- Title
- The politics of suffering and the politics of anthropology
- Creator
- Lattas, Andrew; Morris, Barry
- Relation
- Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia p. 61-87
- Relation
- http://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/isbn/9781742232256.htm
- Publisher
- UNSW Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2010
- Description
- This essay begins by analysing the ideological structure of Peter Sutton's recent book The Politics of Suffering and its use of anthropology to support the federal government's Intervention into Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory.' Later, the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben is drawn upon to offer an alternative anthropological analysis of the Intervention as part of the incorporation of 'culture' into neoliberal forms of racial governance, which seek to depoliticise racial power by reframing it as part of the state's sovereign obligation to deliver care and biosecurity. Recently, Agamben has applied Carl Schmitt's definition of sovereignty to analyse the way the 'provisional and exceptional measure is turned into a technique of government'. But whereas Agamben believes this process has expanded greatly in the modern world, we believe that Australia's Indigenous peoples have always provided a symbolic opposite, an arena where power can be articulated through creating states of exception, which also depend upon creating truths about what it means to be human and to have social order.
- Subject
- anthropology; suffering; Northern Territory; Indigenous Australians
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/923526
- Identifier
- uon:9746
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781742232256
- Language
- eng
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