was holding tightly what had once been
a white rag. It was now soaked with fresh blood. ‘‘You right?’’ I asked. ‘‘Me,
right. Brother yours just been kill me belonga funeral,’’ he replied. ‘‘Mmm,
sorry wulman [old man], you right for walk up?’’ I asked, indicating the health
clinic not far away:

nilco: Yeah, me right. Judge, what time im come?

povinelli: Soon. You talk today?
nilco: Must be. Lawyer, I been talk le [to] im. Im there inside. I go hospital
first, stitches.
povinelli: You sure you right?
nilco: Yeah, me right. What’s wrong?
povinelli: Neh, nothing.

We laughed, shook our heads and turned away from each other.
Once again I turned into the driveway and once again someone rushed
out. This time I faced Tom Keely. He was clearly upset, verging on being be-
side himself, saying that Fred was out of control. Keely proceeded to describe
what had occurred minutes before I arrived. Fred had stormed into the court-
yard yelling that no one from the Nilco family had bothered coming to the
recent funeral of his eldest brother, the senior ceremonial leader for the area,
and yet they dared come to give evidence in the land claim. Fred then picked
up a nullanulla (fighting stick) and hit Nilco across the forehead. ‘‘Hmm,’’ I
replied to Keely, ‘‘That’s true about the funeral.’’ I probably appeared callous

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 The Cunning of Recognition

and distant to Keely—indeed eerily so considering the blood on the driveway.

In response to his unease about my attitude or to my own unease about how
it might appear to him or to me on reflection, I continued the conversation.
Here is a selection from notes I wrote down later in the day:

povinelli: It’s the law, Tom, remember, ‘‘It’s hard; it can happen anytime.’’
What did you think that meant?
keely: Right. Right. Ok, but he was furious, in a rage. This was no rational
ritual punishment.
povinelli: Whether this is rational or passionate it’s what you’ve been de-
fending day after day. ‘‘Any time, anywhere, anyone in your family.’’ No
one’s kidding. I didn’t hear anyone ask if you have to be rational in the de-
livery system for it to be traditional. This isn’t easy. It’s not just hard on
one end of the stick. You try to hit your brother, mother, daughter, because
you’re obliged to.
keely: You think this is how punishment should be carried out—in a rage?

This was not an easy question for me to answer for personal and conceptual
reasons. It was later in this same day that Keely asked Nilco whether or not
he had to follow the law, and what would happen if he did not. Nilco replied
to this line of questioning with stitches latticed across his forehead.
Tom Keely was experienced in land claim procedures and practices, in the
discourses of Aboriginal law, and in representations and some practices of
indigenous men’s ritual. As was I. And, no less than Daly River’s Constable
Turner was forced to reflect, hone, and shape his critical judgment in the prox-
imity of ritual law, were Tom Keely and I affected in our practices of truth.
Both of our first visceral responses might have been critical. But subsequent
reflections focused on the appropriateness of his response and what lay be-
neath it. Keely came to understand the dissonance among his legal practices,
his moral beliefs, and his gut responses. I came to understand the strange tra-
jectory of the familial forms of violence I knew at Belyuen and in the United
States. Here we seem to have evidence opposing the principle of collective
morality. But, on this and subsequent occasions in which we discussed this
incident and others like it, Keely remained hesitant to embrace some local
practices of truth, law, and justice, no matter what sense they made from
a local perspective. I refused to budge on its sensibility. Something nagged
at his and my conscience: an ought, a should, an obligatory attitude toward
certain types of actors and actions that he and I could not dismiss no mat-
ter that neither of us could fully justify its rightfulness in all possible social

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

and cultural contexts. His job and mine, indeed, our desire, was to support
the local, the customary; and yet a feeling remained that something about
this type of social violence was wrong or right no matter what sense it might
make in its own context. Something else appeared alongside this ever so deli-
cate feeling that Keely might not have hitherto imagined—the possibility of
a truly alterior moral order, an other possible world. The possibility of moral
alterity irritated the actual world that Keely inhabited and the fantasy world
he had imagined in his legal practice.44 But it also made his practice serious
and weighty—indeed, profound. He became more human in the domain of
potential inhumanity. And the Belyuen became more authentic; there was a
secret or something truly other behind the words they spoke. But this other-
ness—its truth—is nothing but a feeling of maximal difference from our own;
that is, it is not there, in and of itself. This otherness exists in relationship
to us.
But land claims do not accidentally run into radical difference. They pro-
duce it as the authentic discursive field of indigenous culture. The Kenbi Land
Claim is a good example of this. When the case was first run in 1989, little em-
phasis was placed on the ceremonial side of local indigenous life. And yet, as
suggested in Olney’s writings summarized in chapter 4, ceremonial activity is
widely considered to lie at the heart of Aboriginal culture, to define its differ-
ence. Not surprisingly, then, when the claim was reheard in 1995, customary
law lay at the foreground. But if we asked ourselves what law is this customary
law, we would return to the history of the region as I outline in chapter 3. A
history many of the senior members of the Belyuen remember clearly.
We find ourselves at the point where this chapter began: the elliptical
nature of Aboriginal testimony. When we reexamine the secret nature of Ab-
original evidence, we now see that indigenous persons are obliged simulta-
neously to cite and to safeguard the fact of abhorrent beliefs and practices
from the public record and from public circulation. Many people inside and
outside Aboriginal communities may object to characterizing local secrets
as state and public mandates, arguing that from an Aboriginal perspective
some information is and should be kept secret, sequestered from the public.
And they might further argue that questioning the local origin of practices of
secrecy and knowledge feeds into a recent conservative assault on Aboriginal
testimony.
So let me be clear. What I’m getting at here is somewhat different from the
problem of traditional evidence in land and cultural heritage claims. I am try-
ing to understand the function of the secret in restricted and public sessions

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 The Cunning of Recognition

as a demand on, not an accommodation to, local epistemological practices.

This does not mean that Aboriginal people do not and should not consider
their ritual and quotidian practices as involving varying degrees of exclusivity
and inclusivity or that they should not be allowed to maintain these degrees
in the context of hearings. Rather, it means that a secret is a mandated marker
of authentic indigeneity and reminds us that the truth of this secret is already
circulating in public.
As a result Aboriginal subjects face the task of deciding not only what to
tell non-Aboriginals, but also how deeply they must establish an abject re-
lation to traditions and identifications that are deemed legally and publicly
abhorrent. For example, the performance of secret-sacred male and female
initiation ceremonies on the land under claim is considered a primary index
of land ownership under the lra in this case and others. But the content of
these ceremonies might be immoral from the perspective of the very lawyers
presenting the Belyuen case, if not illegal under existing Australian statutory
laws. In the context of land claims, indigenous women and men must, there-
fore, consider once again the morality and legality of their ceremonial iden-
tities and identifications, bodily performances and sensualities.
This corporeal anxiety and reflexivity is intensified by the material and psy-
chic needs of the land claim process itself—the need to produce in claimants a
belief that, no matter the long, tortured history of state and public repression
and laissez-faire neglect, change is possible. To assuage Belyuen doubts and
overcome the weight of the historical failure of the Kenbi Land Claim, Bel-
yuen lawyers dangled hope, reason, and the progress of white Australia, em-
phasizing the evolving nature of law and interpretation, the changing mood
of the nation, the moral claim of the Belyuen, and my presence as someone
who knew them and cared. The Belyuen were asked to forget failure and in-
difference and instead focus on history in the making. Lives and generations
hanging in the balance, the Belyuen and I stretched to reach the law’s de-
mands and to hide from it those traditions that might shame us in order to
increase the chances we would be free to live our lives.
Little should be surprising here. All people will find that some customary
laws go too far (but we may rely on the facts that the elders will have enough
common sense not to go too far or not to publicize practices crossing this line
of common sense). At some point, the experience of alterity will capitalize
the empty concepts of human justice, human decency, and human right and
will act as a commonsense differentiator between difference and evil, the cul-
tural and the moral. But, in all multicultural contexts, difference teases with

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 The Truest Belief Is Compulsion

alterity; it does so especially in contexts in which the distribution of material

resources are linked to cultural expression.
Go. Walk into the law.

THE COST OF RELAXATION

It is no surprise to people who have had any land claim experience that the
law of recognition imposes certain requirements on the form in which the
local must appear to be recognized as a rights- and material-bearing iden-
tity. Most practicing land claim lawyers and anthropologists know the law
imposes conditions on the performance of local culture and that these con-
ditions are based on abstracted anthropological models that do not fit any
particular Aboriginal group, culture, or practice perfectly. Many lawyers and
anthropologists would describe themselves as liberal, or liberal-Left, but few
as ‘‘idealists.’’ They know that even though the legislative shoe does not quite
fit local footing, indigenous claimants must squeeze into it if they are to gain
the benefits of the law. But this critical legal reflexivity does not preclude these
same persons from also believing that local traditions are ‘‘shoe-like’’; that the
statutory abstractions with which they work were found by an anthropologi-
cal science before becoming foundational in court, public, and state discourse.
That is, juridical and critical publics are seduced by a phrase, by and large, a
variant of the long history of more or less. Most lawyers, land commissioners,
and anthropological consultants understand Aboriginal cultural traditions to
be like the form the law demands, by and large. A ‘‘reasonable Aborigine’’ will
see in the legislation a shadowy image of her or his culture, though she or he
will not seek it. This is the reasonable Aboriginal subject.45
The willingness of lawyers and anthropologists to leap over rather than
tarry in the gap between abstracted anthropological and legal models and
local modes of localization is one of the means by which forms of liberal force
are extended rather than critically engaged. But we can and should ask what
lawyers, anthropologists, and Aboriginal activists should do instead. Lawyers
and the anthropologists assisting them do their best to represent their clients,
to present the truth of their lives to the court, and, through these representa-
tions, to work for social justice. The difference between abstracted anthropo-
logical models and local modes of social organization can even be understood
as a productive part of this fight for social justice. The difference between them
allows lawyers to exploit a certain flexibility in the law. Lawyers can argue
that even though a local group does not perfectly match the requirements of

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 The Cunning of Recognition

a piece of legislation they can nevertheless be seen as fulfilling the spirit of

the law. The spirit of the law is, after all, to recognize local traditional social
organization, not to use an outdated anthropological model to discipline the
local. Such arguments are often made in land and native title claims. And they
are effectively made. They win country for indigenous people.
The spirit of the law is what cares for indigenous people. Critiques of lib-
eral forms of domination should not dismiss or take lightly the truth of state,
national, and legal caretaking. Persons who work within juridical and state
jobs do care deeply about subaltern bodies, desires, and language. They seek
to demonstrate their concern and to show that these bodies, desires, and lan-
guage can be recognized by the law. They beckon them toward the state’s
remedial institutions. But insofar as they do, they unintentionally reinstate
liberal law and desire as the end of difference and they help to saturate locals
with this dream.

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 NOTES

INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL COMMON SENSE

1 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Continuity and Change (1958),’’ in White Man Got No Dreaming

(Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), 50, my emphasis.
2 Hayes v. Northern Territory 1999, Report of the Native Tribunal Commissioner,
Mr. Justice Olney, (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1999), para. 20.
3 www.aboriginal-art.com. Wadeye was connected to this circulatory system prior
to the expansion of the airport and the creation of the art gallery. Several Wadeye
barks, painted during the 1960s, were featured in the most recent Sotheby’s indige-
nous art catalog, with prices listed ranging between five hundred and five thousand
dollars.
4 See Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural
Society (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998); Meaghan Morris, Too Soon, Too Late: His-
tory in Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); and Sara
Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Rout-
ledge, 2000).

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 Notes to Introduction

5 See Stuart Hall, ‘‘When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit,’’ in The
Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and
Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996), 242–60, esp. 252.
6 I do not mean to indicate a geographical space by the phrase ‘‘colonial and post-
colonial world.’’ Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon and, more recently, Homi K.
Bhabha have convincingly argued that the colonial subject is a historical epoch
rather than a geographical location. See Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colo-
nized (New York: Orion, 1965); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans.
Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1965); Homi K. Bhabha, The Loca-
tion of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). See also Mahmood Mamdani, Beyond
Rights Talk and Culture Talk: Comparative Essays in the Politics of Rights and Culture
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
7 Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992); Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of
History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?’’ Representations 37 (1992): 1–16; Homi K.
Bhabha, ‘‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of
Colonialism,’’ in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 66–84; Hall,
‘‘When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’?’’; Kaja Silverman, ‘‘White Skin, Brown Masks:
The Double Mimesis, or Lawrence in Arabia,’’ differences 1.3 (1989): 3–54; Michel-
Rolph Trouillot, ‘‘Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era,’’ Inter-
vention: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. 2.2 (2000): 171–86, special
issue, ‘‘Rights and Wrongs,’’ ed. Homi K. Bhabha and Rajeswari Sunden Rajan.
8 See Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of the critical ideological role played by images in
which the nation and its citizens appear likable to themselves and images in which
they appear to themselves as likable and worthy of love (Žižek, The Sublime Ob-
ject of Ideology [London: Verso, 1989], 105). See also Etienne Balibar’s provoca-
tive reading of Althusser on ideology: ‘‘Just as the accumulation of capital is made
of ‘living labor’ (according to Marx), so the oppressive apparatuses of the State,
Churches, and other dominant institutions function with the popular religious,
moral, legal and aesthetic imaginary of the masses as their specific fuel’’ (Balibar,
‘‘The Non-Contemporaneity of Althusser,’’ in The Althusserian Legacy ed. E. Ann
Kaplan and Michael Sprinker [London: Verso, 1993], 13). See also Lauren Berlant,
‘‘The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,’’ in Cultural Pluralism,
Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1999).
9 John Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 85.
10 Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘‘The Three Normative Sciences,’’ in The Essential Peirce:
Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–1913), ed. The Peirce Edition Project
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 207.
11 Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘‘The Nature of Meaning,’’ in The Essential Peirce: Selected
Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–1913), ed. The Peirce Edition Project (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 210.
12 For Peirce’s discussion of critical common sense, see Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘‘Prag-
matism,’’ in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–

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 Notes to Introduction

1913), ed. The Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998),
398–433.
13 See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1987); and John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993).
14 Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 5–6.
15 This too was the spirit that animated early deconstructive and genealogical texts.
See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, ‘‘The Ends of Man,’’ in Margins of Philosophy
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), 109–36; and Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is
Critique?’’ in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e),
1997), 23–82.
16 For a ‘‘critical theory of recognition’’ and redistribution, see Nancy Fraser, ‘‘From
Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,’’ The
New Left Review 212 (July/August 1995): 68–93.
17 John Frow and Meaghan Morris, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Australian Cultural Studies: A
Reader ed. John Frow and Meaghan Morris (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1993), x.
18 For an overview of the recent economic history of Australia in relationship to the
Asia-Pacific, see R. Higgott, ‘‘Australia: Economic Crises and the Politics of Re-
gional Economic Adjustment,’’ in Southeast Asia in the 1980s: The Politics of Eco-
nomic Crisis, ed. R. Robison, K. Hewison, and R. Higgot (Sydney: Allen and Unwin,
1987), 177–217. Meaghan Morris has also noted this period of economic transfor-
mation as a significant moment in the cultural time of Australian nationalism:
‘‘By 1986, as the Treasurer began to warn of our ‘banana republic’ tendencies and
burgeoning foreign debt, viewers were in the words of one angry critic, ‘treated
nightly to the spectacle of economic commentators pronouncing on the govern-
ment’s political performance. . . . It was as though foreign traders, rather than Aus-
tralian voters, had become the arbiters of political taste in this country’’ (Morris,
‘‘Future Fear,’’ in Mapping the Future: Local Cultures, Global Changes, ed. Jon Bird,
Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner [New York: Rout-
ledge, 1993], 33).
19 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 100.
20 Michael Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-Building State Changes
Its Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 2–3.
21 Antonio Gramsci, ‘‘State and Civil Society,’’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks
(New York: International Publishers, 1992), 206–76.
22 Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra, 213. The equity of income distribution
was celebrated during the 1890 Australasian Federation Conference. See Robin
Sharwood, Debates of the Australasian Federation Conference of 1890 together with
Extracts from the British Press Concerning Federation and the Australasian Federa-
tion Conference of 1890 (Sydney: Legal Books, 1990).
23 Donald Horne, The Lucky Country (Ringwood: Penguin, 1964).
24 See Brian Murphy, The Other Australia (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1993).

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 Notes to Introduction

25 After periods of sustained growth from 1960 to 1974, the Australian economy suf-
fered a severe recession in 1974, leading to what some economists have called ‘‘stag-
flation.’’ Unemployment peaked at 9.9 percent in 1982 but stayed above 7 percent
from 1982 to 1988. At the same time, Australia’s gross external debt rose sharply
from under $10 billion to just under $140 billion. See Barrie Dyster and David
Meredith, Australia in the International Economy in the Twentieth Century (Cam-
bridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. 269. See also Ken Buckley and
Ted Wheelwright, No Paradise for Workers: Capitalism and the Common People in
Australia, 1788–1914 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), 247.
26 See Alvin Y. So and Stephen W. K. Chiu, East Asia and the World Economy (London:
Sage Publications, 1995).
27 Steve Chan and Cal Clark, ‘‘The Rise of the East Asian NICs: Confucian Capitalism,
Status Mobility, and Developmental Legacy,’’ in The Evolving Pacific Basin in the
Global Political Economy, ed. Cal Clark and Steve Chan (Boulder: Lynne Rienner
Publishers, 1992), 41.
28 See Dilip K. Das, The Asia-Pacific Economy (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 17.
29 Depending on their theoretical orientation, economists explain this realignment of
capital accumulation to have been caused by free-market forces, cultural attitudes
(Confucianism), state policy, or relations of dependency. For a good overview, see
So and Chiu, East Asia and the World Economy.
30 Patrick Walters and Michael Gordon, ‘‘We’re a Culture Apart, PM Tells Asia,’’ The
Australian, 18 September 1996, sec. A, p. 1. Michael Millet and Louise Williams,
‘‘PM Defends Soft Line on Indonesia,’’ Sydney Morning Herald, 18 September 1996,
sec. A, p. 1.
31 In the same year, the Immigration Restriction Act imposed an infamous dictation
requirement that screened out nonwhite immigrants.
32 John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, Citizens without Rights: Aborigines and Aus-
tralian Citizenship (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 81–82.
33 Alan Powell, Far Country: A Short History of the Northern Territory (Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 1988), 161.
34 Ronald Wilson, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Sepa-
ration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, ed.
Meredith Wilkie (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commissioner,
1997). See also Tony Austin, I Can Picture the Old Home So Clearly: The Common-
wealth and ‘‘Half-Caste’’ Youth in the Northern Territory, 1911–1939 (Canberra: Ab-
original Studies Press, 1993).
35 Powell, Far Country, 233.
36 See for instance, J. K. Doolan, ‘‘Walk-Off (and Later Return) of Various Aboriginal
Groups from Cattle Stations,’’ in Aborigines and Change: Australia in the ’70s, ed.
R. M. Berndt (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1977). See also
B. Attwood and A. Markus, The 1967 Referendum, or When Aborigines Didn’t Get
the Vote (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Studies, 1997); L. Lippman, Generations of Resistance: The Aboriginal Struggles for
Justice (Melbourne: Longman, 1981); F. Bandler, Turning the Tide (Canberra: Ab-

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 Notes to Introduction

original Studies Press, 1989); and A. Wright, ed., Take Power Like This Old Man
Here: An Anthology of Writings Celebrating Twenty Years of Land Rights in Central
Australia, 1977–1997 (Alice Springs, NT: Jukurrpa Books, 1998).
37 The Bondi protests were reported by Fiona Harai, ‘‘Beating Our Own Drum,’’
The Weekend Australian, 26–27 June 1999, 23; The Indonesian banner was photo-
graphed by Bullit Marquez, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 September 1999, 12.
38 Jane M. Jacobs and Fay Gale, Tourism and the Protection of Aboriginal Cultural Sites
(Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994).
39 Fred Myers, ‘‘Representing Culture: The Production of Discourse(s) for Aborigi-
nal Acrylic Painting,’’ Cultural Anthropology 6.1 (1992): 26–62; Nicholas Thomas,
Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999);
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘Consuming Geist: Popontology and the Spirit of Capital
in Indigenous Australia,’’ Public Culture, special issue ‘‘Millennial Capitalism,’’ ed.
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. 12.2 (2000): 501–28.
40 Eric Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizon
(Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994).
41 ‘‘Ms Edgar said [one] way to destroy a people was to detribalize them by taking
away their stories and their dreams replacing them with imported ones’’ (reported
in Robert Wilson, ‘‘Children’s TV Head Blasts ‘Sinister’ US,’’ The Australian, 3 July
1996, 3).
42 See, for instance, Rosemary Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties:
Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998);
Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);
William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991);
Bernard Williams, ‘‘Toleration: A Political or Moral Question?,’’ in Tolerance be-
tween Intolerance and the Intolerable, ed. Paul Ricoeur (Providence: Berghahn
Books, 1996), 35–48.
43 For critical discussions of the limits of tolerance, see Susan Moller Okin, Is Multi-
culturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 7–24;
Stanley Fish, ‘‘Boutique Multiculturalism,’’ Critical Inquiry 23.2 (1997): 378–95;
Alenka Zupancic, ‘‘The Subject of the Law,’’ in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed.
Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 41–73.
44 Slavoj Žižek, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), 7.
45 John Comaroff, ‘‘The Discourse of Rights in Colonial South Africa: Subjectivity,
Sovereignty, Modernity,’’ in Identities, Politics, and Rights, ed. Austin Sarat and
Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 193–236.
46 Charles Taylor, ‘‘The Politics of Recognition,’’ in Multiculturalism: Examining the
Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994), 25–73, 66.
47 France used already existing legislation prohibiting violence against children to
outlaw the practice of clitoridectomy. See Celia W. Dugger, ‘‘Tug of Taboos: Afri-
can Genital Rite v. U.S. Law,’’ New York Times, 28 December 1996, sec. 1, p. 1. The
French state’s discipline of a north African practice has an uncanny relationship to
its past war in Algeria and to its present-day political relationship with Algeria. The

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 Notes to Introduction

New York Times noted: ‘‘The war has at times come to bear an uncanny resemblance
to the war of Algeria’s independence. Then, too, the guerrillas, Algeria’s National
Liberation Front, used methods of startling savagery—including disembowelment,
decapitation and the mutilation of genitals—to shatter the middle ground in so-
ciety. Then, too, the authorities represented by the French Army responded with
torture and indiscriminate killing. Then, too, the war spilled over into France, di-
viding its society and destroying the Fourth Republic’’ (Roger Cohen, ‘‘Troubled
Tie: France Hears Alarming Echoes of Colonial Past from Algeria,’’ New York Times,
12 December 1996, sec. A, p. 12.
48 The legislation was sponsored by representatives Pat Schroeder (D–Colorado) and
Harry Reid (D–Nevada) as part of the Immigration Act. See Celia Dugger, ‘‘Genital
Mutilation Is Outlawed,’’ New York Times, 12 October 1996, sec. 1, p. 27; and Sharon
Lerner, ‘‘Rite of Wrong,’’ Village Voice, 26 March–1 April 1997, 44–46.
49 Christopher Newfield and Avery F. Gordon, ‘‘Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Busi-
ness,’’ in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 77.
50 A social geography of the practice is emerging in the mass media. The New York
Times educates the public on the regions where women are at the greatest risk:
‘‘New York and Newark are among the metropolitan areas where the largest num-
ber of these at-risk girls and women live’’ (Celia Dugger, ‘‘Genital Mutilation Is
Outlawed,’’ New York Times, 12 October 1996, sec. 1, p. 27.
51 Antonio Gramsci, ‘‘The Modern Prince,’’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks
(New York: International Publishers, 1992), 123–205, esp. 132–33.
52 Mass media often conflates a diverse set of non-Western cultural practices and
represents these as ‘‘premodern’’ or ‘‘precivil.’’ For instance, the New York Times
writes: ‘‘A much broader struggle is taking place across Africa. Throughout much
of the continent, from the ritual slavery of the Ewe to female genital mutila-
tion to polygamy, ancient practices that strike both Westerns and many Africans
as abhorent coexist side by side with modernity’’ (‘‘Human Rites: Africa’s Cul-
ture War—Old Customs, New Values,’’ New York Times, sec. 4, p. 1). Public cul-
ture is currently struggling over how to understand the (il)legitimacy of these
practices when they occur among U.S. immigrants. How should U.S. law treat
underaged marriage, polygamy, and wife beating when they occur in immigrant
communities? See Nina Schuyler, ‘‘When in Rome: Should Courts Make Allow-
ances for Immigrant Culture at Women’s Expense?’’ In These Times 21.7 (1997):
27–29.
53 In the wake of the outlawing of social clitoridectomies by the U.S. Congress, the
Left and Center mass media reported divisions among social communities affected
by the law and among the medical community. For instance, the New York Times
reported that U.S. health care officials were divided in their opinions on whether it
was better to permit moderated and medically supervised clitoridectomies (giving
a ‘‘ritual nick on the prepuse’’) or to condemn the practice to untrained persons
who would perform the operation illegally. See Celia Dugger, ‘‘Tug of Taboos: Afri-
can Genital Rite v. U.S. Law,’’ New York Times, 28 December 1996, sec. 1, p. 1. These

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 Notes to Introduction

divisions within the medical community and the community of practice are noted
but underemphasized in Sharon Lerner, ‘‘Rite of Wrong,’’ 44–46.
54 Stanley Fish has outlined the contradictions and ambivalences in models of multi-
culturalism. He and others distinguish weak and strong forms of multiculturalism
by the degree to which any moral judgment is seen as based on universal grounds
exterior to the particularities of cultural logics or all moral judgments are seen as
excretions of cultural logics or historical discursive positions. Fish argues, how-
ever, that both models are incoherently formulated. According to Fish, even the
most critical proponents of multiculturalism eventually stumble on a case of cul-
tural difference that they feel they should or do refuse to support for reasons that
sound universalizing, but now cannot be defended as such. This is famously illus-
trated by the Salman Rushdie and nambl (North American Man-Boy Love) cases.
See Stanley Fish, ‘‘Boutique Multiculturalism.’’ For a general discussion on the dis-
cursive impasse of multiculturalism in liberal democratic society, see Chicago Cul-
tural Studies Group, ‘‘Critical Multiculturalism,’’ Critical Inquiry 18 (spring 1992):
530–55; David Theo Goldberg, ‘‘Introduction: Multicultural Conditions,’’ in Multi-
culturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994),
1–44; and Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Mapping
Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–18. For a
critical discussion of the instability of both universalist and particularist grounds
for moral claims, see Ernesto Laclau, ‘‘Universalism, Particularism, and the Ques-
tion of Identity,’’ in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 20–35; and Lauren
Berlant, ‘‘1968, or Something,’’ Critical Inquiry 21.1 (1994): 124–55.
55 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia,’’ in Collected Papers, vol. 4, ed. Joan
Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 152–70.
56 Ernesto Laclau, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The Making of Political Identities, ed. Ernesto
Laclau (London: Verso, 1994), 1–8.
57 See Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (1893; New York: Macmil-
lan, 1964).
58 Segments of this discussion are drawn from Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘Sexuality at
Risk: Psychoanalysis Metapragmatically,’’ in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed.
Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and
Elizabeth A. Povinelli and George Chauncey, ‘‘Thinking Sexuality Transnation-
ally,’’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5.4 (1999): 439–49.
59 But see L. Sackett, ‘‘Welfare Colonialism: Developing Division at Wiluna,’’ in Going
It Alone, ed. R. Tonkinson and M. Howard (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press,
1990); J. Collman, Aboriginal Fringe Dwellers and Welfare (St. Lucia: University of
Queensland Press, 1988); Jeremy Beckett, ‘‘Internal Colonialism in a Welfare State:
The Case of the Australian Aborigines,’’ paper presented at the annual meeting of
the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, 1983.
60 Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris, eds., Race Matters: Indigenous Australians
and ‘‘Our’’ Society (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997); Annette Hamilton,
‘‘Fear and Desire: Aborigines, Asians, and the National Imaginary,’’ Australian Cul-
tural History 9 (1990): 14–35; Gillian Cowlishaw, Rednecks, Eggheads, and Black-

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 Notes to Chapter One

fellas (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Jeremy Beckett, Torres Strait
Islanders: Custom and Colonialism (Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
Diane Austin-Broos, ‘‘ ‘Two Laws’: Ontologies, Histories: Ways of Being Aranda
Today,’’ Oceania 7 (1996): 1–20; David Trigger, Whitefella Comin’: Aboriginal Re-
sponses to Colonialism in Northern Australia (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1992).

1 / MUTANT MESSAGES

1 Lorimer Fison, ‘‘Kamilaroi Marriage, Descent, and Relationship,’’ in Kamilaroi and

Kunai, ed. Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt (1880; Canberra: Australian Aboriginal
Press, 1991).
2 Ibid., 29.
3 Ibid., 42.
4 ‘‘By present usage, I mean that which has been developed by the natives themselves,
not that which has resulted from their contact with the white men. This is a factor
which must be altogether cast out of the calculation, and an investigator on this
line of research needs to be continually on watch against it’’ (Fison, ‘‘Kamilaroi
Marriage, Descent, and Relationship,’’ 29).
5 Ibid., 30.
6 Ibid., 59–60.
7 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland (Canberra: Australian Government
Printer, 1996), 146, 176.
8 Ibid., 146. See also Marshall Perron, ‘‘Sacred Sites—a Costly Token to a Dead Cul-
ture,’’ Northern Territory News, 7 January 1989, 7.
9 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, 182.
10 Wilson, Bringing Them Home.
11 See Lisa Kearns, ‘‘Armbands Sell Like Hot Cakes,’’ The Age Melbourne Online,
21 November 1997 (www.theage.com.au).
12 Silverman, ‘‘White Skin, Brown Masks,’’ 3.
13 Freud, ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia.’’
14 I mean ‘‘meconnaissance’’ in the technical Lacanian sense in which ‘‘misrecognition
is not ignorance. Misrecognition represents a certain organization of affirmations
and negations, to which the subject is attached. Hence it cannot be conceived with-
out correlative knowledge. If the subject is capable of misrecognising something,
he surely must know what this function has operated upon. There must surely be,
behind his misrecognition, a kind of knowledge of what there is to misrecognise’’
(Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1, Freud’s Papers on Technique,
1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forester [New York: W. W. Norton,
1988], 167).
15 Morris, Too Soon, Too Late.
16 State policy on indigenous affairs is generally considered to have moved through
four broad phases: genocide, assimilation, self-determination, and most recently,
reconciliation.

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 Notes to Chapter One

17 Debra Jopson, ‘‘Unemployment Rate Set to Soar for Aborigines,’’ The Age, 24 Au-
gust 1998, 7.
18 Matt Price, ‘‘Lightfoot on Black Policy Committee,’’ The Australian, 11 June 1997, 4.
19 Kim Beazley, ‘‘Address to the Nation by the Leader of the Opposition Kim Beazley,’’
The Age Melbourne Online, 2 December 1997 (www.theage.com.au).
20 ‘‘The former Liberal Prime Minister Mr. Malcolm Fraser yesterday added his voice
to community pressure on the Federal Government over its handling of the Wik
debate with a warning that a reputation of trying to build a fair and just society
was at risk’’ (Claire Miller, ‘‘Just Society at Risk, Says Fraser,’’ The Age Melbourne
Online, 26 November 1997 (www.theage.com.au).
21 Beazley, ‘‘Address to the Nation.’’
22 Ibid.
23 Among numerous reports, see Michael Millet, ‘‘Race Row: Tourists Cancel Trips,’’
Sydney Morning Herald, 1 November 1996, sec. A, p. 1; and Peter Switzer, ‘‘Hanson-
ism Feeds on Economy’s Failings,’’ The Weekend Australian, 21–22 June 1997, 54.
24 Ronald Wilson, ‘‘Sir Ronald Wilson Address in Canberra,’’ For a Change Magazine,
Online, February/March, 1998. (www.forachange.co.uk)
25 Taylor, ‘‘The Politics of Recognition.’’
26 As part of National Sorry Day, Australians were urged to write their thoughts in
Sorry Day Books.
27 David Nason, ‘‘Critics Split on Hanson Tactic,’’ The Weekend Australian, 25–26 July
1998, 6.
28 For reports in the northern papers, see Bob Watt, ‘‘Flogging a Custom, Court Told,’’
Northern Territory News, 28 July 1992, 3; Bob Watt, ‘‘Flogging Outside the Law,’’
Northern Territory News, 6 August 1992, 3; The Lone Ranger, ‘‘Death Laws in Cul-
ture,’’ Northern Territory News, 8 July 1996, 11; Bob Watt, ‘‘Wife Killer Says He Was
Cursed,’’ Northern Territory News, 18 June 1999, 5; Bob Watt, ‘‘Nine Years Jail after
Brutal Wife Killing,’’ Northern Territory News, 19 June 1999, 3; and ‘‘Missionary
Weds Girls to Save Them,’’ Northern Territory News, 1 September 1999, 18.
29 Stephanie Peatling, ‘‘PM calls Hanson ‘Sinister’ on Black Vote,’’ Sydney Morning
Herald, 16 July 1998, 5. See also Georgina Windsor, Matthew Abraham, and Maria
Ceresa, ‘‘PM Attacks ‘Abhorrent’ Hanson View,’’ The Australian, 16 July 1998, 4.
30 Peatling, ‘‘PM Calls Hanson ‘Sinister’ on Black Vote,’’ 5.
31 Liberal Prime Minister John Howard described Hanson’s remarks as ‘‘sinister’’
(Peatling, ‘‘PM Calls Hanson ‘Sinister’ on Black Vote’’). Victorian Premier Jeff
Kennett described her remarks as ‘‘abhorrent, undemocratic, ignorant and inaccu-
rate’’ after a memorial lecture in London in honor of former Liberal Prime Minister
Sir Robert Menzies. See ‘‘Crush Hanson Peril: Kennett,’’ The Australian, 16 July
1998, 1. Other Liberal Party leaders were quoted making similar comments. Lib-
eral Senator Ross Lightfoot claimed, ‘‘Aboriginal people in their native state are the
lowest colour on the civilisation spectrum’’ (Matt Price, ‘‘Lightfoot on Black Policy
Committee,’’ The Australian, 11 June 1997, 4).
32 The referendum also removed a section of the Constitution that excluded Aborigi-
nes from population counts used to determine the number of seats in parliament.

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 Notes to Chapter One

33 The first land rights statute was passed in 1966 in South Australia as the Aborigi-
nal Land Trusts Act, 1966 (SA). Since then there has been a series of statutes, in-
cluding Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act, 1981 (SA); Maralinga Tjarutja Land Rights
Act, 1984 (SA); Aboriginal Land Rights Act, 1983 (NSW); Local Government (Ab-
original Lands) Act, 1978 (Qld); Land Act (Aboriginal and Islander Land Grants)
Amendent Act, 1982 (Qld).
34 See Andrew Harvey, ‘‘Land for Rail: Please Explain,’’ Sunday Territorian, 26 July
1998, 15.
35 See Wayne Howell, ‘‘One Nation Defines Aboriginal Identity,’’ Northern Territory
News, 27 July 1998, 2.
36 Patrick Walters and Michael Gordon, ‘‘We’re a Culture Apart, PM Tells Asia,’’ The
Australian, 18 September 1996, sec. A, p. 1. See also Ben Holgate, ‘‘Cringing Under
a Culture Defined,’’ The Australian, 27 August 1998, 14.
37 See Michael Bachelard, ‘‘First Shots in the Race-Based Election We Had to Have,’’
The Australian, 20 July 1998, 13.
38 Benjamin Lee, ‘‘Textuality, Mediation, and Public Discourse,’’ in Habermas and the
Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993), 414–5.
39 See, for instance, Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship.
40 Jacques Lacan, ‘‘Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,’’
Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 146–78.
41 ‘‘At the Third National Welfare Conference held in 1951 the newly appointed federal
Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, vigorously propounded the benefits to Ab-
original people of assimilation and urged greater consistency in practice between
all states and the Northern Territory,’’ (Wilson, Bringing Them Home). See also
Geoffrey Partington, Hasluck versus Coombs: White Politics and Australia’s Aborigi-
nes (Sydney: Quakers Hill Press, 1996).
42 Art of the Hunter: A Film on the Australian Aborigines, John Endean, producer,
with the assistance of A. P. Elkin, circa 1950, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
archives, Canberra.
43 See Andrew Hornery, ‘‘Corporate Dreamtime Collides with Reality,’’ Sydney Morn-
ing Herald, 20 March 2000, 1. The abc ran an exposé on Aboriginal art in its
national news magazine, Four Corners, on 31 May 1999. For general discussion, see
J. C. Altman, Aborigines, Tourism, and Development: The Northern Territory Ex-
perience (Darwin: North Australian Research Unit, 1988); Jennifer Craik, Resorting
to Tourism: Cultural Policies for Tourism Development in Australia (Sydney: Allen
and Unwin, 1991); Jacobs and Gale, eds., Tourism and the Protection of Aboriginal
Cultural Sites; Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art; and Fred Myers, ‘‘Uncertain Regard:
An Exhibition of Aboriginal Art in France,’’ Ethnos 63.1 (1998): 7–47.
44 Peter Garrett, Diesel and Dust, Columbia Records, New York, 1988.
45 Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976 (Canberra: Government
Printer, 30 April 1992).
46 See Wendy Brown, ‘‘Wounded Attachments,’’ in States of Injury, Power, and Free-
dom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 52–76.

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 Notes to Chapter Two

47 See Lisa Clausen, ‘‘The Cruelty of Kindness,’’ Time (Australian edition) 9 June
1997, 46.
48 Laura Tingle, ‘‘Keating Attacks Wik Plan as Racist,’’ The Age Melbourne Online,
12 November 1997 (www.theage.com.au).
49 Clausen, ‘‘The Cruelty of Kindness,’’ 46.
50 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland (1996), 176, 136.
51 Freud, ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia.’’
52 See Debra Jopson, ‘‘One Nation or 301 Nations?’’ Sydney Morning Herald, 9 August
1997, 15.
53 Peter Sloterdjik, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1983); and Slavoj Žižek, ‘‘How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?’’ in The
Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1992), 11–53, esp. 28–33.
54 Roman Jakobson, with Krystyna Pomorska, ‘‘The Concept of the Mark,’’ in On
Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1990); Roman Jakobson, ‘‘Mark and Feature,’’ in Selected
Writings VII (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 332–35; and Edna Andrews, Markedness
Theory: The Union of Asymmetry and Semiosis in Language (Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1990).
55 See Genny O’Loughlin, ‘‘Topsy Secretary—Last of the Larrakia,’’ Northern Territory
News, 10 December 1989, 16.
56 Linda Pearson, ‘‘Aboriginal Land Rights Legislation in New South Wales,’’ Environ-
mental and Planning Law Journal 10.6 (1993): 398–422, esp. 399, 400.
57 M. M. Bakhtin, ‘‘The Problem of Speech Genre,’’ in Speech Genres and Other Late
Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 68.
58 For one such visit, see the discussion of the American ballet star Ted Shawn’s visit
to Belyuen in 1947 in John K. Ewers, ‘‘Aboriginal Ballet,’’ Walkabout 1 December
1947, 29–34.
59 Alan Dearling with Brendan Hanley, Alternative Australia: Celebrating Cultural Di-
versity (Freecyb Publications, 2000).
60 For a fuller discussion of these cases, see Povinelli, ‘‘Consuming Geist.’’

2 / THE VULVA THIEVES (ATNA NYLKNA): MODAL ETHICS

AND THE COLONIAL ARCHIVE

1 Michael Taussig, ‘‘Maleficium: State Fetishism,’’ in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse,

ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 231.
2 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1978; New York: Vin-
tage, 1990), 152.
3 Louis Althusser, ‘‘From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,’’ in Reading Capital, ed. Louis
Althusser and Etienne Balibar (1968; London: Verso, 1997), 11–69.
4 Richard Rorty, ‘‘Habermas, Derrida, and the Function of Philosophy,’’ in Truth
and Progress, Philosophical Papers (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 309.

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 Notes to Chapter Two

5 For an account of Spencer and Gillen’s meeting, ethnographic research trips, and
impact on the social sciences, see D. J. Mulvaney, ‘‘ ‘A Splendid Lot of Fellows’ ’’:
Achievements and Consequences of the Horn Expedition,’’ in Exploring Central
Australia: Society, the Environment, and the 1894 Horn Expedition, ed. S. R. Morton
and D. J. Mulvaney (Chipping Norton, NSW: Surrey Beatty and Sons, 1996), 3–12;
D. J. Mulvaney, ‘‘F. J. Gillen’s Life and Times,’’ in ‘‘My Dear Spencer’’: The Letters
of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, ed. D. J. Mulvaney, Howard Morphy, and Alison
Petch (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997), 1–22; Howard Morphy, ‘‘Gillen—Man of
Science,’’ in ‘‘My Dear Spencer’’: The Letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, ed.
John Mulvaney, Howard Morphy, and Alison Petch (Melbourne: Hyland House,
1997), 23–50; R. R. Marett and J. K. Penniman, eds., Spencer’s Scientific Correspon-
dence with Sir J. G. Frazier and Others (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932); S. R. Moron
and D. J. Mulvaney, eds., Exploring Central Australia: Society, the Environment, and
the 1894 Horn Expedition (Chipping Norton, NSW: Surrey Beatty and Sons, 1996);
and D. J. Mulvaney and J. H. Calaby, ‘‘So Much that Is New’’: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–
1929: A Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1985).
6 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 152, 160, 178, 186, 213, 218, 222, 223, 260, 267, 280.
7 Baldwin Spencer, The Arunta: A Study of a Stone Age People, vol. 1 (London: Mac-
Millan and Co., 1927), ix; Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, Northern Tribes of
Central Australia (London: Macmillan, 1904), 8, 17, 46.
8 Fison, ‘‘Kamilaroi Marriage, Descent, and Relationship,’’ 29.
9 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 257, 253, 249, 186, 177, 172, 167.
10 Spencer, The Arunta, ix.
11 George Stocking Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1881–1951 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 94–98.
12 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 130.
13 Robert Sharwood, Debates of the Australasian Federation Conference, 56. See also
Luke Trainor, British Imperialism and Australian Nationalism: Manipulation, Con-
flict and Compromise in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
14 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields
(New York: The Free Press, 1995), 2.
15 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 203, 218, 221, 222.
16 Ibid., 260.
17 Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia (New York:
Macmillan, 1899), 97.
18 Ibid., 46.
19 George Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 249–
54.

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 Notes to Chapter Two

20 Stocking notes that on account of his radical sexual politics, Richard Burton, then
head of the Anthropological Society of London, ‘‘risked prosecution to publish
works his wife and most of his contemporaries took for pornographic,’’ in Stocking,
Victorian Anthropology, 253.
21 Walter Roth, Ethnological Studies among the North-West-Central Queensland Ab-
origines (Brisbane: Edmund Gregory, Government Printer, 1897).
22 Herbert Basedow, ‘‘Subincision and Kindred Rites of the Australian Aboriginal,’’
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 57 (1927): 123–56.
23 Paola Mantegazza, Anthropological Studies of Sexual Relations of Mankind (New
York: Falstaff Press, 1932).
24 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest (London: Routledge, 1995); Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The
Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1989).
25 M. F. Ashley-Montague, Coming into Being among the Australian Aborigines: A
Study of Procreative Beliefs of the Native Tribes of Australia (London: George Rout-
ledge and Sons, 1937), 49.
26 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 201, 340.
27 Ibid., 207.
28 Jakobson, ‘‘Mark and Feature,’’ 332–35; Jakobson, ‘‘The Concept of the Mark,’’ 134–
40.
29 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 97.
30 Ibid.
31 Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, 137.
32 Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘‘Kinship,’’ Man 30.17 (1930): 19–29.
33 Bronislaw Malinowski, The Family among the Australian Aborigines (New York:
Schocken, 1913), 90.
34 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 98.
35 Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, xiv.
36 Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (1864; Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1986), 115–16.
37 For example, Alain Testart has used the works of Spencer and Gillen to reexam-
ine the relationship between Arrente ritual body techniques and sexual difference.
Testart argues that men defeat women by becoming them. Testart does not mean
to imply by this that a real sexual transubstantion has transpired—but merely, if
very affectively, a metaphorical metamorphosis. (Testart, De la necessite d’etre initie
[Nanterre: Societe d’ethnologie, 1992], 133, 206).
38 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1.
39 ‘‘In the matter of their morality their code differs radically from ours, but it cannot
be denied that their conduct is governed by it, and that any known breaches are
dealt with both surely and severely’’ (Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central
Australia, 47). Compare Lyotard’s discussion of the lessons of the sublime: ‘‘Be-
cause it is a reflective judgment, the Idea of the absolute is only ‘present’ and this

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 Notes to Chapter Two

presence is that of the ‘soul-stirring delight’ that thinking feels on the occasion of
the object it judges sublime’’ (Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans.
Elizabeth Rottenberg [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991], 121).
40 See Richard Rorty, ‘‘On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz,’’ in Objectivity,
Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 207. See also Taylor, ‘‘The Politics of Recognition,’’ 25; and
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1987).
41 Fison, ‘‘Kamilaroi Marriage, Descent, and Relationship,’’ 59–60.
42 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer’’ for confession, 168; anxiety, 128, 130; excitement, 147, 192, 157;
and animated puzzlement, 166, 179, 232.
43 Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 25 October 1884.
44 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity
Baker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950); and The Savage Mind (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1966), 245–69.
45 Donald Davidson, ‘‘Radical Interpretation (1973),’’ in Inquiries into Truth and In-
terpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 137, my emphasis.
46 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy and Petch, ‘‘My
Dear Spencer,’’ 353.
47 Stocking, After Tylor, 92.
48 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 245, 193, 165, 162, 119, 99, 96, 97: ‘‘My Christ, all same Engwura
fire today,’’ 245; ‘‘Too sorry,’’ 193; ‘‘Me askum longa Brian,’’ 165; ‘‘Say professa Jack,
not Fessa,’’ and ‘‘Fessa gone Chappie-Akurna Chappie,’’ 162; ‘‘My fader, ze lord
Zheesas, dwells in my bosom,’’ 119; ‘‘Him all same wild dog, him cant a knowem
what name father longa piccaninny,’’ 99; ‘‘Pirunngaru blackfellow all same while
fellow, him catcham any lubra,’’ 99; ‘‘By & bye plenty maken Piraunngaru,’’ 99;
‘‘That one very good him makeum walk straight,’’ 96; ‘‘All the same wild dog, him
catchem him sister, jump longa me fellow mother,’’ 97.
49 Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984).
50 To put this in another way: a subtending indexical non-sense form must be dis-
tinguished qualitatively and temporally from a secondary sense-meaning built up
from this form. See Michael Silverstein, ‘‘Metapragmatic Discourse and Metaprag-
matic Function,’’ in Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, ed.
John Lucy (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 280–84.
51 Here I use ‘‘conveyance’’ in the manner elaborated in Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Signature,
Event, Context,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), 307–30.
52 Take, for example, this passage from Gillen’s letter to Spencer written on 18 June
1897: ‘‘Two things baffle every attempt at Solution, 1st Why a man speaks to his
Ungaraitcha and not to his Quitia—and 2nd the Umbilyirakira ceremony of the
Enwura, the term Umbilyirakira has only one meaning, and that is a child fresh

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 Notes to Chapter Two

born, for the life of me I cannot get at the meaning of the Ceremony, but the men
who fell down and covered up the Churinga bundle before the women, are sup-
posed to be tumbling dow. [down,] that is they are dying—This thing has worried
me awfully and I have spent hours and hours trying to solve it’’ (Gillen to Spencer
in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 166).
53 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 232.
54 Rorty, ‘‘Habermas, Derrida, and the Function of Philosophy,’’ 309.
55 Stocking, After Tylor, 91.
56 Gillen to Spencer, 30 July 1897, in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear
Spencer,’’ 178.
57 Stocking, After Tylor, 89, 91.
58 Gillen to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 343.
59 In 1883, a severe drought intensified by the polluting effects of free-range cattle led
to a series of conflicts between blacks and whites, which culminated in a massacre
widely reported in northern and southern papers.
60 Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 119.
61 Ibid., 109.
62 Stocking, After Tylor, 90–91. See also Mulvaney and Calaby, ‘‘So Much that Is New.’’
63 Stocking, After Tylor, 9; Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’
106, 108, 109, 122, 128, 130, 159, 166, 179, 186, 192, 232.
64 Derrida has discussed the double-event structure of this liberal deferral in Jacques
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994).
65 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 33;
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3–4.
66 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 65, 62, 64.
67 Perhaps the totemic dilemma was most famously if not most brilliantly discussed
by Lévi-Strauss in his Totemism. At the end of his revolutionary treatment of the
subject he argued that totemic systems should be considered ‘‘religious ideas’’ and
thus ‘‘accorded the same value as any other conceptual system,’’ namely, their value
as providing ‘‘access to the mechanism of thought’’ and ‘‘to the understanding.’’
For Lévi-Strauss, totemic systems like those of the Arrente demonstrated defini-
tively that ‘‘the demands to which it responds and the way in which it tries to meet
them are primarily of an intellectual kind.’’ Lévi-Strauss admits ‘‘sentiments are
also involved’’ but these sentiments function ‘‘in a subsidiary fashion, as responses
of a body of ideas to gaps and lesions which it can never succeed in closing’’ (Lévi-
Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham [Boston: Beacon Press, 1963], 104).
68 Nancy Munn noted a similar point in her seminal paper ‘‘The Transformation of
Subjects into Objects in Warlpiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth,’’ in Australian Aborigi-
nal Anthropology, ed. Ronald Berndt (Perth: University of Western Australia Press,
1970), 141–63.
69 Spencer, The Arunta, 345.

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70 Australian Parliamentary Hansard, House of Representatives, 4 June 1976, p. 3082.

71 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 172, 175.
72 Ibid., 326.
73 Ibid., 269, 459–60.
74 Ibid., 216, 464–65, 772–74.
75 Spencer, The Arunta, 115–16.
76 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 172.
77 Ibid., 179.
78 Ibid., 268.
79 T. G. H. Strehlow, Aranda Phonetics and Grammar (Sydney: Australian National
Research Council, 1944), 59.
80 Ibid., 59, my emphasis.
81 David Wilkins, Mpartne Arrente (Aranda): Studies in the Structure and Seman-
tics of Grammar, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Australian National University, Can-
berra, 1989.
82 See, for instance, T. G. H. Strehlow, Aranda Traditions (Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 1947), 14–18, 86–95.
83 In other words, we can ask about the ‘‘footing’’ of the utterances of the grounds. See
Gregg Urban, ‘‘The ‘I’ of Discourse,’’ in Semiotics, Self, and Society, ed. Ben Lee and
Greg Urban (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989), 27–51; Alan Rumsey, ‘‘Agency, Per-
sonhood, and the ‘I’ of Discourse in the Pacific and Beyond,’’ Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 6 (2000): 99–113.
84 William Hanks, Language and Communicative Practices (Boulder: Westview Press,
1996), 86.
85 Testart, De la necessite d’etre initie, 205.
86 Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 103.
87 Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, xiv.

3 / SEX RITES, CIVIL RIGHTS

1 Australian Archives CRS F1 Item 36/592, 11 June 1936.

2 Ibid., 12 June 1936.
3 Letter from C. A. Carrodus, Secretary, Department of the Interior, to the Ad-
ministrator of the Northern Territory. Australian Archives CRS F1 Item 36/592,
18 June 1936.
4 Memorandum sent to the Administrator in Darwin. Australian Archives CRS F1
Item 36/592, 10 February 1936. See also the Administrator’s response, Australian
Archives CRS F1 Item 36/592, 12 June 1936.
5 E. W. P. Chinnery, Director of Native Affairs to C. A. Carrodus, the Government
Secretary. Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/32, 16 August 1939.
6 See Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), esp. 52. See
also Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Critique of Violence,’’ in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986),

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 Notes to Chapter Three

277–300; and Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Au-
thority,’’ Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 919–1045.
7 Patrick Wolfe, ‘‘Nation and MiscegeNation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-
Mabo Era,’’ Social Analysis 34 (1994): 93–152; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘Reading Rup-
tures, Rupturing Readings: Mabo and the Cultural Politics of Activism,’’ Social
Analysis 41.2 (1997): 20–28.
8 Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1998), 66.
9 Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights, 81–82.
10 Ibid., 88–92.
11 Powell, Far Country, 161.
12 Wilson, Bringing Them Home. See also Austin, ‘‘I Can Picture the Old Home so
Clearly.’’
13 Powell, Far Country, 161.
14 Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights, 92.
15 Ibid., 93.
16 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London:
Cassell, 1999).
17 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Peril in Racial Crossing,’’ Sydney Morning Herald, 18 June 1933, in
MS 3752, Box 1, Item 4, W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material, Australian Institute
for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, Canberra. See also the Crown Law Offi-
cer E. T. Asche’s memo to the Administrator of Darwin, ‘‘Aboriginals Ordinance
1918–1937, Section 3—Interpretation of Definition of ‘Half-Caste.’ ’’ Australian Ar-
chives CRS F1 Item 37/734, 23 November 1937.
18 See Gillian Cowlishaw, ‘‘Colour, Culture, and the Aborigines,’’ Man 22 (1987): 221–
37.
19 Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights, 138; Geoffrey Gray, ‘‘From
Nomadism to Citizenship: AP Elkin and Aboriginal Advancement,’’ in Citizen-
ship and Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities, ed. Nicolas
Peterson and Will Sanders (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
55–78, 55.
20 Gray, ‘‘From Nomadism to Citizenship,’’ 56; J. McEwen, Commonwealth Govern-
ment’s Policy with Respect to Aborigines (Canberra: Commonwealth Government
Printer, 1939).
21 See C. K. Thomas, ‘‘From ‘Australian Aborigines’ to ‘White Australians’: Elkin,
Hasluck, and the Origins of Assimilation,’’ M.A. thesis, Monash University, 1994.
22 A. P. Elkin, Citizenship for the Aborigines: A National Aboriginal Policy (Sydney:
Australasian Publishing, 1944), 12–13.
23 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘The ‘Vanishing’ Indian,’’ 11 March 1946, 2FC 9:05 p.m., script
approved by Federal Talk Dept. MS 3752, Box 3, Item 80, W. E. H. Stanner Unpub-
lished Material.
24 W. Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (1937;
Glouster, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1969, 10. See also lectures by W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Moral

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 Notes to Chapter Three

Man and Immoral Society: Primitive vs Modern Morality,’’ 6 May 1940, MS 3752,
Box 3, Item 60, W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material.
25 Although Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown would engage in a bitter public struggle
over the anthropological meaning of the ‘‘functionalist’’ approach to society, they
and Elkin shared a general understanding of primitive societies as delicately bal-
anced organisms based on local systems of heterosexual reproduction. Thus it is
not surprising that in his highly influential A Black Civilization (1937), dedicated to
Radcliffe-Brown, Warner discovered that ‘‘the whole of the social organization [of
Murngin] is built on the pattern of kinship. The kinship system is the fundamental
form into which the rest of the social organization has been integrated’’ (7).
26 A. P. Elkin, ‘‘Anthropology and the Australian Aboriginal,’’ in White and Black in
Australia, ed. J. S. Needham (London: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowl-
edge, 1935), 32.
27 From A. P. Elkin, ‘‘Anthropology and the Australian Aboriginal.’’ 32.
28 ‘‘Any people whose history, tradition and beliefs are different from our own, is al-
most sure to have customs that seem strange and puzzling to us. We may even feel
that these customs are not so good as ours, that they are degrading and should be
abolished, but before we pass such opinions or act on them, we must first under-
stand what those customs are, the traditions and beliefs on which they are based,
the meaning which they possess for the individuals who practice them, and the so-
cial function which they perform. But while such an understanding undoubtedly
makes another people’s customs less puzzling to us, it does not necessarily com-
mend them all, and we may still feel constrained to use our influence or authority
to have some of them abolished or modified. Here again an understanding of those
customs is essential so that we may know what we are doing when working for their
abolition or modification’’ (Elkin, The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand
Them [London: Angus and Robertson, 1938], 108).
29 From Elkin, ‘‘Anthropology and the Australian Aboriginal,’’ 32, my emphasis.
30 W. E. H. Stanner quoting ‘‘the amiable Mr. Dredge,’’ the early-nineteenth-century
protector who so described his wards (W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Religion, Totemism, and
Symbolism,’’ in Aboriginal Man in Australia: Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor
A. P. Elkin, ed. R. M. Berndt and Catherine Berndt [London: Angus and Robertson,
1965], 235).
31 Other anthropologists, such as W. E. H. Stanner, gave lectures to and corresponded
with missionary groups. See ‘‘Fieldnotes Catholic Mission Docherty,’’ MS 3752, Box
6, Item 143, W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material.
32 Andrew P. Lyons and Harriet Lyons, ‘‘Savage Sexuality and Secular Morality,’’
Canadian Journal of Anthropology 5.1 (fall 1986): 51–64.
33 R. M. Berndt and Catherine Berndt, ‘‘A. P. Elkin—The Man and the Anthropolo-
gist,’’ in Aboriginal Man in Australia: Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor A. P.
Elkin, ed. R. M. Berndt and Catherine Berndt (London: Angus and Robertson,
1965), 18.
34 Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, 123, 127.
35 Ibid., 109.

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 Notes to Chapter Three

36 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘‘Social Sanctions,’’ in Structure and Function in Primitive

Society (1933; New York: The Free Press, 1952), 205–11.
37 See, for example, ‘‘ ‘Too Many Missionaries and Too Few Policemen,’ Minister Says
Inexperienced Clergy Have Made Blacks Idle and Restive,’’ Northern Standard,
1 February 1929; ‘‘Loafing Blacks, Ogden Blames Missions,’’ Northern Standard,
19 February 1929; ‘‘Leave the Abo Alone,’’ Northern Territory Times, 28 October
1930. In an address to the Anglican Men’s movements, W. E. H. Stanner began with
a Sydney Morning Herald allegation that Christianity ‘‘ruins’’ a native people, and
then explored the specific good and bad of Christian missionary work in Aborigi-
nal Australia. Stanner includes the ‘‘unconcealed contempt of many missionaries
for what they call ‘pagan’ culture, that is for the native way of life and social orga-
nization, even in non-religious fields.’’ W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material,
19 February 1953. MS 3752, Box 6, Item 143.
38 ‘‘The Aboriginal of the North,’’ Northern Territory Times, 1 August 1930. See also
‘‘Aborigines Praised,’’ Northern Territory Times (reprinted from the Brisbane Daily
Mail ), 10 February 1931.
39 The Law Reform Commission, The Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws,
Vol. 1, report no. 31 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1986).
40 Aboriginal Friend’s Association, Seventy Fifth Annual Report, 1933, cited in The Law
Reform Commission, The Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws, also cited by
Elkin, Citizenship for the Aborigines. For a more comprehensive comparative ac-
count of the Western Australian system, see Kathryn Helen Autry, ‘‘Silence(s) and
Resistant (Dis)quiet in the Shadow of the Legal System, Race-ing Jurisprudence in
Western Australia by Reference to the Courts of Native Affairs (1936–1954),’’ Ph.D.
diss., La Trobe University, 1999.
41 Joe Croft, ‘‘The Old People and Their Tribal Affairs,’’ Northern Territory Times,
16 May 1930.
42 W. H. Davies, ‘‘The Old People and Their Tribal Affairs,’’ Northern Territory Times,
20 May 1930.
43 See also Australian Archive CRS F3 Item 20/32, 16 August 1939. This system was
modeled and named after the colonial administration of Sir Hubert Murray, lieu-
tenant governor of Papua. The traffic in ideas, methods, and persons was espe-
cially thick between the Northern Territory and the British mandates of Papua
New Guinea and Canberra; between the Australian and British ethnological com-
munities; and between the Daly River, Darwin, and Canberra. Chinnery was a
trained anthropologist in his own right, lecturing in Australia, the United States,
and Britain. It was his scholarly reputation as an anthropologist that earned Chin-
nery an invitation to accompany the minister of the interior on an advisory tour
of the Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory in 1938 and his appoint-
ment as first director of native affairs in the Northern Territory. And, it was as the
gatekeepers of professional anthropology in the Northern and British mandated
territories, that Chinnery, Carrodus, Murray, and other government administra-
tors supported and blocked, at varying times, the research projects of anthropolo-
gists who would be directly or indirectly linked to this case, including Malinowski,

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 Notes to Chapter Three

Radcliffe-Brown, Elkin, Stanner, and their students. Although Murray encouraged

the protection of native customs within the framework of controlled economic de-
velopment, he became alarmed hearing that, at a meeting in 1930 of the Australian
and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, Radcliffe-Brown
not only outlined the social integrative function of native customs but also ques-
tioned the right of the British Empire to interfere in the ‘‘destinies’’ of the peoples
of India and Africa. Chinnery was influential in Radcliffe-Brown’s appointment as
the first chair of anthropology at the University of Sydney in 1926. He would later
oversee Radcliffe-Brown’s graduate research appointments in the territories as he
would the appointment recommendations of the second chair of anthropology,
A. P. Elkin. Both Radcliffe-Brown and Elkin produced influential chapters from
extended research trips in the general region of the Daly River (Radcliffe-Brown
in particular on social organization of Aboriginal tribes based on work among the
Murinpatha) and would formally and informally advise government administra-
tors like Weddell and Chinnery in native affairs. For an account of Elkin’s career,
see T. Wise, The Self-Made Anthropologist (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1985). For an
account of the Murray System and the dense administrative and academic traffic
between Papua New Guinea and Australia, see Andrew Markus, Governing Savages
(Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990); Geoffrey Gray, ‘‘ ‘I Was Not Consulted’: A. P.
Elkin, Papua New Guinea, and the Politics of Anthropology,’’ The Australian Jour-
nal of Politics and History 40.2 (1994): 195–221; and J. D. Legge, ‘‘The Murray Period:
Papua 1906–1940,’’ in Australia and Papua New Guinea, ed. W. J. Hudson (Sydney:
Sydney University Press, 1971), 32–56.
44 W. E. P. Chinnery, Director of Native Affairs, to Government Secretary C.A. Carro-
dus. Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/32, 16 August 1939. See also David Car-
ment, Robyn Maynard, and Alan Powell, eds., Northern Territory Dictionary of
Biography, Volume One: to 1945 (Darwin: Northern Territory University Press,
1990), 56–57.
45 Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages (Boston: Beacon Press, 1929),
371. See also J. W. Bleakley, The Aborigines and Half Castes of Central Australia and
North Australia: Report by J. W. Bleakley, Chief Protector of Aborigines, Common-
wealth of Australia, Parliamentary Paper 21. Australian Government Publishing
Service, Canberra, 1929. See also ‘‘Lower than the Abo,’’ Northern Territory Times,
13 March 1931: ‘‘It is a wonder that the abos did not drown themselves rather
than come into contact with some of the whites that disgraced Australia’s name in
earlier years.’’
46 ‘‘The Aborigines, Special State Proposed, Report to Federal Government,’’ North-
ern Territory Times, 5 April 1929.
47 ‘‘Among Our Books: Review of ER Gribble, The Problem of the Australian Aborigi-
nal,’’ Northern Territory Times, 13 March 1931.
48 Geoffrey Gray, ‘‘Piddington’s Indiscretion: Ralph Piddington, the Australian
National Research Council, and Academic Freedom,’’ Oceania 64.3 (1994): 219.
49 N. Green, The Forrest River Massacres (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Press, 1995);
Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1987).

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 Notes to Chapter Three

50 J. A. Carrodus, Secretary Department of the Interior, to Administrator of the

Northern Territory. Australian Archives CRS F1, Item 36/592, 8 March 1940.
51 See Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen
and Unwin, 1987); Pamela Lyon and Michael Parsons, We Are Staying: The Alya-
warre Struggle for Land at Lake Nash (Alice Springs: Institute for Aboriginal Devel-
opment Press, 1989); and Deborah Bird Rose, Hidden Histories: Black Stories from
Victoria River Downs, Humbert River, and Wave Hill Stations (Canberra: Aboriginal
Studies Press, 1991).
52 Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory, 1937–38, p. 22, quoted in
J. P. M. Long, Aboriginal Settlements: A Survey of Institutional Communities in East-
ern Australia (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970), 1999.
53 This laissez-faire approach made economic sense, as Pamela Lyon and Michael Par-
sons have noted, in the large pastoral industry of Northern Territory. Attempts to
alter it sparked protests in the Northern Territory. In 1934, J. A. Carrodus, then
secretary of the Department of Home and Territories, relieved Weddell for a short
period after Weddell had been assaulted after a series of labor agitation—including
a communist takeover of the government (Lyon and Parsons, We Are Staying, 19).
See also Carment, Maynard, and Powell, Northern Territory Dictionary of Biogra-
phy, 311–12; and Powell, Far Country, esp. 169–73.
54 ‘‘A Plea for the Abo,’’ Northern Territory Times, 30 December 1930.
55 Rev. Stanley Jarvis is reported to have told the Methodist Conference Foreign Mis-
sion that ‘‘our aborigines are a national asset’’ and called for the establishment of
native courts. Rev. Stanley Jarvis, ‘‘Aboriginal Welfare, Methodist Minister’s Plea,’’
Northern Territory Times, 27 March 1931.
56 Newspapers announced anthropologists’ imminent arrival, such as the Northern
Territory Times did for W. E. H. Stanner (‘‘Anthropologist Arrives,’’ Northern Ter-
ritory Times, 19 April 1932).
57 ‘‘Quite possibly, the average bushman does not look upon the black with the eyes
of romance, and is just as well pleased at his gradual extinction, but his habits,
and beliefs have great value to the ethnologist, and it is advisable, therefore, to re-
port, whenever possible, any outstanding items of interest’’ (‘‘The Territory Abo,’’
Northern Territory Times, 8 January 1931).
58 The film concludes: ‘‘The rock and bark painting of the Australian Aborigines,
together with the songs and corroborees, the myths and legends, represent many
centuries of artistic and spiritual development. Unless their ancient way of life is ac-
cepted and encouraged to continue within the white society, this cultural heritage
may be lost as the future generations become detribalized. The art of the hunter
has been an artistic and social contribution to the history of mankind’’ (Art of the
Hunter: A Film of the Australian Aborigines, John Endean, producer; Les Tanner,
commentator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Archives, Canberra).
59 William Hatfield, ‘‘Serial: ‘Smoke Signals from the Never-Never,’ ’’ Northern Terri-
tory Times, 4 March 1932.
60 ‘‘Editorial,’’ Northern Territory Times, 1 August 1930.
61 An editorial in the Northern Territory Times reported, for instance, that ‘‘blacks

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 Notes to Chapter Three

appreciate justice and fair-dealing’’; that ‘‘the most fatal mistake that can be made
in dealing with blacks is to laugh at their secret superstitions and beliefs’’; and
that ‘‘the old men are the repositories of the ceremonial lore of the tribes; which
would rapidly disintegrate did the old men not keep hold of their reins’’ (Northern
Territory Times, 1 August 1930). For an opposing portrait in which a settler’s mur-
der is blamed on ‘‘a sudden blood lust on the part of the aboriginals,’’ see ‘‘Daly
River Notes, Reported Murder,’’ Northern Territory Times, 10 November 1931; and
historically, ‘‘Daly River Outrages and Black Morality,’’ Northern Territory Times
and Gazette, 13 March 1886. These newspapers had a dense intertextual relation to
ethnological texts. See, for instance, Herbert Basedow, The Australian Aboriginal
(Adelaide: F. W. Preece and Sons, 1925), 227.
62 For ‘‘mass subject,’’ see Michael Warner, ‘‘The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,’’
in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1993), 377–401.
63 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981).
64 For an overview, see Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers, and Land
(Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987).
65 ‘‘The Killed Aborigines,’’ Northern Standard, 8 March 1929.
66 MS 3752, Box 7, Item 162(b), W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material.
67 A. V. Stretton, Superintendent of Police, to the Administrator of Darwin. Austra-
lian Archive CRS F3 Item 36/592, 30 June 1936. In an earlier letter Stretton argued
that it was ‘‘necessary [to] arrest natives in order that they may be interrogated by
chief protector who will decide whether [there should be a] court case’’ (Australian
Archives CRS F1 Item 36/592, 15 June 1936).
68 ‘‘It should be competent, however, for any such case to be investigated in the first
place by the nearest police officer and a report submitted for the consideration
of the Chief Protector of Aboriginals’’ (J. A. Carrodus to Weddell. Australian Ar-
chives, CRS F1 Item 36/592, 13 August 1936).
69 Ibid.
70 Australian Archives CRS F1, Item 36/592, 20 June 1936.
71 A. V. Stretton, Superintendent of Police to the Administrator in Darwin. Australian
Archives CRS F1 Item 36/592, 30 June 1936. See also later submission of Coroners
ordinance, Section 8. Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/32, 15 December 1937.
72 In 1829 the New South Wales Supreme Court advised the attorney-general that
it was unjust to apply English law to inter-Aboriginal killings, although in R v.
Jack Congo Murrell, 1836, the New South Wales Supreme Court ruled it had juris-
diction to try Aboriginal persons who committed crimes no matter whether the
crimes were committed within customary frame or not. This would become offi-
cial colonial policy, with the Colonial Office directing the governor of New South
Wales in 1837 (The Law Reform Commission, The Recognition of Aboriginal Cus-
tomary Laws).
73 Their roles were elaborated in the latter half of the nineteenth and in the early
twentieth centuries: 1867 in Victoria, 1886 in Western Australia, 1897 in Queens-

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land, 1909 in New South Wales, and 1910 in the Northern Territory. There were
multiple calls throughout the first thirty years of the Australian federation for the
establishment of native courts to hear criminal cases in which no settlers were in-
volved. As early as 1836 defense attorneys argued to no avail that Australian courts
did not have the jurisdiction to try Aboriginal subjects. R v. Murrell Legge, Supreme
Court of New South Wales 72 (1836). For a brief period, after an Aboriginal man
was sentenced to death for the murder of a white constable (Tuckiar v. The King,
1934), minor short-lived legal reforms were introduced that would have taken into
consideration Aboriginal customary law in cases in which no white person was in-
volved (Tuckiar v. the King, Commonwealth Law Review 52 [1934]: 335, in The Law
Reform Commission, The Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws).
74 Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/32, 28 July 1939.
75 W. B. Kirkland, Acting Chief Protector of Aboriginals, to R. H. Weddell, Admin-
istrator of the Northern Territory. Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 36/592, 10 July
1936. In early March 1940, on the advice of Carrodus, the secretary of the interior
modified his former directive: ‘‘In the future, the direction will only apply in the
case of relatively uncivilised natives who live more or less permanently in remote
areas, who are not under any form of permanent European control, assistance or
supervision, and who depend for internal stability on the free exercise of their
own native customs.’’ Who had authority to discern the tribal remained as it had
in 1936—the chief protector of Aboriginals in consultation with the police and
anthropological advisors (Australian Archive CRS F3 Item 20/32, 8 March 1940).
76 Silverstein, ‘‘Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function,’’ 280–84.
77 Gray, ‘‘From Nomadism to Citizenship.’’
78 Georg Simmel, ‘‘The Metropolis and Mental Life,’’ in On Mental Life and Social
Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324–39.
79 Northern Territory Medical Service File of Papers, Australian Archives CRS F3 Item
20/103, 6 September 1940.
80 Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/103, 7 August 1940.
81 The performance of Kunapipi drew together a number of neighboring groups, in-
cluding the Nangiomeri and Madngella (Australia Archives CRS F3, Item 20/103,
undated ca. 1940).
82 ‘‘The words Secret and Sunday ground are meant for what the Natives call sacred
ground, but pronounce it as I have written’’ (Australian Archives CRS F3 Item
20/103, 8 August 1940).
83 Gillen reports to Spencer that fire-sticks are used to burn the eyes of women and
uncut boys who have purposely or accidentally witnessed prohibited men’s cere-
monies (Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 7).
84 Bill Harney was a supervisor of Aboriginal settlements and, later, a popular writer,
radio personality, and collaborator with the anthropologist A. P. Elkin. In this case
Harney wrote: ‘‘Contact with civilization tends to make the native women disobey
the laws and taboos of the tribe, and they would pass over or near these taboo spots
knowing they are protected by the law, or the white people of that part, and so the
natives seeing their greatest weapon for law and order (increase, regeneration and

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 Notes to Chapter Three

clearing up of tribal disputes) becoming useless by these women, become annoyed

and use force’’ (Northern Territory Medical Service File of Papers, Australian Ar-
chives CRS F3 Item 20/103, 6 September 1940).
85 Spencer, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory, esp. 214–18.
86 Warner, A Black Civilization, 224.
87 Ronald Berndt, Kunapipi (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1951); selections can be
found in the Human Relations Area Files, at the Human Relations Area Files, Inc.
New Haven, Connecticut. See also Ronald Berndt and Catherine Berndt, Sexual
Behavior in Western Arnhem Land (New York: Viking Fund Publication, 1951).
88 Berndt and Berndt, Sexual Behavior in Western Arnhem Land, 148.
89 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Religion, Totemism, and Symbolism,’’ 207–37, esp. 213, 219.
90 Ibid., 233–34.
91 ‘‘A host of stylized acts—the whole repertory of theatrical forms, the making and
use of fire, the drawing and pouring of human blood, spraying with water and
spittle. The use of semen and other exuviae, covering and revealing objects, lay-
ing on of hands, etc., etc.,—all to be seen performed within ritualized processes or
described in the associated myths. All may be classed as vehicles, or symbolising
means, of symbolising’’ (Stanner, ‘‘Religion, Totemism, and Symbolism,’’ 232–33).
92 MS 3752, Box 7, Item 158(c); See also ‘‘The Dreamings of Wali Wali,’’ MS 3752, Box
7, Item 162 (a), W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material. For a published critique
of the Freudian account, see W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘On Freud’s Totem and Taboo,’’
Canberra Anthropology 5.1 (1982): 1–7.
93 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Durmugam: A Nangimeri (1959),’’ in White Man Got No Dream-
ing: Essays 1938–1973 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), 67–
105.
94 Ibid., 82.
95 Ibid., 83. See also MS 3752, Box 19, Item 419, and Box 7, Item 158(c), W. E. H. Stanner
Unpublished Material.
96 Ronald Berndt, ‘‘Law and Order in Aboriginal Australia,’’ in Aboriginal Man in
Australia: Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor A. P. Elkin, ed. R. M. Berndt and
Catherine Berndt (London: Angus and Robertson, 1965), 167–206, esp. 191–92;
W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Ceremonial Economics of the Mulluk-mulluk and Madngella
Tribes of the Daly River, North Australia,’’ Oceania 4 (1933): 10–29, 156–75, 453–70.
97 Stanner, ‘‘Durmugam,’’ 84.
98 Stanner’s field notes make reference to the sexual economy, see ‘‘Wali Wali Manu-
script,’’ MS 3752, Box 7, Item 162, W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material. For a gen-
eral critical discussion, see Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police: The
Colonization of Women in Australia (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1975); Diane
Bell and Pam Ditton, Law, the Old and New: Aboriginal Women in Central Austra-
lian Speak Out (Canberra: Central Australian Legal Aid Service, 1980); and Diane
Kirby, Sex, Power, and Justice: Historical Perspectives of Law in Australia (Mel-
bourne: Oxford University Press, 1995).
99 Powell, Far Country, 188.
100 Nan Utarra, ‘‘The Black Bagnio,’’ Northern Standard, 18 January 1929.

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 Notes to Chapter Three

101 Turner to Director of Native Affairs, ‘‘Police Correspondence,’’ Northern Territory

Archives F77 Series, 28 March 1942.
102 C. D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Hammondsworth: Penguin,
1972); Markus, Governing Savages; Ted Egan, Justice All Their Own: The Caledon
Bay and Woodah Island Killings 1932–33 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,
1996).
103 Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/103, 7 August 1940. File includes confession
statements of Malakmalak men.
104 Ibid.
105 ‘‘This lubra Alice was formerly one of Ex-Tracker Bull-bulls lubras’’ (Australian Ar-
chives CRS F3 Item 20/103, 8 August 1940). In the police reports W. E. H. Stanner
collected Bull-bull and Litchfield natives in 1935, him taking other local men’s wives
(MS 3752, W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material).
106 Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/103, 8 August 1940.
107 Stanner, ‘‘Durmugam,’’ 72.
108 Australia Archives CRS F3 Item 20/103, 8 August 1940.
109 In an exchange with Weddell on 16 August 1935, Turner responds to a charge of
neglect of duty under the Public Service Ordinance of 1928–1934. Turner details
his duties and the rude dismissal of his ‘‘knowledge and . . . experience.’’ ‘‘It was
like if I had been instructed, ‘To go and sit down little boy, I am making all the
enquiries I want. I’ll show you what should have been done’ ’’ ‘‘Police Files,’’ MS
3752, W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material).
110 See, for instance, ‘‘The Territory Abo,’’ Northern Territory Times, 8 January 1931,
which describes recent issues of the Sydney Mail that contain ‘‘some rather wild and
woolly tales of the N.T. and its inhabitants’’ and call on ‘‘the real dinkum bushmen
from the outback’’ to tell the truth of ‘‘stone age abos.’’ See also ‘‘The Aboriginal
of the North,’’ Northern Territory Times, 1 August 1930; and ‘‘Unreliable Natives,’’
Northern Territory Times 19 February 1930.
111 Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/103, undated, unauthored (probably
W. Harney).
112 Ibid., 1 October 1940.
113 Ibid., 8 March 1940.
114 ‘‘Delissaville Diary Loose Leaves Jan 1st 1942 to End,’’ Australian Archives CRS F3
Item 1980/111.
115 Murray’s superintendent responds to a plea from Murray: ‘‘Your isolation at De-
lissaville is appreciated by myself but little can be done to help you other than to
get the car fixed to provide you with transport if required.’’ Northern Territory Ac-
cession 1980/111. See for example, Murray’s personal letter dated 19 July 1942 in
Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 52/570.
116 The Aboriginal Ordinance of 1918 had extended the chief protector’s control over
indigenous women. Under the ordinance, ‘‘Aboriginal females were under the total
control of the Chief Protector from the moment they were born until they died un-
less married and living with a husband ‘who was substantially of European origin’ ’’
(Wilson, Bringing Them Home, 133). The management of black women’s sexuality

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 Notes to Chapter Four

became a central part of a public debate. If Murray was reading the Northern Ter-
ritory Times as a younger man he might have read a report titled ‘‘Gins Get a Few
Strokes.’’ The article is about Oenpelli men and women, with which Wagaidj and
Laragiya had close ceremonial ties. It outlined for readers and administrators a
pedagogy of sexual discipline: ‘‘The following report is written by P. Cahill, Ab-
original Protector, Oenpelli, and published in the Administrator’s annual report:—
The station hands, and their families seem very contented, and all disputes are re-
ferred to me. Wife beating at the camps is almost a thing of the past. I have had
great trouble in preventing wife beating, and am now sure that the preventing of
this practice was the main cause of the Romula poisoning case. At first the whole
of the male natives were under the impression that their women were to be their
bosses, but a little explaining soon showed them their error. The mode is thus—
should a woman become sulky or jealous, the husband, instead of knocking her
down with a stick (and then having to fight her relations), brings his wife up before
me. Very often I can fix the matter at once. At other times I have to let the husband
take a piece of leather, and give her a few strokes. Very often the dispute is settled
on the way from the camp to the station. The men now see the matter in its proper
light, and often in the camp when a lubra is out for a fight, a voice will call out, ‘take
her up to the boss,’ and she is quiet at once. As a sequel to the above there has not
been one fight with clubs or spears this year. The women have a bit of scrap among
themselves now and again, but it soon ends’’ (‘‘Gins Get a Few Strokes,’’ Northern
Territory Times, 3 January 1920). For Murray’s own intervention, see Australian Ar-
chives CRS F3 Item 52/570 letters to military base on Talc Head dated 31 July 1942;
8 August 1942; 24 August 1942; and 8 October 1942.
117 See Elkin Fieldnotes, University of Sydney, Folder 1, Box 18, Item 26 and Folder 2,
Boxes 30 and 31.
118 ‘‘Fieldnotes: Catholic Mission’’ and ‘‘Linguistic Notes and Vocabulary,’’ MS 3752,
W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material. Box 3, Item b.
119 ‘‘E.J. Murray, Delissaville Journal,’’ Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 52/570, 21
October 1942.
120 Ibid., 8 November 1942; 9 November 1942; and 10 November 1942.
121 ‘‘Superintendent Katherine Settlement (diary),’’ Australian Archives NTAC 1980/
111, 5 January 1945; 15 October 1945; 20 October 1945; and 21 October 1945.
122 V. J. White to Director of Native Affairs, Alice Springs, memo dated 30 September
1943. ‘‘E.J. Murray, Delissaville Journal,’’ Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 52/570.
123 See, for instance, Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, 25–26, 130–31 and Elkin, Citi-
zenship for the Aborigines, 25–27.
124 ‘‘Fieldnotes: Port Keats, Daly River,’’ MS 3752 Box 3, Item b., W. E. H. Stanner Un-
published Material.

4 / SHAMED STATES

1 Morris, Too Soon, Too Late, 213. A number of authors have tackled the politics
of shame in Australian public culture. See Elspeth Probyn, ‘‘Shaming Theory,

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 Notes to Chapter Four

Thinking Dis-connections: Feminism and Reconciliation,’’ in Transformations:

Thinking Through Feminism, ed. S. Ahmed, J. Kilby, C. Lury, M. McNeil, and
B. Skeggs (London: Routledge, 2000); Haydie Gooder and Jane M. Jacobs, ‘‘On
the Border of the Unsayable: The Apology in Postcolonial Australia.’’ Interven-
tions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2.2 (2000): 229–47; and Sara
Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Rout-
ledge, 2000).
2 For the subjective entailment of capital labor in the realm of fantasy, see Gaya-
tri Spivak, ‘‘Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value,’’ in In Other Worlds:
Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), 154–75.
3 For a critique and response to this particular strategy of approaching Australian
state responses to multiculturalism, see John Frow and Meaghan Morris, ‘‘Two
Laws: Response to Elizabeth Povinelli,’’ Critical Inquiry 25.3 (1999): 626–30; and
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘The Cunning of Recognition: Reply to Frow and Morris,’’
Critical Inquiry 25.3 (1999): 631–37.
4 Between 1992 and 1995 several Australian Commonwealth commissions were estab-
lished to investigate both the high rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody and the poor
quality of health in Aboriginal communities. In addition, Amnesty International
investigated the high rate of incarceration of Aboriginal men as a possible violation
of their human rights. See David Biles and David McDonald, eds., Deaths in Cus-
tody, Australia, 1980–89: The Research Papers of the Criminology Unit of the Royal
Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (Canberra: Australian Institute of
Criminology, 1992). From 1999 to 2000, the Howard government faced interna-
tional criticism for not intervening in a mandatory sentencing law in the North-
ern Territory, a law which was said to discriminate against Aboriginal people. The
volumes written discussing the impact and meaning of Mabo on property and sov-
ereignty are too numerous to cite in full here; however, the following works were
useful to the preparation of this essay: Sydney Law Review 15.2 (June 1993); Uni-
versity of New South Wales Law Journal 16.1 (1993); Tim Rouse, ed., After Mabo:
Interpreting Indigenous Traditions (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993);
Bain Attwood, ed., In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines, and Australia (Sydney:
Allen and Unwin, 1996); and Murray Goot and Tim Rouse, eds., Make Me a Better
Offer: The Politics of Mabo (Leichhardt, NSW: Pluto Press, 1994). In an insightful
reading of the Mabo decision and critique of liberal theories of society and justice,
Paul Patton highlights the seduction of legal recognition of difference as a path
toward a ‘‘differential concept of society’’ rather than as an inhibitor. See Paul Pat-
ton, ‘‘Mabo, Freedom, and the Politics of Difference,’’ Australian Journal of Political
Science 30.1 (1995): 108–19.
5 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, Australian Law Review 107 (1992): 27.
6 Ibid., 82.
7 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, Australian Law Review 141 (1996): 146.
See also Marshall Perron, ‘‘Sacred Sites—A Costly Token to a Dead Culture,’’ North-
ern Territory News, 7 January 1989, 7.
8 For one of the most influential critical readings of the common law, see Duncan

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 Notes to Chapter Four

Kennedy, ‘‘The Structures of Blackstone’s Commentaries,’’ Buffalo Law Review 28

(1974): 279.
9 Bernard Lane, ‘‘Judges Rule Stolen Children Law Valid,’’ The Australian, 1 Au-
gust 1997.
10 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 26.
11 Robert Manne, ‘‘Forget the Guilt, Remember the Shame,’’ The Australian, 8 July
1996, 11.
12 See Erving Goffman, ‘‘Footing,’’ Semiotica 25 (1979): 1–29.
13 Manne, ‘‘Forget the Guilt,’’ 11.
14 ‘‘Talk of sharing in a collective guilt over the dispossession of the Aborigines is one
thing; however, talk of sharing in a legacy of historical shame is altogether another.
This distinction is most easily explained by analogy. Conservatives such as Howard
and Tim Fischer would have no difficulty in feeling admiration and a kind of pride
in, say, the resourcefulness shown by the soldiers at Gallipoli. I am sure, too, that
they would hope that other Australians would share in their admiration and their
pride. Yet if it is possible and just to feel pride in the achievements of forebears, it
surely cannot be regarded as impossible or unjust to feel shame about past wrongs.
The case I am making can be put simply. To be an Australian is to be embedded
or implicated in this country’s history in a way outsiders or visitors cannot be.
To be implicated in this history opens—as conservatives easily acknowledge—the
possibility of reasonable pride. But to be open to the possibility of pride in achieve-
ment is also, necessarily, to be open to the possibility in shame in wrongdoing’’
(ibid., 11).
15 Australian Parliamentary Hansard, House of Representatives, Thursday, 26 August
1999, 7046–47.
16 Ibid., 7048.
17 See Rosemary Neill, ‘‘Howard Reconciled to a Curate’s Egg,’’ The Australian, 4 June
1999, 15; Michelle Grattan and Margo Kingston, ‘‘Regrets Divide Nation,’’ Sydney
Morning Herald, 27 August 1999, 1; and ‘‘Editorial,’’ Sydney Morning Herald, 31 May
1999.
18 Anne Connolly, ‘‘Accentuate the Positive in Our History—Malouf,’’ The Australian,
10 July 1996, 38; and David Marr, ‘‘Australia—Just Imagine Your Future,’’ Sydney
Morning Herald, 1, 7.
19 Australian Parliamentary Hansard, House of Representatives, Thursday, 26 August
1999, 7047.
20 Ibid., 7047.
21 Ibid., 7049–50.
22 Ibid., 7051.
23 ‘‘Where a clan or group has continued to acknowledge the laws and (so far as practi-
cable) to observe the customs based on the traditions of that clan or group, whereby
their traditional connection with the land has been substantially maintained, the
traditional community title of that clan or group can be said to remain in exis-
tence’’ (The Mabo Decision 1992 with commentary by Richard H. Bartlett [Sydney:
Butterworths, 1993], 48).

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 Notes to Chapter Four

24 Ibid., 49. In 1993, during a televised address to the nation presenting and defend-
ing his decision to enact legislation based on the Mabo ruling, Prime Minister Paul
Keating summarized the conditions the court imposed on the legal productivity
of Aboriginal traditions: ‘‘The Court accepted that native title existed where two
fundamental conditions were met:—that their connection with the land had been
maintained, unbroken down through the years—and that this title had not been
overturned by any action of a government to use the land or to give it to somebody
else’’ (P. J. Keating, ‘‘Prime Minister’s Address to the Nation,’’ in Make Me a Better
Offer: The Politics of Mabo, ed. Murray Goot and Tim Rouse (Leichhardt, NSW:
Pluto Press, 1994), 236.
25 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 44. Brennan argued that native title rights
and interests would be precluded if the recognition were to fracture a skeletal prin-
ciple of our legal system (43).
26 The Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v. the State of Victoria, Fed-
eral Court of Astralia 1606 (1998): para 12. See also Deborah Bird Rose, ‘‘Hard
Times: An Australian Story,’’ in Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australian
and Aotearoa New Zealand (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 1999), 2–19.
27 The Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v. the State of Victoria,
para. 4.
28 Ibid., para. 106.
29 Ibid., para. 112; Olney is quoting from Edward M. Curr, Recollections of Squatting
in Victoria (1883; Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1965), 245.
30 The Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v. the State of Victoria,
para. 14.
31 Ibid., para. 126.
32 Ibid., para. 128.
33 Ashley-Montague, Coming into Being among the Australian Aborigines, 49.
34 Hayes v. Northern Territory, 1999, Report of the Native Tribunal Commissioner,
Mr. Justice Olney (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1999), para. 26.
35 Ibid., para 13.
36 W. V. Quine, ‘‘Where Do We Disagree?,’’ in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson,
ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, 1999), 76. See also Gayatri Spivak
on the function of the native informant in philosophy, in her The Critique of Colo-
nial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
37 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘Do Rocks Listen? The Cultural Politics of Apprehending
Australian Aboriginal Labor,’’ American Anthropologist 97.3 (September 1995): 505–
18.
38 The Law Reform Commission, The Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws.
39 Shane McGrath, ‘‘Traditional Punishment Prevented: Barnes v The Queen,’’ Indige-
nous Law Bulletin 4.8 (December/January 1997–1998): 18.
40 Barnes v the Queen was reported in the Syndey Morning Herald as are periodically
other cases that strain the easy reconciliation of the law of cultural recognition and
the ‘‘real’’ referent of Aboriginal customary law. For news coverage of other cases

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 Notes to Chapter Four

in the Northern Territory, see ‘‘Initiation for All,’’ Northern Territory News, 15 June
1999; Bob Watt, ‘‘Wife-Killer Says He was Cursed,’’ Northern Territory News, 18 June
1999, 5; Bob Watt, ‘‘9 Years Jail after Brutal Wife Killing,’’ Northern Territory News,
19 June 1999, 3; Bob Watt, ‘‘20cm Blade in Lung: Man on Kill Count,’’ Northern Ter-
ritory News, 22 June 1999, 7; ‘‘Missionary Wed Girls to Save Them,’’ Northern Ter-
ritory News, 1 September 1999, 18; Amanda Keenan and Stephane Balogh, ‘‘Ethnic
Community Leaders Attack Killer’s Race Defense,’’ The Australian, 13 August 1998,
9; Bob Watt, ‘‘Spear Man ‘Thought Cop Shot Uncle,’ ’’ Northern Territory News,
28 August 1998, 7; Bob Watt, ‘‘Commissioner Hears of Death: ‘Bone Pointed at
Him,’ ’’ Northern Territory News, 31 January 1989, 14.
41 For discussion of the potential of Mabo for expanding recognition of Aboriginal
customary law, see Rob McLaughlin, ‘‘Some Problems and Issues in the Recog-
nition of Indigenous Customary Law,’’ Aboriginal Law Bulletin 3.28 (July 1996):
4–9. For a fuller discussion, see The Law Reform Commission, The Recognition of
Aboriginal Customary Laws.
42 Paul J. Keating, ‘‘Speech by the Honourable Prime Minister, PJ Keating MP, Austra-
lian Launch of the International Year for the World’s Indigenous People, Redfern,
10 December 1992,’’ Aboriginal Law Bulletin 3.61 (April 1993): 4–5.
43 ‘‘The message (of Mabo) should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the
recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepen-
ing of Australian social democracy to include all indigenous Australians’’ (Keating,
‘‘Speech by the Honourable Prime Minister’’), 5. See also Paul J. Keating, ‘‘Austra-
lian Update: Statement by the Prime Minister, The Hon. P.J. Keating Common-
wealth Response to High Court Mabo Judgement, Canberra 18 October 1993,’’ Ab-
original Law Bulletin 3.64 (October 1993): 18.
44 Keating, ‘‘Australian Update,’’ 18.
45 Keating is referring to the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. He stated that
the mission of the council was ‘‘to forge a new partnership built on justice and eq-
uity and an appreciation of the heritage of Australia’s indigenous people’’ (Keating,
‘‘Speech by the Honourable Prime Minister,’’ 4). For a critical account of the Coun-
cil for Aboriginal Reconciliation, see Daniel Lavery, ‘‘The Council for Aboriginal
Reconciliation: When the CAR Stops on Reconciliation Day Will Indigenous Aus-
tralians Have Gone Anywhere?,’’ Aboriginal Law Bulletin 2.58 (October 1992): 7–8.
46 Australian Parliamentary Hansard, House of Representatives, 7049.
47 Keating, ‘‘Speech by the Honourable Prime Minister,’’ 4.
48 See also M. J. Detmold, ‘‘Law and Difference: Reflections on Mabo’s Case,’’ Sydney
Law Review 15.2 (June 1993): 159–67.
49 The Mabo Decision 1992, 42.
50 Ibid., 28.
51 Decided concurrently with The Thayorre People v. the State of Queensland (1996).
52 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, n. 51, 43.
53 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 18.
54 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, 109.

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 Notes to Chapter Four

55 Ibid., 109, 140.

56 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 42, 139; The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queens-
land, 28, 34, 70, 176.
57 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 42.
58 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, 176.
59 Ibid., 198.
60 Ibid., 35; see also Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 18.
61 See, for instance, The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, 220.
62 See, for instance, Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 18, 26, 27, 29, 41, 83.
63 ‘‘There is no question that indigenous society can and will change on contact with
European culture. . . . But modification of traditional society in itself does not mean
traditional title no longer exists. Traditional title arises from the fact of occupation,
not the occupation of a particular type of society or way of life’’ (Eddie Mabo v. the
State of Queensland, 150). ‘‘These comments apply with particular force to Queens-
land where . . . there were approximately 70 different kinds of Crown leasehold and
Crown perpetual leasehold tenures. To approach the matter by reference to legis-
lation is not to turn one’s back on centuries of history nor is it to impugn basic
principles of property law. Rather, it is to recognise historical development, the
changes in law over centuries and the need for property law to accommodate the
very different situation in this country’’ (The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queens-
land, 58).
64 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 43.
65 Ibid., 83.
66 Ibid., 28.
67 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, 63.
68 The Mabo Decision 1992, 47.
69 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press,
1969).
70 See Frantz Fanon, Black Face, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); and
Bhabha, ‘‘The Other Question,’’ 66–84.
71 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology.
72 ‘‘Radical title’’ refers to the form of title that gives the sovereign paramount power
to create interests in land by grant of tenure. See Susan Burton Phillips, ‘‘A Note:
Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland,’’ The Sydney Law Review 15.2 (June 1993):
121–42.
73 Hugh Morgan of the Western Mining Corporation claimed, ‘‘the High Court had
plunged property law into chaos and ‘given substance’ to the ambitions of Aus-
tralian communists and the Bolshevik left,’’ quoted in Richard Bartlett, ‘‘Mabo:
Another Triumph for the Common Law,’’ Sydney Law Review 15.2 (June 1993): 178–
86. For a discussion on Aborigines and mining in Western Australia, see Richard
Bartlett, ‘‘Inequality Before the Law in Western Australia: The Land (Title and Tra-
ditional Usage) Act,’’ Aboriginal Law Bulletin 3.65 (December 1993): 7–9; and R. A.
Dixon and M. C. Dillon, eds., Aborigines and Diamond Mining: The Politics of Re-

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 Notes to Chapter Five

source Development in the East Kimberley, Western Australia (Nedlands: University

of Western Australia Press, 1990). See also Paul Kauffman, Wik, Mining, and Ab-
origines (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998).
74 James Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
75 While Drucilla Cornell’s discussion of the normative grounding of juridical in-
terpretation in implicit and explicit references to ‘‘the good’’ has been helpful to
my understanding of the technology of discrimination, more attention needs to
be paid to the traffic of dominant hegemonic projects in legal shame. See Drucilla
Cornell, ‘‘From the Lighthouse: The Promise of Redemption and the Possibility of
Legal Interpretation,’’ Cardozo Law Review 11.5–6 (1990): 1688.
76 Brown, ‘‘Wounded Attachments,’’ 53.
77 Several critical essays on identity, difference, and democracy have critically at-
tended to the politics of ‘‘wounded’’ subjects in late modern liberal societies. See,
for instance, Brown, ‘‘Wounded Attachments’’; Berlant, ‘‘The Subject of True Feel-
ing,’’ in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat and
Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 49–84; Fish,
‘‘Boutique Multiculturalism’’; and Trouillot, ‘‘Abortive Rituals.’’

5 / THE POETICS OF GHOSTS: SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

IN THE ARCHIVE OF THE NATION

1 Arjun Appadurai, ‘‘The Production of Locality,’’ in Modernity at Large (Minne-

apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 178–99; Michael Silverstein, ‘‘Con-
temporary Transformations of Local Language Communities,’’ Annual Review of
Anthropology 27 (1998): 401–26.
2 ‘‘Death Rite for Mabalang,’’ Australian Walkabout Show, abc radio program, 1948.
3 For the concept of ‘‘rigid designator,’’ see Saul Kripke, Meaning and Necessity (1972;
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).
4 For Peirce, subject terms and proper names are indices. Thus the ‘‘whole burden of
the sign,’’ including proper names, ‘‘must be ascertained, not by closer examination
of the utterance but by collateral observations of the utterer’’ (Peirce, ‘‘Pragma-
tism,’’ 406–7). See also Benjamin Lee, Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and
the Semiotics of Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), esp. 98–99.
5 This meaning of durlg is also recorded by Elkin in his ‘‘Ngirawat, or the Sharing of
Names in the Wagaitj Tribe, Northern Australia,’’ in Sonderdruck Aus Beitrage Zue
Gesellungs und Volkerwissenschaft (Berlin: Verlag Bebr. Mann, 1950), 67–81.
6 For discussion of these sign-process, see Stanner, ‘‘Religion, Totemism, and Sym-
bolism’’; Fred Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Selves: Sentiment, Place, and Poli-
tics among Western Desert Aborigines (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1986); Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Ab-
original Australian Culture (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
and Ian Keen, Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997).
7 Colin Simpson, Adam in Ochre (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1957), 168.

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 Notes to Chapter Five

8 Ibid., 171.
9 Partington, Hasluck versus Coombs. Simpson also mentions Hasluck in Adam in
Ochre, 187.
10 Simpson, Adam in Ochre, 164.
11 Elkin, ‘‘Ngirawat,’’ 77.
12 The Elkin Archives, University of Sydney. See Folder 1, Box 18, Item 26.
13 A. P. Elkin, ‘‘Arnhem Land Music,’’ Oceania 26.2 (1955): 146.
14 Ibid.
15 Roger M. Keesing, Kin Groups and Social Structure (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich College Publishers, 1975), 148, quoted in Peter Sutton, Native Title and
the Descent of Rights (Perth: National Native Title Tribunal, 1998), 25. Also influ-
ential is Harold Scheffler’s understanding of descent, descent-phrased constructs,
and descent-phrased rules for group understanding, even though Scheffler does not
consider Australian indigenous forms of social organization to be based on descent
but rather on affiliation. See Harold W. Scheffler, Australian Kinship Classification
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
16 W. H. R. Rivers, ‘‘The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry,’’ Socio-
logical Review 3.1 (1910): 1–12; see also Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘Notes on Gridlock:
Genealogy, Intimacy, Sexuality,’’ Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 215–38.
17 See the discussion in 15.
18 The territory to which the descent group’s totem is found is usually referred to as
an estate, thus the phrase ‘‘an estate group.’’ For a review of the study of Austra-
lian Aboriginal kinship, see Ian Keen, ‘‘Twenty-Five Years of Aboriginal Kinship
Studies,’’ in Social Anthropology and Australian Aboriginal Studies: A Contempo-
rary Overview, ed. Ronald Berndt and R. Tonkinson (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies
Press, 1988), 79–123.
19 L. R. Hiatt, Kinship and Conflict (Canberra: Australian National University,
1965), 20.
20 Ian Keen has described the relationship between the definition of ‘‘traditional Ab-
original owners’’ and ‘‘the ‘orthodox model’ of Aboriginal land tenure,’’ in his ‘‘A
Question of Interpretation: The Definition of ‘Traditional Aboriginal Owners’ in
the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act,’’ in Aboriginal Land-Owners: Contemporary
Issues in the Determination of Traditional Aboriginal Land Ownership, ed. L. R.
Hiatt (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1984), 24–45. See, more recently, L. R. Hiatt,
Arguments about Aborigines, Australia, and the Evolution of Social Anthropology
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
21 Hiatt, Kinship and Conflict, 18.
22 A. P. Elkin, ‘‘The Complexity of Social Organization in Arnhem Land,’’ Southwest-
ern Journal of Anthropology 6.1 (1950): 1–20.
23 Allan Marett, ‘‘Wangga Songs of Northwest Australia: Reflections on the Perfor-
mance of Aboriginal Music at SIMS 88,’’ Musicology Australia 15 (1991): 37–46;
Allan Marett, ‘‘Wangga: Socially Powerful Songs?’’ The World of Music 1 (1994): 67–
81; Allan Marett and JoAnne Page, ‘‘Interrelations between Music and Dance in
a Wangga from Northwest Australian,’’ in Essence of Singing and the Substance of

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 Notes to Chapter Five

Song, Recent Responses to the Aboriginal Performing Arts and Other Essays in Hon-
our of Catherine Ellis, ed. Linda Barwick, Allan Marett, and Guy Turnstill (Sydney:
University of Sydney Press, 1995), 27–38.
24 Elkin, ‘‘Ngirawat,’’ 76.
25 Allan Marett has mapped a genealogy of human authorization for the country sur-
rounding Belyuen.
26 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana
Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
27 ‘‘Death Rite for Mabalan.’’
28 ‘‘Death Rite for Mabalan’’ describes the voice of Eliang as the effect of pain caused
by wingmalang, but might also have been voice of the wingmalang pained by Mo-
seck’s trickery. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘ ‘Might Be Something’: The Language of
Indeterminacy in Australian Aboriginal Land Use,’’ Man 28.4 (1993): 679–704.
29 John Lucy has noted: ‘‘In a like manner, structural parallelism in poetry sets up
formal equivalences that tell listeners that certain things are to be compared with
one another’’ (‘‘Reflexive Language and the Human Disciplines,’’ in Reflexive Lan-
guage: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, ed. John Lucy [Cambridge, Eng.: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993], 10).
30 Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976 (Canberra: Australian Gov-
ernment Printer, 30 April 1992).
31 The land on which the Belyuen community is located is already defined as Aborigi-
nal land under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976.
32 The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976, also stipulates the tra-
ditional Aboriginal owner must be entitled to forage as of right, but this entitlement
has never been the basis of a decision.
33 The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976, and the Native Title
Act, (Commonwealth) 1993, stipulate that every claim be accompanied by an
anthropological report.
34 Australian Parliamentary Hansard, House of Representatives, 4 June 1976, p. 3082.
35 See C. Athanasiou, ‘‘Land Rights or Native Title,’’ Indigenous Law Review 4.12
(1998): 14–15.
36 Since then a number of land commissioners have accepted spiritual descent from
a mythic ancestor, with some stating that claimants must also be members of a
human descent group. Dr. M. Reay in the Borroloola Land Claim described spiri-
tual descent as the basis of all forms of descent from an Aboriginal perspective:
‘‘Aborigines collapse history and assimilate the remote Dreamtime into the present.
Transformations of quasi-ancestral beings are visible in the landscape. Ceremonies
re-enact their adventures and their paths are recorded in song. The remote past
is ever present. An individual’s connection to it is his Dreamings and the land in
which his Dreamings are located. The quasi-ancestral beings he shares with father
and the land establish his descent through spirits located in that land from the first
people those beings originated’’ (Borroloola Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal
Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice Toohey [Canberra: Australian Publishing Service,
1978], exhibit 45). In the Uluru Land Claim report, Toohey accepted that a claimant

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 Notes to Chapter Five

could inherit rights from the estate in which he or she was born: ‘‘In that case the
rights are in a sense inherited because they derive from the ancestral being who be-
comes the individual’s personal tjukurr or tjukurrpa, his dreaming or totem. Thus
a child may belong to two or even three estates. He does so actually not potentially.
But the rights are inchoate: more is required before they can be exercised in respect
to any one estate’’ (Uluru Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner,
Mr. Justice Toohey [Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1979], para. 27). Jus-
tice Kearney stated that this type of kirda link gives no more than a secondary
interest in the Yulumu estate and is not passed on to children, Uluru Land Claim
(para. 46). Justice Toohey argued in the Alyawarra and Kaititja Land Claim report
that conception dreaming provides only individual not group rights to country
(Alyawarra and Kaititja Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commission,
Mr. Justice Toohey [Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1978], paras. 28, 29).
However, he accepted Stanner’s argument that every member of the patriline is in
some sense animated by the ‘‘patri-spirit’’ of the clan to which he is affiliated (ibid.,
para. 45). In the Warlpiri, Kukaja, and Ngarti Land Claim report, Kearney once
again addressed spiritual descent, finding that persons conceived on a Dreaming
track within the claimant country are linked with the country, being animated by
its spirit; and, given this spiritual connection to the country, if the persons reside
with other (descent) members of the group, acquire the necessary knowledge of
the Dreamings and sites, perform the required duties, and are recognized by other
members of the group they can be found to be members of the local descent group
(Warlpiri, Kukatja, and Ngarti Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Com-
mission, Mr. Justice Kearney (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1985), paras.
30, 31.
37 Nicholson River (Waanyi/Gaeawa) Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Com-
missioner, Mr. Justice Kearney (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1985),
para. 57.
38 Ibid., para. 68.
39 Ibid., para. 63. Kearney also noted in Nicholson River report that because Dr. Reay
was dealing in Borroloola Land Claim only with patrilineal descent groups, she
limited her discussion to the ‘‘father’’ (see Nicholson River Land Claim, para. 66).
Dr. Chase commented more broadly in Nicholson River that ‘‘the positing of a
common descent among people from a mythic ancestor in any case presents no
problems . . . the phenomenon is commonly found by field workers elsewhere in
Australia. In Cape York Peninsula, for example, the term for dreamings, or totems,
is a derivative of the term for father’s father, and in societies with shallow gen-
erational depth in genealogies, the generations immediately above that of grand-
fathers are commonly fused into the time period of mythic ancestors and their
activities’’ (Nicholson River Land Claim, exhibit 58, p. 12). In the Cox River Land
Claim report, Kearney found that persons who based their inclusion in a local de-
scent group solely on vaguely phrased relations through the Dreaming or through
ceremony should be excluded. They must in addition be related to the relevant
local land-holding group by a principle of descent (Cox River (Alawa-Ngandji)

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 Notes to Chapter Five

Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Claim Commissioner, Mr. Justice Kearney
[Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1984]. In the Mount Allan Land Claim
report, Mr. Justice Kearney addressed the question of whether ‘‘spiritual geneal-
ogy’’ would satisfy the requirements of local descent group under the lra. Kearney
first noted Toohey’s finding that a local descent group may be recruited on a prin-
ciple of descent deemed relevant by the claimants (Mount Allan Land Claim, Report
by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice Kearney [Canberra: Australian
Publishing Service, 1985], para. 48). Kearney stated that ‘‘perceived descent from
a common mythic ancestor is a principle of descent which conveys the notion of
common ancestry’’ (Mount Allan Land Claim, para. 48). In the case of Judy Napal-
jarri, and Tiger Japanangla and his siblings, there was no evidence of any actual
genealogical link between them and members of the local descent group for the
Yulumu and Ngarlu estates (Mount Allan Land Claim, para 45). Moreover, Tiger
Japanangla’s father’s estate was located over one hundred kilometers to the west of
the claim land. Tiger Japanangla was, nevertheless, found to satisfy the definition
of a traditional Aboriginal owner because the claimants deemed as relevant a prin-
ciple of a shared ‘‘spiritual genealogical link’’ to the local descent group and claim
land on the basis of a shared descent from a common honey ant ancestor. Dr. Peter-
son described this spiritual genealogy in the following way: ‘‘All Honey Ant kirda
groups that are in contact and know each other and that lie on common dreaming
tracks . . . are seen to be related as from common Honey Ant ancestors—that all
the Honey Ant ancestors are themselves related’’ (Mount Allan Land Claim, 134).
40 Timber Creek Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice
Maurice (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1985).
41 Ti Tree Station Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice
Maurice (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1987), para. 99.
42 Ibid., para. 96.
43 Ibid., para. 100.
44 In his report on the Lander, Warlpiri, and Anmatjirra Land Claim to the Willowra
Pastoral Lease, Toohey stated: ‘‘The words ‘local,’ ‘descent’ and ‘group’ are ordinary
English words to which a meaning can be attached, given a context which in this
case is the Land Rights Act. The matter should not be approached with some pre-
conceived model in mind to which the evidence must accommodate itself. Rather
it is a matter of the conclusions to be drawn from the evidence. A local descent
group may be ‘recruited on a principle of descent deemed relevant by claimants.’ If
the evidence so dictates, a local descent gruop may be unilineal or non-unilineal’’
(Lander, Warlpiri, Anmatjirra Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commis-
sioner, Mr. Justice Toohey [Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1980], para. 89).
45 Timber Creek Land Claim, para. 92.
46 Northern Land Council and Others v. Aboriginal Land Commissioner and Another,
Australian Law Review 105 (1992): 539, para. 60; See also Finniss River Land Claim,
Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice Toohey (Canberra: Austra-
lian Publishing Service, 1981), para. 161.

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 Notes to Chapter Five

47 Kenbi (Cox Peninsula) Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner,
Mr. Justice Olney (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1991), para. 7.2.3.
48 Maria Brandl, Adrienne Haritos, and Michael Walsh, Kenbi Land Claim (Darwin:
Northern Land Council, 1979), 152.
49 See Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Belyuen Traditional Aboriginal Owners (Kenbi Land
Claim) (Darwin: Northern Land Council, 1996).
50 See Povinelli, Belyuen Traditional Aboriginal Owners.
51 Brandl, Haritos, and Walsh, Kenbi Land Claim, 31.
52 For a concise history of the political events that led to the establishment of Wood-
ward’s Commission and the narrowing of its recommendations, see Graham Neate,
Aboriginal Land Rights Law in the Northern Territory (Chippendale, NSW: Alter-
native Publishing Cooperative, 1989), esp. 1–40.
53 Kenbi (Cox Peninsula) Land Claim, para. 7.2.4.
54 Kenbi Transcripts (Indooroopilly: Transcripts Australia, 1995–1998), 7061.
55 Oleny reviewed at length legal precedent for viewing the ‘‘local descent group,’’
especially discussion of the Woodward report before parliament: ‘‘The paragraphs
from the first Woodward report which are reproduced as Appendix A to this re-
port draw a clear distinction in Aboriginal social organisation between a ‘tribe’ or
‘linguistic group’ on the one hand, and a ‘local descent group’ on the other. Given
that the form of subsection 50 (4) has its origin in clause 27 of the draft Bill in the
second Woodward report, there is a strong inference to be drawn that the meaning
to be attributed to ‘tribe’ or ‘linguistic group’ was quite different from the idea of a
‘local descent group’ ’’ (Kenbi [Cox Peninsula] Land Claim [Australian Publishing
Service, 1991], paras. 8.40–8.49).
57 Ibid., para. 9.6.
58 As an anthropologist opposing the Belyuen claim pointed out in the second hear-
ing.
59 The Supreme Court hearing an appeal of his findings ruled that Olney had erred
as a matter of law—he had imposed an outdated anthropological model on local
forms of social recruitment rather than considering, as required by law, recruitment
principles ‘‘deemed relevant by the claimants’’: ‘‘The point is that the principle of
descent will be one that is recognized as applying in respect of the particular group.
Further, there is no reason the particular principle of descent traditionally operat-
ing may not change over time.’’ The Supreme Court advised future land commis-
sioners to first look at contemporary local beliefs, not at anthropological models,
and at the degree they have deviated from traditional (read: precontact) beliefs and
practices, and then see whether they fall within the meaning and intentions of the
Aboriginal Land Rights Act (and likewise, for claims lodged under the Native Title
Act, 1993. The court also reiterated that the act should be ‘‘broadly construed so as
to give effect to the beneficial purposes of the Act.’’ But the Supreme Court did not
overturn the direction that the assessment (and through it power) flowed. By de-
fining a ‘‘local descent group’’ as a subdivision of a linguistic or dialect group with
clan (or ‘‘totemic’’) ties to particular sacred sites on the land claimed, it entrenched

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 Notes to Chapter Five

the a priori status of national definitions of sociality functioning before the law
enters the locale of its discriminations. See Northern Land Council and Others v.
Aboriginal Land Commissioner and Another, 539.
60 The land commissioner, Justice Gray, had not as of the writing of this essay written
his report on traditional Aboriginal ownership in the Kenbi Land Claim.
61 Others have noted the differential effects of hegemonic formations on social
groups. See the still-compelling analysis of family in France in Jacques Donzelot,
Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).
62 Kenbi Transcripts, 5294.
63 Peter Sutton, a senior anthropologist representing one of the Laragiya claimant
groups (but having done no ethnographic research among the Belyuen), insisted
that the land commissioner distinguish between territorial rights based on blood-
lines, a principle of territoriality he considered ‘‘traditional,’’ and the personal ties
to country based on historical connections he considered ‘‘historical.’’ In his view
the Belyuen asserted interests ‘‘in ancestral country on one basis’’ (durlg) ‘‘and
the country of their—for most of them, I would think, their strongest emotional
and personal—personalized attachments’’ on another basis’’ (maruy) (Kenbi Tran-
scripts, 6578).
64 A. P. Elkin, ‘‘Ngirawat, or the sharing of Names in the Wagalt; tribe, Northern
Australia,’’ 68.
65 Brandl, Haritos, and Walsh, Kenbi Land Claim, 161.
66 Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma (London: Athlone, 1964), 13–
14.
67 Kenbi Transcripts, 4899.
68 Ibid., 5241–42.
69 Ibid., 7332.
70 Ibid., 7349–50.
71 Colin Simpson announces to the audience: ‘‘Mosec is dancing solo around the old
man and I don’t know if I have ever seen finer dancing in my life, he is comparable
with a dancer like Le Shine the art of a fine ballet. Really, but don’t take my word
for it ask Ted Shawn the American dancer who toured Australia and visited De-
lissaville and who said that Mosec would be a sensation in London or New York’’
(‘‘Death Rite for Mabalan,’’ Australian Walkabout Show).
72 Guidelines written to interpret the amended Native Title Act make these conditions
explicit:

The description [must be] clear enough to allow someone else to see whether
any particular person is a member of the group. The basic principle is that there
should be some objective way of verifying the identity of members of the group.
The following are examples only of what may be an acceptable description:
• biological relations of a person named in the native title claim group (and
relations by adoption, or according to traditional laws and customs);
• relations or descendents of a person named in the native title claim group,
and people related by marriage to those relations or descendents, including

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 Notes to Chapter Six

people in de facto or multiple partnerships, where such relationships are

recognised by that group’s traditional laws and customs;
• relations or descendents or a person named in the native title group, and
people who have been adopted by those relations or descendents;
• people who belong to the group, according to its laws and customs.
Note: a description of the group’s laws and customs may be required.
National Native Title Tribunal, ‘‘Guidelines to Applicants, Registration Test Infor-
mation Sheet, no 2,’’ October 1998.
73 Northern Land Council and Others v. Aboriginal Land Commissioner and Another,
554. For statements by land commissioners on the flexibility of Aboriginal tradi-
tions, see Daly River (Malak Malak) Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal land
Commissioner, Mr. Justice Toohey (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1982);
Nicholson River Land Claim; and Jawoyn (Katherine Area) Land Claim, Report by
the Aboriginal land Commissioner, Mr. Justice Kearney (Canberra: Australian Pub-
lishing Service, 1987).
74 See also Kenbi Transcripts 7317, 7320, 7341–43, 7351–55, 7464–69.
75 Ibid., 7341–42.
76 Ibid., 7364.
77 Nomad, Australian Music International, New York, 1994.

6 / THE TRUEST BELIEF IS COMPULSION

1 Benjamin Lee, Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Sub-
jectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 342. For a critical comment on the
emergence of the notion of distinterest, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Mod-
ern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
2 Diane Bell, Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was, and Will Be (Mel-
bourne: Spinifex, 1998); Ronald Brunton, ‘‘The Hindmarsh Island Bridge and the
Credibility of Australian Anthropology,’’ Anthropology Today 21.4 (1996): 2–7; and
James Weiner, ‘‘The Secret of the Ngarrindjeri: The Fabrication of Social Knowl-
edge,’’ Arena 5 (1995): 17–32.
3 Francesca Merlan, ‘‘The Limits of Cultural Construction,’’ Oceania 61 (1991): 341–
52.
4 Lee, Talking Heads, 109. In the Peircean tradition two types of indeterminacy are
distinguished: indefiniteness, signaled by the quantifier ‘‘some’’; and generality,
signaled by the quantifier ‘‘any.’’ In the process of distinguishing his account of
translation and interpretation from Quine’s, Donald Davidson likewise defines in-
determinacy in terms of the quantifier ‘‘any.’’ See Donald Davidson, ‘‘Reply to W. V.
Quine,’’ in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Peru, Ill.: Open Court Publishing,
1999), 80–86. See also Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘Radical Worlds: The Anthropology
of Incommensurability and Inconceivability,’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 30
(2001): 319–34.

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 Notes to Chapter Six

5 W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).

6 Davidson would likely see this sociologically weak version as the result of the so-
cial interest in the ‘‘new, surprising, or disputed’’ rather than ‘‘the vast amount of
agreement on plan matters’’ (Davidson, ‘‘Belief and the Basis of Meaning,’’ in In-
quiries into Truth and Interpretation [New York: Oxford University Press, 1984],
141–54, 153).
7 Kenbi Transcripts, 5660.
8 For a review of the literature, see Francesca Merlan, ‘‘Australian Aboriginal Con-
ception Revisited,’’ Man 21.3 (1986): 474–93.
9 Warner, A Black Civilization, 24.
10 Ibid., 24.
11 Ibid., 23, my emphasis. Gillen continually refers to the labor of interpretation. See,
for instance, his letters to Spencer in which he says the following: ‘‘Can’t get people
to admit [that they exchange women in ceremony]’’ (128); ‘‘I couldn’t believe it my-
self at first but after numerous inquiries’’ (135, see also 139–40); ‘‘Father says they
have sex on the graveyard. You can’t imagine how I tingled with desire to be upon
the spot to probe this strange custom to the bottom’’ (234). (Mulvaney, Morphy,
and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear Spencer’’).
12 Warner, A Black Civilization, 24.
13 Kenbi Transcripts, 4961–62.
14 Ibid., 6613.
15 Merland, ‘‘The Limits of Cultural Construction.’’
16 Ti Tree Station Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice
Maurice, paras. 92, 93, 107.
17 Kenbi Transcripts, 7184.
18 Elkin, ‘‘Arnhem Land Music,’’ 144.
19 Kenbi Transcripts, 4190–91.
20 Ibid., 4191.
21 Ibid., 4195.
22 Ibid., 4259.
23 Ibid., 4279.
24 Ibid., 4279.
25 Ibid., 4279.
26 Ibid., 4280–81.
27 Ibid., 4295.
28 See for instance, Ibid., 6086–96.
29 Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976, sec. 3(1).
30 Ibid., sec. 51(3).
31 Timber Creek Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice
Maurice, para. 90.
32 Ibid., para. 92.
33 Ibid., para 96.
34 Ibid., para 96.
35 Kenbi Transcripts, 5901–2.

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 Notes to Chapter Six

36 F. R. Palmer, Mood and Modality (1986; Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University

Press, 1998); J. Barnes, ‘‘Evidentials in the Tuyuca Verb,’’ International Journal of
American Linguistics 50 (1984): 255–71; John Lyons, Semantics (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 1977).
36 Kenbi Transcripts, 5389.
37 Ibid., 5881 and 5887.
38 Ibid., 5887.
39 Ibid., 5159.
40 Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1963), 17, 20–21.
41 Lévi-Strauss, Totemism.
42 Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976, sec. 51 (3).
43 National Native Title Tribunal, ‘‘Guidelines to Applicants, Registration Test Infor-
mation, Sheet no 2,’’ October 1998.
44 In being bothered Keely faced the reverse dilemma of Hilary Putman’s philoso-
pher, rephrased by Stanley Fish thusly: ‘‘What if the answers philosophers come
up with are answers only in the highly artificial circumstances of the philosophy
seminar where ordinary reasons for action are systematically distrusted and intro-
duced only to be dismissed as naive? And what if, once the philosopher goes away
or ceases himself or herself to be a philosopher, those ordinary reasons return with-
out a vengeance and action is just as it was before, if not unproblematic, at least
not mysterious’’ (Stanley Fish, ‘‘Truth and Toilets: Pragmatism and the Practice
of Life,’’ in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and
Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 418–33.
45 See Kwaku Mensah v. the King (1946) AC 83; Moffa v. the Queen (1977) 138 CLR 601.

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From The Cunning of Recognition by Povinelli, Elizabeth A.. DOI: 10.1215/9780822383673
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 NOTES

INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL COMMON SENSE

1 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Continuity and Change (1958),’’ in White Man Got No Dreaming

(Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), 50, my emphasis.
2 Hayes v. Northern Territory 1999, Report of the Native Tribunal Commissioner,
Mr. Justice Olney, (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1999), para. 20.
3 www.aboriginal-art.com. Wadeye was connected to this circulatory system prior
to the expansion of the airport and the creation of the art gallery. Several Wadeye
barks, painted during the 1960s, were featured in the most recent Sotheby’s indige-
nous art catalog, with prices listed ranging between five hundred and five thousand
dollars.
4 See Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural
Society (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998); Meaghan Morris, Too Soon, Too Late: His-
tory in Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); and Sara
Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Rout-
ledge, 2000).

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 Notes to Introduction

5 See Stuart Hall, ‘‘When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit,’’ in The
Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and
Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996), 242–60, esp. 252.
6 I do not mean to indicate a geographical space by the phrase ‘‘colonial and post-
colonial world.’’ Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon and, more recently, Homi K.
Bhabha have convincingly argued that the colonial subject is a historical epoch
rather than a geographical location. See Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colo-
nized (New York: Orion, 1965); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans.
Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1965); Homi K. Bhabha, The Loca-
tion of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). See also Mahmood Mamdani, Beyond
Rights Talk and Culture Talk: Comparative Essays in the Politics of Rights and Culture
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
7 Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992); Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of
History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?’’ Representations 37 (1992): 1–16; Homi K.
Bhabha, ‘‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of
Colonialism,’’ in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 66–84; Hall,
‘‘When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’?’’; Kaja Silverman, ‘‘White Skin, Brown Masks:
The Double Mimesis, or Lawrence in Arabia,’’ differences 1.3 (1989): 3–54; Michel-
Rolph Trouillot, ‘‘Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era,’’ Inter-
vention: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. 2.2 (2000): 171–86, special
issue, ‘‘Rights and Wrongs,’’ ed. Homi K. Bhabha and Rajeswari Sunden Rajan.
8 See Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of the critical ideological role played by images in
which the nation and its citizens appear likable to themselves and images in which
they appear to themselves as likable and worthy of love (Žižek, The Sublime Ob-
ject of Ideology [London: Verso, 1989], 105). See also Etienne Balibar’s provoca-
tive reading of Althusser on ideology: ‘‘Just as the accumulation of capital is made
of ‘living labor’ (according to Marx), so the oppressive apparatuses of the State,
Churches, and other dominant institutions function with the popular religious,
moral, legal and aesthetic imaginary of the masses as their specific fuel’’ (Balibar,
‘‘The Non-Contemporaneity of Althusser,’’ in The Althusserian Legacy ed. E. Ann
Kaplan and Michael Sprinker [London: Verso, 1993], 13). See also Lauren Berlant,
‘‘The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,’’ in Cultural Pluralism,
Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1999).
9 John Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 85.
10 Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘‘The Three Normative Sciences,’’ in The Essential Peirce:
Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–1913), ed. The Peirce Edition Project
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 207.
11 Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘‘The Nature of Meaning,’’ in The Essential Peirce: Selected
Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–1913), ed. The Peirce Edition Project (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 210.
12 For Peirce’s discussion of critical common sense, see Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘‘Prag-
matism,’’ in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–

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 Notes to Introduction

1913), ed. The Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998),
398–433.
13 See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1987); and John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993).
14 Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 5–6.
15 This too was the spirit that animated early deconstructive and genealogical texts.
See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, ‘‘The Ends of Man,’’ in Margins of Philosophy
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), 109–36; and Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is
Critique?’’ in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e),
1997), 23–82.
16 For a ‘‘critical theory of recognition’’ and redistribution, see Nancy Fraser, ‘‘From
Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,’’ The
New Left Review 212 (July/August 1995): 68–93.
17 John Frow and Meaghan Morris, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Australian Cultural Studies: A
Reader ed. John Frow and Meaghan Morris (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1993), x.
18 For an overview of the recent economic history of Australia in relationship to the
Asia-Pacific, see R. Higgott, ‘‘Australia: Economic Crises and the Politics of Re-
gional Economic Adjustment,’’ in Southeast Asia in the 1980s: The Politics of Eco-
nomic Crisis, ed. R. Robison, K. Hewison, and R. Higgot (Sydney: Allen and Unwin,
1987), 177–217. Meaghan Morris has also noted this period of economic transfor-
mation as a significant moment in the cultural time of Australian nationalism:
‘‘By 1986, as the Treasurer began to warn of our ‘banana republic’ tendencies and
burgeoning foreign debt, viewers were in the words of one angry critic, ‘treated
nightly to the spectacle of economic commentators pronouncing on the govern-
ment’s political performance. . . . It was as though foreign traders, rather than Aus-
tralian voters, had become the arbiters of political taste in this country’’ (Morris,
‘‘Future Fear,’’ in Mapping the Future: Local Cultures, Global Changes, ed. Jon Bird,
Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner [New York: Rout-
ledge, 1993], 33).
19 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 100.
20 Michael Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-Building State Changes
Its Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 2–3.
21 Antonio Gramsci, ‘‘State and Civil Society,’’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks
(New York: International Publishers, 1992), 206–76.
22 Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra, 213. The equity of income distribution
was celebrated during the 1890 Australasian Federation Conference. See Robin
Sharwood, Debates of the Australasian Federation Conference of 1890 together with
Extracts from the British Press Concerning Federation and the Australasian Federa-
tion Conference of 1890 (Sydney: Legal Books, 1990).
23 Donald Horne, The Lucky Country (Ringwood: Penguin, 1964).
24 See Brian Murphy, The Other Australia (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1993).

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 Notes to Introduction

25 After periods of sustained growth from 1960 to 1974, the Australian economy suf-
fered a severe recession in 1974, leading to what some economists have called ‘‘stag-
flation.’’ Unemployment peaked at 9.9 percent in 1982 but stayed above 7 percent
from 1982 to 1988. At the same time, Australia’s gross external debt rose sharply
from under $10 billion to just under $140 billion. See Barrie Dyster and David
Meredith, Australia in the International Economy in the Twentieth Century (Cam-
bridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. 269. See also Ken Buckley and
Ted Wheelwright, No Paradise for Workers: Capitalism and the Common People in
Australia, 1788–1914 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), 247.
26 See Alvin Y. So and Stephen W. K. Chiu, East Asia and the World Economy (London:
Sage Publications, 1995).
27 Steve Chan and Cal Clark, ‘‘The Rise of the East Asian NICs: Confucian Capitalism,
Status Mobility, and Developmental Legacy,’’ in The Evolving Pacific Basin in the
Global Political Economy, ed. Cal Clark and Steve Chan (Boulder: Lynne Rienner
Publishers, 1992), 41.
28 See Dilip K. Das, The Asia-Pacific Economy (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 17.
29 Depending on their theoretical orientation, economists explain this realignment of
capital accumulation to have been caused by free-market forces, cultural attitudes
(Confucianism), state policy, or relations of dependency. For a good overview, see
So and Chiu, East Asia and the World Economy.
30 Patrick Walters and Michael Gordon, ‘‘We’re a Culture Apart, PM Tells Asia,’’ The
Australian, 18 September 1996, sec. A, p. 1. Michael Millet and Louise Williams,
‘‘PM Defends Soft Line on Indonesia,’’ Sydney Morning Herald, 18 September 1996,
sec. A, p. 1.
31 In the same year, the Immigration Restriction Act imposed an infamous dictation
requirement that screened out nonwhite immigrants.
32 John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, Citizens without Rights: Aborigines and Aus-
tralian Citizenship (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 81–82.
33 Alan Powell, Far Country: A Short History of the Northern Territory (Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 1988), 161.
34 Ronald Wilson, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Sepa-
ration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, ed.
Meredith Wilkie (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commissioner,
1997). See also Tony Austin, I Can Picture the Old Home So Clearly: The Common-
wealth and ‘‘Half-Caste’’ Youth in the Northern Territory, 1911–1939 (Canberra: Ab-
original Studies Press, 1993).
35 Powell, Far Country, 233.
36 See for instance, J. K. Doolan, ‘‘Walk-Off (and Later Return) of Various Aboriginal
Groups from Cattle Stations,’’ in Aborigines and Change: Australia in the ’70s, ed.
R. M. Berndt (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1977). See also
B. Attwood and A. Markus, The 1967 Referendum, or When Aborigines Didn’t Get
the Vote (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Studies, 1997); L. Lippman, Generations of Resistance: The Aboriginal Struggles for
Justice (Melbourne: Longman, 1981); F. Bandler, Turning the Tide (Canberra: Ab-

272

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 Notes to Introduction

original Studies Press, 1989); and A. Wright, ed., Take Power Like This Old Man
Here: An Anthology of Writings Celebrating Twenty Years of Land Rights in Central
Australia, 1977–1997 (Alice Springs, NT: Jukurrpa Books, 1998).
37 The Bondi protests were reported by Fiona Harai, ‘‘Beating Our Own Drum,’’
The Weekend Australian, 26–27 June 1999, 23; The Indonesian banner was photo-
graphed by Bullit Marquez, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 September 1999, 12.
38 Jane M. Jacobs and Fay Gale, Tourism and the Protection of Aboriginal Cultural Sites
(Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994).
39 Fred Myers, ‘‘Representing Culture: The Production of Discourse(s) for Aborigi-
nal Acrylic Painting,’’ Cultural Anthropology 6.1 (1992): 26–62; Nicholas Thomas,
Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999);
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘Consuming Geist: Popontology and the Spirit of Capital
in Indigenous Australia,’’ Public Culture, special issue ‘‘Millennial Capitalism,’’ ed.
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. 12.2 (2000): 501–28.
40 Eric Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizon
(Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994).
41 ‘‘Ms Edgar said [one] way to destroy a people was to detribalize them by taking
away their stories and their dreams replacing them with imported ones’’ (reported
in Robert Wilson, ‘‘Children’s TV Head Blasts ‘Sinister’ US,’’ The Australian, 3 July
1996, 3).
42 See, for instance, Rosemary Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties:
Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998);
Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);
William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991);
Bernard Williams, ‘‘Toleration: A Political or Moral Question?,’’ in Tolerance be-
tween Intolerance and the Intolerable, ed. Paul Ricoeur (Providence: Berghahn
Books, 1996), 35–48.
43 For critical discussions of the limits of tolerance, see Susan Moller Okin, Is Multi-
culturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 7–24;
Stanley Fish, ‘‘Boutique Multiculturalism,’’ Critical Inquiry 23.2 (1997): 378–95;
Alenka Zupancic, ‘‘The Subject of the Law,’’ in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed.
Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 41–73.
44 Slavoj Žižek, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), 7.
45 John Comaroff, ‘‘The Discourse of Rights in Colonial South Africa: Subjectivity,
Sovereignty, Modernity,’’ in Identities, Politics, and Rights, ed. Austin Sarat and
Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 193–236.
46 Charles Taylor, ‘‘The Politics of Recognition,’’ in Multiculturalism: Examining the
Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994), 25–73, 66.
47 France used already existing legislation prohibiting violence against children to
outlaw the practice of clitoridectomy. See Celia W. Dugger, ‘‘Tug of Taboos: Afri-
can Genital Rite v. U.S. Law,’’ New York Times, 28 December 1996, sec. 1, p. 1. The
French state’s discipline of a north African practice has an uncanny relationship to
its past war in Algeria and to its present-day political relationship with Algeria. The

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 Notes to Introduction

New York Times noted: ‘‘The war has at times come to bear an uncanny resemblance
to the war of Algeria’s independence. Then, too, the guerrillas, Algeria’s National
Liberation Front, used methods of startling savagery—including disembowelment,
decapitation and the mutilation of genitals—to shatter the middle ground in so-
ciety. Then, too, the authorities represented by the French Army responded with
torture and indiscriminate killing. Then, too, the war spilled over into France, di-
viding its society and destroying the Fourth Republic’’ (Roger Cohen, ‘‘Troubled
Tie: France Hears Alarming Echoes of Colonial Past from Algeria,’’ New York Times,
12 December 1996, sec. A, p. 12.
48 The legislation was sponsored by representatives Pat Schroeder (D–Colorado) and
Harry Reid (D–Nevada) as part of the Immigration Act. See Celia Dugger, ‘‘Genital
Mutilation Is Outlawed,’’ New York Times, 12 October 1996, sec. 1, p. 27; and Sharon
Lerner, ‘‘Rite of Wrong,’’ Village Voice, 26 March–1 April 1997, 44–46.
49 Christopher Newfield and Avery F. Gordon, ‘‘Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Busi-
ness,’’ in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 77.
50 A social geography of the practice is emerging in the mass media. The New York
Times educates the public on the regions where women are at the greatest risk:
‘‘New York and Newark are among the metropolitan areas where the largest num-
ber of these at-risk girls and women live’’ (Celia Dugger, ‘‘Genital Mutilation Is
Outlawed,’’ New York Times, 12 October 1996, sec. 1, p. 27.
51 Antonio Gramsci, ‘‘The Modern Prince,’’ in Selections from the Prison Notebooks
(New York: International Publishers, 1992), 123–205, esp. 132–33.
52 Mass media often conflates a diverse set of non-Western cultural practices and
represents these as ‘‘premodern’’ or ‘‘precivil.’’ For instance, the New York Times
writes: ‘‘A much broader struggle is taking place across Africa. Throughout much
of the continent, from the ritual slavery of the Ewe to female genital mutila-
tion to polygamy, ancient practices that strike both Westerns and many Africans
as abhorent coexist side by side with modernity’’ (‘‘Human Rites: Africa’s Cul-
ture War—Old Customs, New Values,’’ New York Times, sec. 4, p. 1). Public cul-
ture is currently struggling over how to understand the (il)legitimacy of these
practices when they occur among U.S. immigrants. How should U.S. law treat
underaged marriage, polygamy, and wife beating when they occur in immigrant
communities? See Nina Schuyler, ‘‘When in Rome: Should Courts Make Allow-
ances for Immigrant Culture at Women’s Expense?’’ In These Times 21.7 (1997):
27–29.
53 In the wake of the outlawing of social clitoridectomies by the U.S. Congress, the
Left and Center mass media reported divisions among social communities affected
by the law and among the medical community. For instance, the New York Times
reported that U.S. health care officials were divided in their opinions on whether it
was better to permit moderated and medically supervised clitoridectomies (giving
a ‘‘ritual nick on the prepuse’’) or to condemn the practice to untrained persons
who would perform the operation illegally. See Celia Dugger, ‘‘Tug of Taboos: Afri-
can Genital Rite v. U.S. Law,’’ New York Times, 28 December 1996, sec. 1, p. 1. These

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 Notes to Introduction

divisions within the medical community and the community of practice are noted
but underemphasized in Sharon Lerner, ‘‘Rite of Wrong,’’ 44–46.
54 Stanley Fish has outlined the contradictions and ambivalences in models of multi-
culturalism. He and others distinguish weak and strong forms of multiculturalism
by the degree to which any moral judgment is seen as based on universal grounds
exterior to the particularities of cultural logics or all moral judgments are seen as
excretions of cultural logics or historical discursive positions. Fish argues, how-
ever, that both models are incoherently formulated. According to Fish, even the
most critical proponents of multiculturalism eventually stumble on a case of cul-
tural difference that they feel they should or do refuse to support for reasons that
sound universalizing, but now cannot be defended as such. This is famously illus-
trated by the Salman Rushdie and nambl (North American Man-Boy Love) cases.
See Stanley Fish, ‘‘Boutique Multiculturalism.’’ For a general discussion on the dis-
cursive impasse of multiculturalism in liberal democratic society, see Chicago Cul-
tural Studies Group, ‘‘Critical Multiculturalism,’’ Critical Inquiry 18 (spring 1992):
530–55; David Theo Goldberg, ‘‘Introduction: Multicultural Conditions,’’ in Multi-
culturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994),
1–44; and Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Mapping
Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–18. For a
critical discussion of the instability of both universalist and particularist grounds
for moral claims, see Ernesto Laclau, ‘‘Universalism, Particularism, and the Ques-
tion of Identity,’’ in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 20–35; and Lauren
Berlant, ‘‘1968, or Something,’’ Critical Inquiry 21.1 (1994): 124–55.
55 Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia,’’ in Collected Papers, vol. 4, ed. Joan
Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 152–70.
56 Ernesto Laclau, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The Making of Political Identities, ed. Ernesto
Laclau (London: Verso, 1994), 1–8.
57 See Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (1893; New York: Macmil-
lan, 1964).
58 Segments of this discussion are drawn from Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘Sexuality at
Risk: Psychoanalysis Metapragmatically,’’ in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed.
Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and
Elizabeth A. Povinelli and George Chauncey, ‘‘Thinking Sexuality Transnation-
ally,’’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5.4 (1999): 439–49.
59 But see L. Sackett, ‘‘Welfare Colonialism: Developing Division at Wiluna,’’ in Going
It Alone, ed. R. Tonkinson and M. Howard (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press,
1990); J. Collman, Aboriginal Fringe Dwellers and Welfare (St. Lucia: University of
Queensland Press, 1988); Jeremy Beckett, ‘‘Internal Colonialism in a Welfare State:
The Case of the Australian Aborigines,’’ paper presented at the annual meeting of
the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, 1983.
60 Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris, eds., Race Matters: Indigenous Australians
and ‘‘Our’’ Society (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997); Annette Hamilton,
‘‘Fear and Desire: Aborigines, Asians, and the National Imaginary,’’ Australian Cul-
tural History 9 (1990): 14–35; Gillian Cowlishaw, Rednecks, Eggheads, and Black-

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 Notes to Chapter One

fellas (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Jeremy Beckett, Torres Strait
Islanders: Custom and Colonialism (Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
Diane Austin-Broos, ‘‘ ‘Two Laws’: Ontologies, Histories: Ways of Being Aranda
Today,’’ Oceania 7 (1996): 1–20; David Trigger, Whitefella Comin’: Aboriginal Re-
sponses to Colonialism in Northern Australia (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1992).

1 / MUTANT MESSAGES

1 Lorimer Fison, ‘‘Kamilaroi Marriage, Descent, and Relationship,’’ in Kamilaroi and

Kunai, ed. Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt (1880; Canberra: Australian Aboriginal
Press, 1991).
2 Ibid., 29.
3 Ibid., 42.
4 ‘‘By present usage, I mean that which has been developed by the natives themselves,
not that which has resulted from their contact with the white men. This is a factor
which must be altogether cast out of the calculation, and an investigator on this
line of research needs to be continually on watch against it’’ (Fison, ‘‘Kamilaroi
Marriage, Descent, and Relationship,’’ 29).
5 Ibid., 30.
6 Ibid., 59–60.
7 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland (Canberra: Australian Government
Printer, 1996), 146, 176.
8 Ibid., 146. See also Marshall Perron, ‘‘Sacred Sites—a Costly Token to a Dead Cul-
ture,’’ Northern Territory News, 7 January 1989, 7.
9 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, 182.
10 Wilson, Bringing Them Home.
11 See Lisa Kearns, ‘‘Armbands Sell Like Hot Cakes,’’ The Age Melbourne Online,
21 November 1997 (www.theage.com.au).
12 Silverman, ‘‘White Skin, Brown Masks,’’ 3.
13 Freud, ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia.’’
14 I mean ‘‘meconnaissance’’ in the technical Lacanian sense in which ‘‘misrecognition
is not ignorance. Misrecognition represents a certain organization of affirmations
and negations, to which the subject is attached. Hence it cannot be conceived with-
out correlative knowledge. If the subject is capable of misrecognising something,
he surely must know what this function has operated upon. There must surely be,
behind his misrecognition, a kind of knowledge of what there is to misrecognise’’
(Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1, Freud’s Papers on Technique,
1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forester [New York: W. W. Norton,
1988], 167).
15 Morris, Too Soon, Too Late.
16 State policy on indigenous affairs is generally considered to have moved through
four broad phases: genocide, assimilation, self-determination, and most recently,
reconciliation.

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 Notes to Chapter One

17 Debra Jopson, ‘‘Unemployment Rate Set to Soar for Aborigines,’’ The Age, 24 Au-
gust 1998, 7.
18 Matt Price, ‘‘Lightfoot on Black Policy Committee,’’ The Australian, 11 June 1997, 4.
19 Kim Beazley, ‘‘Address to the Nation by the Leader of the Opposition Kim Beazley,’’
The Age Melbourne Online, 2 December 1997 (www.theage.com.au).
20 ‘‘The former Liberal Prime Minister Mr. Malcolm Fraser yesterday added his voice
to community pressure on the Federal Government over its handling of the Wik
debate with a warning that a reputation of trying to build a fair and just society
was at risk’’ (Claire Miller, ‘‘Just Society at Risk, Says Fraser,’’ The Age Melbourne
Online, 26 November 1997 (www.theage.com.au).
21 Beazley, ‘‘Address to the Nation.’’
22 Ibid.
23 Among numerous reports, see Michael Millet, ‘‘Race Row: Tourists Cancel Trips,’’
Sydney Morning Herald, 1 November 1996, sec. A, p. 1; and Peter Switzer, ‘‘Hanson-
ism Feeds on Economy’s Failings,’’ The Weekend Australian, 21–22 June 1997, 54.
24 Ronald Wilson, ‘‘Sir Ronald Wilson Address in Canberra,’’ For a Change Magazine,
Online, February/March, 1998. (www.forachange.co.uk)
25 Taylor, ‘‘The Politics of Recognition.’’
26 As part of National Sorry Day, Australians were urged to write their thoughts in
Sorry Day Books.
27 David Nason, ‘‘Critics Split on Hanson Tactic,’’ The Weekend Australian, 25–26 July
1998, 6.
28 For reports in the northern papers, see Bob Watt, ‘‘Flogging a Custom, Court Told,’’
Northern Territory News, 28 July 1992, 3; Bob Watt, ‘‘Flogging Outside the Law,’’
Northern Territory News, 6 August 1992, 3; The Lone Ranger, ‘‘Death Laws in Cul-
ture,’’ Northern Territory News, 8 July 1996, 11; Bob Watt, ‘‘Wife Killer Says He Was
Cursed,’’ Northern Territory News, 18 June 1999, 5; Bob Watt, ‘‘Nine Years Jail after
Brutal Wife Killing,’’ Northern Territory News, 19 June 1999, 3; and ‘‘Missionary
Weds Girls to Save Them,’’ Northern Territory News, 1 September 1999, 18.
29 Stephanie Peatling, ‘‘PM calls Hanson ‘Sinister’ on Black Vote,’’ Sydney Morning
Herald, 16 July 1998, 5. See also Georgina Windsor, Matthew Abraham, and Maria
Ceresa, ‘‘PM Attacks ‘Abhorrent’ Hanson View,’’ The Australian, 16 July 1998, 4.
30 Peatling, ‘‘PM Calls Hanson ‘Sinister’ on Black Vote,’’ 5.
31 Liberal Prime Minister John Howard described Hanson’s remarks as ‘‘sinister’’
(Peatling, ‘‘PM Calls Hanson ‘Sinister’ on Black Vote’’). Victorian Premier Jeff
Kennett described her remarks as ‘‘abhorrent, undemocratic, ignorant and inaccu-
rate’’ after a memorial lecture in London in honor of former Liberal Prime Minister
Sir Robert Menzies. See ‘‘Crush Hanson Peril: Kennett,’’ The Australian, 16 July
1998, 1. Other Liberal Party leaders were quoted making similar comments. Lib-
eral Senator Ross Lightfoot claimed, ‘‘Aboriginal people in their native state are the
lowest colour on the civilisation spectrum’’ (Matt Price, ‘‘Lightfoot on Black Policy
Committee,’’ The Australian, 11 June 1997, 4).
32 The referendum also removed a section of the Constitution that excluded Aborigi-
nes from population counts used to determine the number of seats in parliament.

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 Notes to Chapter One

33 The first land rights statute was passed in 1966 in South Australia as the Aborigi-
nal Land Trusts Act, 1966 (SA). Since then there has been a series of statutes, in-
cluding Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act, 1981 (SA); Maralinga Tjarutja Land Rights
Act, 1984 (SA); Aboriginal Land Rights Act, 1983 (NSW); Local Government (Ab-
original Lands) Act, 1978 (Qld); Land Act (Aboriginal and Islander Land Grants)
Amendent Act, 1982 (Qld).
34 See Andrew Harvey, ‘‘Land for Rail: Please Explain,’’ Sunday Territorian, 26 July
1998, 15.
35 See Wayne Howell, ‘‘One Nation Defines Aboriginal Identity,’’ Northern Territory
News, 27 July 1998, 2.
36 Patrick Walters and Michael Gordon, ‘‘We’re a Culture Apart, PM Tells Asia,’’ The
Australian, 18 September 1996, sec. A, p. 1. See also Ben Holgate, ‘‘Cringing Under
a Culture Defined,’’ The Australian, 27 August 1998, 14.
37 See Michael Bachelard, ‘‘First Shots in the Race-Based Election We Had to Have,’’
The Australian, 20 July 1998, 13.
38 Benjamin Lee, ‘‘Textuality, Mediation, and Public Discourse,’’ in Habermas and the
Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993), 414–5.
39 See, for instance, Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship.
40 Jacques Lacan, ‘‘Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,’’
Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 146–78.
41 ‘‘At the Third National Welfare Conference held in 1951 the newly appointed federal
Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, vigorously propounded the benefits to Ab-
original people of assimilation and urged greater consistency in practice between
all states and the Northern Territory,’’ (Wilson, Bringing Them Home). See also
Geoffrey Partington, Hasluck versus Coombs: White Politics and Australia’s Aborigi-
nes (Sydney: Quakers Hill Press, 1996).
42 Art of the Hunter: A Film on the Australian Aborigines, John Endean, producer,
with the assistance of A. P. Elkin, circa 1950, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
archives, Canberra.
43 See Andrew Hornery, ‘‘Corporate Dreamtime Collides with Reality,’’ Sydney Morn-
ing Herald, 20 March 2000, 1. The abc ran an exposé on Aboriginal art in its
national news magazine, Four Corners, on 31 May 1999. For general discussion, see
J. C. Altman, Aborigines, Tourism, and Development: The Northern Territory Ex-
perience (Darwin: North Australian Research Unit, 1988); Jennifer Craik, Resorting
to Tourism: Cultural Policies for Tourism Development in Australia (Sydney: Allen
and Unwin, 1991); Jacobs and Gale, eds., Tourism and the Protection of Aboriginal
Cultural Sites; Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art; and Fred Myers, ‘‘Uncertain Regard:
An Exhibition of Aboriginal Art in France,’’ Ethnos 63.1 (1998): 7–47.
44 Peter Garrett, Diesel and Dust, Columbia Records, New York, 1988.
45 Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976 (Canberra: Government
Printer, 30 April 1992).
46 See Wendy Brown, ‘‘Wounded Attachments,’’ in States of Injury, Power, and Free-
dom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 52–76.

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 Notes to Chapter Two

47 See Lisa Clausen, ‘‘The Cruelty of Kindness,’’ Time (Australian edition) 9 June
1997, 46.
48 Laura Tingle, ‘‘Keating Attacks Wik Plan as Racist,’’ The Age Melbourne Online,
12 November 1997 (www.theage.com.au).
49 Clausen, ‘‘The Cruelty of Kindness,’’ 46.
50 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland (1996), 176, 136.
51 Freud, ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia.’’
52 See Debra Jopson, ‘‘One Nation or 301 Nations?’’ Sydney Morning Herald, 9 August
1997, 15.
53 Peter Sloterdjik, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1983); and Slavoj Žižek, ‘‘How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?’’ in The
Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1992), 11–53, esp. 28–33.
54 Roman Jakobson, with Krystyna Pomorska, ‘‘The Concept of the Mark,’’ in On
Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1990); Roman Jakobson, ‘‘Mark and Feature,’’ in Selected
Writings VII (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 332–35; and Edna Andrews, Markedness
Theory: The Union of Asymmetry and Semiosis in Language (Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1990).
55 See Genny O’Loughlin, ‘‘Topsy Secretary—Last of the Larrakia,’’ Northern Territory
News, 10 December 1989, 16.
56 Linda Pearson, ‘‘Aboriginal Land Rights Legislation in New South Wales,’’ Environ-
mental and Planning Law Journal 10.6 (1993): 398–422, esp. 399, 400.
57 M. M. Bakhtin, ‘‘The Problem of Speech Genre,’’ in Speech Genres and Other Late
Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 68.
58 For one such visit, see the discussion of the American ballet star Ted Shawn’s visit
to Belyuen in 1947 in John K. Ewers, ‘‘Aboriginal Ballet,’’ Walkabout 1 December
1947, 29–34.
59 Alan Dearling with Brendan Hanley, Alternative Australia: Celebrating Cultural Di-
versity (Freecyb Publications, 2000).
60 For a fuller discussion of these cases, see Povinelli, ‘‘Consuming Geist.’’

2 / THE VULVA THIEVES (ATNA NYLKNA): MODAL ETHICS

AND THE COLONIAL ARCHIVE

1 Michael Taussig, ‘‘Maleficium: State Fetishism,’’ in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse,

ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 231.
2 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1978; New York: Vin-
tage, 1990), 152.
3 Louis Althusser, ‘‘From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,’’ in Reading Capital, ed. Louis
Althusser and Etienne Balibar (1968; London: Verso, 1997), 11–69.
4 Richard Rorty, ‘‘Habermas, Derrida, and the Function of Philosophy,’’ in Truth
and Progress, Philosophical Papers (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 309.

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 Notes to Chapter Two

5 For an account of Spencer and Gillen’s meeting, ethnographic research trips, and
impact on the social sciences, see D. J. Mulvaney, ‘‘ ‘A Splendid Lot of Fellows’ ’’:
Achievements and Consequences of the Horn Expedition,’’ in Exploring Central
Australia: Society, the Environment, and the 1894 Horn Expedition, ed. S. R. Morton
and D. J. Mulvaney (Chipping Norton, NSW: Surrey Beatty and Sons, 1996), 3–12;
D. J. Mulvaney, ‘‘F. J. Gillen’s Life and Times,’’ in ‘‘My Dear Spencer’’: The Letters
of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, ed. D. J. Mulvaney, Howard Morphy, and Alison
Petch (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997), 1–22; Howard Morphy, ‘‘Gillen—Man of
Science,’’ in ‘‘My Dear Spencer’’: The Letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer, ed.
John Mulvaney, Howard Morphy, and Alison Petch (Melbourne: Hyland House,
1997), 23–50; R. R. Marett and J. K. Penniman, eds., Spencer’s Scientific Correspon-
dence with Sir J. G. Frazier and Others (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932); S. R. Moron
and D. J. Mulvaney, eds., Exploring Central Australia: Society, the Environment, and
the 1894 Horn Expedition (Chipping Norton, NSW: Surrey Beatty and Sons, 1996);
and D. J. Mulvaney and J. H. Calaby, ‘‘So Much that Is New’’: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–
1929: A Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1985).
6 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 152, 160, 178, 186, 213, 218, 222, 223, 260, 267, 280.
7 Baldwin Spencer, The Arunta: A Study of a Stone Age People, vol. 1 (London: Mac-
Millan and Co., 1927), ix; Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, Northern Tribes of
Central Australia (London: Macmillan, 1904), 8, 17, 46.
8 Fison, ‘‘Kamilaroi Marriage, Descent, and Relationship,’’ 29.
9 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 257, 253, 249, 186, 177, 172, 167.
10 Spencer, The Arunta, ix.
11 George Stocking Jr., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1881–1951 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 94–98.
12 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 130.
13 Robert Sharwood, Debates of the Australasian Federation Conference, 56. See also
Luke Trainor, British Imperialism and Australian Nationalism: Manipulation, Con-
flict and Compromise in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
14 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields
(New York: The Free Press, 1995), 2.
15 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 203, 218, 221, 222.
16 Ibid., 260.
17 Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia (New York:
Macmillan, 1899), 97.
18 Ibid., 46.
19 George Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 249–
54.

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 Notes to Chapter Two

20 Stocking notes that on account of his radical sexual politics, Richard Burton, then
head of the Anthropological Society of London, ‘‘risked prosecution to publish
works his wife and most of his contemporaries took for pornographic,’’ in Stocking,
Victorian Anthropology, 253.
21 Walter Roth, Ethnological Studies among the North-West-Central Queensland Ab-
origines (Brisbane: Edmund Gregory, Government Printer, 1897).
22 Herbert Basedow, ‘‘Subincision and Kindred Rites of the Australian Aboriginal,’’
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 57 (1927): 123–56.
23 Paola Mantegazza, Anthropological Studies of Sexual Relations of Mankind (New
York: Falstaff Press, 1932).
24 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest (London: Routledge, 1995); Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The
Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1989).
25 M. F. Ashley-Montague, Coming into Being among the Australian Aborigines: A
Study of Procreative Beliefs of the Native Tribes of Australia (London: George Rout-
ledge and Sons, 1937), 49.
26 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 201, 340.
27 Ibid., 207.
28 Jakobson, ‘‘Mark and Feature,’’ 332–35; Jakobson, ‘‘The Concept of the Mark,’’ 134–
40.
29 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 97.
30 Ibid.
31 Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, 137.
32 Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘‘Kinship,’’ Man 30.17 (1930): 19–29.
33 Bronislaw Malinowski, The Family among the Australian Aborigines (New York:
Schocken, 1913), 90.
34 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 98.
35 Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, xiv.
36 Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (1864; Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1986), 115–16.
37 For example, Alain Testart has used the works of Spencer and Gillen to reexam-
ine the relationship between Arrente ritual body techniques and sexual difference.
Testart argues that men defeat women by becoming them. Testart does not mean
to imply by this that a real sexual transubstantion has transpired—but merely, if
very affectively, a metaphorical metamorphosis. (Testart, De la necessite d’etre initie
[Nanterre: Societe d’ethnologie, 1992], 133, 206).
38 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1.
39 ‘‘In the matter of their morality their code differs radically from ours, but it cannot
be denied that their conduct is governed by it, and that any known breaches are
dealt with both surely and severely’’ (Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central
Australia, 47). Compare Lyotard’s discussion of the lessons of the sublime: ‘‘Be-
cause it is a reflective judgment, the Idea of the absolute is only ‘present’ and this

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 Notes to Chapter Two

presence is that of the ‘soul-stirring delight’ that thinking feels on the occasion of
the object it judges sublime’’ (Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans.
Elizabeth Rottenberg [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991], 121).
40 See Richard Rorty, ‘‘On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz,’’ in Objectivity,
Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 207. See also Taylor, ‘‘The Politics of Recognition,’’ 25; and
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1987).
41 Fison, ‘‘Kamilaroi Marriage, Descent, and Relationship,’’ 59–60.
42 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer’’ for confession, 168; anxiety, 128, 130; excitement, 147, 192, 157;
and animated puzzlement, 166, 179, 232.
43 Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 25 October 1884.
44 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity
Baker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950); and The Savage Mind (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1966), 245–69.
45 Donald Davidson, ‘‘Radical Interpretation (1973),’’ in Inquiries into Truth and In-
terpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 137, my emphasis.
46 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy and Petch, ‘‘My
Dear Spencer,’’ 353.
47 Stocking, After Tylor, 92.
48 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 245, 193, 165, 162, 119, 99, 96, 97: ‘‘My Christ, all same Engwura
fire today,’’ 245; ‘‘Too sorry,’’ 193; ‘‘Me askum longa Brian,’’ 165; ‘‘Say professa Jack,
not Fessa,’’ and ‘‘Fessa gone Chappie-Akurna Chappie,’’ 162; ‘‘My fader, ze lord
Zheesas, dwells in my bosom,’’ 119; ‘‘Him all same wild dog, him cant a knowem
what name father longa piccaninny,’’ 99; ‘‘Pirunngaru blackfellow all same while
fellow, him catcham any lubra,’’ 99; ‘‘By & bye plenty maken Piraunngaru,’’ 99;
‘‘That one very good him makeum walk straight,’’ 96; ‘‘All the same wild dog, him
catchem him sister, jump longa me fellow mother,’’ 97.
49 Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984).
50 To put this in another way: a subtending indexical non-sense form must be dis-
tinguished qualitatively and temporally from a secondary sense-meaning built up
from this form. See Michael Silverstein, ‘‘Metapragmatic Discourse and Metaprag-
matic Function,’’ in Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, ed.
John Lucy (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 280–84.
51 Here I use ‘‘conveyance’’ in the manner elaborated in Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Signature,
Event, Context,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), 307–30.
52 Take, for example, this passage from Gillen’s letter to Spencer written on 18 June
1897: ‘‘Two things baffle every attempt at Solution, 1st Why a man speaks to his
Ungaraitcha and not to his Quitia—and 2nd the Umbilyirakira ceremony of the
Enwura, the term Umbilyirakira has only one meaning, and that is a child fresh

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born, for the life of me I cannot get at the meaning of the Ceremony, but the men
who fell down and covered up the Churinga bundle before the women, are sup-
posed to be tumbling dow. [down,] that is they are dying—This thing has worried
me awfully and I have spent hours and hours trying to solve it’’ (Gillen to Spencer
in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 166).
53 See extracts from Gillen’s letters to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds.,
‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 232.
54 Rorty, ‘‘Habermas, Derrida, and the Function of Philosophy,’’ 309.
55 Stocking, After Tylor, 91.
56 Gillen to Spencer, 30 July 1897, in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear
Spencer,’’ 178.
57 Stocking, After Tylor, 89, 91.
58 Gillen to Spencer in Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 343.
59 In 1883, a severe drought intensified by the polluting effects of free-range cattle led
to a series of conflicts between blacks and whites, which culminated in a massacre
widely reported in northern and southern papers.
60 Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 119.
61 Ibid., 109.
62 Stocking, After Tylor, 90–91. See also Mulvaney and Calaby, ‘‘So Much that Is New.’’
63 Stocking, After Tylor, 9; Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’
106, 108, 109, 122, 128, 130, 159, 166, 179, 186, 192, 232.
64 Derrida has discussed the double-event structure of this liberal deferral in Jacques
Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994).
65 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 33;
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3–4.
66 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 65, 62, 64.
67 Perhaps the totemic dilemma was most famously if not most brilliantly discussed
by Lévi-Strauss in his Totemism. At the end of his revolutionary treatment of the
subject he argued that totemic systems should be considered ‘‘religious ideas’’ and
thus ‘‘accorded the same value as any other conceptual system,’’ namely, their value
as providing ‘‘access to the mechanism of thought’’ and ‘‘to the understanding.’’
For Lévi-Strauss, totemic systems like those of the Arrente demonstrated defini-
tively that ‘‘the demands to which it responds and the way in which it tries to meet
them are primarily of an intellectual kind.’’ Lévi-Strauss admits ‘‘sentiments are
also involved’’ but these sentiments function ‘‘in a subsidiary fashion, as responses
of a body of ideas to gaps and lesions which it can never succeed in closing’’ (Lévi-
Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham [Boston: Beacon Press, 1963], 104).
68 Nancy Munn noted a similar point in her seminal paper ‘‘The Transformation of
Subjects into Objects in Warlpiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth,’’ in Australian Aborigi-
nal Anthropology, ed. Ronald Berndt (Perth: University of Western Australia Press,
1970), 141–63.
69 Spencer, The Arunta, 345.

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 Notes to Chapter Three

70 Australian Parliamentary Hansard, House of Representatives, 4 June 1976, p. 3082.

71 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 172, 175.
72 Ibid., 326.
73 Ibid., 269, 459–60.
74 Ibid., 216, 464–65, 772–74.
75 Spencer, The Arunta, 115–16.
76 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 172.
77 Ibid., 179.
78 Ibid., 268.
79 T. G. H. Strehlow, Aranda Phonetics and Grammar (Sydney: Australian National
Research Council, 1944), 59.
80 Ibid., 59, my emphasis.
81 David Wilkins, Mpartne Arrente (Aranda): Studies in the Structure and Seman-
tics of Grammar, Unpublished PhD Thesis, Australian National University, Can-
berra, 1989.
82 See, for instance, T. G. H. Strehlow, Aranda Traditions (Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 1947), 14–18, 86–95.
83 In other words, we can ask about the ‘‘footing’’ of the utterances of the grounds. See
Gregg Urban, ‘‘The ‘I’ of Discourse,’’ in Semiotics, Self, and Society, ed. Ben Lee and
Greg Urban (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989), 27–51; Alan Rumsey, ‘‘Agency, Per-
sonhood, and the ‘I’ of Discourse in the Pacific and Beyond,’’ Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 6 (2000): 99–113.
84 William Hanks, Language and Communicative Practices (Boulder: Westview Press,
1996), 86.
85 Testart, De la necessite d’etre initie, 205.
86 Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 103.
87 Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, xiv.

3 / SEX RITES, CIVIL RIGHTS

1 Australian Archives CRS F1 Item 36/592, 11 June 1936.

2 Ibid., 12 June 1936.
3 Letter from C. A. Carrodus, Secretary, Department of the Interior, to the Ad-
ministrator of the Northern Territory. Australian Archives CRS F1 Item 36/592,
18 June 1936.
4 Memorandum sent to the Administrator in Darwin. Australian Archives CRS F1
Item 36/592, 10 February 1936. See also the Administrator’s response, Australian
Archives CRS F1 Item 36/592, 12 June 1936.
5 E. W. P. Chinnery, Director of Native Affairs to C. A. Carrodus, the Government
Secretary. Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/32, 16 August 1939.
6 See Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), esp. 52. See
also Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Critique of Violence,’’ in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986),

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 Notes to Chapter Three

277–300; and Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Au-
thority,’’ Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 919–1045.
7 Patrick Wolfe, ‘‘Nation and MiscegeNation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-
Mabo Era,’’ Social Analysis 34 (1994): 93–152; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘Reading Rup-
tures, Rupturing Readings: Mabo and the Cultural Politics of Activism,’’ Social
Analysis 41.2 (1997): 20–28.
8 Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1998), 66.
9 Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights, 81–82.
10 Ibid., 88–92.
11 Powell, Far Country, 161.
12 Wilson, Bringing Them Home. See also Austin, ‘‘I Can Picture the Old Home so
Clearly.’’
13 Powell, Far Country, 161.
14 Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights, 92.
15 Ibid., 93.
16 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London:
Cassell, 1999).
17 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Peril in Racial Crossing,’’ Sydney Morning Herald, 18 June 1933, in
MS 3752, Box 1, Item 4, W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material, Australian Institute
for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, Canberra. See also the Crown Law Offi-
cer E. T. Asche’s memo to the Administrator of Darwin, ‘‘Aboriginals Ordinance
1918–1937, Section 3—Interpretation of Definition of ‘Half-Caste.’ ’’ Australian Ar-
chives CRS F1 Item 37/734, 23 November 1937.
18 See Gillian Cowlishaw, ‘‘Colour, Culture, and the Aborigines,’’ Man 22 (1987): 221–
37.
19 Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights, 138; Geoffrey Gray, ‘‘From
Nomadism to Citizenship: AP Elkin and Aboriginal Advancement,’’ in Citizen-
ship and Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities, ed. Nicolas
Peterson and Will Sanders (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
55–78, 55.
20 Gray, ‘‘From Nomadism to Citizenship,’’ 56; J. McEwen, Commonwealth Govern-
ment’s Policy with Respect to Aborigines (Canberra: Commonwealth Government
Printer, 1939).
21 See C. K. Thomas, ‘‘From ‘Australian Aborigines’ to ‘White Australians’: Elkin,
Hasluck, and the Origins of Assimilation,’’ M.A. thesis, Monash University, 1994.
22 A. P. Elkin, Citizenship for the Aborigines: A National Aboriginal Policy (Sydney:
Australasian Publishing, 1944), 12–13.
23 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘The ‘Vanishing’ Indian,’’ 11 March 1946, 2FC 9:05 p.m., script
approved by Federal Talk Dept. MS 3752, Box 3, Item 80, W. E. H. Stanner Unpub-
lished Material.
24 W. Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (1937;
Glouster, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1969, 10. See also lectures by W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Moral

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 Notes to Chapter Three

Man and Immoral Society: Primitive vs Modern Morality,’’ 6 May 1940, MS 3752,
Box 3, Item 60, W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material.
25 Although Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown would engage in a bitter public struggle
over the anthropological meaning of the ‘‘functionalist’’ approach to society, they
and Elkin shared a general understanding of primitive societies as delicately bal-
anced organisms based on local systems of heterosexual reproduction. Thus it is
not surprising that in his highly influential A Black Civilization (1937), dedicated to
Radcliffe-Brown, Warner discovered that ‘‘the whole of the social organization [of
Murngin] is built on the pattern of kinship. The kinship system is the fundamental
form into which the rest of the social organization has been integrated’’ (7).
26 A. P. Elkin, ‘‘Anthropology and the Australian Aboriginal,’’ in White and Black in
Australia, ed. J. S. Needham (London: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowl-
edge, 1935), 32.
27 From A. P. Elkin, ‘‘Anthropology and the Australian Aboriginal.’’ 32.
28 ‘‘Any people whose history, tradition and beliefs are different from our own, is al-
most sure to have customs that seem strange and puzzling to us. We may even feel
that these customs are not so good as ours, that they are degrading and should be
abolished, but before we pass such opinions or act on them, we must first under-
stand what those customs are, the traditions and beliefs on which they are based,
the meaning which they possess for the individuals who practice them, and the so-
cial function which they perform. But while such an understanding undoubtedly
makes another people’s customs less puzzling to us, it does not necessarily com-
mend them all, and we may still feel constrained to use our influence or authority
to have some of them abolished or modified. Here again an understanding of those
customs is essential so that we may know what we are doing when working for their
abolition or modification’’ (Elkin, The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand
Them [London: Angus and Robertson, 1938], 108).
29 From Elkin, ‘‘Anthropology and the Australian Aboriginal,’’ 32, my emphasis.
30 W. E. H. Stanner quoting ‘‘the amiable Mr. Dredge,’’ the early-nineteenth-century
protector who so described his wards (W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Religion, Totemism, and
Symbolism,’’ in Aboriginal Man in Australia: Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor
A. P. Elkin, ed. R. M. Berndt and Catherine Berndt [London: Angus and Robertson,
1965], 235).
31 Other anthropologists, such as W. E. H. Stanner, gave lectures to and corresponded
with missionary groups. See ‘‘Fieldnotes Catholic Mission Docherty,’’ MS 3752, Box
6, Item 143, W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material.
32 Andrew P. Lyons and Harriet Lyons, ‘‘Savage Sexuality and Secular Morality,’’
Canadian Journal of Anthropology 5.1 (fall 1986): 51–64.
33 R. M. Berndt and Catherine Berndt, ‘‘A. P. Elkin—The Man and the Anthropolo-
gist,’’ in Aboriginal Man in Australia: Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor A. P.
Elkin, ed. R. M. Berndt and Catherine Berndt (London: Angus and Robertson,
1965), 18.
34 Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, 123, 127.
35 Ibid., 109.

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 Notes to Chapter Three

36 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘‘Social Sanctions,’’ in Structure and Function in Primitive

Society (1933; New York: The Free Press, 1952), 205–11.
37 See, for example, ‘‘ ‘Too Many Missionaries and Too Few Policemen,’ Minister Says
Inexperienced Clergy Have Made Blacks Idle and Restive,’’ Northern Standard,
1 February 1929; ‘‘Loafing Blacks, Ogden Blames Missions,’’ Northern Standard,
19 February 1929; ‘‘Leave the Abo Alone,’’ Northern Territory Times, 28 October
1930. In an address to the Anglican Men’s movements, W. E. H. Stanner began with
a Sydney Morning Herald allegation that Christianity ‘‘ruins’’ a native people, and
then explored the specific good and bad of Christian missionary work in Aborigi-
nal Australia. Stanner includes the ‘‘unconcealed contempt of many missionaries
for what they call ‘pagan’ culture, that is for the native way of life and social orga-
nization, even in non-religious fields.’’ W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material,
19 February 1953. MS 3752, Box 6, Item 143.
38 ‘‘The Aboriginal of the North,’’ Northern Territory Times, 1 August 1930. See also
‘‘Aborigines Praised,’’ Northern Territory Times (reprinted from the Brisbane Daily
Mail ), 10 February 1931.
39 The Law Reform Commission, The Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws,
Vol. 1, report no. 31 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1986).
40 Aboriginal Friend’s Association, Seventy Fifth Annual Report, 1933, cited in The Law
Reform Commission, The Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws, also cited by
Elkin, Citizenship for the Aborigines. For a more comprehensive comparative ac-
count of the Western Australian system, see Kathryn Helen Autry, ‘‘Silence(s) and
Resistant (Dis)quiet in the Shadow of the Legal System, Race-ing Jurisprudence in
Western Australia by Reference to the Courts of Native Affairs (1936–1954),’’ Ph.D.
diss., La Trobe University, 1999.
41 Joe Croft, ‘‘The Old People and Their Tribal Affairs,’’ Northern Territory Times,
16 May 1930.
42 W. H. Davies, ‘‘The Old People and Their Tribal Affairs,’’ Northern Territory Times,
20 May 1930.
43 See also Australian Archive CRS F3 Item 20/32, 16 August 1939. This system was
modeled and named after the colonial administration of Sir Hubert Murray, lieu-
tenant governor of Papua. The traffic in ideas, methods, and persons was espe-
cially thick between the Northern Territory and the British mandates of Papua
New Guinea and Canberra; between the Australian and British ethnological com-
munities; and between the Daly River, Darwin, and Canberra. Chinnery was a
trained anthropologist in his own right, lecturing in Australia, the United States,
and Britain. It was his scholarly reputation as an anthropologist that earned Chin-
nery an invitation to accompany the minister of the interior on an advisory tour
of the Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory in 1938 and his appoint-
ment as first director of native affairs in the Northern Territory. And, it was as the
gatekeepers of professional anthropology in the Northern and British mandated
territories, that Chinnery, Carrodus, Murray, and other government administra-
tors supported and blocked, at varying times, the research projects of anthropolo-
gists who would be directly or indirectly linked to this case, including Malinowski,

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Radcliffe-Brown, Elkin, Stanner, and their students. Although Murray encouraged

the protection of native customs within the framework of controlled economic de-
velopment, he became alarmed hearing that, at a meeting in 1930 of the Australian
and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, Radcliffe-Brown
not only outlined the social integrative function of native customs but also ques-
tioned the right of the British Empire to interfere in the ‘‘destinies’’ of the peoples
of India and Africa. Chinnery was influential in Radcliffe-Brown’s appointment as
the first chair of anthropology at the University of Sydney in 1926. He would later
oversee Radcliffe-Brown’s graduate research appointments in the territories as he
would the appointment recommendations of the second chair of anthropology,
A. P. Elkin. Both Radcliffe-Brown and Elkin produced influential chapters from
extended research trips in the general region of the Daly River (Radcliffe-Brown
in particular on social organization of Aboriginal tribes based on work among the
Murinpatha) and would formally and informally advise government administra-
tors like Weddell and Chinnery in native affairs. For an account of Elkin’s career,
see T. Wise, The Self-Made Anthropologist (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1985). For an
account of the Murray System and the dense administrative and academic traffic
between Papua New Guinea and Australia, see Andrew Markus, Governing Savages
(Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990); Geoffrey Gray, ‘‘ ‘I Was Not Consulted’: A. P.
Elkin, Papua New Guinea, and the Politics of Anthropology,’’ The Australian Jour-
nal of Politics and History 40.2 (1994): 195–221; and J. D. Legge, ‘‘The Murray Period:
Papua 1906–1940,’’ in Australia and Papua New Guinea, ed. W. J. Hudson (Sydney:
Sydney University Press, 1971), 32–56.
44 W. E. P. Chinnery, Director of Native Affairs, to Government Secretary C.A. Carro-
dus. Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/32, 16 August 1939. See also David Car-
ment, Robyn Maynard, and Alan Powell, eds., Northern Territory Dictionary of
Biography, Volume One: to 1945 (Darwin: Northern Territory University Press,
1990), 56–57.
45 Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages (Boston: Beacon Press, 1929),
371. See also J. W. Bleakley, The Aborigines and Half Castes of Central Australia and
North Australia: Report by J. W. Bleakley, Chief Protector of Aborigines, Common-
wealth of Australia, Parliamentary Paper 21. Australian Government Publishing
Service, Canberra, 1929. See also ‘‘Lower than the Abo,’’ Northern Territory Times,
13 March 1931: ‘‘It is a wonder that the abos did not drown themselves rather
than come into contact with some of the whites that disgraced Australia’s name in
earlier years.’’
46 ‘‘The Aborigines, Special State Proposed, Report to Federal Government,’’ North-
ern Territory Times, 5 April 1929.
47 ‘‘Among Our Books: Review of ER Gribble, The Problem of the Australian Aborigi-
nal,’’ Northern Territory Times, 13 March 1931.
48 Geoffrey Gray, ‘‘Piddington’s Indiscretion: Ralph Piddington, the Australian
National Research Council, and Academic Freedom,’’ Oceania 64.3 (1994): 219.
49 N. Green, The Forrest River Massacres (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Press, 1995);
Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1987).

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50 J. A. Carrodus, Secretary Department of the Interior, to Administrator of the

Northern Territory. Australian Archives CRS F1, Item 36/592, 8 March 1940.
51 See Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen
and Unwin, 1987); Pamela Lyon and Michael Parsons, We Are Staying: The Alya-
warre Struggle for Land at Lake Nash (Alice Springs: Institute for Aboriginal Devel-
opment Press, 1989); and Deborah Bird Rose, Hidden Histories: Black Stories from
Victoria River Downs, Humbert River, and Wave Hill Stations (Canberra: Aboriginal
Studies Press, 1991).
52 Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory, 1937–38, p. 22, quoted in
J. P. M. Long, Aboriginal Settlements: A Survey of Institutional Communities in East-
ern Australia (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970), 1999.
53 This laissez-faire approach made economic sense, as Pamela Lyon and Michael Par-
sons have noted, in the large pastoral industry of Northern Territory. Attempts to
alter it sparked protests in the Northern Territory. In 1934, J. A. Carrodus, then
secretary of the Department of Home and Territories, relieved Weddell for a short
period after Weddell had been assaulted after a series of labor agitation—including
a communist takeover of the government (Lyon and Parsons, We Are Staying, 19).
See also Carment, Maynard, and Powell, Northern Territory Dictionary of Biogra-
phy, 311–12; and Powell, Far Country, esp. 169–73.
54 ‘‘A Plea for the Abo,’’ Northern Territory Times, 30 December 1930.
55 Rev. Stanley Jarvis is reported to have told the Methodist Conference Foreign Mis-
sion that ‘‘our aborigines are a national asset’’ and called for the establishment of
native courts. Rev. Stanley Jarvis, ‘‘Aboriginal Welfare, Methodist Minister’s Plea,’’
Northern Territory Times, 27 March 1931.
56 Newspapers announced anthropologists’ imminent arrival, such as the Northern
Territory Times did for W. E. H. Stanner (‘‘Anthropologist Arrives,’’ Northern Ter-
ritory Times, 19 April 1932).
57 ‘‘Quite possibly, the average bushman does not look upon the black with the eyes
of romance, and is just as well pleased at his gradual extinction, but his habits,
and beliefs have great value to the ethnologist, and it is advisable, therefore, to re-
port, whenever possible, any outstanding items of interest’’ (‘‘The Territory Abo,’’
Northern Territory Times, 8 January 1931).
58 The film concludes: ‘‘The rock and bark painting of the Australian Aborigines,
together with the songs and corroborees, the myths and legends, represent many
centuries of artistic and spiritual development. Unless their ancient way of life is ac-
cepted and encouraged to continue within the white society, this cultural heritage
may be lost as the future generations become detribalized. The art of the hunter
has been an artistic and social contribution to the history of mankind’’ (Art of the
Hunter: A Film of the Australian Aborigines, John Endean, producer; Les Tanner,
commentator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Archives, Canberra).
59 William Hatfield, ‘‘Serial: ‘Smoke Signals from the Never-Never,’ ’’ Northern Terri-
tory Times, 4 March 1932.
60 ‘‘Editorial,’’ Northern Territory Times, 1 August 1930.
61 An editorial in the Northern Territory Times reported, for instance, that ‘‘blacks

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appreciate justice and fair-dealing’’; that ‘‘the most fatal mistake that can be made
in dealing with blacks is to laugh at their secret superstitions and beliefs’’; and
that ‘‘the old men are the repositories of the ceremonial lore of the tribes; which
would rapidly disintegrate did the old men not keep hold of their reins’’ (Northern
Territory Times, 1 August 1930). For an opposing portrait in which a settler’s mur-
der is blamed on ‘‘a sudden blood lust on the part of the aboriginals,’’ see ‘‘Daly
River Notes, Reported Murder,’’ Northern Territory Times, 10 November 1931; and
historically, ‘‘Daly River Outrages and Black Morality,’’ Northern Territory Times
and Gazette, 13 March 1886. These newspapers had a dense intertextual relation to
ethnological texts. See, for instance, Herbert Basedow, The Australian Aboriginal
(Adelaide: F. W. Preece and Sons, 1925), 227.
62 For ‘‘mass subject,’’ see Michael Warner, ‘‘The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,’’
in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1993), 377–401.
63 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981).
64 For an overview, see Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers, and Land
(Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987).
65 ‘‘The Killed Aborigines,’’ Northern Standard, 8 March 1929.
66 MS 3752, Box 7, Item 162(b), W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material.
67 A. V. Stretton, Superintendent of Police, to the Administrator of Darwin. Austra-
lian Archive CRS F3 Item 36/592, 30 June 1936. In an earlier letter Stretton argued
that it was ‘‘necessary [to] arrest natives in order that they may be interrogated by
chief protector who will decide whether [there should be a] court case’’ (Australian
Archives CRS F1 Item 36/592, 15 June 1936).
68 ‘‘It should be competent, however, for any such case to be investigated in the first
place by the nearest police officer and a report submitted for the consideration
of the Chief Protector of Aboriginals’’ (J. A. Carrodus to Weddell. Australian Ar-
chives, CRS F1 Item 36/592, 13 August 1936).
69 Ibid.
70 Australian Archives CRS F1, Item 36/592, 20 June 1936.
71 A. V. Stretton, Superintendent of Police to the Administrator in Darwin. Australian
Archives CRS F1 Item 36/592, 30 June 1936. See also later submission of Coroners
ordinance, Section 8. Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/32, 15 December 1937.
72 In 1829 the New South Wales Supreme Court advised the attorney-general that
it was unjust to apply English law to inter-Aboriginal killings, although in R v.
Jack Congo Murrell, 1836, the New South Wales Supreme Court ruled it had juris-
diction to try Aboriginal persons who committed crimes no matter whether the
crimes were committed within customary frame or not. This would become offi-
cial colonial policy, with the Colonial Office directing the governor of New South
Wales in 1837 (The Law Reform Commission, The Recognition of Aboriginal Cus-
tomary Laws).
73 Their roles were elaborated in the latter half of the nineteenth and in the early
twentieth centuries: 1867 in Victoria, 1886 in Western Australia, 1897 in Queens-

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land, 1909 in New South Wales, and 1910 in the Northern Territory. There were
multiple calls throughout the first thirty years of the Australian federation for the
establishment of native courts to hear criminal cases in which no settlers were in-
volved. As early as 1836 defense attorneys argued to no avail that Australian courts
did not have the jurisdiction to try Aboriginal subjects. R v. Murrell Legge, Supreme
Court of New South Wales 72 (1836). For a brief period, after an Aboriginal man
was sentenced to death for the murder of a white constable (Tuckiar v. The King,
1934), minor short-lived legal reforms were introduced that would have taken into
consideration Aboriginal customary law in cases in which no white person was in-
volved (Tuckiar v. the King, Commonwealth Law Review 52 [1934]: 335, in The Law
Reform Commission, The Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws).
74 Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/32, 28 July 1939.
75 W. B. Kirkland, Acting Chief Protector of Aboriginals, to R. H. Weddell, Admin-
istrator of the Northern Territory. Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 36/592, 10 July
1936. In early March 1940, on the advice of Carrodus, the secretary of the interior
modified his former directive: ‘‘In the future, the direction will only apply in the
case of relatively uncivilised natives who live more or less permanently in remote
areas, who are not under any form of permanent European control, assistance or
supervision, and who depend for internal stability on the free exercise of their
own native customs.’’ Who had authority to discern the tribal remained as it had
in 1936—the chief protector of Aboriginals in consultation with the police and
anthropological advisors (Australian Archive CRS F3 Item 20/32, 8 March 1940).
76 Silverstein, ‘‘Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function,’’ 280–84.
77 Gray, ‘‘From Nomadism to Citizenship.’’
78 Georg Simmel, ‘‘The Metropolis and Mental Life,’’ in On Mental Life and Social
Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324–39.
79 Northern Territory Medical Service File of Papers, Australian Archives CRS F3 Item
20/103, 6 September 1940.
80 Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/103, 7 August 1940.
81 The performance of Kunapipi drew together a number of neighboring groups, in-
cluding the Nangiomeri and Madngella (Australia Archives CRS F3, Item 20/103,
undated ca. 1940).
82 ‘‘The words Secret and Sunday ground are meant for what the Natives call sacred
ground, but pronounce it as I have written’’ (Australian Archives CRS F3 Item
20/103, 8 August 1940).
83 Gillen reports to Spencer that fire-sticks are used to burn the eyes of women and
uncut boys who have purposely or accidentally witnessed prohibited men’s cere-
monies (Mulvaney, Morphy, and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear Spencer,’’ 7).
84 Bill Harney was a supervisor of Aboriginal settlements and, later, a popular writer,
radio personality, and collaborator with the anthropologist A. P. Elkin. In this case
Harney wrote: ‘‘Contact with civilization tends to make the native women disobey
the laws and taboos of the tribe, and they would pass over or near these taboo spots
knowing they are protected by the law, or the white people of that part, and so the
natives seeing their greatest weapon for law and order (increase, regeneration and

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 Notes to Chapter Three

clearing up of tribal disputes) becoming useless by these women, become annoyed

and use force’’ (Northern Territory Medical Service File of Papers, Australian Ar-
chives CRS F3 Item 20/103, 6 September 1940).
85 Spencer, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory, esp. 214–18.
86 Warner, A Black Civilization, 224.
87 Ronald Berndt, Kunapipi (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1951); selections can be
found in the Human Relations Area Files, at the Human Relations Area Files, Inc.
New Haven, Connecticut. See also Ronald Berndt and Catherine Berndt, Sexual
Behavior in Western Arnhem Land (New York: Viking Fund Publication, 1951).
88 Berndt and Berndt, Sexual Behavior in Western Arnhem Land, 148.
89 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Religion, Totemism, and Symbolism,’’ 207–37, esp. 213, 219.
90 Ibid., 233–34.
91 ‘‘A host of stylized acts—the whole repertory of theatrical forms, the making and
use of fire, the drawing and pouring of human blood, spraying with water and
spittle. The use of semen and other exuviae, covering and revealing objects, lay-
ing on of hands, etc., etc.,—all to be seen performed within ritualized processes or
described in the associated myths. All may be classed as vehicles, or symbolising
means, of symbolising’’ (Stanner, ‘‘Religion, Totemism, and Symbolism,’’ 232–33).
92 MS 3752, Box 7, Item 158(c); See also ‘‘The Dreamings of Wali Wali,’’ MS 3752, Box
7, Item 162 (a), W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material. For a published critique
of the Freudian account, see W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘On Freud’s Totem and Taboo,’’
Canberra Anthropology 5.1 (1982): 1–7.
93 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Durmugam: A Nangimeri (1959),’’ in White Man Got No Dream-
ing: Essays 1938–1973 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), 67–
105.
94 Ibid., 82.
95 Ibid., 83. See also MS 3752, Box 19, Item 419, and Box 7, Item 158(c), W. E. H. Stanner
Unpublished Material.
96 Ronald Berndt, ‘‘Law and Order in Aboriginal Australia,’’ in Aboriginal Man in
Australia: Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor A. P. Elkin, ed. R. M. Berndt and
Catherine Berndt (London: Angus and Robertson, 1965), 167–206, esp. 191–92;
W. E. H. Stanner, ‘‘Ceremonial Economics of the Mulluk-mulluk and Madngella
Tribes of the Daly River, North Australia,’’ Oceania 4 (1933): 10–29, 156–75, 453–70.
97 Stanner, ‘‘Durmugam,’’ 84.
98 Stanner’s field notes make reference to the sexual economy, see ‘‘Wali Wali Manu-
script,’’ MS 3752, Box 7, Item 162, W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material. For a gen-
eral critical discussion, see Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police: The
Colonization of Women in Australia (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1975); Diane
Bell and Pam Ditton, Law, the Old and New: Aboriginal Women in Central Austra-
lian Speak Out (Canberra: Central Australian Legal Aid Service, 1980); and Diane
Kirby, Sex, Power, and Justice: Historical Perspectives of Law in Australia (Mel-
bourne: Oxford University Press, 1995).
99 Powell, Far Country, 188.
100 Nan Utarra, ‘‘The Black Bagnio,’’ Northern Standard, 18 January 1929.

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 Notes to Chapter Three

101 Turner to Director of Native Affairs, ‘‘Police Correspondence,’’ Northern Territory

Archives F77 Series, 28 March 1942.
102 C. D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Hammondsworth: Penguin,
1972); Markus, Governing Savages; Ted Egan, Justice All Their Own: The Caledon
Bay and Woodah Island Killings 1932–33 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,
1996).
103 Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/103, 7 August 1940. File includes confession
statements of Malakmalak men.
104 Ibid.
105 ‘‘This lubra Alice was formerly one of Ex-Tracker Bull-bulls lubras’’ (Australian Ar-
chives CRS F3 Item 20/103, 8 August 1940). In the police reports W. E. H. Stanner
collected Bull-bull and Litchfield natives in 1935, him taking other local men’s wives
(MS 3752, W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material).
106 Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/103, 8 August 1940.
107 Stanner, ‘‘Durmugam,’’ 72.
108 Australia Archives CRS F3 Item 20/103, 8 August 1940.
109 In an exchange with Weddell on 16 August 1935, Turner responds to a charge of
neglect of duty under the Public Service Ordinance of 1928–1934. Turner details
his duties and the rude dismissal of his ‘‘knowledge and . . . experience.’’ ‘‘It was
like if I had been instructed, ‘To go and sit down little boy, I am making all the
enquiries I want. I’ll show you what should have been done’ ’’ ‘‘Police Files,’’ MS
3752, W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material).
110 See, for instance, ‘‘The Territory Abo,’’ Northern Territory Times, 8 January 1931,
which describes recent issues of the Sydney Mail that contain ‘‘some rather wild and
woolly tales of the N.T. and its inhabitants’’ and call on ‘‘the real dinkum bushmen
from the outback’’ to tell the truth of ‘‘stone age abos.’’ See also ‘‘The Aboriginal
of the North,’’ Northern Territory Times, 1 August 1930; and ‘‘Unreliable Natives,’’
Northern Territory Times 19 February 1930.
111 Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 20/103, undated, unauthored (probably
W. Harney).
112 Ibid., 1 October 1940.
113 Ibid., 8 March 1940.
114 ‘‘Delissaville Diary Loose Leaves Jan 1st 1942 to End,’’ Australian Archives CRS F3
Item 1980/111.
115 Murray’s superintendent responds to a plea from Murray: ‘‘Your isolation at De-
lissaville is appreciated by myself but little can be done to help you other than to
get the car fixed to provide you with transport if required.’’ Northern Territory Ac-
cession 1980/111. See for example, Murray’s personal letter dated 19 July 1942 in
Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 52/570.
116 The Aboriginal Ordinance of 1918 had extended the chief protector’s control over
indigenous women. Under the ordinance, ‘‘Aboriginal females were under the total
control of the Chief Protector from the moment they were born until they died un-
less married and living with a husband ‘who was substantially of European origin’ ’’
(Wilson, Bringing Them Home, 133). The management of black women’s sexuality

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 Notes to Chapter Four

became a central part of a public debate. If Murray was reading the Northern Ter-
ritory Times as a younger man he might have read a report titled ‘‘Gins Get a Few
Strokes.’’ The article is about Oenpelli men and women, with which Wagaidj and
Laragiya had close ceremonial ties. It outlined for readers and administrators a
pedagogy of sexual discipline: ‘‘The following report is written by P. Cahill, Ab-
original Protector, Oenpelli, and published in the Administrator’s annual report:—
The station hands, and their families seem very contented, and all disputes are re-
ferred to me. Wife beating at the camps is almost a thing of the past. I have had
great trouble in preventing wife beating, and am now sure that the preventing of
this practice was the main cause of the Romula poisoning case. At first the whole
of the male natives were under the impression that their women were to be their
bosses, but a little explaining soon showed them their error. The mode is thus—
should a woman become sulky or jealous, the husband, instead of knocking her
down with a stick (and then having to fight her relations), brings his wife up before
me. Very often I can fix the matter at once. At other times I have to let the husband
take a piece of leather, and give her a few strokes. Very often the dispute is settled
on the way from the camp to the station. The men now see the matter in its proper
light, and often in the camp when a lubra is out for a fight, a voice will call out, ‘take
her up to the boss,’ and she is quiet at once. As a sequel to the above there has not
been one fight with clubs or spears this year. The women have a bit of scrap among
themselves now and again, but it soon ends’’ (‘‘Gins Get a Few Strokes,’’ Northern
Territory Times, 3 January 1920). For Murray’s own intervention, see Australian Ar-
chives CRS F3 Item 52/570 letters to military base on Talc Head dated 31 July 1942;
8 August 1942; 24 August 1942; and 8 October 1942.
117 See Elkin Fieldnotes, University of Sydney, Folder 1, Box 18, Item 26 and Folder 2,
Boxes 30 and 31.
118 ‘‘Fieldnotes: Catholic Mission’’ and ‘‘Linguistic Notes and Vocabulary,’’ MS 3752,
W. E. H. Stanner Unpublished Material. Box 3, Item b.
119 ‘‘E.J. Murray, Delissaville Journal,’’ Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 52/570, 21
October 1942.
120 Ibid., 8 November 1942; 9 November 1942; and 10 November 1942.
121 ‘‘Superintendent Katherine Settlement (diary),’’ Australian Archives NTAC 1980/
111, 5 January 1945; 15 October 1945; 20 October 1945; and 21 October 1945.
122 V. J. White to Director of Native Affairs, Alice Springs, memo dated 30 September
1943. ‘‘E.J. Murray, Delissaville Journal,’’ Australian Archives CRS F3 Item 52/570.
123 See, for instance, Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, 25–26, 130–31 and Elkin, Citi-
zenship for the Aborigines, 25–27.
124 ‘‘Fieldnotes: Port Keats, Daly River,’’ MS 3752 Box 3, Item b., W. E. H. Stanner Un-
published Material.

4 / SHAMED STATES

1 Morris, Too Soon, Too Late, 213. A number of authors have tackled the politics
of shame in Australian public culture. See Elspeth Probyn, ‘‘Shaming Theory,

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 Notes to Chapter Four

Thinking Dis-connections: Feminism and Reconciliation,’’ in Transformations:

Thinking Through Feminism, ed. S. Ahmed, J. Kilby, C. Lury, M. McNeil, and
B. Skeggs (London: Routledge, 2000); Haydie Gooder and Jane M. Jacobs, ‘‘On
the Border of the Unsayable: The Apology in Postcolonial Australia.’’ Interven-
tions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2.2 (2000): 229–47; and Sara
Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Rout-
ledge, 2000).
2 For the subjective entailment of capital labor in the realm of fantasy, see Gaya-
tri Spivak, ‘‘Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value,’’ in In Other Worlds:
Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), 154–75.
3 For a critique and response to this particular strategy of approaching Australian
state responses to multiculturalism, see John Frow and Meaghan Morris, ‘‘Two
Laws: Response to Elizabeth Povinelli,’’ Critical Inquiry 25.3 (1999): 626–30; and
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘The Cunning of Recognition: Reply to Frow and Morris,’’
Critical Inquiry 25.3 (1999): 631–37.
4 Between 1992 and 1995 several Australian Commonwealth commissions were estab-
lished to investigate both the high rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody and the poor
quality of health in Aboriginal communities. In addition, Amnesty International
investigated the high rate of incarceration of Aboriginal men as a possible violation
of their human rights. See David Biles and David McDonald, eds., Deaths in Cus-
tody, Australia, 1980–89: The Research Papers of the Criminology Unit of the Royal
Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (Canberra: Australian Institute of
Criminology, 1992). From 1999 to 2000, the Howard government faced interna-
tional criticism for not intervening in a mandatory sentencing law in the North-
ern Territory, a law which was said to discriminate against Aboriginal people. The
volumes written discussing the impact and meaning of Mabo on property and sov-
ereignty are too numerous to cite in full here; however, the following works were
useful to the preparation of this essay: Sydney Law Review 15.2 (June 1993); Uni-
versity of New South Wales Law Journal 16.1 (1993); Tim Rouse, ed., After Mabo:
Interpreting Indigenous Traditions (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993);
Bain Attwood, ed., In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines, and Australia (Sydney:
Allen and Unwin, 1996); and Murray Goot and Tim Rouse, eds., Make Me a Better
Offer: The Politics of Mabo (Leichhardt, NSW: Pluto Press, 1994). In an insightful
reading of the Mabo decision and critique of liberal theories of society and justice,
Paul Patton highlights the seduction of legal recognition of difference as a path
toward a ‘‘differential concept of society’’ rather than as an inhibitor. See Paul Pat-
ton, ‘‘Mabo, Freedom, and the Politics of Difference,’’ Australian Journal of Political
Science 30.1 (1995): 108–19.
5 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, Australian Law Review 107 (1992): 27.
6 Ibid., 82.
7 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, Australian Law Review 141 (1996): 146.
See also Marshall Perron, ‘‘Sacred Sites—A Costly Token to a Dead Culture,’’ North-
ern Territory News, 7 January 1989, 7.
8 For one of the most influential critical readings of the common law, see Duncan

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 Notes to Chapter Four

Kennedy, ‘‘The Structures of Blackstone’s Commentaries,’’ Buffalo Law Review 28

(1974): 279.
9 Bernard Lane, ‘‘Judges Rule Stolen Children Law Valid,’’ The Australian, 1 Au-
gust 1997.
10 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 26.
11 Robert Manne, ‘‘Forget the Guilt, Remember the Shame,’’ The Australian, 8 July
1996, 11.
12 See Erving Goffman, ‘‘Footing,’’ Semiotica 25 (1979): 1–29.
13 Manne, ‘‘Forget the Guilt,’’ 11.
14 ‘‘Talk of sharing in a collective guilt over the dispossession of the Aborigines is one
thing; however, talk of sharing in a legacy of historical shame is altogether another.
This distinction is most easily explained by analogy. Conservatives such as Howard
and Tim Fischer would have no difficulty in feeling admiration and a kind of pride
in, say, the resourcefulness shown by the soldiers at Gallipoli. I am sure, too, that
they would hope that other Australians would share in their admiration and their
pride. Yet if it is possible and just to feel pride in the achievements of forebears, it
surely cannot be regarded as impossible or unjust to feel shame about past wrongs.
The case I am making can be put simply. To be an Australian is to be embedded
or implicated in this country’s history in a way outsiders or visitors cannot be.
To be implicated in this history opens—as conservatives easily acknowledge—the
possibility of reasonable pride. But to be open to the possibility of pride in achieve-
ment is also, necessarily, to be open to the possibility in shame in wrongdoing’’
(ibid., 11).
15 Australian Parliamentary Hansard, House of Representatives, Thursday, 26 August
1999, 7046–47.
16 Ibid., 7048.
17 See Rosemary Neill, ‘‘Howard Reconciled to a Curate’s Egg,’’ The Australian, 4 June
1999, 15; Michelle Grattan and Margo Kingston, ‘‘Regrets Divide Nation,’’ Sydney
Morning Herald, 27 August 1999, 1; and ‘‘Editorial,’’ Sydney Morning Herald, 31 May
1999.
18 Anne Connolly, ‘‘Accentuate the Positive in Our History—Malouf,’’ The Australian,
10 July 1996, 38; and David Marr, ‘‘Australia—Just Imagine Your Future,’’ Sydney
Morning Herald, 1, 7.
19 Australian Parliamentary Hansard, House of Representatives, Thursday, 26 August
1999, 7047.
20 Ibid., 7047.
21 Ibid., 7049–50.
22 Ibid., 7051.
23 ‘‘Where a clan or group has continued to acknowledge the laws and (so far as practi-
cable) to observe the customs based on the traditions of that clan or group, whereby
their traditional connection with the land has been substantially maintained, the
traditional community title of that clan or group can be said to remain in exis-
tence’’ (The Mabo Decision 1992 with commentary by Richard H. Bartlett [Sydney:
Butterworths, 1993], 48).

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 Notes to Chapter Four

24 Ibid., 49. In 1993, during a televised address to the nation presenting and defend-
ing his decision to enact legislation based on the Mabo ruling, Prime Minister Paul
Keating summarized the conditions the court imposed on the legal productivity
of Aboriginal traditions: ‘‘The Court accepted that native title existed where two
fundamental conditions were met:—that their connection with the land had been
maintained, unbroken down through the years—and that this title had not been
overturned by any action of a government to use the land or to give it to somebody
else’’ (P. J. Keating, ‘‘Prime Minister’s Address to the Nation,’’ in Make Me a Better
Offer: The Politics of Mabo, ed. Murray Goot and Tim Rouse (Leichhardt, NSW:
Pluto Press, 1994), 236.
25 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 44. Brennan argued that native title rights
and interests would be precluded if the recognition were to fracture a skeletal prin-
ciple of our legal system (43).
26 The Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v. the State of Victoria, Fed-
eral Court of Astralia 1606 (1998): para 12. See also Deborah Bird Rose, ‘‘Hard
Times: An Australian Story,’’ in Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australian
and Aotearoa New Zealand (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 1999), 2–19.
27 The Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v. the State of Victoria,
para. 4.
28 Ibid., para. 106.
29 Ibid., para. 112; Olney is quoting from Edward M. Curr, Recollections of Squatting
in Victoria (1883; Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1965), 245.
30 The Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v. the State of Victoria,
para. 14.
31 Ibid., para. 126.
32 Ibid., para. 128.
33 Ashley-Montague, Coming into Being among the Australian Aborigines, 49.
34 Hayes v. Northern Territory, 1999, Report of the Native Tribunal Commissioner,
Mr. Justice Olney (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1999), para. 26.
35 Ibid., para 13.
36 W. V. Quine, ‘‘Where Do We Disagree?,’’ in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson,
ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Peru, Ill.: Open Court, 1999), 76. See also Gayatri Spivak
on the function of the native informant in philosophy, in her The Critique of Colo-
nial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
37 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘Do Rocks Listen? The Cultural Politics of Apprehending
Australian Aboriginal Labor,’’ American Anthropologist 97.3 (September 1995): 505–
18.
38 The Law Reform Commission, The Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws.
39 Shane McGrath, ‘‘Traditional Punishment Prevented: Barnes v The Queen,’’ Indige-
nous Law Bulletin 4.8 (December/January 1997–1998): 18.
40 Barnes v the Queen was reported in the Syndey Morning Herald as are periodically
other cases that strain the easy reconciliation of the law of cultural recognition and
the ‘‘real’’ referent of Aboriginal customary law. For news coverage of other cases

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 Notes to Chapter Four

in the Northern Territory, see ‘‘Initiation for All,’’ Northern Territory News, 15 June
1999; Bob Watt, ‘‘Wife-Killer Says He was Cursed,’’ Northern Territory News, 18 June
1999, 5; Bob Watt, ‘‘9 Years Jail after Brutal Wife Killing,’’ Northern Territory News,
19 June 1999, 3; Bob Watt, ‘‘20cm Blade in Lung: Man on Kill Count,’’ Northern Ter-
ritory News, 22 June 1999, 7; ‘‘Missionary Wed Girls to Save Them,’’ Northern Ter-
ritory News, 1 September 1999, 18; Amanda Keenan and Stephane Balogh, ‘‘Ethnic
Community Leaders Attack Killer’s Race Defense,’’ The Australian, 13 August 1998,
9; Bob Watt, ‘‘Spear Man ‘Thought Cop Shot Uncle,’ ’’ Northern Territory News,
28 August 1998, 7; Bob Watt, ‘‘Commissioner Hears of Death: ‘Bone Pointed at
Him,’ ’’ Northern Territory News, 31 January 1989, 14.
41 For discussion of the potential of Mabo for expanding recognition of Aboriginal
customary law, see Rob McLaughlin, ‘‘Some Problems and Issues in the Recog-
nition of Indigenous Customary Law,’’ Aboriginal Law Bulletin 3.28 (July 1996):
4–9. For a fuller discussion, see The Law Reform Commission, The Recognition of
Aboriginal Customary Laws.
42 Paul J. Keating, ‘‘Speech by the Honourable Prime Minister, PJ Keating MP, Austra-
lian Launch of the International Year for the World’s Indigenous People, Redfern,
10 December 1992,’’ Aboriginal Law Bulletin 3.61 (April 1993): 4–5.
43 ‘‘The message (of Mabo) should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the
recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepen-
ing of Australian social democracy to include all indigenous Australians’’ (Keating,
‘‘Speech by the Honourable Prime Minister’’), 5. See also Paul J. Keating, ‘‘Austra-
lian Update: Statement by the Prime Minister, The Hon. P.J. Keating Common-
wealth Response to High Court Mabo Judgement, Canberra 18 October 1993,’’ Ab-
original Law Bulletin 3.64 (October 1993): 18.
44 Keating, ‘‘Australian Update,’’ 18.
45 Keating is referring to the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. He stated that
the mission of the council was ‘‘to forge a new partnership built on justice and eq-
uity and an appreciation of the heritage of Australia’s indigenous people’’ (Keating,
‘‘Speech by the Honourable Prime Minister,’’ 4). For a critical account of the Coun-
cil for Aboriginal Reconciliation, see Daniel Lavery, ‘‘The Council for Aboriginal
Reconciliation: When the CAR Stops on Reconciliation Day Will Indigenous Aus-
tralians Have Gone Anywhere?,’’ Aboriginal Law Bulletin 2.58 (October 1992): 7–8.
46 Australian Parliamentary Hansard, House of Representatives, 7049.
47 Keating, ‘‘Speech by the Honourable Prime Minister,’’ 4.
48 See also M. J. Detmold, ‘‘Law and Difference: Reflections on Mabo’s Case,’’ Sydney
Law Review 15.2 (June 1993): 159–67.
49 The Mabo Decision 1992, 42.
50 Ibid., 28.
51 Decided concurrently with The Thayorre People v. the State of Queensland (1996).
52 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, n. 51, 43.
53 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 18.
54 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, 109.

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 Notes to Chapter Four

55 Ibid., 109, 140.

56 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 42, 139; The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queens-
land, 28, 34, 70, 176.
57 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 42.
58 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, 176.
59 Ibid., 198.
60 Ibid., 35; see also Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 18.
61 See, for instance, The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, 220.
62 See, for instance, Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 18, 26, 27, 29, 41, 83.
63 ‘‘There is no question that indigenous society can and will change on contact with
European culture. . . . But modification of traditional society in itself does not mean
traditional title no longer exists. Traditional title arises from the fact of occupation,
not the occupation of a particular type of society or way of life’’ (Eddie Mabo v. the
State of Queensland, 150). ‘‘These comments apply with particular force to Queens-
land where . . . there were approximately 70 different kinds of Crown leasehold and
Crown perpetual leasehold tenures. To approach the matter by reference to legis-
lation is not to turn one’s back on centuries of history nor is it to impugn basic
principles of property law. Rather, it is to recognise historical development, the
changes in law over centuries and the need for property law to accommodate the
very different situation in this country’’ (The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queens-
land, 58).
64 Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 43.
65 Ibid., 83.
66 Ibid., 28.
67 The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland, 63.
68 The Mabo Decision 1992, 47.
69 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press,
1969).
70 See Frantz Fanon, Black Face, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); and
Bhabha, ‘‘The Other Question,’’ 66–84.
71 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology.
72 ‘‘Radical title’’ refers to the form of title that gives the sovereign paramount power
to create interests in land by grant of tenure. See Susan Burton Phillips, ‘‘A Note:
Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland,’’ The Sydney Law Review 15.2 (June 1993):
121–42.
73 Hugh Morgan of the Western Mining Corporation claimed, ‘‘the High Court had
plunged property law into chaos and ‘given substance’ to the ambitions of Aus-
tralian communists and the Bolshevik left,’’ quoted in Richard Bartlett, ‘‘Mabo:
Another Triumph for the Common Law,’’ Sydney Law Review 15.2 (June 1993): 178–
86. For a discussion on Aborigines and mining in Western Australia, see Richard
Bartlett, ‘‘Inequality Before the Law in Western Australia: The Land (Title and Tra-
ditional Usage) Act,’’ Aboriginal Law Bulletin 3.65 (December 1993): 7–9; and R. A.
Dixon and M. C. Dillon, eds., Aborigines and Diamond Mining: The Politics of Re-

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 Notes to Chapter Five

source Development in the East Kimberley, Western Australia (Nedlands: University

of Western Australia Press, 1990). See also Paul Kauffman, Wik, Mining, and Ab-
origines (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998).
74 James Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
75 While Drucilla Cornell’s discussion of the normative grounding of juridical in-
terpretation in implicit and explicit references to ‘‘the good’’ has been helpful to
my understanding of the technology of discrimination, more attention needs to
be paid to the traffic of dominant hegemonic projects in legal shame. See Drucilla
Cornell, ‘‘From the Lighthouse: The Promise of Redemption and the Possibility of
Legal Interpretation,’’ Cardozo Law Review 11.5–6 (1990): 1688.
76 Brown, ‘‘Wounded Attachments,’’ 53.
77 Several critical essays on identity, difference, and democracy have critically at-
tended to the politics of ‘‘wounded’’ subjects in late modern liberal societies. See,
for instance, Brown, ‘‘Wounded Attachments’’; Berlant, ‘‘The Subject of True Feel-
ing,’’ in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat and
Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 49–84; Fish,
‘‘Boutique Multiculturalism’’; and Trouillot, ‘‘Abortive Rituals.’’

5 / THE POETICS OF GHOSTS: SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

IN THE ARCHIVE OF THE NATION

1 Arjun Appadurai, ‘‘The Production of Locality,’’ in Modernity at Large (Minne-

apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 178–99; Michael Silverstein, ‘‘Con-
temporary Transformations of Local Language Communities,’’ Annual Review of
Anthropology 27 (1998): 401–26.
2 ‘‘Death Rite for Mabalang,’’ Australian Walkabout Show, abc radio program, 1948.
3 For the concept of ‘‘rigid designator,’’ see Saul Kripke, Meaning and Necessity (1972;
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).
4 For Peirce, subject terms and proper names are indices. Thus the ‘‘whole burden of
the sign,’’ including proper names, ‘‘must be ascertained, not by closer examination
of the utterance but by collateral observations of the utterer’’ (Peirce, ‘‘Pragma-
tism,’’ 406–7). See also Benjamin Lee, Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and
the Semiotics of Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), esp. 98–99.
5 This meaning of durlg is also recorded by Elkin in his ‘‘Ngirawat, or the Sharing of
Names in the Wagaitj Tribe, Northern Australia,’’ in Sonderdruck Aus Beitrage Zue
Gesellungs und Volkerwissenschaft (Berlin: Verlag Bebr. Mann, 1950), 67–81.
6 For discussion of these sign-process, see Stanner, ‘‘Religion, Totemism, and Sym-
bolism’’; Fred Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Selves: Sentiment, Place, and Poli-
tics among Western Desert Aborigines (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1986); Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Ab-
original Australian Culture (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
and Ian Keen, Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997).
7 Colin Simpson, Adam in Ochre (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1957), 168.

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 Notes to Chapter Five

8 Ibid., 171.
9 Partington, Hasluck versus Coombs. Simpson also mentions Hasluck in Adam in
Ochre, 187.
10 Simpson, Adam in Ochre, 164.
11 Elkin, ‘‘Ngirawat,’’ 77.
12 The Elkin Archives, University of Sydney. See Folder 1, Box 18, Item 26.
13 A. P. Elkin, ‘‘Arnhem Land Music,’’ Oceania 26.2 (1955): 146.
14 Ibid.
15 Roger M. Keesing, Kin Groups and Social Structure (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich College Publishers, 1975), 148, quoted in Peter Sutton, Native Title and
the Descent of Rights (Perth: National Native Title Tribunal, 1998), 25. Also influ-
ential is Harold Scheffler’s understanding of descent, descent-phrased constructs,
and descent-phrased rules for group understanding, even though Scheffler does not
consider Australian indigenous forms of social organization to be based on descent
but rather on affiliation. See Harold W. Scheffler, Australian Kinship Classification
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
16 W. H. R. Rivers, ‘‘The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry,’’ Socio-
logical Review 3.1 (1910): 1–12; see also Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘Notes on Gridlock:
Genealogy, Intimacy, Sexuality,’’ Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 215–38.
17 See the discussion in 15.
18 The territory to which the descent group’s totem is found is usually referred to as
an estate, thus the phrase ‘‘an estate group.’’ For a review of the study of Austra-
lian Aboriginal kinship, see Ian Keen, ‘‘Twenty-Five Years of Aboriginal Kinship
Studies,’’ in Social Anthropology and Australian Aboriginal Studies: A Contempo-
rary Overview, ed. Ronald Berndt and R. Tonkinson (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies
Press, 1988), 79–123.
19 L. R. Hiatt, Kinship and Conflict (Canberra: Australian National University,
1965), 20.
20 Ian Keen has described the relationship between the definition of ‘‘traditional Ab-
original owners’’ and ‘‘the ‘orthodox model’ of Aboriginal land tenure,’’ in his ‘‘A
Question of Interpretation: The Definition of ‘Traditional Aboriginal Owners’ in
the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act,’’ in Aboriginal Land-Owners: Contemporary
Issues in the Determination of Traditional Aboriginal Land Ownership, ed. L. R.
Hiatt (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1984), 24–45. See, more recently, L. R. Hiatt,
Arguments about Aborigines, Australia, and the Evolution of Social Anthropology
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
21 Hiatt, Kinship and Conflict, 18.
22 A. P. Elkin, ‘‘The Complexity of Social Organization in Arnhem Land,’’ Southwest-
ern Journal of Anthropology 6.1 (1950): 1–20.
23 Allan Marett, ‘‘Wangga Songs of Northwest Australia: Reflections on the Perfor-
mance of Aboriginal Music at SIMS 88,’’ Musicology Australia 15 (1991): 37–46;
Allan Marett, ‘‘Wangga: Socially Powerful Songs?’’ The World of Music 1 (1994): 67–
81; Allan Marett and JoAnne Page, ‘‘Interrelations between Music and Dance in
a Wangga from Northwest Australian,’’ in Essence of Singing and the Substance of

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 Notes to Chapter Five

Song, Recent Responses to the Aboriginal Performing Arts and Other Essays in Hon-
our of Catherine Ellis, ed. Linda Barwick, Allan Marett, and Guy Turnstill (Sydney:
University of Sydney Press, 1995), 27–38.
24 Elkin, ‘‘Ngirawat,’’ 76.
25 Allan Marett has mapped a genealogy of human authorization for the country sur-
rounding Belyuen.
26 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana
Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
27 ‘‘Death Rite for Mabalan.’’
28 ‘‘Death Rite for Mabalan’’ describes the voice of Eliang as the effect of pain caused
by wingmalang, but might also have been voice of the wingmalang pained by Mo-
seck’s trickery. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘ ‘Might Be Something’: The Language of
Indeterminacy in Australian Aboriginal Land Use,’’ Man 28.4 (1993): 679–704.
29 John Lucy has noted: ‘‘In a like manner, structural parallelism in poetry sets up
formal equivalences that tell listeners that certain things are to be compared with
one another’’ (‘‘Reflexive Language and the Human Disciplines,’’ in Reflexive Lan-
guage: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, ed. John Lucy [Cambridge, Eng.: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993], 10).
30 Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976 (Canberra: Australian Gov-
ernment Printer, 30 April 1992).
31 The land on which the Belyuen community is located is already defined as Aborigi-
nal land under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976.
32 The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976, also stipulates the tra-
ditional Aboriginal owner must be entitled to forage as of right, but this entitlement
has never been the basis of a decision.
33 The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976, and the Native Title
Act, (Commonwealth) 1993, stipulate that every claim be accompanied by an
anthropological report.
34 Australian Parliamentary Hansard, House of Representatives, 4 June 1976, p. 3082.
35 See C. Athanasiou, ‘‘Land Rights or Native Title,’’ Indigenous Law Review 4.12
(1998): 14–15.
36 Since then a number of land commissioners have accepted spiritual descent from
a mythic ancestor, with some stating that claimants must also be members of a
human descent group. Dr. M. Reay in the Borroloola Land Claim described spiri-
tual descent as the basis of all forms of descent from an Aboriginal perspective:
‘‘Aborigines collapse history and assimilate the remote Dreamtime into the present.
Transformations of quasi-ancestral beings are visible in the landscape. Ceremonies
re-enact their adventures and their paths are recorded in song. The remote past
is ever present. An individual’s connection to it is his Dreamings and the land in
which his Dreamings are located. The quasi-ancestral beings he shares with father
and the land establish his descent through spirits located in that land from the first
people those beings originated’’ (Borroloola Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal
Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice Toohey [Canberra: Australian Publishing Service,
1978], exhibit 45). In the Uluru Land Claim report, Toohey accepted that a claimant

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 Notes to Chapter Five

could inherit rights from the estate in which he or she was born: ‘‘In that case the
rights are in a sense inherited because they derive from the ancestral being who be-
comes the individual’s personal tjukurr or tjukurrpa, his dreaming or totem. Thus
a child may belong to two or even three estates. He does so actually not potentially.
But the rights are inchoate: more is required before they can be exercised in respect
to any one estate’’ (Uluru Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner,
Mr. Justice Toohey [Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1979], para. 27). Jus-
tice Kearney stated that this type of kirda link gives no more than a secondary
interest in the Yulumu estate and is not passed on to children, Uluru Land Claim
(para. 46). Justice Toohey argued in the Alyawarra and Kaititja Land Claim report
that conception dreaming provides only individual not group rights to country
(Alyawarra and Kaititja Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commission,
Mr. Justice Toohey [Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1978], paras. 28, 29).
However, he accepted Stanner’s argument that every member of the patriline is in
some sense animated by the ‘‘patri-spirit’’ of the clan to which he is affiliated (ibid.,
para. 45). In the Warlpiri, Kukaja, and Ngarti Land Claim report, Kearney once
again addressed spiritual descent, finding that persons conceived on a Dreaming
track within the claimant country are linked with the country, being animated by
its spirit; and, given this spiritual connection to the country, if the persons reside
with other (descent) members of the group, acquire the necessary knowledge of
the Dreamings and sites, perform the required duties, and are recognized by other
members of the group they can be found to be members of the local descent group
(Warlpiri, Kukatja, and Ngarti Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Com-
mission, Mr. Justice Kearney (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1985), paras.
30, 31.
37 Nicholson River (Waanyi/Gaeawa) Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Com-
missioner, Mr. Justice Kearney (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1985),
para. 57.
38 Ibid., para. 68.
39 Ibid., para. 63. Kearney also noted in Nicholson River report that because Dr. Reay
was dealing in Borroloola Land Claim only with patrilineal descent groups, she
limited her discussion to the ‘‘father’’ (see Nicholson River Land Claim, para. 66).
Dr. Chase commented more broadly in Nicholson River that ‘‘the positing of a
common descent among people from a mythic ancestor in any case presents no
problems . . . the phenomenon is commonly found by field workers elsewhere in
Australia. In Cape York Peninsula, for example, the term for dreamings, or totems,
is a derivative of the term for father’s father, and in societies with shallow gen-
erational depth in genealogies, the generations immediately above that of grand-
fathers are commonly fused into the time period of mythic ancestors and their
activities’’ (Nicholson River Land Claim, exhibit 58, p. 12). In the Cox River Land
Claim report, Kearney found that persons who based their inclusion in a local de-
scent group solely on vaguely phrased relations through the Dreaming or through
ceremony should be excluded. They must in addition be related to the relevant
local land-holding group by a principle of descent (Cox River (Alawa-Ngandji)

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 Notes to Chapter Five

Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Claim Commissioner, Mr. Justice Kearney
[Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1984]. In the Mount Allan Land Claim
report, Mr. Justice Kearney addressed the question of whether ‘‘spiritual geneal-
ogy’’ would satisfy the requirements of local descent group under the lra. Kearney
first noted Toohey’s finding that a local descent group may be recruited on a prin-
ciple of descent deemed relevant by the claimants (Mount Allan Land Claim, Report
by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice Kearney [Canberra: Australian
Publishing Service, 1985], para. 48). Kearney stated that ‘‘perceived descent from
a common mythic ancestor is a principle of descent which conveys the notion of
common ancestry’’ (Mount Allan Land Claim, para. 48). In the case of Judy Napal-
jarri, and Tiger Japanangla and his siblings, there was no evidence of any actual
genealogical link between them and members of the local descent group for the
Yulumu and Ngarlu estates (Mount Allan Land Claim, para 45). Moreover, Tiger
Japanangla’s father’s estate was located over one hundred kilometers to the west of
the claim land. Tiger Japanangla was, nevertheless, found to satisfy the definition
of a traditional Aboriginal owner because the claimants deemed as relevant a prin-
ciple of a shared ‘‘spiritual genealogical link’’ to the local descent group and claim
land on the basis of a shared descent from a common honey ant ancestor. Dr. Peter-
son described this spiritual genealogy in the following way: ‘‘All Honey Ant kirda
groups that are in contact and know each other and that lie on common dreaming
tracks . . . are seen to be related as from common Honey Ant ancestors—that all
the Honey Ant ancestors are themselves related’’ (Mount Allan Land Claim, 134).
40 Timber Creek Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice
Maurice (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1985).
41 Ti Tree Station Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice
Maurice (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1987), para. 99.
42 Ibid., para. 96.
43 Ibid., para. 100.
44 In his report on the Lander, Warlpiri, and Anmatjirra Land Claim to the Willowra
Pastoral Lease, Toohey stated: ‘‘The words ‘local,’ ‘descent’ and ‘group’ are ordinary
English words to which a meaning can be attached, given a context which in this
case is the Land Rights Act. The matter should not be approached with some pre-
conceived model in mind to which the evidence must accommodate itself. Rather
it is a matter of the conclusions to be drawn from the evidence. A local descent
group may be ‘recruited on a principle of descent deemed relevant by claimants.’ If
the evidence so dictates, a local descent gruop may be unilineal or non-unilineal’’
(Lander, Warlpiri, Anmatjirra Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commis-
sioner, Mr. Justice Toohey [Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1980], para. 89).
45 Timber Creek Land Claim, para. 92.
46 Northern Land Council and Others v. Aboriginal Land Commissioner and Another,
Australian Law Review 105 (1992): 539, para. 60; See also Finniss River Land Claim,
Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice Toohey (Canberra: Austra-
lian Publishing Service, 1981), para. 161.

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 Notes to Chapter Five

47 Kenbi (Cox Peninsula) Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner,
Mr. Justice Olney (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1991), para. 7.2.3.
48 Maria Brandl, Adrienne Haritos, and Michael Walsh, Kenbi Land Claim (Darwin:
Northern Land Council, 1979), 152.
49 See Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Belyuen Traditional Aboriginal Owners (Kenbi Land
Claim) (Darwin: Northern Land Council, 1996).
50 See Povinelli, Belyuen Traditional Aboriginal Owners.
51 Brandl, Haritos, and Walsh, Kenbi Land Claim, 31.
52 For a concise history of the political events that led to the establishment of Wood-
ward’s Commission and the narrowing of its recommendations, see Graham Neate,
Aboriginal Land Rights Law in the Northern Territory (Chippendale, NSW: Alter-
native Publishing Cooperative, 1989), esp. 1–40.
53 Kenbi (Cox Peninsula) Land Claim, para. 7.2.4.
54 Kenbi Transcripts (Indooroopilly: Transcripts Australia, 1995–1998), 7061.
55 Oleny reviewed at length legal precedent for viewing the ‘‘local descent group,’’
especially discussion of the Woodward report before parliament: ‘‘The paragraphs
from the first Woodward report which are reproduced as Appendix A to this re-
port draw a clear distinction in Aboriginal social organisation between a ‘tribe’ or
‘linguistic group’ on the one hand, and a ‘local descent group’ on the other. Given
that the form of subsection 50 (4) has its origin in clause 27 of the draft Bill in the
second Woodward report, there is a strong inference to be drawn that the meaning
to be attributed to ‘tribe’ or ‘linguistic group’ was quite different from the idea of a
‘local descent group’ ’’ (Kenbi [Cox Peninsula] Land Claim [Australian Publishing
Service, 1991], paras. 8.40–8.49).
57 Ibid., para. 9.6.
58 As an anthropologist opposing the Belyuen claim pointed out in the second hear-
ing.
59 The Supreme Court hearing an appeal of his findings ruled that Olney had erred
as a matter of law—he had imposed an outdated anthropological model on local
forms of social recruitment rather than considering, as required by law, recruitment
principles ‘‘deemed relevant by the claimants’’: ‘‘The point is that the principle of
descent will be one that is recognized as applying in respect of the particular group.
Further, there is no reason the particular principle of descent traditionally operat-
ing may not change over time.’’ The Supreme Court advised future land commis-
sioners to first look at contemporary local beliefs, not at anthropological models,
and at the degree they have deviated from traditional (read: precontact) beliefs and
practices, and then see whether they fall within the meaning and intentions of the
Aboriginal Land Rights Act (and likewise, for claims lodged under the Native Title
Act, 1993. The court also reiterated that the act should be ‘‘broadly construed so as
to give effect to the beneficial purposes of the Act.’’ But the Supreme Court did not
overturn the direction that the assessment (and through it power) flowed. By de-
fining a ‘‘local descent group’’ as a subdivision of a linguistic or dialect group with
clan (or ‘‘totemic’’) ties to particular sacred sites on the land claimed, it entrenched

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 Notes to Chapter Five

the a priori status of national definitions of sociality functioning before the law
enters the locale of its discriminations. See Northern Land Council and Others v.
Aboriginal Land Commissioner and Another, 539.
60 The land commissioner, Justice Gray, had not as of the writing of this essay written
his report on traditional Aboriginal ownership in the Kenbi Land Claim.
61 Others have noted the differential effects of hegemonic formations on social
groups. See the still-compelling analysis of family in France in Jacques Donzelot,
Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).
62 Kenbi Transcripts, 5294.
63 Peter Sutton, a senior anthropologist representing one of the Laragiya claimant
groups (but having done no ethnographic research among the Belyuen), insisted
that the land commissioner distinguish between territorial rights based on blood-
lines, a principle of territoriality he considered ‘‘traditional,’’ and the personal ties
to country based on historical connections he considered ‘‘historical.’’ In his view
the Belyuen asserted interests ‘‘in ancestral country on one basis’’ (durlg) ‘‘and
the country of their—for most of them, I would think, their strongest emotional
and personal—personalized attachments’’ on another basis’’ (maruy) (Kenbi Tran-
scripts, 6578).
64 A. P. Elkin, ‘‘Ngirawat, or the sharing of Names in the Wagalt; tribe, Northern
Australia,’’ 68.
65 Brandl, Haritos, and Walsh, Kenbi Land Claim, 161.
66 Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma (London: Athlone, 1964), 13–
14.
67 Kenbi Transcripts, 4899.
68 Ibid., 5241–42.
69 Ibid., 7332.
70 Ibid., 7349–50.
71 Colin Simpson announces to the audience: ‘‘Mosec is dancing solo around the old
man and I don’t know if I have ever seen finer dancing in my life, he is comparable
with a dancer like Le Shine the art of a fine ballet. Really, but don’t take my word
for it ask Ted Shawn the American dancer who toured Australia and visited De-
lissaville and who said that Mosec would be a sensation in London or New York’’
(‘‘Death Rite for Mabalan,’’ Australian Walkabout Show).
72 Guidelines written to interpret the amended Native Title Act make these conditions
explicit:

The description [must be] clear enough to allow someone else to see whether
any particular person is a member of the group. The basic principle is that there
should be some objective way of verifying the identity of members of the group.
The following are examples only of what may be an acceptable description:
• biological relations of a person named in the native title claim group (and
relations by adoption, or according to traditional laws and customs);
• relations or descendents of a person named in the native title claim group,
and people related by marriage to those relations or descendents, including

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 Notes to Chapter Six

people in de facto or multiple partnerships, where such relationships are

recognised by that group’s traditional laws and customs;
• relations or descendents or a person named in the native title group, and
people who have been adopted by those relations or descendents;
• people who belong to the group, according to its laws and customs.
Note: a description of the group’s laws and customs may be required.
National Native Title Tribunal, ‘‘Guidelines to Applicants, Registration Test Infor-
mation Sheet, no 2,’’ October 1998.
73 Northern Land Council and Others v. Aboriginal Land Commissioner and Another,
554. For statements by land commissioners on the flexibility of Aboriginal tradi-
tions, see Daly River (Malak Malak) Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal land
Commissioner, Mr. Justice Toohey (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1982);
Nicholson River Land Claim; and Jawoyn (Katherine Area) Land Claim, Report by
the Aboriginal land Commissioner, Mr. Justice Kearney (Canberra: Australian Pub-
lishing Service, 1987).
74 See also Kenbi Transcripts 7317, 7320, 7341–43, 7351–55, 7464–69.
75 Ibid., 7341–42.
76 Ibid., 7364.
77 Nomad, Australian Music International, New York, 1994.

6 / THE TRUEST BELIEF IS COMPULSION

1 Benjamin Lee, Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Sub-
jectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 342. For a critical comment on the
emergence of the notion of distinterest, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Mod-
ern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
2 Diane Bell, Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was, and Will Be (Mel-
bourne: Spinifex, 1998); Ronald Brunton, ‘‘The Hindmarsh Island Bridge and the
Credibility of Australian Anthropology,’’ Anthropology Today 21.4 (1996): 2–7; and
James Weiner, ‘‘The Secret of the Ngarrindjeri: The Fabrication of Social Knowl-
edge,’’ Arena 5 (1995): 17–32.
3 Francesca Merlan, ‘‘The Limits of Cultural Construction,’’ Oceania 61 (1991): 341–
52.
4 Lee, Talking Heads, 109. In the Peircean tradition two types of indeterminacy are
distinguished: indefiniteness, signaled by the quantifier ‘‘some’’; and generality,
signaled by the quantifier ‘‘any.’’ In the process of distinguishing his account of
translation and interpretation from Quine’s, Donald Davidson likewise defines in-
determinacy in terms of the quantifier ‘‘any.’’ See Donald Davidson, ‘‘Reply to W. V.
Quine,’’ in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Peru, Ill.: Open Court Publishing,
1999), 80–86. See also Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘‘Radical Worlds: The Anthropology
of Incommensurability and Inconceivability,’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 30
(2001): 319–34.

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 Notes to Chapter Six

5 W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).

6 Davidson would likely see this sociologically weak version as the result of the so-
cial interest in the ‘‘new, surprising, or disputed’’ rather than ‘‘the vast amount of
agreement on plan matters’’ (Davidson, ‘‘Belief and the Basis of Meaning,’’ in In-
quiries into Truth and Interpretation [New York: Oxford University Press, 1984],
141–54, 153).
7 Kenbi Transcripts, 5660.
8 For a review of the literature, see Francesca Merlan, ‘‘Australian Aboriginal Con-
ception Revisited,’’ Man 21.3 (1986): 474–93.
9 Warner, A Black Civilization, 24.
10 Ibid., 24.
11 Ibid., 23, my emphasis. Gillen continually refers to the labor of interpretation. See,
for instance, his letters to Spencer in which he says the following: ‘‘Can’t get people
to admit [that they exchange women in ceremony]’’ (128); ‘‘I couldn’t believe it my-
self at first but after numerous inquiries’’ (135, see also 139–40); ‘‘Father says they
have sex on the graveyard. You can’t imagine how I tingled with desire to be upon
the spot to probe this strange custom to the bottom’’ (234). (Mulvaney, Morphy,
and Petch, eds., ‘‘My Dear Spencer’’).
12 Warner, A Black Civilization, 24.
13 Kenbi Transcripts, 4961–62.
14 Ibid., 6613.
15 Merland, ‘‘The Limits of Cultural Construction.’’
16 Ti Tree Station Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice
Maurice, paras. 92, 93, 107.
17 Kenbi Transcripts, 7184.
18 Elkin, ‘‘Arnhem Land Music,’’ 144.
19 Kenbi Transcripts, 4190–91.
20 Ibid., 4191.
21 Ibid., 4195.
22 Ibid., 4259.
23 Ibid., 4279.
24 Ibid., 4279.
25 Ibid., 4279.
26 Ibid., 4280–81.
27 Ibid., 4295.
28 See for instance, Ibid., 6086–96.
29 Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976, sec. 3(1).
30 Ibid., sec. 51(3).
31 Timber Creek Land Claim, Report by the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Mr. Justice
Maurice, para. 90.
32 Ibid., para. 92.
33 Ibid., para 96.
34 Ibid., para 96.
35 Kenbi Transcripts, 5901–2.

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 Notes to Chapter Six

36 F. R. Palmer, Mood and Modality (1986; Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University

Press, 1998); J. Barnes, ‘‘Evidentials in the Tuyuca Verb,’’ International Journal of
American Linguistics 50 (1984): 255–71; John Lyons, Semantics (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 1977).
36 Kenbi Transcripts, 5389.
37 Ibid., 5881 and 5887.
38 Ibid., 5887.
39 Ibid., 5159.
40 Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1963), 17, 20–21.
41 Lévi-Strauss, Totemism.
42 Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976, sec. 51 (3).
43 National Native Title Tribunal, ‘‘Guidelines to Applicants, Registration Test Infor-
mation, Sheet no 2,’’ October 1998.
44 In being bothered Keely faced the reverse dilemma of Hilary Putman’s philoso-
pher, rephrased by Stanley Fish thusly: ‘‘What if the answers philosophers come
up with are answers only in the highly artificial circumstances of the philosophy
seminar where ordinary reasons for action are systematically distrusted and intro-
duced only to be dismissed as naive? And what if, once the philosopher goes away
or ceases himself or herself to be a philosopher, those ordinary reasons return with-
out a vengeance and action is just as it was before, if not unproblematic, at least
not mysterious’’ (Stanley Fish, ‘‘Truth and Toilets: Pragmatism and the Practice
of Life,’’ in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and
Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 418–33.
45 See Kwaku Mensah v. the King (1946) AC 83; Moffa v. the Queen (1977) 138 CLR 601.

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From The Cunning of Recognition by Povinelli, Elizabeth A.. DOI: 10.1215/9780822383673
Duke University Press, 2002. All rights reserved.
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Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Rout-

ledge, 2000.
Altman, J. C. Aborigines, Tourism, and Development: The Northern Territory Experience.
Darwin: North Australian Research Unit, 1988.
Althusser, Louis. ‘‘From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy.’’ In Reading Capital, ed. Louis
Althusser and Etienne Balibar. 1968; London: Verso, 1997. 11–69.
Andrews, Edna. Markedness Theory: The Union of Asymmetry and Semiosis in Language.
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Appadurai, Arjun. ‘‘The Production of Locality.’’ In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimen-
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 INDEX

Abduction: critical, 16; extreme, 11, 16, liberation struggles, 29; marriage, 77,
194 116; mobility, 116; natives, 115; policy,
Abhorrence, 13, 32, 45, 85, 182, 261, 262, 115; politics, 168; race, 115; reserves,
263, 265; public, 266. See also Aversion; 67, 125; rites, 134; social relations, 64;
Repugnance spiritual attachment to the land, 166;
Abject, 182, 184, 251, 266 spirituality, 165; state definition of, 188;
Aboriginal: activism, 22, 23, 45, 50, 114; subjects, 58, 60, 64, 68, 72, 117, 141, 182,
agency, 145, 148; citizenship, 41, 121; 251, 267; title, 66; traditions, 150
contact with settlers, 127; cosmology Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
and philosophy, 121, 141; customs, 121, Affairs (Ministry), 46, 238
128, 134; definitions of, 208; employ- Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Ter-
ment, 116, 158; experts, 119; heritage, ritory) Act (1976), 2, 23, 34, 45, 51, 67,
51, 166; high culture, 140; hunting and 100, 189, 205, 208, 209, 212, 213, 215,
gathering, 168; knowledge, 65; labor, 224, 231, 246, 250, 251, 254, 259, 262,
129; law, 93, 139, 165, 168, 256, 264; 266

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 Index

Aboriginal Heritage Act (1988), 24, 238 Ancestral beings, 140; composition of,
Aboriginal Land Councils, 46 200; powers of, 140
Aboriginal Ordinance (1911), 22, 116, Anthropological Society of London: 79
159 Anthropology, 72, 119–20, 121, 138,
Aboriginal Protection League, 118 150, 168, 189, 194, 196, 212, 246, 247;
Aboriginal Protector (Office of ), 22, 116, models, 198, 209, 216, 267; theory, 211;
132, 133, 134 training, 128
Aborigines, 122, 128, 129, 184; abuse of, Anxiety, 14, 67, 69, 86, 97, 131, 136, 146,
127; average life expectancy of, 158; 160, 181, 182, 226, 230, 266
Chief Protector of, 22, 116, 132, 133; Apology, 153, 161
common law status of, 115; Constitu- Appadurai, Arjun, 188
tional status of, 115; dispossession of, Archive, 33, 34, 68, 71, 93, 113, 114, 150,
161; employers, 127; guardianship of, 159, 170, 187, 192, 206–7, 215, 225, 228,
116; immoral use of, 150; physical ex- 233, 236, 237–38; colonial, 72, 73, 74,
termination of, 93; ‘‘reasonable,’’ 267; 108, 109, 165, 167; disciplinary nature
urban, 165 of, 188; of history, 188, 235; of mem-
Aborigines Protection Association, 118 ory, 193; national, 227; restricted, 224;
Abstraction, 188, 192, 197, 226, 227; technology of, 230; of traditions, 237
diagrammatic, 219; statutory, 267 Argument, 31, 32, 34, 207, 208, 219, 220,
Administrator, 112, 116, 120, 121; colonial, 222, 227, 247; anthropological, 247;
85–86; liberal government, 150; state, diagrammatic, 196; invaginatory
184 nature of, 206. See also Justification
Affect, 27, 48, 122, 160, 176, 184, 194; Arnhem Land, 119, 139, 140, 197, 242, 249
technology of, 142. See also Feelings Arrente, 33, 73–76, 78, 79, 81–86, 88–104,
Agency, 137; aboriginal, 114, 137, 144, 145, 107–8, 167–69, 240
148; authorizing, 202, 223; conditions Ars erotica, 79
of, 136; legal, 181 Art, 24, 54, 66
Alanga Lippo, Agnes, 191, 192, 193, 206, Ashley Montagu, M. F., 79, 166
213, 217 Asia-Pacific, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 38, 42, 161,
Alcheringa, 89, 97. See also Dreaming 182
Alice Springs, 2, 45, 75, 93, 97, 103, 149 Assimilation, 1, 2, 37, 41, 43, 49, 53
Alterity, 5, 12, 13, 27, 60, 67, 78, 98, 113, Attitudes, 129, 136, 184, 254, 257, 259;
176, 180, 184, 237, 248, 251, 266, 267; obligatory, 264; propositional, 239
cultural, 68, 77; ethics of, 73; funda- Aufhebung, 98, 150
mental, 184; moral, 85; positive, 65; Aufklärung, 98. See also Enlightenment
radical, 74, 137, 163; and similarity, Australian High Court, 64, 153, 154, 155,
72; social productivity of, 74. See also 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 167,
Difference 172, 175, 176, 177, 181, 182, 228
Althusser, Louis, 74 Australian Institute of Aboriginal and
Ambivalence, 28, 29, 34, 114, 150, 184, Torres Strait Islander Studies, 198, 200
188 Authenticity, 6, 57, 60, 67, 114, 180, 189,
Amnesty International, 158 205, 265
Ancestors: dreamtime, 62; genealogical, Autonomy, 99, 108, 127; practical, 120.
156; human, 200 See also Heteronomy

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 Index

Aversion, 28. See also Abhorrence; Re- Body, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 167,
pugnance 191, 220, 240, 251; cartography of,
Avery, John, 248 105; excitement of, 107; ideal, 55;
intensification of, 106; techniques of,
Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 96, 135 77
Barnes v. the Queen (1997), 169, 170 Bourdieu, Pierre, 87, 170
Barradjap, Tom, 61, 62, 64, 68, 198, 200, Brandl, Maria, 198
212, 217. See also Burradjup, Tommy Brennan, Justice, 164
Barrow Creek, 92 Brinken tribe, 138, 139
Barwick, Linda, 193 British Association for the Advancement
Basedow, Herbert, 79, 137 of Science, 127, 128
Bauman, Zygmunt, 146 British House of Commons Select Com-
Beazley, Kim, 162, 175 mittee on Aborigines, 123
Belief, 4, 34, 41, 46–48, 51, 57, 123, 156, British Social Hygiene Council, 121
163, 168, 170, 177, 220, 235, 245, 246,
253, 255, 257, 259; ascription, 236, 240, Canada, 26, 156
242, 247; capacity, 243; ceremonial, Cape Dombey, 194, 217
251; compulsory degree of, 255; con- Capital, 2, 4, 17, 24, 29, 42, 50, 56, 57,
ception, 242; cultural, 119, 150, 157; 67–68, 84, 127, 128, 137, 179, 182, 189,
customary, 60, 156; local, 122, 210; 228, 233; access by Aboriginals to, 23;
moral, 264; popular public, 243; ref- accumulation, 20, 127; advanced, 68;
erential content of, 236; totemic, 242; circulation of, 233; consumer, 58, 67;
traditional, 60, 164; ‘‘true,’’ 236 cultural, 233; excesses of, 189; global,
Believability, 247 18; investment, 19–20, 66; realignment,
Belyuen, 30, 34, 61–62, 66, 67, 147–48, 19, 161; spirit of, 67; symbolic, 128
151, 187–93, 198, 200, 201, 203, 208, Capitalism, 76, 142
210–29, 231, 233, 237, 240, 244–47, 249, Caputo, John, 9
250, 252, 253, 255–58, 260, 261–63. See Carrodus, C. A., 112, 114, 115, 118, 119, 125,
also Delissaville; Wagaitj 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 147
Bennett, Maudie, 191, 217 Caruth, Cathy, 98
Berndt, Catherine, 140, 238 Categorical imperative, 261
Berndt, Ronald, 140, 142, 238 Census, 22, 115
Bianamu, Trevor, 219 Ceremony: 60, 75, 76, 145, 168, 203,
‘‘Big Sunday,’’ 139, 141, 142, 148, 193, 194, 212, 240, 244, 251, 252, 255, 260;
224 erotic/sexual side of, 152; high, 224;
Bilawag, Betty, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 17, 34, 68, initiation, 46, 87; knowledge of, 216,
190, 193, 200, 217, 226, 258, 259 leader (alatunja), 101, 102, 214, 263;
Bilbil, Marjorie, 189, 200, 207, 221, 222, obligations of, 219, practice of, 246;
225, 226, 231, 244, 245, 246 site of, 265; songs, 249; time of, 106;
Bitbin, Gracie, 189, 226 tribal, 149; women’s, 191, 193; young
Bleakley, J. W., 126 men’s, 61. See also Ritual
Blood: descent, 216; racialized notion of, Charity, 84, 259
117; right, 216 Children: abuse of, 109; marriage, 167;
Blowes, Robert, 61, 64, 228, 229, 258, 259 removal, 112, 116, 173; spirit, 242

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 Index

Chinnery, E. W. P., 125 Commonwealth Government, 115, 128,

Christianity, 76, 93, 120, 121, 123, 127, 133, 133
142, 241, 249 Communication, 8–9, 77, 89, 90, 92, 94,
Churinga, 93, 101, 102, 105 98, 134, 168, 240
Circulation, 34, 76, 79, 129, 168, 188, 233, Communicative action, 75, 91, 92, 98, 242
235, 265, 266 Communicative reason, 122, 127
Citizenship, 6, 19, 25–26, 29, 45, 59, 73, Compulsion, 26, 106, 108, 179, 257, 261
86, 117, 118, 129, 141, 149, 150, 231, Corporeality, 19, 33, 73–74, 76, 82, 99,
242; Aboriginal, 41, 121; abstract, 175, 102–3, 107, 140–41, 191, 203, 207, 211,
185; classical liberal democratic, 175; 227, 230, 266. See also Embodiment
national, 135; normative, 160, 163, 184; Cox Peninsula, 30, 66, 147, 194, 195, 197,
rights and benefits, 22, 41, 113, 115, 116, 198, 201, 211, 216, 217, 220, 241, 249,
118, 125, 128 250, 257, 258
Civil rights, 24, 27, 28, 161 Croft, Joe, 124, 125
Civil society, 32, 36, 41, 43, 52, 113, 120, Curr, Edward M., 165, 166, 169
123, 136, 141, 236 Customary, 262, 265; belief, 60, 156; dif-
Civilization, 118, 122, 128, 132, 150; ference, 64; law, 38, 44, 48, 85, 108,
‘‘black,’’ 243; contact with, 139; mod- 113–15, 121, 124, 128, 134, 136, 140, 146–
ern, 27; savage/barbarian, 27–28; 47, 157, 164, 168, 169, 175, 176, 255, 265;
Western, 129, 133 practice, 124, 131, 133, 156, 179
Clan, 58, 141, 151, 192, 197, 203; estate
group, 209; patri-, 213, 215; patrilineal, Daly River, 74, 112, 113, 117, 124, 126, 131,
211, 220; solidarity, 209; songs, 224; 132, 134, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 144,
territorial, 212 145, 147, 148, 149, 151, 191, 195, 264;
Cognatic group, 219, 227 Aboriginal Land Trust, 67
Colonialism, 6, 14, 22, 28, 35, 39, 40, 42, Danggalaba, 211, 212, 213, 215, 220
72–74, 85–86, 90, 96, 98, 108–9, 123– Darwin, 2, 7, 30, 45, 66, 112, 124, 133, 134,
24, 152, 154, 157, 159, 160, 161, 165–67, 144, 149, 189, 194, 198, 213, 214, 225–26,
171, 176, 212, 251; archive, 72, 73, 74, 231, 249, 263
108, 109, 165, 167; brutalities, 92, 253; Davidson, Donald, 87
evil, 159; history, 72, 160, 162, 176, 181; Davies, W., 124, 125
subject, 22, 39, 161; subjectivity, 22 Deane, Justice William, 161
Commodification, 24, 54, 67, 128 Deleuze, Gilles, 13
Commodity, 20, 24, 50, 65, 68 De Lissa, Benjamin Cohen, 193
Common sense, 60, 67, 96, 98, 113, 125, Delissaville, 147, 148, 149, 211–12, 220, 223,
127, 141, 156, 165, 168, 171, 177, 179, 181, 226, 249. See also Belyuen
211, 228, 266; critical, 11, 34, 50, 56 Democracy, 17, 25, 29, 113, 180, 184, 236
‘‘Common spiritual affiliations,’’ 208, 214, Deontic, 85, 114, 262; community, 12;
215, 254 marker, 260
Commonwealth Constitution (1901), Deontology, 5, 9. See also Modality
21–22, 115, 116 Derrida, Jacques, 98
Commonwealth Department of the Descent, 82, 119, 122, 157, 188, 196, 212,
Home and Territories, 111 247, 255; ambilineal, 122, 211; biologi-
Commonwealth Franchise Act (1902), 116 cal, 29, 209; blood, 216; cognatic, 122,

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 Index

194, 211, 216, 247; groups, 194, 197; Doubt, 10, 11, 15, 16
heterosexual, 217, 231; human, 212, 219, Dreaming, the, 141, 167, 195, 197, 244, 248,
224, 246, 252; lines, 210; local, 211, 216; 260; ancestor, 240; conception, 241;
matrilineal, 122, 211; models of, 214; site, 192, 197
patrilineal, 122, 194, 195, 209, 215, 248; Dreamtime, 62
physical, 248; pragmatic, 198; prin- Durkheim, Émile, 31, 85, 87, 128, 139, 261
ciple of, 210, 228, 248; spiritual, 209, Durlg, 190, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 200,
210, 224, 228, 246, 247, 248; structures, 209, 211, 212, 217, 220, 221, 223, 227,
194; supplemented, 210; of territorial 240, 244, 260
rights, 209; traditional, 215 Durmugam, 141, 142, 145
Desire, 2, 3, 7, 16, 29, 36, 38, 39, 48, 56, 59, Duwun Island, 201, 203, 205, 206, 207,
64, 65, 66, 68, 73, 96, 98, 121, 123, 126, 219, 223
129, 133, 135, 177, 180, 184, 189, 213, 224,
225, 228, 230, 231, 253, 257 East Timor, 23
Diaspora, 26, 29, 50 Economy, 18, 19, 56, 66–68, 194; rural,
Difference, 4, 8, 18, 21, 24, 25, 29, 34, 59, 128; symbolic, 68; tourist, 121
60, 73, 78, 107, 109, 124, 131, 137, 156, Ecospirituality, 166
163–64, 167, 169, 180, 181, 184–85, 187, Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, 33,
241, 251, 255, 262, 265; authentic in- 37, 39, 44, 52, 108, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157,
digenous, 251; cultural, 8, 18, 21, 24, 159, 162, 163, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175,
25, 34, 59, 60, 73, 107, 109, 124, 131, 176, 177, 178, 179, 182, 183, 185, 246
137, 163, 167, 180, 181, 185, 187, 241, Elkin, Adolphus P., 75, 118, 119, 120, 121,
251; customary, 64; discriminable, 122, 123, 138, 140, 147, 150, 190, 191, 193,
180; and diversity, 17, 18, 27; expres- 194, 197, 200, 211, 213, 220, 228, 229,
sive, 127; ideological, 59; index of, 249
255; indigenous, 34; legally mandated, Embodiment, 3, 48, 50, 62, 253, 257; of
262; liberal discourses of, 188; maxi- knowledge, 9
mal, 265; narcissism of minor, 86, 131; Emiyenggal, 194, 195, 205, 207, 214, 223,
racial, 59, 117, 118; radical, 137, 265; rea- 226, 233, 260
soned/reasonable, 107; sexual, 84, 96, Engwura, 87, 93, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105,
122, 194, 196; traditional, 60; uncanny, 106
248. See also Alterity Enjoyment, 49, 50, 52, 57, 193
Directive, 115, 133, 147 Enlightenment, 86, 155, 261, 262. See also
Disappointment, 65, 230 Aufklärung
Discrimination, 45, 46, 163; gender, 116; Epistemology, 5, 9, 36, 60, 113, 117, 120,
inequality, 45; structures of, 30, 32, 33 131–32, 144–45, 169, 266. See also
Disgust, 122, 126, 167 Deontology
Disinterestedness, 228, 236 Eroticism, 140, 152
Disposition, 4, 39, 51, 135 Estate, 196, 197, 207, 211–12, 217, 220
Djarem, Ester, 189, 190, 191, 217, 226 Ethics, 5, 7–8, 14–15, 27, 67, 72, 75, 108; of
Djarug, Alice, 189, 226, 257 alterity, 73; meta-, 113, 114; modal, 71,
Djarug, Patsy-Ann, 189, 190 72; of respect, 72; of territoriality, 258;
Djewalabag, 202, 226 textual, 72
Dorlk, 193, 200, 220. See also Durlg Ethnological Society, 79

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 Index

Ethnopornographia, 79, 136 Freud, Sigmund, 71, 86, 128

Everingham, Paul, 198 Frontier, 42, 76, 113, 123, 124, 125–26,
Evidence, 169, 205, 227, 238, 252, 253, 254, 127–29, 130–32, 134, 139, 143–44, 145–
264, 265; legally felicitous, 227; prima 46
facie, 246; restricted, 235, 236; secret
nature of Aboriginal, 265; traditional, Gallipoli, 161
255 Garran, Robert, 117
Evil, 154, 159, 170, 173, 266 Gaudron, Justice Mary, 161
Exchange, 67, 196; bodily/social, 141; cor- Gender, 82, 84, 150, 152; discrimination,
poreal, 209; generalized and restricted, 116; distinctions, 104; hierarchy, 82. See
196; sexual, 139 also Women
Genealogy, 60, 114, 156, 216–17, 210, 227;
Fabrication, 241, 247, 249, 252, 254 legal, 210; of multiculturalism, 113
Faculties, 120, 123, 132, 191–92 Genre, 135, 136, 137, 146, 259; law of, 135;
Fairness, 169, 170 legal, 135; moral, 135; musical, 190,
Family, 64, 82–83, 122, 125, 127, 211, 215, 200–1, 224–25; mythic, 100
219, 224 Geography: sacred, 255; social, 58, 59
Fanon, Frantz, 6, 181 Gillen, Frank, 33, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78,
Fantasy, 37, 54, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89,
75, 87, 107, 128, 131, 134, 155, 181, 183, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102,
265 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 111, 235, 240, 241,
Fascism, 38, 53 242. See also Spencer, Baldwin
Federation Conference (1890), 77 Globalism, 158, 245; capital, 18; depres-
Feelings, 35–38, 42, 48–49, 113, 179, sion, 127; local resistance to, 246;
184. See also Ambivalence; Anxiety; system, 170; tourism, 58
Disappointment; Enjoyment; Horror; Good, the, 12, 52, 122, 142, 159, 163, 171,
Optimism; Paranoia; Passion; Pleasure; 173, 177, 179, 181; intentions, 16, 18, 31,
Shame; Sympathy 32, 55, 72, 121, 123, 129, 154, 159, 160,
Fejo, Mirella, 250–51 163; iterative trace of, 174; judgment,
Fejo, Wally, 249–50 158; liberal, 46. See also Truth
Fetishism, 71 Gramsci, Antonio, 11, 27
Fiduciary duties, 153 Gray, John, 216
Fison, Rev. Lorimer, 35, 36, 55, 60, 65, 68, Griffith, Sir Samuel, 77
75, 76, 82, 83, 86, 92, 150, 152. See also Gunabibi: 140. See also Kunapipi
Howitt, A. W.
Force, 73, 86, 94, 113, 121, 124, 127, 128, Habermas, Jürgen, 38, 75, 114
139, 225, 226, 230 ‘‘Half-caste problem,’’ 143
Ford, Lyz, 193, 223 Hamilton, Annette, 71, 72
Foreclosure, 98 Hanson, Pauline, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45,
Foucault, Michel, 71 46, 52, 53, 68, 154
Franchise, 22, 115. See also Suffrage Harney, Bill, 138, 139, 141, 142, 147, 148,
Fraser, Malcolm, 41 149, 194
Freedom, 73, 181, 258, 261, 262 Hasluck, Paul, 49, 50, 193

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Hawke, Bob, 18 and material-bearing, 266; rights- and

Hayes v. Northern Territory (1999), 167 resource-bearing, 185
Health, 2, 30, 40, 46, 57, 119, 189, 191, 213, Ideology, 21, 58–59, 129, 146, 150, 174, 179,
228, 263 188, 230, 262
Hegel, G. F. W., 17 Imabulg, Tommy Lyons, 61, 148, 212, 217,
Hegemony, 108, 183, 261 221
Herbert, Xavier, 143 Imaginary, 62, 135
Hermannsberg Mission (Lutheran), 93, Immigration, 21, 40, 42, 44, 53
104 Immigration Restriction Act (1905), 117
Herron, John, 41, 46 Imperialism, 53
Heteronomy, 99. See also Autonomy Inawana, 193. See also ‘‘Big Sunday’’
Heterosexuality, 188, 217; descent, 217, Incoherence, 184
231; machinery of human descent, 209; Incommensurability, 135–37, 189, 252–53,
monogamous, 83, 136; reproduction, 239
119, 194, 207, 209, 210, 212, 220, 224, Inconceivability, 12–14, 247
248; social machinery of, 231 Indeterminacy, 29, 73, 105, 115, 239
Hiatt, L. R., 196, 197 Indexicality, 64, 90, 96, 106, 127, 135, 140,
Hindmarsh Island, 238–39 172, 178, 192, 196, 200–2, 205, 209, 255,
Historicity, 32, 50 257
Historiography, 34, 74 Indigenous Arts Board, 58
Holocaust, 146 Indigenous liberation movement, 22
Home and Territories, Department of, Indonesia, 20, 33
112, 115, 134, 137 Inexpressibility, 236, 237, 239, 261, 262
Horror, 36, 65, 67, 109, 122, 127, 184, 252 Infant mortality, 40
Housing, 40, 57, 189, 228 Inference: 9, 10, 79
Howard, John, 21, 23, 41, 45, 46, 47, 51, International Year for the World’s In-
153, 161, 162, 172 digenous Peoples, 171
Howie, Ross, 61 Interpretant, 11, 12, 24, 141, 247
Howitt, A. W., 75, 76, 82, 83, 92, 150, 152. Interpretation, 73, 75, 82, 89–91, 97–98,
See also Fison, Rev. Lorimer 115, 129, 133, 181, 202, 207, 237, 266
Human, 85, 120, 265–26; ancestors, 200; Intertextuality, 238
capacity, 118; civil culture, 118; de- Intichiuma, 102
cency, 266; European views of, 94; Intimacy, 27, 28, 29, 43, 64, 83, 96, 105,
rationality, 119 116, 136, 138, 140, 141, 183, 251
Humanism, 16, 22, 29, 131, 142, 182 Intolerance, 15, 33, 42, 43, 46, 52, 53, 54,
Human rights, 21, 24, 37, 42, 113, 266 73, 147, 158, 163, 170, 178, 181. See also
Tolerance
Identification, 19, 50, 55, 56, 113, 131, 170, Isaacs, John, 198
180, 183, 197, 266
Identity, 8, 13, 18–19, 26, 28–29, 34, 39, Judgment, 33, 85, 113, 120, 125, 154, 159,
47–48, 55–56, 60, 64, 68, 113, 116–18, 163, 179, 182, 205, 227, 230, 240, 247,
125, 129, 136, 170, 176, 185, 191, 192, 197, 256, 257; criminal law, 176; critical,
203, 206, 213, 230, 236, 253, 266; rights- 132, 133; determinate, 97; good, 158;

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Judgment (continued ) 235, 237, 240, 243, 247, 248, 255, 257,
judicial, 157, 178; legal, 180, 210; liberal, 265, 266; Nicholson River (1985), 209,
14; moral, 28, 77, 123, 133, 137; negative, 210; Ti Tree (1987), 210, 219, 247, 248;
155; negative critical, 108; perceptual, Yorta Yorta, 164, 165
10, 15; proper, 84; publicly mediated, Land Commissioner, 109, 208, 209, 210,
230; reflexive, 14, 16, 236 211, 215, 216, 217, 225, 228, 240, 243–44,
Justice, 10, 45–47, 54, 56, 85, 113–15, 124, 250, 252, 254, 255, 262
126, 131, 135, 137, 158–60, 171, 176, 177, Land councils, 50, 228
179, 236, 261, 264, 266–67 Land rights, 23, 32, 34, 51, 60, 169, 181,
Justification, 8, 15, 16, 194, 262 187, 196, 209, 212
Larrakia, 59, 60, 61, 194, 206, 207, 211,
Kaititja, 92 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 219, 224, 233,
Kant, Immanuel, 9, 11, 87 246, 249, 250, 252, 253, 258, 259
Kapug, 190, 193, 198 Law, 59, 64, 67, 68, 131, 134, 135, 178, 189,
Kearney, Justice, 209, 210 225, 253, 262; Aboriginal, 139, 165, 168,
Keating, Paul, 18, 19, 21, 41, 53, 160, 171, 256, 264; ancient, 38, 41–43, 50–51, 52,
172 53, 54, 55, 56, 65, 139, 179; British, 123,
Keely, Tom, 214–15, 221, 256, 258, 262, 133, 173; common, 2, 3, 25, 32, 37, 43, 53,
263, 264, 265 69, 115, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 164,
Keesing, Roger M., 194 165, 167, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177,
Kenbi Land Claim, 244, 246 179, 182, 184, 253; criminal, 154, 169;
King, Christine Fejo, 250, 251, 252 customary, 37, 38–9, 44, 48, 85, 108, 113,
King, Jessica, 252 121, 124, 134, 140, 157, 164, 168–69, 175,
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 22 176, 255, 262, 265; statutory, 2, 3, 32,
Kinship, 64, 75, 82, 104, 119, 122, 148, 151, 154, 157, 164, 169, 170, 173, 174, 179, 208,
168, 194–96, 203, 205, 211, 219, 223, 243, 230, 253, 266; traditional, 45, 52, 54, 55,
247–48 61, 64, 68, 122, 164, 165; tribal, 112, 145,
Kirby, Justice, 176, 180 196
Kirkland, W. B., 134, 135, 136, 137 Law Reform Commission, 169
Kiyuk, 194, 195, 214, 217, 220 Leach, Edmund, 221, 228
Klingender, Jessica, 243 Lee, Benjamin, 236
Kulaluk, 60 Legitimation, 184
Kunapipi, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146; Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 82, 87, 107, 196, 261
grounds, 138. See also Big Sunday; Liberal, 6, 10–12, 13–14, 29, 32, 46, 73,
Gunabibi; Karwati 84, 98, 113, 131, 150, 159, 173, 179, 188,
Kymlicka, Will, 38 225, 230–31, 261, 268; agreement, 90;
body techniques, 76; capital, 16; colo-
Labor, 18–19, 127, 129 nization, 131; democracy, 11, 14, 15,
Labour Accord, 19, 20, 157, 160, 162–63, 28–29, 37–38, 43, 114, 124, 135, 137, 160,
198 173, 182; diasporas, 5, 6, 7, 14, 30, 51;
Land claim, 7, 30, 62, 64, 66, 114, 147, 180, discourse, 6, 9, 16, 188; fantasy, 155;
188, 205, 208, 213, 219, 236, 240, 247, force, 267; ideals, 92, 236; models of
254; Kenbi, 7, 13, 59, 60, 61, 68, 69, 208, communication and rationality, 75;
209, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 217, 220, 227, models of state and citizen, 185; multi-

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cultural, 5, 11, 12, 24, 28, 31, 108, 170, Maruy, 61, 197, 219, 220, 221, 223, 227, 240,
175; reason, 32, 34; recognition, 31, 230, 243, 253, 260
231; reflective judgment, 73–74; society, Marx, Karl, 11, 134
12, 75; subject, 16, 33, 34, 53, 73, 88, 162; Masculinity, 122
tolerance (cultural), 88, 175; traditions, Matrifiliation, 210, 211
14, 47; understanding, 73, 88 Maurice, Justice Michael, 210, 219, 221,
Liberalism, 6, 10–11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 29, 31, 224, 247, 248, 254, 255, 257
44, 54, 98, 159, 162; critique of, 155; Mauss, Marcel, 261
Enlightenment, 261; impasse in, 32, 33, McArthur and Roper River, 124
34; late, 3, 17, 56, 109; self-correction McEwen, John, 118
of, 32; self-reflexivity of, 32, 33 McLoughlin, Murray, 198
Lineage, 207, 211–14 Media, 20–21, 24, 28, 33, 38, 46, 47, 50–51,
Linguistics, 117, 203, 261; anthropologists, 68, 109, 123, 158, 172, 175, 226
135; code, 203; function, 203; groups, Mediation, 75, 114, 191
194, 220; technologies, 257 Memory, 153, 191–93
Lippo, Tom, 217 Menthayenggal, 194–95, 214, 233
Local descent group, 195, 208–9, 210–11, Merlan, Francesca, 239
213–14, 216–17, 224, 227–28, 246–47, Metalinguistic, 79, 96, 175
255 Milirrpum v. Nabalco Pty. Ltd., 187
Locality, 34, 164, 187, 189, 195, 220, 223, Miller, Lydia, 58
245, 252 Miscegenation, 117, 142–3, 249
Localization, 188, 189, 197, 205, 225 Missionaries, 93, 120–21, 133, 147, 149, 150,
Lowie, Robert, 139 151, 173, 242, 249; Board of Study for
the Preparation of, 121
Mabalan, 187, 189, 190, 198, 200, 226 Modality, 31, 109, 256–57, 260–61; de-
Mabo, Eddie, 157, 158. See also Eddie ontic, 72; epistemic, 72; future, 98. See
Mabo v. the State of Queensland also Deontology
Macdonnell Ranges, 95 Modernity, 16, 41, 50, 182, 243; savage
Maine, Sir Henry, 84, 111 history of, 54; settler, 38, 39, 40, 233,
Malakmalak, 134, 138, 139, 142, 144, 145 251; white, 118
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 83, 121, 126, 136, Monoculturalism, 176
139 Mood, 72, 192, 230, 256, 257
Malouf, David, 162 Morality, 4, 6, 15–16, 28–29, 31, 33, 46,
Mandatory sentencing, 23 52–53, 55, 77–79, 80, 85, 94, 108, 112,
Manpurr, Mosec, 190, 193, 200, 201, 202, 113, 114, 115, 119, 122, 124, 129, 131, 134,
207, 217, 222, 223, 226, 227, 229, 230, 144, 146, 177, 181, 260, 264; action,
258 67; address, 27; alterity, 85; assess-
Marrett, Allan, 193, 198, 200, 208, 222, ment, 120, 150; collective, 15, 132, 137,
223, 224, 225, 228, 229 264; compulsion, 262; decency, 3; di-
Marriage, 36, 76–77, 82–83, 94, 116, 119, lemma, 145, 172; feeling, 120, 134, 146,
148, 151, 167, 217, 219–20, 255, 172 239; hegemony, 108; ideologies of,
Marriamu, 2, 122, 194, 195, 214, 217, 220, 30, 31; imperatives, 175; injunctions,
233 138; integration, 113; intuition, 9, 11;
Marritjeban, 2, 194, 196, 207, 214 judgment, 28, 77, 123, 133, 137; liberal

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Morality (continued ) Ngirawat, 193, 200

discourses of, 188; national, 137, 160; Ngunbudj, 61, 253
normative, 137; public, 12, 169; realm Nilco, Alexander, 256, 263, 264
(supersensible), 85; reason, 9, 10, 32, Nilco, Leslie, 241
33; sense, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 31, 34, Northern Land Council, 200, 208, 213,
108, 112, 137, 145, 146, 236; stance, 78, 87 235, 250
Moreen, Ginger, 190, 212 Northern Territory, 77, 115, 116, 124, 125,
Moreen, Rusty, 212 126, 128, 132–33, 135, 158, 159, 250
Morgan, Lewis Henry, 82 Northern Territory Ordinance, 38
Morris, Meaghan, 39, 154 Northern Territory Welfare Act (1953), 22
Mosek: 193. See also Manpurr, Mosec Nyuidj, 61, 190, 191, 192, 200, 202–3, 205,
Moyle, Alice, 200, 224 206, 207, 222–23, 240, 253, 260; mal
Multiculturalism, 7, 8, 12, 14, 16, 17, 25, 38, (language), 201–3, 205
75, 155, 164, 169, 184, 240, 266; Austra-
lian, 30, 32, 54, 113, 179, 184; debates, Obligation, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 31, 34, 37,
26; domination, 6; as form of nation- 72, 108, 203, 240, 255, 257, 258–60, 262.
alism, 233; genealogy of, 113; historical See also Compulsion
ground of, 114; indigenous, 33; legal, Olney, Justice, 2, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168,
180, 184, 236; liberal, 5, 11, 12, 24, 28, 169, 215, 231, 265
31, 108; policy of, 40, 172; settler, 33; Olympics, 24, 42, 58
in society, 171; state, 74, 153, 167; and One Nation, 43, 44, 45, 47
tolerance, 176 Ontology, 19, 99, 103, 104, 140, 200,
Mundjimainmain, Billy, 200–202, 205–7 201–2, 212, 222; -durlg, 207
Murngin, 119, 139, 242 Optimism, 25, 38, 59, 65, 86, 108, 131, 155,
Murray, Jack, 147–49, 194 158, 159, 160, 162, 172, 177, 230
‘‘Murray system,’’ 125, 128
Myth, 99–100, 139, 140, 209, 210, 246, 249 Paranoia, 36, 60, 131, 146
Parkes, Sir Henry, 77
Nadidi, 207 Passion, 27, 41, 47, 57, 60, 122, 153, 160,
Nanggalinya, 249 216, 230
Nangiomeri, 141, 142 Pastoralism, 37, 39, 41, 46, 75–76, 128, 130,
Narrative, 58, 135, 154, 176, 181, 200–201, 173, 242
222, 228, 230 Patrifiliation, 209–12
Nation-building, 154, 161; settler, 37, 38, Peirce, Charles Sanders, 10, 11, 191, 194
42, 54, 119 Performativity, 15, 16, 33, 116, 161, 167,
Nationalism, 120, 123–24, 127, 130, 155 176, 182, 201–2, 205, 207
Native Affairs, Department of, 125, 138, Perkins, Charles, 22
144, 147 Piddington, Ralph O’Reilly, 127, 136
Native title, 2, 12, 32–33, 37, 39, 42, 45–47, Pleasure, 43, 50, 136, 139
51, 53, 55, 156, 157, 158, 165, 169–72, 174, Poetics, 129, 203, 205; function, 203;
177, 180–82, 188, 268; claims, 6, 12, 40, public sphere, 131
41, 236, 262; tribunals, 37, 157 Polygamy, 151
Native Title Act (1993), 2, 39, 45, 46, 51, Port Keats, 131, 140, 151, 152, 257, 263. See
157, 163, 246, 262 also Wadeye

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Postcoloniality, 6, 14, 29, 39, 155, 183 37, 39, 56, 65, 73, 74, 87, 108, 131, 143,
Poverty, 2, 7, 30, 68, 123, 157, 158, 191, 213, 153–55, 161, 168–69, 177, 183–84, 253,
217, 226 266
Powel, Alan, 116 Reconciliation, 2, 18, 29, 51, 161–63, 171,
Pragmatics, 74, 89, 90, 94, 96, 178, 184, 172
188, 198, 207, 219, 228; features, 201; Redistribution, 16, 32, 39, 56, 73, 161; of
form, 230; hyper-, 228; meta-, 203 material goods and social rights, 240;
Predication, 238; and denotation, 83 of resources, 49
Property, 41–42, 84, 122, 154, 173, 189, Referents, 140, 205; clarity, 116; confu-
194, 197 sion, 117; content, 236, 239; indetermi-
Public, 50, 52, 55, 67, 76, 121, 123, 141, 143, nacy, 115; nonspecificity, 58; object, 115;
150, 154, 172, 181, 182, 189, 209, 225, predication, 47; text, 238; trouble, 115;
235, 237, 242, 262, 267; debate, 8, 14, truth, 194
15, 24, 25, 28, 33, 38, 47, 49, 123, 124, Reflexivity, 266
127, 154, 160, 170, 182, 236, 239, 246; Relativism, 13, 80, 114
deliberation, 34; normative, 163, 184, Reparation, 6, 16, 25, 29, 55, 59–60, 154,
185, 240; opinion, 32, 59, 174; reason: 161, 163, 183, 254
4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 32, 33, 87, Republican movement, 21
143, 154, 159, 168–69; record, 207, 235, Repugnance, 6, 12, 25, 33, 34, 47, 54,
237, 265; scandals, 103, 118; sphere: 12, 69, 74, 78, 85, 109, 151, 154, 155, 163,
33, 47, 50, 124, 146, 157, 170, 177, 236; 164, 167, 169, 170, 173, 176, 177, 179; to
sympathy, 26, 38, 189 whites, 159, 174. See also Abhorrence;
Aversion
Quine, W. V.: 168, 240 Ridgeway, Senator Adam, 161
Rights, 24, 27–28, 37, 45, 51, 57, 117–18,
Race, 59, 118, 164; Aboriginal, 43; -based 161, 183, 207, 210, 212–13, 216, 236, 251–
legislation, 45; -based election, 46, 52; citizenship, 22, 41, 113, 115, 116, 118,
47; betrayal, 21; and citizenship, 118; 125; human, 21, 24, 37, 42, 113, 266;
coding, 58; ethnic population, 27, 48; land, 51, 60, 169, 181, 187, 196, 209, 212;
imagined, 58; policy, 119; topologizing special, 57, 153, 156
of, 118; traditions, 38 Ritual, 16–17, 25, 58, 72, 74, 79, 82, 88–
Racism, 18, 52 89, 94, 96, 99, 103–4, 107, 111, 113, 117,
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 82, 119, 120, 139, 119–21, 124, 126–28, 132, 134, 137–39,
194, 196 139–40, 143–48, 150–52, 167, 188, 191,
Rationality, 108, 154, 242, 261; critical, 10, 194, 200, 207, 209, 210, 221, 224–25,
16; human, 119 240, 249, 255–56. See also Ceremony
Reason, 5, 11, 14, 16, 31, 84–87, 94, 123, Rivers, W. H. R., 194
125, 131, 132, 134; anthropological, 119, Rorty, Richard, 38, 75, 87, 91, 162
150; communicative, 122, 127; crisis in, Rose, Jacqueline, 155
73, 85, 125; critical, 15–16; instrumental, Roth, W. E. H., 79
225, 243; practical, 75; procedural, 15,
34, 236; speculative, 120; sympathetic, Secretary, Topsy, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 68,
119. See also Public: reason 220
Recognition, 4, 5, 7–12, 14–16, 17, 32–33, Secrets, 237, 262, 266; function of, 265

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Semantics, 90, 94, 96; code, 207; content Spencer, Baldwin, 33, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77,
and structure, 228; decontextualizable, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89,
230; feature, 104, 201; impenetrable, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100,
203; meaning, 202; opacity, 202; sense, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 111, 126, 139,
201; and structural approaches to 141, 235, 240, 241, 242. See also Gillen,
textual meaning, 188; structure, 257; Frank
violence, 96 Spirituality, 61, 65, 66–67, 85, 88, 181, 207,
Semiotics, 31, 47, 48, 55, 61, 88, 93, 192, 209, 219, 246, 249, 250–51, 252, 268;
201, 207, 256; circulation, 141; hinge, conception, 242; descent, 209, 210, 224,
58; mediation, 65, 129; practices, 201; 228, 246, 247, 248
remainders, 61 Spivak, Gayatri, 11, 155
Settler, 33, 36, 65, 123–24, 128, 167, 174, Stanner, W. E. H., 1, 111, 117, 119, 120, 121,
176, 225; modernity, 38, 39, 40, 233, 251; 131, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148,
nation, 37, 38, 42, 54, 119; sexuality, 34, 149, 152, 153, 209, 212, 215, 224
143, 144, 146; violence, 126, 136, 162 State, 58, 112–13, 116, 128, 132, 134–35, 137,
Sex, 73, 79–80, 82–85, 88–90, 96, 94, 99, 144–46, 149, 183
108, 117, 121–22, 133–34, 139–41, 143, Stocking, George, 97
146, 148, 150, 248; as form of attach- ‘‘Stolen’’ generation, 12, 22, 37, 43, 46, 53,
ment, 106, 107; and limits of reason, 154, 159, 162, 213
125; and murder, 149; as public matter, Strehlow, T. G. H., 104
143; regulation of (interracial), 143; Stretton, A. V., 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137,
ritual, 33, 72–73, 79, 82, 89, 94, 99, 103, 149
111, 113, 119–21, 124, 137, 139, 143, 180; as Stuart, John McDouall, 95
symbolic tool, 140 Subaltern, 16, 17, 27, 28, 39, 49, 182, 183;
Sexuality, 83, 122, 131, 136–37, 141–44, 148, bodies, desires, and language, 268; and
150, 152, 219, 243; history of, 73; and minorities, 189; studies, 6
social organization, 188 Subjectivity, 3, 4, 11, 18, 22, 31, 73, 137, 138,
Shame, 17, 18, 27–29, 42, 54, 56, 123, 124, 261
154, 155, 157, 161, 162, 163, 171, 176, 181, Sutton, Peter, 246, 247
182, 183, 217, 251, 252, 266 Sykes, Bobby, 22
Signs, 117, 192, 252 Symbolic, 59, 68, 82, 111, 128, 141, 149, 209
Silverman, Kaja, 39 Sympathy, 59, 120, 122, 132, 150, 189
Simmel, Georg, 138
Simpson, Colin, 190, 191, 193, 198, 223 Taussig, Michael, 71
Singh, Harry, 221, 222 Taylor, Charles, 17, 38
Singh, John, 198 Technique, 107; administrative, 128;
Singh, Olga, 198, 212 bodily, 84, 88; bureaucratic, 132; cita-
Singh, Raelene, 61, 62, 64, 65, 68, 259 tional, 87; legal, 176; linguistic, 179; of
Sloterdijk, Peter, 155 the body, 77; textual, 88, 173
Smiler, Paul, 263 Terra Australis, 173
Smyth, R. Bough, 166 Terra nullius, 39, 157, 160, 178
Sovereignty, 77, 153, 156–59 Territoriality, 2, 141, 193, 196, 197, 201,
Space, 18, 66, 135, 150, 192, 201, 206 207, 209, 212, 215, 217, 219, 220, 259, 261
Speech, 62, 133, 146, 175, 202 Territorialization, 188, 189, 224

336

From The Cunning of Recognition by Povinelli, Elizabeth A.. DOI: 10.1215/9780822383673

Duke University Press, 2002. All rights reserved.
 Index

Text, 72–73, 75, 88, 116, 119, 123, 129, 134, Undecidability, 202
155, 165, 168, 173, 178, 188, 206, 208, 223, Understanding, 30, 34, 81, 86, 87, 97, 114,
226, 230, 235, 237–39 119–21, 123, 126, 129, 131, 136, 150–51,
Textuality, 119, 207, 219; abstraction, 175; 159, 219, 236
debris, 113; deletion, 72, 108; ellipsis, Unknowability, 59
72, 80, 88, 108, 235, 236, 237; ethics, 72; Unrepresentability, 58, 59
footnotes, 88; fragments, 149; frames, Unspeakability, 237, 239
137; ideology, 179; implicature, 79; in-
tolerance, 178; limit, 208; meaning, Value, 4, 8, 20, 24, 29, 37–38, 42–43,
188; mediations, 66, 75, 114, 146; meta-, 49, 52, 60–61, 64–69, 82–83, 96, 99,
235; methods, 119; paraphrase, 72, 115, 122, 127–28, 131, 135, 146, 163, 165,
88; practices, 75, 155; pragmatics, 173; 170–72, 183–85, 227, 230
space, 129; techniques, 88, 173; voicing, Violence, 6, 7, 13, 33, 37, 38, 64, 73, 76, 92,
129 96, 99, 101, 107, 113, 119, 133, 139, 140,
Tickner, Robert, 238 144, 150, 264, 265
Tolerance, 13, 16, 18, 24, 41, 88, 108, 122, Voicing, 134
131, 137, 175
Tourism, 4, 24, 42, 50, 58, 67–68, 121, 128, Wadeye, 2, 4, 7, 30, 66, 67. See also Port
229 Keats
Tradition, 65, 120, 150, 170, 173, 228, 266; Wadjigiyn, 194–95, 214, 220, 221, 226, 233
archive of, 237; precolonial, 133, 152 Wagaitj, 147, 148, 193, 194, 197, 200, 207,
Translation, 74, 96, 207, 239, 251 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 220, 223, 227, 249.
Translocal, 230, 231 See also Belyuen
Transnational, 34, 134, 158, 252 Wagaman, 138, 142
Trauma, 16, 29, 36, 46, 50, 52–54, 76, 82, Walsh, Michael, 213
88, 98, 99, 101–2, 106, 161, 185 Walzer, Michael, 13
Tribe: affairs, 125, 145; blacks, 112; cere- Wangga, 190, 198, 200–203, 205–8, 213,
mony, 149; character, 129; custom, 113, 219, 222–25, 228–31, 233
115, 149; function, 127; group (new), Wargite tribe, 149
194, 224; law, 112, 145, 196; ‘‘more or Warner, Michael, 236
less,’’ 123–4, 126, 128, 132, 253; practice, Warner, W. Lloyd, 119, 139, 140, 241, 242
134 Warren, Rev. Mr., 125
Truth, 10, 62, 64, 67, 91, 114, 143, 169, 178, Waugite, 193
228, 231, 240, 245, 253, 261, 264, 266; Weber, Max, 169
ascriptions, 242; discursive forms of, Wedell, Robert H., 111, 132, 145
227; referential, 194; self-evidence, 11, Welfare (social security), 40, 44, 51, 112,
16; universalism, 27; value, 64, 205. See 213, 228; health, housing, and, 127;
also Good programs/benefits, 6, 41; social, 46,
Tuckiar v. the King, 144 158
Turner, Constable J. T., 138, 144, 145, 146, Welfare Ordinance Act (1953), 116
147, 148, 149, 194, 264 Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland
(1996), 33, 37, 39, 41, 51, 52, 64, 153, 155,
Uncanny, 74, 86, 142, 145, 167, 170, 189 156, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 182,
Uncertainty, 87 185

337

From The Cunning of Recognition by Povinelli, Elizabeth A.. DOI: 10.1215/9780822383673

Duke University Press, 2002. All rights reserved.
 Index

Willshire, Constable W. C., 93 Yarrowin, Linda, 189, 190

Wilson, Ronald, 43 Yarrowin, Roy, 198
Women, 116, 139. See also Gender Yarrowin, Ruby, 189, 193, 226, 229, 260
Woodward, Justice, 212, 217 Yindi, Yothu, 23
World Bank, 26 Yorta Yorta, 164, 167, 169
Worlds: actual, 10, 15, 17, 26, 52, 265; im- Young, Tony, 241, 244, 245, 250, 251, 257,
probable, 257; possible, 10, 15, 97, 256, 258, 260
257, 265
Žižek, Slavoj, 25, 155

338

From The Cunning of Recognition by Povinelli, Elizabeth A.. DOI: 10.1215/9780822383673

Duke University Press, 2002. All rights reserved.
From The Cunning of Recognition by Povinelli, Elizabeth A.. DOI: 10.1215/9780822383673
Duke University Press, 2002. All rights reserved.
 ELIZABETH A. POVINELLI is Professor of Anthropology
and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. She is
author of Labor’s Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of
Aboriginal Action and editor of the journal Public
Culture.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Povinelli, Elizabeth A.
The cunning of recognition : indigenous alterities and
the making of Australian multiculturalism / Elizabeth A.
Povinelli.
p. cm. — (Politics, history, and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-8223-2853-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 0-8223-2868-2 (pkb. : alk. paper)
1. Australian aborigines—Ethnic identity. 2. Australian
aborigines—Claims. 3. Multiculturalism—Australia.
4. Australia—Race relations. I. Title. II. Series.
gn666 .p64 2002
305.89'915—dc21 2001007382

From The Cunning of Recognition by Povinelli, Elizabeth A.. DOI: 10.1215/9780822383673

Duke University Press, 2002. All rights reserved.