Exploring Australian Aboriginal multiple modes of belonging to Country, this “cosmography” necessarily extends its descriptive work across several ontologies, in the tradition of William James” “pluriverse”, Bruno Latour’s “modes of existence”, and Isabelle Stengers’ “cosmopolitics”. Beginning with a reflective narrative introduction, the article then describes different modes of territorial belonging, including the religious, semiotic, legal, and political. The fieldwork was based in Broome, Western Australia where concepts and configurations of territorial belonging have shifted over the last fifty years, among the Aboriginal communities there, from traditional Goolarabooloo regionalism to Yawuru nationalism. The chapter concludes that traditional Indigenous territorial belonging is strong precisely because it has several ontologically different belongings operating at once, and that modernization has the effect of attenuating such territorial belonging.

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Peace and Belonging in Aboriginal Australia: A Political “Cosmography”

  • Stephen Muecke

摘要

Exploring Australian Aboriginal multiple modes of belonging to Country, this “cosmography” necessarily extends its descriptive work across several ontologies, in the tradition of William James” “pluriverse”, Bruno Latour’s “modes of existence”, and Isabelle Stengers’ “cosmopolitics”. Beginning with a reflective narrative introduction, the article then describes different modes of territorial belonging, including the religious, semiotic, legal, and political. The fieldwork was based in Broome, Western Australia where concepts and configurations of territorial belonging have shifted over the last fifty years, among the Aboriginal communities there, from traditional Goolarabooloo regionalism to Yawuru nationalism. The chapter concludes that traditional Indigenous territorial belonging is strong precisely because it has several ontologically different belongings operating at once, and that modernization has the effect of attenuating such territorial belonging.