Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/70724
161 Visitors
441 Hits
138 Downloads
- Title
- Articulating culture(s): being black in Wilcannia
- Title
- Being black in Wilcannia
- Related
- Australasian Digital Theses Program
- Publisher
- Australia : Macquarie University
- Date
- 2006
- Author/Creator
- Gibson, Lorraine Douglas
- Description
- Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Society, Culture, Media & Philosophy, Department of Anthropology, 2006.
- Description
- Bibliography: p. 257-276.
- Description
- Introduction: coming to Wilcannia -- Wilcannia: plenty of Aborigines, but no culture -- Who you is? -- Cultural values: ambivalences and ambiguities -- Praise, success and opportunity -- "Art an' culture: the two main things, right?" -- Big Murray Butcher: "We still doin' it" -- Granny Moisey's baby: the art of Badger Bates -- Epilogue.
- Description
- Dominant society discourses and images have long depicted the Aboriginal people of the town of Wilcannia in far Western New South Wales as having no 'culture'. In asking what this means and how this situation might have come about, the thesis seeks to respond through an ethnographic exploration of these discourses and images. The work explores problematic and polemic dominant society assumptions regarding 'culture' and 'Aboriginal culture', their synonyms and their effects. The work offers Aboriginal counter-discourses to the claim of most white locals and dominant culture that the Aboriginal people of Wilcannia have no culture. In so doing the work presents reflexive notions about 'culture' as verbalised and practiced, as well as providing an ethnography of how culture is more tacitly lived. -- Broadly, the thesis looks at what it is to be Aboriginal in Wilcannia from both white and black perspectives. The overarching concern of this thesis is a desire to unpack what it means to be black in Wilcannia. The thesis is primarily about the competing values and points of view within and between cultures, the ways in which Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people tacitly and reflexively express and interpret difference, and the ambivalence and ambiguity that come to bear in these interactions and experiences. This thesis demonstrates how ideas and actions pertaining to 'race' and 'culture' operate in tandem through an exploration of values and practices relating to 'work', 'productivity', 'success', 'opportunity' and the domain of 'art'. These themes are used as vehicles to understanding the 'on the ground' effects and affects of cultural perceptions and difference. They serve also to demonstrate the ambiguity and ambivalence that is experienced as well as being brought to bear upon relationships which implicitly and explicitly are concerned with, and concern themselves with difference.
- Description
- Mode of access: World Wide Web.
- Description
- xii, 276 p. ill
- Subject Keyword
- Art, Aboriginal Australian -- New South Wales -- Wilcannia
- Subject Keyword
- Aboriginal Australians -- New South Wales -- Wilcannia -- Ethnic identity
- Subject Keyword
- Aboriginal Australians -- New South Wales -- Wilcannia
- Subject Keyword
- Aboriginal Australians -- New South Wales -- Wilcannia -- Social life and customs
- Subject Keyword
- Aboriginal Australians -- New South Wales -- Wilcannia -- Social conditions
- Subject Keyword
- Aboriginal Australians -- New South Wales -- Wilcannia -- Economic conditions
- Subject Keyword
- Wilcannia (N.S.W.) -- Race relations
- Resource Type
- Thesis PhD
- Organisation
- Macquarie University. Dept. of Anthropology
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/70724
- Identifier
- 1354796
- Language
- eng
- Rights
- Copyright disclaimer: http://www.copyright.mq.edu.au
- Rights
- Copyright Lorraine Douglas Gibson 2006.
- Full Text
-
-
