Mining, indigeneity, alterity: or, mining Indigenous alterity?

ABSTRACT

In this special issue on ‘extraction’, we think critically about two urgent and entangled questions, examining the political economy of mining and Indigenous interests in Australia, and the moral economy of Indigenous cultural difference within Cultural Studies and Anthropology. In settler colonial states such as Australia, Indigenous cultural difference is now routinely presented as commensurate with, rather than obstructive of, extractive industry activity. Meanwhile, the renewed interest in ‘radical alterity’ across these disciplines has seen a movement away from regarding authoritative claims about ‘others’ as morally suspect – as only extracting from or mining Indigenous worlds for insights and academic prestige. The ‘ontological turn’, however, leads us to question the empirical status of the ontologies circulating through academic discussions. What happens when Indigenous people disappoint, in their embrace of environmentally destructive industries such as mining, for example? We argue that in cases where ‘they’ are not as different as ‘we’ might hope them to be, scholars should be concerned to foreground the potential role of colonial history and processes of domination in the production and reduction of ontological difference. Second, we call for critical assessment of the political, epistemological, and social effects of both academic and societal evaluations of difference. We conclude by urging for a scholarship that does not pick and choose between agreeable and less agreeable forms of cultural difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Alterity
• difference
• Indigenous people
• mining
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Timothy Neale is currently a research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. He is the author of Wild articulations: environmentalism and indigeneity in Northern Australia (University of Hawaii Press, In Press).

Eve Vincent is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

ORCID

Timothy Neale http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4703-5801

Eve Vincent http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6913-124X

Notes

1. This point applies particularly to Western Australia where the state government has been widely criticized for deregistering many sacred sites and proposing to weaken heritage legislation. Further, Bennetts (2015) outlines a recent shift over the same period towards ‘industry-friendly site assessment outcomes' and staff appointments with industry backgrounds.

2. Pickering’s (1999) detailed examination of the Australian material leads him to conclude that anthropophagy was not a cultural feature of any Indigenous society across the Australian continent prior to colonization.

3. Historical developments, including the 1998–2003 civil violence in the Solomon Islands, have led to a ‘hardening’ of ‘already incipient ethnicised insular categories’ (2014, p. 45) among the Arosi, Scott finds. The Arosi are not multinaturalists, and are increasingly closed to others: Scott details ‘calls to purify Makira of foreign ways and people’ in order to revitalize the ‘power of their core Makiran ontology’ (2014, p. 43). He argues scholars should approach ontological differences having suspended evaluation, engaging instead a ‘wonder’ at otherness that precedes moral judgement about the nature of that otherness (2014, p. 50).

4. Geographer Kathryn Yusoff (2016) recently questioned the uncoupling of questions of ontology and questions of ‘territory’, a point especially pertinent in Australia as policy developments indicate that state governments and the Commonwealth government are increasingly unwilling to resource small, remote settlements in which Aboriginal people live on their ancestral country.