Aboriginal Criminology and the Postmodern Condition: From Anomie to Anomaly

Abstract

The very high rates of Aboriginal over-representation in the criminal justice systems of the white ‘settler’ societies are conventionally explained in terms of pervasive effects of cultural dispossession and social and economic disadvantage and dislocation. These approaches have been recently elaborated to account for the wide regional variations in patterns of offending in countries such as Canada and Australia. However, these approaches are more attuned to the pathologies of the transition into modernity rather than the current environment of postmodernity which is marked by unstable identity, indeterminate social and cultural processes and a global rather than a national positioning of the Aboriginal subject. A model based on anomaly rather than anomie as the generative dynamic of the Aboriginal condition is developed, based on the insights of theorists within the Durkheimian tradition.