Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses possible explanations inside and external to the discipline of anthropology for the lack of detailed ethnographic attention paid to non-indigenous people, experiences, practices and values in studies of shared settler-indigenous settings.

Paper long abstract:

Today most anthropologists conducting research with indigenous people and issues in settler nations like Australia, Canada and the United States would agree, in theory, that 'indigenous cultural practices, institutions, and politics become such in articulation with what is not considered indigenous within the particular social formation where they exist' (de la Cadena & Starn 2007:4). This paper asks why, then, anthropologists seem reluctant to pay as detailed ethnographic attention to non-indigenous people, experiences, social practices and sets of vales as they have long paid to indigenous people's lives? Based loosely on four frames for grasping culture as the ongoing organisation of diversity proposed by Hannerz (2015) - the state, the market, movements and consociality - the paper discusses possible explanations inside and beyond the discipline for some common responses to the presenter's research focus in the central Australian town of Alice Springs; a place long shared by a diversity of indigenous and non-indigenous people. The responses indicate that non-indigenous people don't seem to matter much in the final analysis of the everyday lived experiences of interactions and activities in shared indigenous-settler places. The paper argues for an expansion of conceptual and methodological approaches in order to capture the broader range and complexity of contemporary realities in indigenous-settler nations.