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Critical Reflections on Management and Organization: A Postcolonial Perspective
Edited by Banerjee and Prasad
Introduction
In 1967, the people of Australia voted for an amendment to the constitution that gave power to legislate for Aboriginal people to the federal government. This set off a process of enfranchisement, emancipation and engagement with settler Australia. While Aborigines continue to live mostly in remote or rural settlements and urban enclaves, in the four decades since emancipation they have become increasingly enmeshed with the wider Australian administration for their welfare, benefit and, concomitantly, their regulation and control. Anthropology in Australia has been slow to recognise this.
Australian Aboriginal anthropology is usually carried out in the footsteps of recent and raw colonialism. It is now most frequently undertaken in order to establish autochthonous rights. It has required little re-crafting to do this since both colonial exclusion and contemporary recognition of rights require the construction of Aboriginal societies as separate, distinct, classical and primordial. Yet, Aboriginal people are enmeshed in processes of modernity, most intrusively as subjects of bureaucracy. While anthropology is much concerned with representing the Aborigines to the settler society, it has so far barely begun to turn its gaze on the cultures of administration nearer to home ([22] Sullivan, 1996a, pp. 43-69; [8] Lea, 2002). Yet, this paper argues, not to do so ignores the major partner in the intercultural equation of Aboriginal development. Aboriginal life is almost entirely supported by grant and welfare regimes, and therefore by public sector administration and by Aboriginal community sector service delivery.
This paper is about the development of bureaucratic culture and its influence in Aboriginal affairs where it interacts with Aboriginal communities and organisations. While this is an intercultural interaction, it does not occur through the overlapping of separate domains, but rather through the sharing of an intercultural field ([24] Sullivan, 2005; [12] Merlan, 2006; [27] Weiner, 2006) wherein Aboriginal people are sucked into patterns of action determined by the bureaucratic imagination; where they themselves populate bureaucracies more or less compliant with its demands; and they provide the raw material of bureaucratic industry for those who, in many cases, will never know anything but over-mediated representations of Aboriginal life. This complex intercultural field where local experience is embedded within national...