DEBATE: Are anthropologists being candid about Aboriginal cultural discontinuities in native title cases?
Event Details
- Date:
- Friday, 04 May 2012
- Time:
- 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
- Room:
- 360
- UQ Location:
- Physiology Lecture Theatres (St Lucia)
- URL:
- http://socialscience.uq.edu.au/documents/newsevents/seminars/Seminar2012_Brunton_SackettDebate.pdf
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Debbie Lim
- Phone:
- 53152
- Email:
- d.lim@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Social Science
Event Description
- Full Description:
- PROPONENT: Dr Ron Brunton, Consultant Anthropologist
RESPONDENT: Dr Lee Sackett, Consultant Anthropologist & Honorary Research Fellow, UQ School of Social Science
CHAIR: Professor David Trigger, Head School of Social Science, UQ
PROPOSITION:
A central requirement for a successful native title claim is the continuation of the body of traditional laws and customs from which rights in country are derived. Although it is accepted that some degree of modification can have occurred since European settlement, once the laws and customs are no longer acknowledged and observed native title is lost and cannot be revived. A substantial body of anthropological research indicates that by the post-WWII period it was no longer possible to talk of any meaningful observance of traditional laws. But many contemporary anthropologists tend to downplay or dismiss such research, arguing that the earlier anthropologists, misled by the assimilationist thinking of the times, failed to recognise the many continuities that supposedly existed.
Dr Brunton will argue that this contemporary attachment to what Joel Robbins, in another context, has criticised as ‘continuity thinking’ is creating a corpus of material that gives a more distorted understanding of the trajectories of Aboriginal social and cultural change, particularly in long-settled Australia, than the work of the assimilation-era anthropologists that is now being disparaged.
Dr Sackett accepts that native title case law tells us that once people cease to acknowledge and observe traditional laws and customs, their native title rights and interests in land “are not capable of revival.” This said, Sackett will raise questions as to whether an apparent abandonment of law and custom at some levels or in some arenas of a society necessarily entails an abandonment of law and custom at all levels or in all arenas of the society. From this, Sackett will go on to raise questions as to what ‘revival’ might or might not entail. This will position Dr. Sackett to address Dr Brunton’s charges concerning possible “distorted understandings” as regards continuity versus change.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
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- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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