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Accepted Paper:

The Demand-Share Market: Indigenous economies and Aboriginal art  
John Carty (South Australian Museum)

Paper short abstract:

Anthropologists have struggled to tie the economic success of Contemporary Aboriginal artists with any rigour to questions of cultural transformation and reproduction. Inspired by Peterson’s notion of the demand-share economy (1993), this paper examines how artistic income in Balgo is translated into the reproduction, testing and transformation of social relationships.

Paper long abstract:

Aboriginal art is the most successful engagement that Indigenous people living in remote areas have been able to make with the broader Australian economy. Yet Anthropologists have struggled to integrate this economic success with ethnographic descriptions of cultural transformation or reproduction. Most accounts of Aboriginal artistic production make token acknowledgement of the importance of artistic income, and then proceed to elide the economic to focus entirely on the ritual, religious or aesthetic dimensions of that art object. This emphasis is partly a retreat from the categorical novelty and theoretical challenge that this complex emergent phenomena of Aboriginal art presents; sitting as it does at the intersection of cultural, political and economic systems. In this intercultural context, it has proven difficult for anthropologists to frame, describe and analyse painting for money in terms of cultural practice.

My research in Australia's Western Desert region seeks to preserve the quotidian unity of 'economic' and 'cultural' practice by framing Balgo acrylic painting as a form of Indigenous labour. What is received in exchange for that labour is money, and the power to invest or redistribute it according to social principles and priorities. Inspired by Peterson's notion of the demand-share economy (1993), I examine how the money produced though painting is translated into Indigenous value and the reproduction, testing and transformation of social relationships. By showing how the income from Balgo art circulates in the daily dynamics of Balgo social life, this paper seeks to provide an ethnographic description that reintegrates economic and cultural interpretations of contemporary Desert art.

Panel P04
Ethnography and the production of anthropological knowledge: essays in honour of Nicolas Peterson
  Session 1