Paper short abstract:

In Central Australia, cultural difference is seen as self-evident for community development projects that seek "Two-Way" cultural engagements. In this paper I argue that difference is performed as both the problem to be overcome and the crucial ethic for negotiating development practice.

Paper long abstract:

Community development in Central Australia proceeds on the notion that development projects happen at a self-evident interface between Yapa (Indigenous) and Kardiya (non-Indigenous) culture. In these settings, development discourse stresses that "Two Way," intercultural or bicultural approaches are central to successful project outcomes. In this paper I suggest that this orientation produces contradictory desires for non-Indigenous development staff: at once to build strong relationships and to be liked by Indigenous people, while maintaining a distance that is professionally appropriate, where segregation is itself a form of solidarity (Bessire 2014:206). I argue that that the development project performs a version of Indigeneity through the concept of "community" that must always be held separate. This results in what I refer to as "sanitised relatedness"—using Kowal's (2015) concept of sanitised difference—between Yapa and Kardiya. Importantly, the distinctiveness of Indigeneity in my analysis is understood as entangled with forms of community development practice. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation in Central Australia, and focusing mainly on the non-Indigenous actors in these settings, I attend to the making of difference, where cultural separation is both the problem to be overcome and the crucial ethic through which Kardiya staff negotiate their work and presence in Central Australia.