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Raphael Lemkin in Remote Australia: The Logic of Cultural Genocide and Homelands

Version 2 2024-06-03, 23:46
Version 1 2019-02-26, 15:36
journal contribution
posted on 2018-11-01, 00:00 authored by Jon AltmanJon Altman
© 2018 Oceania Publications In the 1970s, Aboriginal people in remote Australia took decisive steps to decentralize from government settlements and missions to live and make a living on their ancestral lands at places that have become known as homelands. Over time, this migration garnered some state support and saw the emergence of new facilitating institutions. But in the last decade homeland living has been discursively demeaned by politicians, and policies have been put in place to undermine the possibility of residing and making a livelihood in these smallest, most remote places mainly located on Indigenous-titled lands. As Indigenous territorial rights expand, the state looks to extinguish possibilities for current and future generations to utilize the land and its resources for livelihood. In this article, I draw on evidence from political discourse, policy documents and programme design and implementation to outline this state project to eliminate a contemporary lifeway. I provide ethnographic evidence from work with Kuninjku people in Arnhem Land that documents this destruction. I engage with the work of Raphael Lemkin to document and theorize the techniques being deployed in terms of the logic of cultural genocide. I end by asking what homelands people might do to push back and what role anthropologists might play in such a process.

History

Journal

Oceania

Volume

88

Issue

3

Pagination

336 - 359

Publisher

Wiley

Location

London, Eng.

ISSN

0029-8077

eISSN

1834-4461

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

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