Abstract
Once restricted to ‘expert’ medical and functionalist psycho-sociological terminology, ‘dysfunctionality’ seems to have known a surge of success in the last twenty years within common language to refer to perceived pathological or ‘maladaptive’ aspects of individual and social behaviour. Within the Australian context, ongoing public debates on socio-economic and health issues within Australian Indigenous communities now commonly feature the term ‘dysfunctional’ to qualify the various ‘problems’ which are popularly assumed to be prevalent within Indigenous communities, from high rates of unemployment to alcohol abuse and ‘domestic violence’. Public commentators’ recourse to the term has been particularly frequent around the time of the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention. Public outcry about the ‘dysfunction’ of Aboriginal communities has operated as justification for state intervention, with a strong emphasis on disciplining and reforming behaviours and inducing individual ‘responsibilities’ (this is particularly evident in the restriction of individual welfare income spending to the purchase of food and other essential goods – see Lattas & Morris 2010a, 2010b). While arguments on which it was based occupied a growing place in public debate since the 1990s (see Austin-Broos 2011), the Intervention can be viewed as a landmark in the gaining in public authority of a particular type of discourse about remote Indigenous communities, a discourse which portrays these communities as maladaptive ‘exceptions’ to the ‘mainstream’ (depictions of Aboriginal communities in terms of pathology, however, are not limited to ‘classical’ remote Northern Territory communities, as we shall see with the case of Palm Island, located in North East Queensland). Such contrastive discourse is not strictly limited to, but particularly evident in, neoliberal accounts of contemporary conditions within Indigenous communities.
Highlights
Once restricted to ‘expert’ medical and functionalist psycho-sociological terminology, ‘dysfunctionality’ seems to have known a surge of success in the last twenty years within common language to refer to perceived pathological or ‘maladaptive’ aspects of individual and social behaviour
Like the Durkheimian concept of anomie, dysfunctionality posits an absence of moral governance as the source of suicide, domestic violence, murder, alcohol and drug abuse rather than explaining their causes
The ‘liberal consensus’, in Sutton’s view, is what has characterized policies and attitudes towards Aboriginal people between the 1970s and the 1990s, its dominant assumptions remaining strongly in place but starting to be questioned and opposed during the 1990s
Summary
Even if the observer attempts to view a social system from an ethically neutral vantage point, his decision concerning the functionality or dysfunctionality of a set of conditions for any individual or subgroup implies a definite value as to what constitutes ‘the good life’. (Mayer Hacker 1951: 355)
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