Navigating cultural intimacy in Tasmanian Aboriginal public culture

Abstract

This article examines the utility of, and embarrassment around, strategic essentialism in Tasmanian Aboriginal public culture. My argument is informed by extensive participant observation in community-led education programs. Australia’s Tasmanian Aboriginal community has historically been defined by outsiders in terms of racial and cultural deficiencies. These judgments preceded and followed their supposed 1876 extinction. These education programs, catering primarily to elementary school students, idealized Tasmanian Aboriginal culture by emphasizing continuity and connection into deep antiquity. They also included moments in which private anxieties about essentialism, deficiency, and what I term their taxonomical fuzziness are made public. The delicate interplay between essentialism and private feelings about loss, appearance, and cultural inferiority is best understood in relation to Herzfeld’s “cultural intimacy.” I argue that approaching public culture through this concept forces researchers to engage with the pervasive fluency of stereotypes through which Native and Indigenous voices regularly must speak in order to be heard.