Sarah E Holcombe

Remote Freedoms

Politics, Personhood and Human Rights in Aboriginal Central Australia

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Sarah E. Holcombe is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 384
• Erscheinungstermin: 10. Juli 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 226mm x 152mm x 28mm
• Gewicht: 612g
• ISBN-13: 9781503606470
• ISBN-10: 1503606473
• Artikelnr.: 49382879

Autorenporträt

Sarah E. Holcombe is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Indigenous Rights as Human Rights in Central Australia
chapter abstract
This chapter provides a brief history of human rights and how the discourse
of human rights is understood in law and policy within the Australian
state. Australia's ambivalent relationship with human rights is examined,
providing a backdrop to the lack of ethnographic treatments of human
rights. Tracing the ethnographic focus on land rights as a form of cultural
rights, it then lays the foundation for understanding how broader human
rights concerns have been decoupled from Indigenous rights. Exploring the
parameters for recognition of Indigenous human rights, this chapter
interrogates the normative principles embodied within the human rights
discourse. Considering how an Anangu person becomes a "human-rights
holder," the chapter unpacks the elements that specify this type of
personhood. The tensions between culture and human rights are explored via
the key tenets of a human-rights-based ontology, enabling a discussion of
human rights culture in relation to Anangu cultures.
1The Act of Translation: Emancipatory Potential and Apocryphal Revelations
chapter abstract
This chapter examines concepts of rights that arise as the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights is translated into the local vernacular of
Pintupi-Luritja. The semantic properties of English and possible equivalent
Anangu concepts are juxtaposed in the translation context, and the
limitations and possibilities of the universal human rights discourse are
reimagined. This chapter then sets up the core challenges and possibilities
of the local uptake of this discourse. Interrogating the assumptions
embedded in the Declaration is also to interrogate the foundations of the
secular modern person. Can this rights bearer accommodate the ideals of the
relational spiritual Anangu person? The anthropological literature on this
relational or sociocentric person is discussed. Revisiting this early
ethnographic subject is essential if we are to reconsider this distinction
in terms of a continuum, rather than a dichotomy and thus also to encourage
a local dialogue with human rights.
2Engendering Social and Cultural Rights
chapter abstract
This chapter explores the relationality of gender and forming and becoming
an Anangu "woman" or "man." The family is one of these core sites and one
of the most contested sites within the realm women's human rights. The
gendered sociality of work practices are explored as sites that reinforce
the status quo of gendered roles and responsibilities. This chapter also
begins the discussion on women's rights as human rights by recalling the
history between early feminism and the Indigenous civil rights movement
within Australia. This discussion enables a consideration of the tensions
between collectivist and individualist approaches to women's rights as it
actively works through the idea that universal concepts, such as women's
human rights, can take hold only when they are encountered within local and
particular contexts. By exploring where the principles of human rights are
operating in several NGOs the work of human rights is revealed.
3"Stop Whinging and Get on with It": The Shifting Contours of Gender
Equality (and Equity)
chapter abstract
This chapter examines the contested contours of complementarity and
equality through the lens of gender by exploring how gender as a relational
practice is manifest in a range of social contexts that assert gender
segregation. The social ramifications of the ceremonial practices of "men's
business" are explored as a paradigmatic location for making gender.
Likewise, the Aboriginal English term "women's business" captures a range
of practices to include female sexuality and reproductive rights. This
chapter begins to specify a regional and local perspective as mediated
through notions of gender complementarity, rather than equality. Although
the applicability of feminism is challenged, there is a range of indicators
of social transformation where these social practices of gender segregation
are being modified and adapted, notably in the changing relations of
reproduction. The chapter also examines the social and ontological
structures that mediate violence and that have become known as "family
violence."
4"Women Go to the Clinic, and Men Go to Jail": The Gendered Indigenized
Subject of Legal Rights
chapter abstract
This chapter explores the intersections among legal rights, local
perceptions of social justice, and gender violence. Spousal or intimate
partner violence exposes multiple sites of articulation with formal rights
via the legal system at the same time as revealing Anangu responsibilities
in customary terms. Anangu women's interactions with and responses to the
legal system, including the police, reflect contradictory and competing
discourses between family and the state system. The formal legal system
representing Aboriginal people has instrumentalized women as the "victims"
and men as the "perpetrators" through the extensive range of mandatory
reporting and sentencing laws. This chapter specifically elaborates the
ways in which rights that entail some specification of suffering, injury,
or inequality compel an identity defined by subordination. Seeking to
explain Anangu women's lack of compliance with pressing charges against
violent spouses, the chapter considers whether mandatory reporting and
mandatory sentencing reduce the suffering of victims.
5Therapy Culture and the Intentional Subject
chapter abstract
This chapter examines therapeutic interventions, including the Cross
Borders Indigenous Family Violence Program and the Women's Shelter outreach
service. These programs and services aim, respectively, to change the
status of the "perpetrator" to an empathizer and to alter the subjectivity
of clients from a "victim" to an actor. Exploring these methods and
approaches, the chapter analyzes the ways in which this new Aboriginal self
is inscribed as the inner subjectivities of the participants/clients are
managed. As these therapeutic technologies aim to foster the
responsibilization discourse they must first question and dismantle the
sociocentric structures of feeling that guide Anangu decision making. These
programs and services closely follow the framework and concepts that
underpin human rights. The role these therapeutic technologies plays in the
production of individuals' "freedom to choose" and freedom to associate
offers insight into the incremental transformation of Anangu subjects into
human rights holders.
6Civil and Political Rights: Is There Space for an Aboriginal Politics?
chapter abstract
This chapter explores the ways in which citizenship has become the
mechanism for neoliberal reform. How do the tensions in human rights as
political entailments play out between the regulatory dimensions of
citizenship and its emancipatory promise? The behavioral norms that this
citizen has to comply with are explored in terms of rights as entailments
as these unfold via the responsibilization discourse and ubiquitous working
of the good governance project. This chapter ultimately asks: What are the
terms for an efficacious Aboriginal politics with and against the state,
and is there room to expand the political imagination to incorporate
alternative terms and modalities? In the course of the case study
discussion on governance, a pluralist approach is articulated as this
concept is specified as "good enough" or as "effective and legitimate." It
has come to incorporate the foundational dimensions of a multicultural and
a self-consciously "incomplete" human rights.
7International Human Rights Forums and (East Coast) Indigenous Activism
chapter abstract
The penultimate chapter returns to the sites where human rights and
Indigenous human rights took their shape and continue to evolve-the United
Nations Headquarters in New York City and Geneva. In discussing the soft
advocacy within the UNPFII, its other roles as educatory and emancipatory
through further development of the second wave Indigenism are elaborated,
along with the performative aspects of these UN sites as a "public audit
ritual." The multivalent concept of "good governance" is also located here.
Although the methodology of this chapter has telescopic tendencies, it is
also a reflection of the issues that confound the possibilities for the
mobilization of this discourse to remote central Australia. A key question
explored is whether and how the Indigenous human rights discourse, at this
international level, circulates to remote central Australia, where arguably
it is most needed.
Conclusion
chapter abstract
This chapter summarizes the dimensions of human rights that underpin a
diverse range of government policies, approaches, and programs in very
remote central Australia. Many of these dimensions are the acknowledged
public goods of accountability, representation and gender equity. For
Anangu citizens the entailments of citizenship are dual edged. Whether
explicit or tacit, there has been an increasing coupling of rights and
duties. By exploring this discourse, the relationship between what
constitutes a [human] right and what constitutes a person was revealed.
This book agitates for alternative understandings of human dignity and more
porous human rights that are less dependent on liberal definitions of
humanity. Yet, the moral language and social justice potential of human
rights has much to offer Anangu. The conclusion locates local practices
that intersect with and explicitly draw from human rights norms to reveal
what it takes for sociomoral normative practices to change.