Friends, colleagues, please join us for the October instalment of our Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by Dr Eve Vincent of Macquarie University. The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.
Date: Thursday 12 October
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122
(Also, by videoconference, at Deakin Burwood C2.05, Deakin Downtown, and VMP 39384)
‘The politics of disgust, suffering and compassion in an outback Australian town’
This seminar takes account of two developments that both constitute ‘experimental interventions’ into Aboriginal lives in the rural South Australian town of Ceduna. First, between 2008-2016, the local council engaged a private security firm to essentially remove from view the socially aberrant otherness of Aboriginal public drinkers: guard dogs were used to enforce local by-laws, which are seen to enshrine ‘civilised’ norms. Disgust animated the local debate surrounding this experiment, foul matter—rubbish and shit—and ‘foul language’ assuming prominence in discourses justifying the dogs’ introduction and retention. Second, in 2015, Ceduna was selected as the first trial site for the cashless welfare card, the latest iteration of Australia’sracialised experiments in welfare reform. Public debate surrounding the controversial federal government’s trial’s beginnings saw discourses shift from the politics of disgust to the politics of suffering and compassion. These case studies are analysed together using Didier Fassin’s term, ‘biolegitimacy’, which emphasises the ‘construction of the meaning and values of life instead of [focussing exclusively on] the exercise of forces and strategies [used] to control it’ (2009: 52). Tracking then between the state’s neglect and ‘abandonment’ of Indigenous lives (Povinelli 2011), and the terms in which care and concern are expressed for these same lives, I seek to grasp both the governance of life and some sense of the value marginalised social actors attach to their particular lives, in the process glimpsing something of ‘their practice of politics’ (Fassin 2009: 57).
References: Fassin, D. (2009). Another Politics of Life is Possible. Theory Culture Society 26(5): 44-60; Povinelli, E. (2011). Economies of Abandonment. Durham: Duke University Press.
Biography
Dr Eve Vincent is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University. She is the author of ‘Against Native Title’: Conflict and Creativity in Outback Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2017) and co-editor of Unstable Relations: Environmentalism and Indigenous People in Contemporary Australia (UWAP, 2016).