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Accepted Paper:

Indigenous Education and Citizenship: Ethnographically Investigating State Appropriations  
Laura Burmeister (University of Connecticut (USA))

Paper short abstract:

This paper applies Nicolas Paterson’s criticisms of Thomas Paine’s theory of welfare colonialism to Territory educational initiatives. Ethnographic examples from a culturally diverse school are intended to demonstrate the State’s subversive intentions of training “responsible” citizens and reproducing a low-wage labour pool.

Paper long abstract:

In explaining persistently low levels of indigenous material wealth, Jeremy Beckett (1988) characterized Aboriginal Australia in terms of Thomas Paine's theory of "welfare colonialism" (1977.) Welfare colonialism posits that granting citizenship rights to fourth world peoples is debilitating because it perpetuates State dependence. Nicolas Peterson criticized Paine's concept as inadequate in explaining socio-economic relationships between the State and Aboriginal peoples (1999.) Peterson insightfully identified welfare colonialism as theoretically limited because, amongst other things, it ignores subversive State intentions embedded in policies that recreate indigenous social capital in colonial terms.

In this paper, I illustrate some of the shortcomings Peterson charges welfare colonialism with by drawing on 14 months of research in a Territory school. Following Peterson's emphasis on the importance of theory informed by ethnography, I provide research examples from a culturally diverse educational context outside of Darwin that are intended to demonstrate subversive State goals underlying educational policies. I assert that contemporary State intentions include appropriating Aboriginal childhoods in terms of victimhood, thereby ensuring "responsible" citizenship training and the reproduction of a low-wage Australian labour pool.

Panel P04
Ethnography and the production of anthropological knowledge: essays in honour of Nicolas Peterson
  Session 1