Erasing Culture and Race: Practising ‘self‐determination’1

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper is an ethnographic exploration of the process heralded by the progressive policies of Aboriginal self‐determination. The discourse of self‐determination was based on anti‐racist ideals and a break with the past. However, state officials did not divest themselves of their cultural baggage, and proceeded by trial and error to implement a program of creating autonomous Aboriginal communities for people of whom they had no knowledge. In attempting to reshape communities there was little recognition of the cultural specificities of the Aboriginal domain let alone the way difference, both as race and as culture, had been constructed and perpetuated in practice. The state erased its own white past. The ordinary practices of state officials became a glass barrier, precluding Aborigines from responding either as expected or as they themselves desired. Neither incompetence, ignorance nor ill‐will is at the root of these failures, but rather the liberal, common sense, anti‐racism which informs the state's refusal to deal with the social realities of history and race. The absence of history and race from anthropology's study of cultural dynamics frames the discussion.