Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how native title claimant groups in north-western and south-eastern Australia produce and respond to the elicitation of inter- and intra-group differences despite their strong assertions of commonality with their close neighbours in many other contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Co-author: Simon Correy, NTSCORP

Freud (1918) drew on the work of the nineteenth century ethnologist, Ernest Crawley, to explore how intersubjective and intergroup identities are constituted through a focus on seemingly very minor differences discerned against a background of overwhelming similarity with significant social others. Indeed, Freud found that "it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them". Prefiguring by nearly half a century, Levi-Strauss' notion of the importance of "differences that resemble" in totemic thought, Freud attributed the conflict over minor differences to the threat they represent to processes of individuation and the sustaining of autonomy.

This paper follows in the tradition of Nic Peterson's life-long concern with the irreducible importance of ethnographic data and concomitantly its constitutive role in the production of empirically grounded anthropological theory and often within the context of mediation by the nation state. This concern is present in his early work on Aboriginal tribes and boundaries, the significance of the role of terminological definition in claims under the Aboriginal Land rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cth) and continued in his contributions to an anthropological understanding of the native title era in both remote and settled Australia.

During the native title application process in Australia, the state seeks out iconic differences between groups in the indigenous polity as well as between the indigenous and settler domains as bounded wholes. However, any acknowledgement by claimants of the contingent nature of these domain separations is strongly discouraged since reflexivity on these maters is seen to undermine the claimant group's cultural integrity. This paper explores how claimant groups in north- western and south-eastern Australia produce and respond to the elicitation of differences in native title claims despite their strong assertions of commonality with their close neighbours in many other contexts.