Paper short abstract:

This paper twists an old concern with the origins of dysfunctional social policy in Indigenous affairs to a belated recognition of the co-dependencies these speak to, tracing the laminations of policies past and present to the existence of militarised mining economies within our collective bodies.

Paper long abstract:

For some anthropologists, the militarisation of everyday life can be tracked in the gradual seepage of war tactics into civilian life, where they become new norms (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois 2004: 19-22; Shaw 2016). We might think here of the proliferation of security-guarded gated communities, of routine 'stop-and-frisk' encounters at airport terminals, or the harvesting of consumer data from surveillance technologies. Others have noted that war has also affected everyday infrastructural possibilities, from medical technologies and disease management to logistical systems and environmental interventions (Trappen and Clough 2013). Less often traced, even with contemporary permissions to follow uncanny connections, is the relationship between Indigenous rights to land and militarily sanctioned extraction interests. This paper explores these connections as part of an ongoing project to make sense of the insensibilities of Indigenous social policy in Australia and how this relates to everything else that we might take for granted within analysis. It twists an old concern with the origins of dysfunctional social policy in Indigenous affairs into a belated recognition of the co-dependencies these speak to, tracing the laminations of policies past and present to the existence of militarised mining economies within our collective bodies. Extraction feeds and shelters, connecting us to ripped sites; should we be damaged, cyborg technologies might pull us from death, or return some ability, or drag the life that sits inside one body into new forms, organs donated that others may breathe another day. Can we give any part of our militarised existence up?