Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Central Australia to argue that the concept of 'the intercultural', while a timely critique, runs up against its limits when deployed as ethnographic method, when binaries that have crumbled analytically remain significant in material terms.

Paper long abstract:

In the now well-known special issue of Oceania (2005), the concept of 'the intercultural' emerged as a formal critique of the kind of anthropology that refused to meaningfully consider what was diacritically non-Indigenous, and simultaneously, suggested future avenues for productive ethnography. Over a decade later, citation of the concept has become somewhat obligatory (Lea 2012), while properly intercultural ethnography remains in its infancy. In this paper I draw upon fieldwork conducted in a setting that appears as axiomatically 'intercultural': an international NGO, with predominantly 'white' staff, working with Warlpiri people in Central Australia, and one in which my research participants persistently deployed a binary between Indigenous and non-Indigenous as a social ordering device. I trace my attempt at 'intercultural analysis', examining the tension between taking that binary seriously as an object of study while simultaneously asserting the conceptual primacy of a 'single socio-cultural field', as the social scientist with an apparently privileged, Archimedean perspective. To get to an intercultural analysis would seem to require that we substitute our ethnographic subjects with the apparently reliable coordinates of pre-colonial Indigenous life, or of Western modernity, before reinserting those same subjects as intercultural hybrids. This paper argues that this contrivance is borne of the provenance of the intercultural as primarily an anthropological critique, and subsequently questions the usefulness of the concept in doing and writing ethnography.