I’ve ignored this blog during the uni term, but now it’s over I realise that there were many interesting points I could post. It’s anthropology after all. The first discussion that comes to mind regards racial identity. Aborigines, for example, are being asked to prove their Aboriginality to receive land grants and other benefits. The right of providing those benefits can be argued, but that’s another topic. Instead, I want to question what it is to be Aboriginal.<\/p>\n
If a person has only one Aboriginal parent, are they still Aboriginal? What if only one grandparent was? Or is it less about blood and more about upbringing? Is someone raised in an Aboriginal community Aboriginal? What if a (hypothetical?) full-blood Caucasian person grows up in such a community, learning to live off the land, to paint Aboriginal style, is involved in ceremonies, provides for his\/her family in the Aboriginal way? Could they be considered Aboriginal?<\/p>\n
Some would say that being Aboriginal means less these days, or in certain towns, because they follow western ways – living in houses, buying food from a supermarket. In the Australian Journal of Anthropology<\/a>, Lorraine Gibson recites an encounter between a white Australian and an Aboriginal elder carving out a canoe for a traditional museum. The white man discredits the work because it’s being done with a chainsaw. The Aboriginal responds by asking whether the other drove to the museum in his horse and cart.<\/p>\n Why shouldn’t a culture be allowed to evolve, making use of advances available around them, and still be considered to be the same culture. Does Aboriginality imply a stagnant culture? If so, isn’t every culture doomed to extinction? And with today’s rate of progress, wouldn’t the concept of culture be meaningless? I’d hate to think so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve ignored this blog during the uni term, but now it’s over I realise that there were many interesting points I could post. It’s anthropology after all. The first discussion that comes to mind regards racial identity. Aborigines, for example, are being asked to prove their Aboriginality to receive land grants and other benefits. The… Continue reading Racial Identity<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":362,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361\/revisions\/362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}