Searching for Certainty in Purity: Indigenous Fundamentalism

Abstract

Indigenous resistance to colonial hegemony developed as one based on a politics of difference. This strategic construction of difference relied on the notion of culture to establish a discursive space to articulate the political demands of the subjugated Indigenous minority. This article interrogates the less liberatory impulses of such political constructions of identity and culture. I contend that indigenous responses to colonization that are based on a politics of difference have the potential to, and in particular instances do, invoke the notion of culture and identity as an oppressive site of authority in a way that is, in practice, fundamentalist.

Notes

1. Peter Sutton, The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009).

2. Fred Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics Among Western Desert Aborigines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 159.

3. Jane Kelsey, Economic Fundamentalism (London and East Haven: Pluto Press); see also, Marjorie Cohen, “What Women Should Know About Economic Fundamentalism,” Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal 21(2): 97–107 (1997); Lee Bolderman, The Cult of the Market: Economic Fundamentalism and its Discontents (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2007), http://www.epress.anu.edu.au/cotm/pdf/whole_book.pdf (accessed 10 Nov. 2013).

4. Christian Lundberg, “Dueling Fundamentalisms,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4(1): 106 (2007); Steve Bruce, Fundamentalism (Oxford: Polity, 2000), 13.

5. Martin E. Marty, “The Fundamentals of Fundamentalism,” in Lawrence Kaplan, ed., Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 18; Joyce Green, “Cultural and Ethnic Fundamentalism: The Mixed Potential for Identity, Liberation, and Oppression,” in The Scholar Series (Saskatchewan: University of Regina, 2003), 1.

6. Steve Bruce, Fundamentalism, 13.

7. Malisse Ruthven, Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007), 6; Marty, “The Fundamentals of Fundamentalism,” 18–19.

8. Marty, “The Fundamentals of Fundamentalism,” 21.

9. Ruthven, Fundamentalism, 22.

10. Christian Lundberg, “Dueling Fundamentalisms,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4(1): 106 (2007).

11. Geoffrey Stokes, “Citizenship and Aboriginality: Two Conceptions of Identity in Aboriginal Political Thought,” in Geoffrey Stokes, ed., The Politics of Identity in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 169.

12. Ibid., 169; see also, Robert Ariss, “Writing Lack: The Construction of an Aboriginal Discourse,” in Beckett, ed., Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988), 132.

13. It must be noted that whilst the politics of the 1930s significantly shaped Aboriginal activism over the following decades, I am cognizant of the fact that the earlier Australian Aborigines Progressive Association did assert the value of traditional culture in modern Indigenous politics. See: John Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom: The Origins of Aboriginal Activism (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007).

14. Marcia Langton, “Anthropology, Politics and the Changing World of Aboriginal Australians,” Anthropological Forum 21(1): 1 (2011).

15. Richard McGregor, “Protest and Progress: Aboriginal Activism in the 1930s,” Australian Historical Studies 25(101): 555 (2008).

16. McGregor, “Protest and Progress,” 556.

17. Russell McGregor, “Another Nation: Aboriginal Activism in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s,” Australian Historical Studies 40(3): 343 (2003).

18. Ibid., 353.

19. Ibid., 357.

20. Ibid., 354.

21. Ibid., 354.

22. Ibid., 354.

23. Sarah Maddison, Black Politics: Inside the Complexity of Aboriginal Political Culture (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2009), 119.

24. Noel Pearson, “Passive Welfare and the Destruction of Indigenous Society in Australia,” in Peter Saunders, ed., Reforming the Australian Welfare State (Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2000).

25. Marcia Langton, “Indigenous Exceptionalism and the Constitutional ‘Race Power’” (Speech presented at Melbourne Writer's Festival, 26 Aug., 2012), http://www.recognise.org.au/downloads/8f2d6396820886086f16.pdf (accessed 9 Nov. 2013).

26. Rosemary Neill, White Out: How Politics is Killing Black Australia (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2002).

27. Peter Sutton, “The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Policy in Australia Since the 1970s,” Anthropological Forum 11(2): 137 (2001).

28. Pearson, “Passive Welfare,” 136.

29. Langton, “Indigenous Exceptionalism,” 1.

30. Sutton, “The Politics of Suffering,” 137.

31. Neill, White Out, 71.

32. Ibid., 241.

33. Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, eds., Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1996), 205.

34. Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 127.

35. Yin Paradies, “Beyond Black and White: Essentialism, Hybridity and Indigeneity,” Journal of Sociology 42(4): 356 (2006).

36. Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent's Tail, 1993), 65.

37. Paradies, “Beyond Black and White,” 357.

38. Spivak, Selected Works, 216–17.

39. Paul Dourish, “Strategic Essentialism and Environmental Sustainability,” in Sixth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Sydney, Australia, 19–22 May 2008, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.182.1884&rep=rep1&type=pdf#page=63 (accessed 11 Nov. 2013).

40. Elisabeth Eide, “Strategic Essentialism and Ethnification: Hand in Glove?,” Nordicom Review 31(2): 76 (2010).

41. R. D. Grillo, “Cultural Essentialism and Cultural Anxiety,” Anthropological Theory 3(2): 158 (2003), emphasis in the original.

42. Verena Stolcke, “Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe,” Current Anthropology 36(1): 4 (1995).

43. Ibid., 5.

44. Green, “Cultural and Ethnic Fundamentalism,” 4.

45. Grillo, “Cultural Essentialsim,” 165.

46. Terry Moore, “Problematising Identity: Governance, Politics and the ‘Making of the Aborigines,’” Journal of Australian Studies 80: 177–88.

47. Moore, “Problematizing Identity,” 186.

48. Ibid., 186.

49. Ibid., 186.

50. Green, “Cultural and Ethnic Fundamentalism,” 1.

51. Ibid., 1.

52. Marcia Langton, “The End of ‘Big Men’ Politics,” Griffith Review 22: 3 (2008).

53. ABC, “Abbott Criticized for ‘Urban Aboriginal’ Comment,” ABC News, 13 Nov. 2012, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-13/abbott-criticised-for-urban-aboriginal-mp-comment/4369688 (accessed 27 Oct. 2013).

54. Michelle Grattan, “Aboriginal MP Rebukes Boss Abbott,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 Nov. 2012, http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/aboriginal-mp-rebukes-boss-abbott-20121113-29aup.html (accessed 27 Oct. 2013).

55. Green, “Cultural and Ethnic Fundamentalism,” 3.

56. Ibid., 3.

57. Ibid., 3.

58. Green, “Cultural and Ethnic Fundamentalism,” 9.

59. Ben Henderson, “Mundine Defends Comments About Aboriginal Culture and Homosexuality,” NITV News, 1 Nov. 2013, http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/11/01/mundine-defends-comments-about-aboriginal-culture-and-homosexuality (accessed 25 Nov. 2013).

60. Alex Rowe, “Anthony Mundine Slammed Over Redfern Now Gay Rant,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 Nov. 2013, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/anthony-mundine-slammed-over-redfern-now-gay-rant-20131102-2wsy4.html#ixzz2lcfF80n6 (accessed 25 Nov. 2013).

61. Ibid.