THE ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS OF ‘CLOSING THE GAPS’

Abstract

In Australia and New Zealand, the realization of the knowledge object ‘national population’ makes it necessary to involve Indigenous Australians and Māori in the Census. Both Indigenous peoples have engaged in the Census and have made use of the resulting official statistics in their self-representation as peoples not yet accorded social justice. This paper considers two of the issues of representing Indigenous peoples as populations: where to draw the distinction that makes the non-Indigenous/Indigenous population binary; and how to prevent the quantitative representation (‘population’) from subverting the qualitative representation (‘people’). That ‘population’ might trump ‘people’ is arguably an effect of the nation-state being a kind of ‘method assemblage’ in which people are arrayed as social entities that are knowable in certain terms. Drawing on the terms of recent liberal political theory, the paper poses the question of the ‘civicity’ of Indigenous Australians and Māori, concluding that there are ways that Indigenous intellectuals might use population data to substantiate their claims to people-hood.

Keywords:

• social justice
• political ontology
• liberalism
• population
• Indigenous people
• civicity

Acknowledgements

Research on this paper was funded by the Australian Research Council (DP0665866). I would like to thank Jon Altman, Emma Kowal, Manuhuia Barcham, two anonymous referees and the editors for their comments.

Notes

1. When the Indigenous population is a small proportion, there is little difference between an Indigenous/non-Indigenous comparison and an Indigenous/total population comparison. The earliest version of the binary in Australia was in the latter terms.

2. I share my ARC grant work with Dr. Len Smith (ANU) and we have employed Dr Tiffany Shellam (Deakin University).

3. I do not infer that Māori lack a normative culture. My point is that it is evidently difficult to specify its content as a distinct normative universe within New Zealand society.