Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series #9: Cameo Dalley, ‘Encounters in the Death Space: Cattle, Aboriginal Capitalism and Organisations in Remote Northern Australia’

Friends, colleagues, please join us for the November instalment of our Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by Dr Cameo Dalley of Melbourne. The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

Date: Thursday 9 November
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122

(Also, by videoconference, at Deakin Burwood C2.05, Deakin Downtown, and VMP 39384)

Encounters in the Death Space: Cattle, Aboriginal Capitalism and Organisations in Remote Northern Australia

This article draws on research undertaken in a remote Aboriginal pastoral station in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia to explore the encounters and after-effects of the arrival of a new form of expansive Aboriginal capitalism. The gloss of the neoliberal capitalist ideal is the empowerment of a small group of emplaced but hypermarginal Aboriginal people, through the provision of capacity and resources by a more powerful Aboriginal organisation. However, the promise of empowerment hides the predatory nature of the encounter and the lateral structural violence that it entails. This violence is propelled by what Amit (2012) has called ‘exceptional disjunctures’, which here I take to be moments that punctuate the social fabric of pre-existing forms of indigeneity. Here the ‘death space’, to borrow Taussig’s (1987) notion, is not occupied by the colonial settler-state, but rather by Aboriginal people and Aboriginal organisations themselves. The impacts of encounters in this space are compound in that they involve the wresting of land, and the control of commodities (cattle) away from a small group of people who have had their tradition-derived rights recognised by the settler-state through successive legal processes. What is at risk in these encounters then is the expansion of hypermarginality via the diminishment of claims to particularised forms of indigenous identity.

 

Biography

Dr Cameo Dalley is a McArthur Postdoctoral Fellow in anthropology at the University of Melbourne. Her current research project has investigated the multiple realms in which kardiya and Ngarinyin Aboriginal belonging is manifest in the Kimberley region. She has published on topics of identity, indigeneity and the intercultural and her most recent publication examines education-driven mobility for Indigenous youth http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9830-9780824867966.aspx. 

 

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