Paper short abstract:

Can a bicultural approach capture the co-production of ways of becoming in a settler-Indigenous town like Alice Springs? This paper evaluates bicultural understandings among town residents and in ethnographic analyses of difference in a town long shared by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

Paper long abstract:

The remote service town of Alice Springs in Central Australia has always been a place shared by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people from a diversity of social and cultural backgrounds and places of origin. This paper discusses the value of a bicultural conceptual approach in capturing everyday interactions and the co-production of ways of becoming and belonging in this settler-Indigenous town. Based on 19 years of ethnographic research with non-Indigenous and Indigenous people in the town and surrounding regions, it evaluates how bicultural understandings expressed by a variety of town residents compares with their lived experiences and day-to-day social practice. It questions ethnographic analyses of contemporary formations of inequality and relations that continue to reinforce biculturalism in the face of more complex formations and ambivalent articulations of diversity and difference. It argues for theoretical and ethnographic approaches that move beyond social categories as the starting point for analysis, in order to better understand social and cultural dynamics in contemporary Indigenous-non-Indigenous settings.