Postmodernity and the Aboriginal Condition: the Cultural Dilemmas of Contemporary Policy

Abstract

Recent attempts to deal with Australian Aboriginality in non-descentist and non-essentialising language exemplify the postmodern dilemmas of developing a sociology of Fourth World peoples. Aboriginality as a social category is riven by tensions between the homogenising forces of modernity which have produced the 'normalised' self- identifying Aboriginal subject and the pluralising forces established around an aesthetic of community. Welfare colonialism, as a discursive formation, institutionalises and proliferates these contradictions, generating a dynamic which produces tendencies towards both the 'hyper rationalisation' and the 'hyper-differentiation' of the Aboriginal condition. This process is manifested in the fragmentation or 'decentring' of the sites and discourses, global and local, through which a contemporary Aboriginal identity may be grounded. Several dilemmas are explored, including the medical (AIDS) administrative (housing, employment) and politico-legal (self-government) instances of discursive fragmentation.