Paper short abstract:

The standard demographic categories of the mainstream dominate Australian policy discourse, rendering it irredeemably ethnocentric. This paper argues for an anthropologically informed Indigenous demography, nascent in Peterson’s 'Australian Territorial Organization' but not yet fully realised.

Paper long abstract:

As a subdiscipline, anthropological demography is very underdeveloped in the Australian context. The standard socio-demographic categories of the mainstream invariably frame the collection of demographic data on Indigenous Australians, rendering policy discourse irredeemably ethnocentric. This paper contemplates an anthropologically informed Indigenous demography—nascent in Nic Peterson's 'Australian Territorial Organization'—that would create a 'recognition space', making Indigenous categories visible to the state. There are two distinct projects involved.

The first concerns the 'tyranny of numbers'— it is only that which is quantifiable that is deemed 'real'. Since many of the categories that structure the socio-demographic characteristics of Indigenous populations are invisible to the gaze of the anthropologically uninformed demographer, the view that emerges from data collections such as the national census is fundamentally incoherent. Ethnographic enquiry and anthropological analysis can reveal the categories that pattern Indigenous socio-demographies, rendering them measurable so that they begin to count as 'data'.

The systems of value that underpin these categories are not easily captured through methodologies that rely on measuring what people say they do as opposed to one that observes behaviour in context. The second kind of contribution that anthropology can make to the demographic 'recognition space' is through its systematic methodology for the collection of 'qualitative' data. Such data are no less real, but are devalued in a society that seems able only act in terms of the quantifiable. This is a more challenging project, since it asserts the equality of anthropological analysis rather than accepting its role merely as demography's handmaiden.