Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how class-based sets of value judgements cut across indigenous and non-indigenous residents' understandings of contemporary relational dynamics in the Central Australian town of Alice Springs.

Paper long abstract:

Class as a category of social difference is largely absent from anthropological research and analysis of indigenous-settler relations in Australia. Other categories, such as race, culture, indigeneity and kinship are taken to be much more prominent in defining who one is and how inequalities and divisions are reproduced between indigenous and non-indigenous people and domains. By exploring sets of values and everyday ethics that underpin indigenous and non-indigenous people's and institutional stakeholders' judgements of what is appropriate and inappropriate, desirable and undesirable, good and bad, in the Central Australian town of Alice Springs, the paper explores how the reality of class is in fact salient for how town people understand themselves and others, even if such understandings are 'spoken through' other categories of difference. The paper discusses how the displacement of class into privileged categories of race and indigeneity tend to obscure how these categories are increasingly crosscut by class division.