Still under the Act? Subjectivity and the State in Aboriginal North Queensland

Abstract

Both the colonial encapsulation and post-colonial recognition of North Queensland's Aboriginal population have been achieved through legislative demarcation. This paper explores the way such demarcation has extended the influence of the state within local Aboriginal life-worlds, focusing on the State of Queensland's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993. Drawing on ethnographic and historical material from Central Cape York Peninsula, and recent anthropological theorization of the state, I argue that anthropologists need to seriously consider Aboriginal claims about what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls 'state effects'. But careful examination of these claims suggests that the state no longer simply imposes its projects on fundamentally distinct Aboriginal life-worlds. Not only is the state now deeply engaged within these life-worlds, it is also deeply interwoven into post-colonial Aboriginal subjectivities. Show more