A Neo-colonial Farce? Discourses of Deficit in Australian Aboriginal Land Claim and Native Title Cases

Bibliographic Data

ID20042495
AuthorsMichael Walsh (0000-0002-6441-3635)
Year2011
Pages327-346
Publication date2011-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueDiscourses of Deficit (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230299023_18
OpenAlexW2472390100
ISBN9780230299023
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited9

This chapter draws on the author’s experience (2008) in the highly interdiscursive arena of Australian Aboriginal land claim and native title cases. Among the discourses encountered are those of the judges, lawyers, Aboriginal claimants and witnesses, and a range of experts. My own direct experience has been as an anthropologist and linguist, but other experts, including archaeologists and historians, have played a prominent role in these proceedings. One site for discursive dispute is a perceived straying outside disciplinary borders: historians doing ethnography, ethnographers doing history, anthropologists daring to talk about language! Such ‘transgressions’ are framed in terms of deficit not only by the expert practitioners but especially by the judge and lawyers representing interests opposed to the claimants’. The discourse of experts is further found deficient in the eyes of the law because of accusations of bias. Meanwhile Aboriginal claimants and witnesses find themselves in a discursive environment which is foreign enough for the average Anglo-Australian. For them it presents enormous challenges, not just because of the cultural distance involved and a significantly different use of language but also because of fundamentally different views on the dissemination of traditional knowledge. A ‘discourse’ can, at a broader level, be situated in groups or professions each of which is socialised into that discourse, but at a finer level it can refer to subsets, or even individuals, whose discourse has been shaped by their own unique life histories

Colonialism · Discipline · Ethnography · Media studies · Political science · Situated · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Australian Indigenous Culture and History · Gender Studies · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Law · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies

Tools

Open DOILibgen