Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the conspicuous silence in Australianist anthropology on ethnographic engagement with human rights. A critical focus on the diverse work of human rights brings into sharp relief the complex ways in which the State attempts to construct the contemporary citizen.

Paper long abstract:

Since the early 1970s an abiding preoccupation of Australianist Anthropology has historically been on rights to land; beginning with the 1971 Justice Blackburn decision that culminated in the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act 1976. Anthropologists were strong advocates for the recognition of Indigenous property rights and were instrumental in developing the categories at law that now define Indigenous Australian land tenure in these legally discursive contexts. Since 1992, with the recognition of native title, even more anthropologists are involved in writing claims for recognition of native title or assisting with heritage clearances to facilitate land use agreements. However, the comfort of this historical fit has since been called into question, principally from within the discipline. It is now clear that land rights have eclipsed other aspects of Indigenous human rights.

While land rights have encompassed "regaining some fraction of the personal and group autonomy which existed prior to colonisation" (Peterson and Langton 1983), the "performance of cultural continuity" (Povinelli 2002) required for the recognition of rights to land rarely transferred itself to other domains of Indigenous human rights. Indeed, in 1989 when the anthropologist Diane Bell raised the issue of Aboriginal women's human rights in relation to intra-racial rape in remote central Australia, she was a lone voice within and beyond the academy. This paper will argue that this focus on such a narrow form of cultural rights has decoupled the anthropological project from the broader set of human rights concerns, creating a legacy that is difficult to shift.