Still under the act? Subjectivity and the state in Aboriginal North Queensland.

Smith, Benjamin Richard

Both the colonial encapsulation and post-colonial recognition of North Queensland's Aboriginal population have been achieved through legislative demarcation. Under the auspices of the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 ('the Act'), Queensland's Aboriginal population became state wards, (1) although they were not recognised as Australian citizens for another seventy years (Chesterman and Galligan 1997:31-57; Ganter and Kidd 1993; Kidd 1996). More recently, the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993 and Queensland's own Aboriginal Land Act 1991 have provided instruments for the legal recognition of groups of 'traditional owners' understood to hold conjoint interests in land. (2)

This paper explores the ongoing effects of legal demarcation on Aboriginal North Queenslanders, drawing on my own ethnographic and applied research in Central Cape York Peninsula. (3) These effects stem, in part, from the manner in which 'the Act' provided for the localization of the state in places like the Central Peninsula. In these places, the state effected huge transformations in Aboriginal lives through the control of local authorities and through the state's support of settler 'bosses'. This control included the creation of an indentured labour force and the state removals that produced the 'stolen generations' (HREOC 1997; Read 1999). The early period of authoritarian control also laid the grounds for the transformation of the 'Aboriginal domain' (von Sturmer 1984)--those aspects of the local that are marked by specifically Aboriginal forms of social action, and which are presumed to exist in disjunction from the state projects and the local settler population. The effects of these transformations continue to shape Aboriginal lives.

The tone of the state's relationship with Aborigines apparently shifted from control to facilitation during the 'self-determination' era that followed the repeal of the Act's remaining provisions in 1971. (4) During this period, new legislation provided for Aboriginal land rights and for the establishment of local, regional and national Aboriginal organizations. This legislation has been widely presumed to be beneficial, not least in terms of the state's recognition of distinct Aboriginal 'rights'. But while attempts to achieve social justice may have underlain the development of such legislation, many Aboriginal people are less sure of its benefits. During fieldwork in the Central Peninsula, including substantial work on claims made under the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993 and Queensland's Aboriginal Land Act 1991, Aboriginal claimants have repeatedly made two related complaints to me: that 'Native Title causes arguments between our families', and--with regard to the Native Title process--that 'we are still under the Act'.

In what follows, I consider these complaints, taking them as a starting point to explore the ongoing effects of state demarcation of Aboriginal identities. The assertion that Aboriginal people remain 'under the Act' implies that the state continues to cause detrimental effects through its treatment of Aboriginal people. It also implies that these effects stem from a state understood as fundamentally disconnected from Aboriginal life-worlds. I do not consider such perceptions of ongoing disempowerment in relation to the state to be inaccurate. But conceptions of Aboriginal life-worlds existing in opposition to the state fail to grasp the growing imbrication of the state within these life-worlds. Moreover, conceptions of the state's externality not only obscure, but also effect the state's reshaping of Aboriginal lives. In order to properly understand the contemporary relationship between the state and Aboriginal people--as well as the historical foundations of this relationship--it is necessary to build on recent anthropological insights into the social life of the state (Aretxaga 2003: Linke 2006; Trouillot 2003). This work argues persuasively that the state not only exists as an aspect of local life-worlds, but that it is also internalized as an aspect of local personhood or subjectivity.

In this article I offer a conception of the changing relationship between Aboriginal people and the state. I argue that the state's relationship with Aborigines now extends beyond forceful interventions into local social organization and the limitation of the capacity for self-determination, despite these being what many Aboriginal North Queenslanders have in mind when they claim that they remain 'under the Act'. In order to understand the state-Aboriginal relationship, I suggest that it is necessary to come to grips with the ways in which the state has transformed Aboriginal subjectivities.

SUBJECTIVITY AND THE STATE

Following recent anthropological accounts (Biehl et. al. 2007; Luhrmann 2006; Ortner 2005; Sokefeld 1999), I understand 'subjectivity' to designate the shifting series of perceptions, thoughts and affects and actions that give shape to human existence. Ortner (2005: 31) encapsulates the complex character of subjectivity, formed in the interplay between personal experience and social and cultural configurations, defining it as

 the ensemble of modes of perception, affect, thought, desire, fear,
 and so forth that animate social subjects ... as well as the
 cultural and social formations that shape, organize, and provoke
 these modes of affect, thought and so on (Ortner 2005: 31).

Understood in this way, subjectivity neither precedes nor exists separately from social organization. And although it depends on a general human 'egoity', it always involves particular, embodied experiences of personhood (Jackson 1998:7-8). (5) This is not to say that subjectivity is fundamentally individual. Rather, individuality itself marks a particular, socio-culturally inflected form of personhood, generative of particular kinds of subjectivity. Subjectivity, then, is deeply tied--in a constitutive manner--with the formal and informal sociopolitical configurations that shape the conduct of persons and groups (Butler 1997: Foucault 1982). These include the socio-political configurations that constitute the state.

Given this interweaving of subjectivity and social organization, examining conceptions of personhood and self-experience can shed light on the relationship between the state and Aboriginal people. I find Trouillot's (2003) recent discussion of 'state effects' to be particularly useful for understanding this relationship. For Trouillot, 'state effects' represent the manner in which the state is constituted through particular forms of social action. With regard to North Queensland, paying careful attention to the operation of state effects within local life-worlds can not only reveal the manner in which Aboriginal people are affected by the state, but also the ways that these changes have reshaped Aboriginal subjectivities.

Viewed in this way, the Queensland Government's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993 can be understood as marking the transformation of Aboriginal subjectivity within a state-oriented socio-cultural field. From the moment that Aboriginal people came 'under the Act'--when they found themselves 'outside the nation, [but] inside the state' (Beckett 1988:6)--they became subject to the state. This subjection occurred not only through the application of coercive force, but also through a re-orientation of Aboriginal social and cultural life. This has led not only to a situation in which there is no autonomous Aboriginal community, independent of the state (Cowlishaw 2004:313), but also one in which the state and 'Indigenous life projects' are now deeply interwoven (Peterson 2006:7).

While Aboriginal complaints about continuing state control recognize the ongoing coercive force of the state in Aboriginal lives, they fail to recognize the extent to which a re-orientation of Aboriginal subjectivity has become a key aspect of contemporary Aboriginal-state relations. Indeed, such a realization is made difficult partly because both popular and academic understandings of the state typically revolve around a distinction between the state, on one hand, and society on the other (Mitchell 1991). This distinction, internalized by those subject to the state's authority, lies at the heart of the state's constitution in particular human life-worlds (Linke 2006:217). It appears to take a particularly strong form among Aboriginal North Queenslanders, who commonly conceive of a radical distinction between 'Aboriginal society' and the 'mainstream' state. (6)

Making a distinction between Aboriginal life-worlds and the state is a form of what Austin-Broos (1996:2) calls 'two-laws talk'. Like other talk of this kind, it posits a fundamental disjuncture between settler or 'mainstream' society and 'Aboriginal societ(ies)'. The claim that Aboriginal North Queenslanders are 'still under the Act' thus acknowledges the inevitability of participation in wider Australian society, whilst simultaneously obfuscating the radical influence of state bureaucracy (and other aspects of the 'mainstream') on Aboriginal cultural production, identity and self-experience.

Austin-Broos' analysis hints at this obfuscation in noting the way in which 'progressive European cultural encompassment proceeds by stealth' (Austin-Broos 1996:2, fn.1). But her approach to two-laws talk as a basis for the contestation of assimilation is not without problems. In Far North Queensland, talk of being 'still under the Act' disguises the character of encompassment as much as it exposes it. Such talk is itself--in part at least--a form of 'ideology as lived experience' (Austin-Broos 1996:2, fn.1). With regard to Central Cape York Peninsula, Austin-Broos is both simultaneously close to the mark and wide of it when she writes that:

 The two-laws formulation ... becomes a construction of
 Aboriginality as much as it is also a construction of European law
 ... The larger process involves, however, a certain cultural
 hegemony to the extent that this process is inexorably shaped by
 the context of white society (Austin-Broos 1996:3, emphasis added).

In understanding the relationships between the state and Aboriginal Australians, we can usefully expand an anthropological conception of the contemporary state to include forms of organization, social fields and subjectivities outside the state's formal limits (Aretxaga 2003; Kapferer 1995; Linke 2006; Trouillot 2003; see also Foucault 1982; Mitchell 1991). This conceptual move reveals that the 'cultural hegemony' identified by Austin-Broos operates through auto-constructions of Aboriginality. Such auto-constructions are shaped by past and present societal contexts. Notions of identity and autonomy may thus draw their cultural logic from originally exogenous modes of thinking. This may be particularly true of those notions tied to contemporary articulations of 'indigeneity' (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000; Kapferer 1995; Kuper 2003; Meyer and Geschiere 1999; Povinelli 2002). The fact that Aborigines continue to identify as members of a particular culture distinct from settler society (Austin-Broos 1996:4) cannot simply be taken as a successful resistance to assimilation in either cultural or social terms. Rather, in the current context, identity lies at the heart of the existence of the state in relation to Aboriginal subjects, not least through the way identity is configured within 'the practised constitution of experience' (Austin-Broos 1996:6, fn.3)--that is, through the interweaving of identity and subjectivity.

On the other hand, it is clear that Aboriginal life-worlds involve social and cultural forms quite different to those associated with the 'mainstream' and the state, and that these forms generate distinct aspects of Aboriginal subjectivity. Rather than simply being assimilated or completely transformed through encapsulation, then, Aboriginal subjectivities are now complex in character. This complexity is produced through the location of Aboriginal subjects within intercultural social fields (see also Hinkson and Smith 2005; Smith 2008). These fields subsist partly in socio-cultural forms (including forms of personhood) that are deeply contiguous with those present prior to colonization. But they are also constituted through the local presence of aspects of wider Australian society, not least those aspects associated with the state. Rather than existing as discrete aspects of Aboriginal life-worlds, these originally indigenous and exogenous socio-cultural forms continue to act upon and transform each other. The result is not only a profoundly intercultural social milieu, but also multivalent forms of personhood and experiences of subjectivity.

ABORIGINALITY 'UNDER THE ACT'

In order to understand the ongoing transformations of Aboriginal subjectivity, it is useful to examine the historical relationship between Aboriginal people and the state. In what follows I explore this relationship in a particular region--Central Cape York Peninsula--paying attention to the ways in which the state has engaged with Aboriginal life-worlds and the transformations effected by the state's local manifestations.

As the colonial frontier expanded into the Central Peninsula in the 1860s and 1870s, it encountered an indigenous life-world populated by the speakers of several regional language varieties. The settler population rapidly identified the indigenous population as composed of a series of 'tribes' identified with these languages. But although identification with particular languages occurred amongst local Aborigines, 'tribal' identities were not the basis of Aboriginal attachments to land or 'country'. (7) Instead, the primary basis of indigenous attachment to land was through sets of people identified with particular places or areas, often glossed by anthropologists as 'clans' (Chase 1980; Rigsby 1992; Sutton 2003; Sutton and Rigsby 1982). (8) Rather than being the basis for all social action, however, 'clan' identities appear to have been among various means by which consociates sought to project varying forms of autonomy and relatedness within the social, political and economic life of regional communities (see Myers 1986; Martin 1993). With regard to attachments to land, these shifting projections of autonomy and relatedness appear to have given property relations an indeterminate and context-bound character.

The northwards advance of the colonial frontier rapidly transformed this Aboriginal life-world. Despite initial 'frontier' relations with Aboriginal people occurring beyond the ambit of the state, the Central Peninsula's Aboriginal population soon became subject to state-sponsored control under the provisions of the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897. The Act was intended to 'protect' Aborigines from the violence of settler populations through their removal to missions and reserves, as well as to restrict Aboriginal access to opium and alcohol. In order to achieve these aims, the Act provided for governmental control of Aboriginal people. It allowed the State Government's representatives 'to remove and keep "every aboriginal within any District ... [on] any reserve situated within such District, in such manner, and subject to such conditions, as may be prescribed" (Chesterman and Galligan 1997:40). The Act also allowed for the removal of Aborigines from one reserve to another, the regulation of Aboriginal employment, and control of the movement of those subject to its provisions. The legislation provided for the application of punishments for a range of offences including 'insubordination' or 'creating a disturbance'. It also enabled the control of wages, the control of marriages and the 'exemption' of certain people of Aboriginal descent from its provisions.

These provisions were administered by local 'Protectors of Aboriginals', who included policemen and mission superintendents. Protectors were afforded immense regulatory power both by the scope of the Act and the general nature of its provisions (Chesterman and Galligan 1997:41). In Coen--the principal township of the Central Peninsula--the local Protector was the police sergeant. Coen's remote location and the township's tiny population meant that he came to personify the local authority of the state, providing an example of the manner in which the state becomes personalised at the margins of the polity (Aretxaga 2003:396). In the day-to-day exercise of his powers, the Coen Protector presided over the distribution of Aboriginal workers across the region, organizing contracts for indentured labour on the cattle stations in the district. He was also responsible for the administration of Aboriginal bank accounts and was the final arbiter of Aboriginal purchases from the town's stores via chits, which he signed. (9) At the township's annual horse races--when Aboriginal station workers came into Coen for the festivities--he organized marriages between young men and women, cutting across established arrangements for 'promise' marriage and regional kinship norms.

The local implementation of the Act illustrates the way in which the state manifests within a particular social field through what Trouillot (2003:81, 89) calls 'state effects'. For Trouillot, these effects produce the state through a range of social interactions, both within and beyond the state's formal or institutional existence. These effects include (but are not limited to) an isolation effect (which produces individualized subjects 'molded and modelled for governance as part of an undifferentiated yet specific "public"), an identification effect (which produces collectivities or like 'kinds' through which 'individuals recognize themselves as the same'), a legibility effect (which involves the 'production of both a language and a knowledge for governance ... theoretical and empirical tools that classify, serialize, and regulate collectivities, and [the production] of the collectivities so engendered'); and a spatialization effect (that involves 'the production of boundaries ... of territories and jurisdictions') (Trouillot 2003:81).

Trouillot's theorization of isolation effects brings him close to Foucault's understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and the state. As Foucault notes, the modern state exists--in part--as a sophisticated structure within which individuals are integrated precisely through the shaping of individuality of a particular kind (Foucault 1982:783). This shaping of individuality includes forms of 'pastoral care'--manifested historically in Northern Queensland as 'protection'--of those subject to the state.

Reflecting on the colonial period in which the Act operated, an isolation effect is evident both in the administrative creation of individual identities for administrative purposes, and in the administrative treatment of local Aborigines. Each Aboriginal person subject to the Act was given an identification number (linked to a record card), used for the administration of labour contracts, bank accounts, and for communication between local Protectors and with the Chief Protector's office in Brisbane. The police records pertaining to the Central Peninsula are full of references to individuals whom policemen encountered on their travels through the district, identified by either a Christian name alone or by a Christian name and surname as well as an identification number. Records from the Coen Protectorate from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s similarly list information including the 'English names' of Aboriginal men and women under work 'agreements' (contracts for indentured labour), their identity numbers, ages (often estimated or occasionally listed as unknown), their place of residence, place of birth, marital status and name of husband or wile and children, the 'breed' (degree of racial admixture) of named persons and their immediate relations, the date they were last employed, their 'working ability' and other 'remarks'. (10) Identity numbers were essential not only for administrative co-ordination, but also because English names often changed repeatedly, in particular when Aborigines began to work for a new white 'boss'.

There is insufficient evidence to conclude that the administrative identification of individuated Aboriginal persons 'under the Act' directly re-shaped local Aboriginal personhood or subjectivity. But closely related aspects of local control of Aboriginal people certainly fed into the re-shaping of Aboriginal identity and personhood, not least the introduction of new practices of naming. New forms of name--in particular, the introduction of surnames have subtly re-shaped the ways in which shared identities are presented and understood by Aboriginal people, replacing earlier forms of naming which articulated 'clan' identities (McConnel 1930; Thomson 1946). Surnames have also affected the way in which non-indigenes have made presumptions about the degree of relatedness between Aboriginal people, often leading to interventions that have by turns either fortified or weakened connections between Aboriginal kin.

The control of Aboriginal people by local authorities has affected the reckoning of personhood in numerous other ways. For example, the control of Aboriginal workers led to their separation from kin and country. This separation led to an intense individuation in personal ties to country, displacing conjoint attachments to the region's landscape (Smith 2002a). Similarly, the disruption of the region's indigenous 'promise [arranged] marriage' practices led to new affinal patterns that weakened customary ties between 'countrymen' (Chase 1980), intermarrying sets of consociates whose 'clan' areas were spatially proximate to one another.

The Act unarguably produced identification and legibility effects in the Central Peninsula, through which administratively identified individuals came to be realigned as members of particular collectivities. Perhaps the most important such realignment of this kind during the colonial period was the identification of particular Aborigines as 'Coen people"--those whose usual residence and employment were within the Coen Protectorate. The records of the Chief Protector's Office and the Department of Aboriginal Affairs contain numerous communications discussing the movement of Aboriginal people between Coen and other settlements on the Peninsula. These communications often identified particular individuals on the basis that they were 'Coen people' or because they 'belonged' to one of the Peninsula's coastal mission settlements. The Aboriginal people of the region took up these regional identities, and came to identify themselves and their consociates as 'Coen people'.

Presentations of identity based on historical consociality also included identities based on the more fluid and informal 'mobs' of workers associated with particular cattle stations. Sometimes radically disjunct from individuals' own traditional countries, these station identities nonetheless re-shaped Aboriginal attachments to country. Station identities continue to be articulated by the Aboriginal people of the central Peninsula with reference to stations with which they and their forebears had prolonged associations. A number of Coen families, for instance, are spoken of as 'Rokeby people' on the basis of the development of connections with Rokeby station through being born and raised there, and by working on the property alongside their parents and other kin (see Smith 2003a, 2006).

Regardless of the informal recognition of such shared identities--including the maintenance of station identities through the renewal of work 'agreements'--the state's formal emphasis, during the lifetime of the Act, was on individuated persons rather than groups. In particular--unlike colonial administrations elsewhere--the colonial state remained disinterested in the Central Peninsula's 'tribal' or 'clan' identities. While a number of local 'leaders' were identified with particular tribes or locations, the state's overwhelming interest was in the regulation of individuals. Despite the occasional nomination of tribal identities on the 'king plates' given to these men as a signifier of their status (see Smith 2003b:17-19), locally-appointed 'kings' were primarily of interest due to their supposed authority over collections of Aboriginal people in places like Coen's Aboriginal reserve, rather than as the leaders of named tribal groups per se.

The Act also produced legibility effects, providing local Protectors and other administrators with a language and knowledge for the governance of Aborigines (Trouillot 2003:81). (11) Language and knowledge of this kind allowed for the classification and regulation of Aboriginal collectivities, producing these collectivities as social facts. As already noted, local indigenous identities were only of limited interest in the administration of the Central Peninsula's Aboriginal people; more important in making the region's indigenous population legible was the identification of people as Aboriginal--or as members of the region's "coloured' population, exempt from state 'protection'--through the Act's legislative mechanisms. Although indigenous distinctions between whites and Aborigines almost certainly pre-date the passing of the Act, the Act's local effects embedded 'Aborigine' as a particular kind of social category employed not only by the local Protector, but also by other settlers and by Aboriginal people themselves. As a result of this legibility effect, a particular 'human kind' (Hirsch 2001:253)--the 'Aborigine' or 'Aboriginal'--came into being. The concept of Aboriginality has thus been shaped by its centrality to the administrative project of distinguishing, enumerating and controlling local Indigenous populations. This concept is now deeply embedded within Aboriginal people's own sense of selfhood, and their understanding of their actual and desired relationships with the state, In this way, the local indigenous population have come to understand themselves as Aboriginal according to the terms of the Act.

Lastly, a spatialization effect produced new administrative boundaries and jurisdictions, for example the Coen Protectorate, within which a particular set of listed Aboriginal workers were administered and supplied as a source of indentured labour to local cattle stations. (12) These boundaries and jurisdictions--which became a central part of Aboriginal social life through the forms of flow and closure (Meyer and Geschiere 1999) produced through the control of Aboriginal mobility--have led to the coalescence of new regional social fields, for instance those involving 'Rokeby people' or 'Coen people'.

Beyond the administrative and social delimitation of the 'Coen region', a further spatialization effect is apparent in the integration of the boundaries of pastoral leases into local Aboriginal understandings of the landscape. In many cases, these boundaries or 'fencelines' are not simply understood as divisions superimposed on pre-existing cultural landscapes. Rather, they have become part of the figuration of Aboriginal landscapes; in several cases these 'fence-lines' are now used to define the extent of Aboriginal groups' territorial interests in figurations of local customary tenure (Smith 2002a, 2003c). The local Aboriginal uptake of fence-lines as a means of reckoning customary tenure marks the 'folding back' of the administrative delimitation of pastoral leases into Aboriginal 'law and custom', and into the affectively-charged articulations of connection with 'country'.

POST-COLONIAL STATE EFFECTS

State-Aboriginal relations changed radically in the early 1970s, further transforming local life-worlds. Nationally, this period was marked by a shift to government policies of self-determination and self-management. In the Central Peninsula, the repeal of Queensland's formal regime of Protection, the extension of welfare benefits and the award of equal wages to Aboriginal people led to a collapse in employment. Local pastoralists proved unable or unwilling to employ more than a handful of Aboriginal workers under the new conditions. This led to the region's Aboriginal population being centralized in Coen, and their reliance on welfare payments. Listlessness and the availability of alcohol caused increasing social problems in the township.

In these changed circumstances, an officer of Queensland's Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) replaced the local Protector. The new Department 'Manager' undertook the administration of matters pertaining to the local Aboriginal population, attempting to support them through the changes, resulting from what has come to be known locally as 'the freedom'. Although this period saw increasing levels of anomie, it also saw a series of concerted attempts by local people--often in partnership with local community advisors and administrators--to attempt to determine their own futures.

There is little doubt that these attempts reflected a changing national Indigenous agenda. The Whitlam Labor Government of the early 1970s introduced self-determination policies that sought the recognition of Indigenous cultural difference, recognizing inherent Aboriginal rights and the need for self representation' (Altman 2004:307). This new policy environment provided both ideational and material support for local Aboriginal aspirations, despite the conservative--and often reactionary--response of the Queensland Government to these changes (see Brennan 1992; Kidd 1997). It seems likely that the ways in which Coen's Aboriginal people came to articulate and pursue their aspirations for self-determination were profoundly shaped by national policy discourse, albeit that these aspirations also built on the continuing desire to re-establish lived connections with country and to regenerate meaningful activities following the collapse of station employment.

In the early 1980s, local Aboriginal aspirations for self-determination resulted in the establishment of the first of several regional Aboriginal corporations, leading to the formation of the Coen Regional Aboriginal Corporation (CRAC) in 1993. These corporations represented the interests of a number of Coen's Aboriginal families whose homelands lay as far as 100km from the township. Establishment of the corporations facilitated access to homelands, supporting aspirations to gain title to these areas and to establish 'outstations' which would allow people to live on their country on a semi-permanent or occasional basis (Smith 2004). Attempts by local families to regain control of homelands were supported by purchases and transfers of station properties and other blocs of land. Further support for the attempts arrived in the early 1990s with the passage of Queensland's Aboriginal Land Act 1991 and the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993, both of which responded to growing legal and political pressure to restore land to 'traditional owners'.

Conceptualizing the changes and continuities apparent in the period from the 1970s to the 1990s in terms of state effects provides a useful perspective on the relationship between the state and Aborigines in the Central Peninsula. (13) Among the continuities apparent in this period, isolation effects appear to have continued to shape individualized Aboriginal subjects 'as part of an undifferentiated yet specific "public" (Trouillot 2003:81). It is unclear if an individuated sense of financial resources developed earlier in relation to Protector-controlled bank accounts. But access to direct control of individual accounts, which followed the repeal of the Act, has fed into a strong contemporary sense of having 'one's own money' which is now protected from a local 'moral economy', in which forms of demand-sharing remain prevalent (see Martin 1995: Peterson 2006). Doubtless this individuation of financial resources draws on a long-running emphasis on personal autonomy, articulated against a profound sense of relatedness (Martin 1995:5-7), and on particular pre-colonial forms of personal property (Rigsby and Chase 1998:214, fn.32), as well as the colonial management of personal income. It seems likely nonetheless that a history of waged employment and personal income underlie a particular trajectory of individuation in relation to financial resources. Whilst the ways in which money is spent or distributed may well transform its meaning among Aboriginal consociates (Martin 1995:7), there is nonetheless a clear sense among Coen people that money is made by an individual's own efforts, and belongs to that person, despite the possibility of others demanding it from them. The individual retention and control of financial resources is now personally--if not necessarily publicly--justifiable on this individuated basis.

The individuation of financial resources is further shaped by individuated employment arrangements, which have been re-established in the region following a period of majority unemployment through CRAC's establishment of a local Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme. This scheme provided for Aboriginal employment on locally administered projects, remunerated at the same rate as unemployment benefits. Under this local 'workfare' program, Aborigines have again experienced themselves as individuated members of a local workforce, earning their 'own money'--and experiencing deductions from 'wages'--paid on a weekly basis into personal bank accounts. Whilst these individuated aspects of the local economy continue to exist alongside strongly relational economic practices, it is nonetheless clear that, in implementing the CDEP scheme, the local Aboriginal Corporation has extended at least one state effect in the central Peninsula.

THE NEW 'TRIBES'

In addition to the individuating effects of employment projects and bank accounts, the era of 'self-determination' was also marked by an increasing administrative and Aboriginal emphasis on particular kinds of conjoint identity. In particular, Aboriginal people in the Central Peninsula have increasingly come to present themselves in terms of a set of 'tribal' identities in their involvement in administrative contexts.

The emergence of language-named 'tribal' groups through colonial encapsulation has been the subject of extensive anthropological comment. Fried (1968) identified such tribes as secondary phenomena, resulting from the articulation between indigenous populations and nation-states, both as an internal development and through the imposition of exogenous forms of governance. Rumsey (1989), however, links the emergence of 'language groups' or 'tribes' in the context of Aboriginal land claims with indigenous traditions that connect language varieties, country and people through accounts of ancestral action or 'Dreaming' (see also Merlan 1981; Rigsby 1995; Smith 2000a). Cautious about Fried's critique of the notion of the 'tribe', Rumsey (1989:74, following Hymes 1968:43) suggests that careful attention to the relationships between language, land and 'cultural units' can provide a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which tribes have emerged in the context of land claims.

In the Central Peninsula, language-named tribes appear not only in relation to land claims, but also in other administrative engagements with the region's Aboriginal population following the shift to 'self-determination' and 'self-management' policies. The first DAA Manager in Coen, Dulcie Higgins, was already discussing problems among the local Aboriginal population in terms of language-named groups when she wrote in 1977 of 'three major tribes, the Luma Luma [Lamalama], Carngue [Kaanju] and the Munkin [Mungkan] who are all very jealous of each other' (cited from Kidd 1996:43). Higgins further notes her attempts to deal with the local population in terms of their tribal allegiances, whilst simultaneously encouraging them to view themselves as a unitary community:

 I have always tried to treat the people as one people always of
 course recognizing the tribal structures, at meetings making sure
 the three tribal leaders were present but trying to get them to
 work as Coen Aboriginals rather than separate tribes (cited from
 Kidd 1996: 43, emphasis added).

These tribal identities accord with Rumsey's suggestion of an articulation between indigenous ideas and state processes, rather than representing a simple (post-) colonial imposition. In the Central Peninsula--as elsewhere in Northern Australia--Aboriginal traditions posit a tie between land, language and people, such that any given 'country' and those attached to it are connected to a particular language variety (Rigsby 1992, 1999). Moreover, these linguistic ties often coincide with--although they do not determine--connections between sets of 'countrymen' (Chase 1980) associated with geographically proximate countries.

With the national shift towards self-determination policies, an awareness of 'tribal' identities appears to have become the basis for administrative attempts at engaging with indigenous political structures. In addition to the government agencies, newly formed local and regional 'Aboriginal organizations' (14) tended to deal with a range of social and economic issues on the basis of 'tribal' and similar countrymen identities. The agencies assisting with the development of CRAC in the early 1990s, for example, built local 'tribes' into the Corporation's formal governance arrangements. As a result, CRAC's Aboriginal board includes reserved positions for seven language-named 'tribal' groups connected to the region's various outstations, as well as an eighth position for 'town people'.

Administrative attempts to engage with indigenous social organization were encouraged by local Aboriginal people, who appeal" to have responded to these attempts by presenting themselves as members of language-named (and broadly language-affiliated) 'tribal' groups. As one Coen man said of the language-named group with which he identified, 'we put it in the business way'. This suggests that Aboriginal people regarded these group identities as a convenient and appropriate means for presenting conjoint interests. But such presentations were not intended to displace different attachments to country within these groups. While members conjointly established outstations across the region, they continued to maintain norms regarding use of country that differentiated between their consociates in relation to particular places and 'countries'.

Identification and legibility effects characterize this growing administrative recognition of tribes, and the parallel attribution of a tribal identity to most, if not all Coen people. With the policy shift towards 'self-determination', local manifestations of the state--in particular those dependent on Indigenous governance arrangements--have come to depend on named tribal collectivities. These collective identities allow sets of Aboriginal people to be recognized--and to recognize themselves--as the same, enabling the operation of new forms of intercultural governance.

Despite the apparent intentions of local Aboriginal leaders, these 'tribal' collectivities have not simply remained as a convenient form of occasional identity, behind which local indigenous forms of identification operate according to customary principles. Rather, these projections of conjoint identity have taken on a life of their own in the intercultural social field that has developed through the increasing interpenetration of local Aboriginal life-worlds and the 'mainstream' (Smith 2008), 'folding back' onto local Aboriginal worlds and individuated Aboriginal persons.

The transformative force of these projections is particularly apparent as an outcome of land claim and Native Title processes. These claims--which began in the 1990s with Queensland's Aboriginal Land Act 1991 (ALA) and the Commonwealth Native Title Act 1993 (NTA)--have tended to reify 'tribal' and other 'countryman' identities through the presentation of groups of Aboriginal people as conjointly holding 'traditional affiliation' and/or 'historical connections' with the area claimed (ALA), or as possessing rights and interests in a precisely delimited area under their shared traditional law and custom (NTA). (15)

During the pursuit of a particular claim, identification and legibility effects tend to focus on the same 'tribal' collectivities that provide the focus for local governance arrangements. (16) Following the determination of a particular claim, successful claimant groups are further reified through the legal incorporation of new governance structures. These structures include the 'Prescribed Bodies Corporate' (PBCs) that are formed to take carriage of newly determined Native Title rights and interests (see Mantziaris and Martin 2000). Spatialization effects are also apparent throughout claim processes, which necessarily involve the precise geographical delimitation of the areas over which claims are made and eventually determined.

The state's requirements for precise delimitation also shape the identification of the membership of claimant groups. The Native Title Act, in particular, demands that any given person be able to be definitively identified as a member of the claimant group--or excluded from such membership--through a precise description of the group's composition. This requirement is intended to provide an acceptable measure of certainty to the state's recognition of customary rights and interests.

This requirement of certainty marks a disparity between the requirements of the state and the manner in which Aboriginal attachments to country exist beyond the Native Title 'recognition space' (Smith 2003c). The need for certainty exemplifies the 'ontology of determinacy' (Gaonkar 2002:6) that underlies the social constitution of the state. This requirement ensures that the complex, shifting iterations of attachment that constitute much local Aboriginal sociality are at odds with the social logic through which the state is constituted, and through which the state incorporates other aspects of the social. As a social formation the state only gains social traction through 'thin simplifications' (Scott 1998) that replace the complex, shifting and indeterminate aspects of social life with reified, static representations. Where indeterminacy and fluidity are particularly prominent aspects of social action, the effects of this state reification are particularly marked.

Reified, static constructions of Aboriginal group identities predominate in Native Title claims and in other forms of administrative 'recognition'. These constructions, which possess sufficient fixity for the operations of state processes, come to stand in for the complex, iterative articulations of attachment to country that have long typified interactions among Aboriginal people (Glaskin 2007; Smith 2003c). Although various state employees and consultants continue to elicit such identities, the requirement to produce these identities has also been recognized by Aboriginal people themselves. The Aboriginal presentation of language-named tribes 'in the business way' responds to the state's requirement for reified group identities in the Native Title process, and in ongoing attempts to produce forms of local and regional governance that are at once 'culturally appropriate', 'functional' and 'sustainable' (Smith 2008).

This reification of 'tribal' groups involves a particular kind of isolation effect. Rather than the isolation of individuals identified by Trouillot (2003), however, it is the newly incorporated 'tribal' groups that are clearly distinguished from one another through the production of determinate memberships and identities. This enactment of isolation produces what is, perhaps, the most dramatic transformation of Aboriginal social norms within the Native Title 'recognition space' (Mantziaris and Martin 2000; Smith and Morphy 2007; Weiner 2003). Whereas Aboriginal attachments to country have long involved shifting, indeterminate articulations of shared or differentiated identities, the newly 'isolated' and reified tribal groups are marked by continuing, reified articulations of membership--a difference with profound implications for the Aboriginal people of the region.

STILL UNDER THE ACT?

In a paper apposite to the argument presented here, Kapferer (1995:82) notes that Aboriginal identities, like other forms of late-modern identity, are value constructions deeply interconnected with contemporary states. The administrative processes constitutive of the state in the Central Peninsula continue to both instigate and engage with the production of particular kinds of collective identity and the forms of subjectivity that underpin these identities. The appearance of language-named tribes to label 'groups' held to exist within the Aboriginal domain is thus suggestive of ongoing transformations of Aboriginal subjectivities, generated through state codification of the more indeterminate and fluid articulations of local Aboriginal attachments to country.

The interconnection of subjectivity with the cultural and social formations that shape social action make it inevitable that local manifestations of the state--and the "mainstream' more generally--will have profound effects on Aboriginal people. In part, this involves what Hirsch (2001:247, following Hacking 1986), calls the 'looping effect of human kinds', wherein 'people classified in a certain way tend to conform or grow into the ways they are described; but...also evolve their own ways, so that the classifications and descriptions have to be constantly revised'. As such, the transformation of Aboriginal subjectivity involves the syncretic interplay of subjectivity and state-oriented categories. Moreover, indigenous cultural forms also persist within local social action. Rather than a simple transformation of Aboriginal subjects through the forceful application of state-oriented identities, the result is the complex iteration of multivalent forms of subjectivity, established through the interplay of originally indigenous and exogenous socio-cultural forms.

But while multivalent subjectivities problematize totalizing accounts of state encompassment and capillary power, the way in which the state takes on a social life 'through the subject's capacity to perceive, feel and interpret' (Linke 2006:209) also problematizes accounts of Aboriginal resistance to the influence of the state. In the Central Peninsula, Aboriginal complaints that 'Native Title causes fights between our families' and that 'we are still under the Act', seem--on first blush--to mark moments in which Aboriginal people experience the state as existing in opposition to local values and practices. On further consideration, however, the foundations of these claims begin to appear more complex, pointing towards the interweaving of the state and Aboriginal life-worlds. While Aboriginal people subject to state projects undoubtedly reshape, and even undermine, the 'frames and structures' they inhabit but 'did not create' (Gross 1985:79, after de Certeau 1980; see also Cowlishaw 1994/1988), these frames and structures are simultaneously transformative of local subjectivities, not least through the constitution of oppositional identities.

These complexities are apparent in the affective responses of Aboriginal people to the state and administrative processes. They are particularly apparent in the fiercely affective responses of Aboriginal claimants to Native Title claim processes.

These affective responses were apparent during a recent Native Title claim in the Central Peninsula. Like many others, this claim was marked by ongoing conflicts between claimant 'families'. (17) These conflicts centred on the belief held by some claimants that other claimant families had little, if any, traditional tie to the claim area. The latter families strongly refuted these allegations. In both cases, claimants angrily insisted that the Aboriginal organizations and state agencies involved in the claim process--the regional Land Council and its consultant anthropologists, the National Native Title Tribunal and the Federal Court--should intervene to ensure that their interests were reflected in the eventual determination of customary 'rights and interests' in the claim area.

This appeal to administrative authority is telling. Linke (2006:217-18, following Zizek 1989:37-38) notes that an affective belief in 'the ultimate "justice, truth and functionality" of the state' marks the state's internalization in those subject to its powers. While there may be a certain pragmatic recognition of the state's authority at play among Aboriginal claimants, the near-ubiquitous claims that only state power is able to resolve such conflicts and that 'Aboriginal people have got to heal" it from whites before they will take notice' both seem to suggest the relevance of Linke's argument.

Other aspects of this conflict also point towards the direct and indirect influence of state effects on Aboriginal subjectivities, and the state's role in generating and perpetuating such conflicts. An often-repeated assertion made by claimants about those they regard as making claims over areas with which they have no connection is that they are doing so in pursuit of financial benefits. This assertion is commonly made regarding those members of the Peninsula's 'stolen generations' who have returned to the region in the context of land claims (see Smith 2000b, 2003a, 2006). (18) Aboriginal perceptions of what Martin (1995:4, after Sansom 1988) calls a 'monetisation of the mind', which underlie these assertions, are likely linked to the more general inculcation of individuation and orientation to the region's cash economy. Local Aboriginal people certainly understand this monetary orientation to be deeply interconnected with the Act and its effects; they associate it with the racial distinctions through which the Act operated and the mixed 'racial' heritage of most stolen generation people. From this local perspective, however, 'monetisation' is most commonly understood as 'their white blood showing through' rather than as an effect of particular cultural values on modes of thought and action.

But if individuating isolation effects arguably underlay the monetary motivations of some claimants, a more general shift towards an isolated reckoning of interests was apparent across the whole claimant group. As previously noted, a growing administrative orientation of Aboriginal reckonings of attachment to 'country' has accompanied the state's requirement for reified constructions of groups of 'traditional owners'. Despite the continuing articulation of less determinate, shifting iterations of attachment to land among some Aboriginal people, many others have increasingly come to rely on reified tribal identities even in the interactions constitutive of the 'Aboriginal domain'. This is particularly true of younger men and women, and also the majority of members of the 'stolen generations' (Smith 2000b). (19)

There is substantial evidence that the Native Title era has seen these reified constructions 'fold back' into local Aboriginal life worlds. The legislative demarcation of 'traditional owner groups' and their interests has become a social fact in the Central Peninsula, despite the continuing articulation of shifting presentations of conjoint interests by many Aboriginal people. Whereas these shifting 'dimensions of contrast' (20) (Weiner 2005:5) give conjoint interests a distinctly indeterminate character, decentring and collapsing any given articulation of interest over time, the reified constructions of 'tribal groups' that prevail in Native Title claims demand a once-and-for-all resolution of the inclusion or exclusion of any potential claimant. And while multiple, shifting articulations of interests have long constituted local land-based identities, the state now demands the resolution of differing Aboriginal assertions of connection to a particular area. Despite the possibility of differentiating between various claimants' 'rights and interests', the requirement of determinacy impels claimants to contest one another's views as to the correct definition of the set of right-holders. The result is that 'native title causes fights between [claimant] families'. That most--if not all--claimants feel affectively impelled to assert their own articulation of the claim as the only acceptable one seems to mark the Aboriginal incorporation of a state-oriented 'ontology of determinacy'.

If the irruption of conflicts over the determination of claimant groups marks one aspect of state-oriented Aboriginal subjectivities, then another aspect is marked by the expectation that the state can and should be able to resolve these fights by intervening in them. This expectation of state intervention suggests a deeply held attachment to a state that is simultaneously regarded as forcefully imposing itself on Aboriginal life-worlds. Only partly integrated into local life-worlds, the state is the subject of deeply affective expectations, yet also remains partially outside the local symbolic universe, with the result that state interventions often take on the character of traumatic injunctions. If this is true of the state in general (Linke 2006:217), it is particularly apparent in the Central Peninsula. In conflicts over Native Title claims, and in local sociality more generally, the state is variously truly absent, subject to obfuscation through its saturation in Aboriginal modes of thought, feeling and action, and apparent in its forceful action in relation to Aboriginal people. If the first and last of these orientations reveal the state as 'thing-like' and fundamentally external to local life-worlds, allowing Aboriginal people to conceive of themselves as 'still under the Act', then the transformation of Aboriginal subjectivities simultaneously incorporates the same life-worlds within the 'society of the state'.

CONCLUSION

Sokefeld (1999:430) argues that anthropological attention to subjectivity 'demands "ethnographies of the particular" ... that examine what people actually do in the specific circumstances of their daily lives'. Anthropologists engaged in Native Title research have been similarly exhorted to 'attend to behaviour and action so that we can highlight or point to the discrepancy between the ideal and the real' (Rigsby 2001:8). But moving from an anthropology for to an anthropology of Native Title (Smith and Morphy 2007)--and examining the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) as one aspect of the state's increasing saturation of Aboriginal life-worlds, as I have tried to do here--suggests that the 'ideal' and the 'real' are more deeply interconnected in Aboriginal Australia than is often presumed. Attention to behaviour and action, within and beyond the context of Native Title claims, makes visible the ways in which 'ideal' demarcations of Aboriginal identities have come to have profound effects within local life-worlds. Moreover, such attention suggests that these effects have resulted not only from the external imposition of the 'thin simplifications' required by administrative processes, but also through transformations of the ways in which Aboriginal people think, feel and act.

The Native Title era has seen the growing importance of language-named 'tribal' identities in places like Central Cape York Peninsula. These reified demarcations of Aboriginal identity lie at the heart of Aboriginal people's involvement in administrative processes. They have enabled administrators to make sense of local life-worlds in an era of 'self-determination' policies, and have simultaneously allowed Aboriginal people to advance their own aspirations by engaging agencies concerned with local development.

If the growing emphasis on 'tribal' identities marks a deepening state-orientation among local indigenous populations, this orientation does not indicate a simple process of assimilation. But such reified identities are not simply a matter of convenience, nor are they limited to intercultural engagements between Aboriginal 'groups' and a distinct administrative domain. Tribal identities have 'folded back' onto local life-worlds, reshaping the ways Aboriginal people think about themselves, despite the continuing existence of shifting articulations of autonomy and relatedness within the 'Aboriginal domain'. The coexistence of these

markedly different ways of reckoning local identities has led to the emergence of multivalent forms of Aboriginal subjectivity, reflecting the complex, intercultural character of contemporary Aboriginal lives.

The simultaneous existence of state-oriented, reified tribal identities and shifting, indeterminate articulations of autonomy and relatedness present problems for many Aboriginal people involved in Native Title claims. On the one hand, attempts to construct a reified set of Aboriginal title-holders in the context of multiple and shifting local articulations of attachment to 'country' lead to what many claimants refer to as 'fights between our families'. On the other hand, the multivalent character of Aboriginal subjectivities--at once partly distinct from the processes constitutive of the state, and partly embedded within these processes--leads to a sense of being 'still under the Act', imposed upon by processes and agencies understood as distinct from Aboriginal 'society'.

Closer anthropological attention to the articulation of identities across differing contexts can reveal the complexities of post-colonial Aboriginal subjectivities and their profound but partial intercalation with the state. This kind of attention necessarily leads towards an anthropological critique--but not a rejection--of Aboriginal claims about the state. In particular, it becomes difficult to sustain an uncritical engagement with 'two-laws talk'. The complexities of the Aboriginal-state relationship cannot be accounted for on the basis of the fundamental distinction between Aboriginal and Anglo-Australian societies--and subjectivities--implied by such talk. Instead, to paraphrase Weiner (1995:xix), anthropologists must trace the 'routes of communication and thematic entrapment' that shape such distinctions. Moreover, we must consider the ways in which anthropology itself demarcates Aboriginal identities and reiterates fundamental distinctions between Aboriginal people and the state, and the effects of such anthropological demarcation. An unreflexive position with regard to anthropological practice further limits our ability to understand why Aboriginal people consider themselves to be 'still under the Act', why claimants believe 'native title causes fights between our families', and to make sense of the complex truths that underlie these concerns.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper is based on research supported by the Australian Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the Emslie Hornimann Fund and the University of London. Earlier versions were presented at the 2001 meeting of the Australian Anthropological Society, at the workshop Custom: The Fate of Non-Western Law and Indigenous Governance in the 21st Century, held at The Australian National University in 2002, and in the CAEPR Seminar Series at The Australian National University in 2003. I am deeply grateful to the people of Central Cape York Peninsula for their ongoing support of my research. I am also grateful to the two anonymous referees for Oceania for their useful comments. Any errors of fact and analysis that remain are mine.

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NOTES

(1.) Throughout this article, I use the un-capitalised form ('the state') to refer to the state as a socio-political phenomenon or entity and the capitalised form ('the State') to refer to the State of Queensland.

(2.) On the Aboriginal Land Act 1991, see Brennan 1992 and Smith 2003a. On the Native Title Act 1993 see Smith and Morphy 2007, Sutton 2003 and Toussaint 2004.

(3.) The author has conducted ethnographic research in the Central Peninsula since 1996, and has simultaneously worked as a consultant anthropologist on a series of land claims under State and Federal legislation during this period.

(4.) The control of Queensland's Aborigines exercised under the 1897 Act continued through its later amendments, and under the Aborigines Preservation and Protection Act 1939 and the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders' Act 1965 (see Kidd 1996).

(5.) In many contexts subjectivity is not individual in character, being constituted through different kinds of personhood and other social and cultural configurations (for example, those associated with the 'Aboriginal domain').

(6.) More generally, the imaginary distinction between state and society is strongly marked in Australia, despite Australia being a 'particularly strong example of a social formation which, for all its contextual diversity, is entirely a state construction ... a society of the state' (Kapferer and Morris, 2003:81). Pertinent to the argument of this paper is Kapferer and Morris's (2003:86) suggestion that Australian settlements and communities generally emerged 'from within and by means of the machinery of the state' and that 'It]he state did not become internal to the person so much as the person was instituted already as internal to the state'.

(7.) 'Country' is a commonly-used 'Aboriginal English' term, which denotes places or areas 'where an Aboriginal person or community belongs, to which they have a responsibility, and from which they can draw spiritual strength' (Arthur 1996:119; see also Rigsby 1992:354). Throughout this paper, I use inverted commas to mark terms and phrases drawn from the variety of Aboriginal English spoken by the Central Peninsula's indigenous population.

(8.) These 'clans' were locally identified terms that indicated their 'association with' or 'connection to' a named place, an associated totem, or another signifier of conjoint place-based identity.

(9.) Many Aboriginal people claim that these arrangements involved corrupt collusion between local police and storekeepers.

(10.) The information presented on record cards is often partial and/or inaccurate. They are now commonly used (with due care) in the preparation of Native Title claims as evidence for connection to country and/or in the preparation of genealogies.

(11.) Trouillot (2003:81) is unclear on the distinction between 'identification' and 'legibility'. 1 understand him to mean that 'identification' occurs on the basis of the conglomeration of (isolated) 'atomized subjects', whilst 'legibility' involves the making-visible of collectivities presumed to pre-exist state interventions.

(12.) Such administrative boundaries continue to structure social life in the region, including Coen's Aboriginal 'workfare' scheme, the regional definition of which cross-cuts ties between Aboriginal people across the Peninsula (Smith 2002b).

(13.) In what follows, I focus on the changes and continuities in state-Aboriginal relations up to the late 1990s. I have refrained from examining more recent changes in this relationship stemming from the policies of the Howard Coalition Government (1996-20071, and those now emerging under the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. The period from 1996 onwards has been marked by significant changes to state-Aboriginal relationships, and these changes have undoubtedly further reshaped Aboriginal subjectivities. 1 intend to discuss the effects of more recent policies elsewhere (and see Smith 2007b).

(14.) A number of Aboriginal organizations which deal with the wider Cape York Peninsula region are based in the regional administrative centre of Cairns, some 600km south of Coen. These organizations include the Cape York Land Council, which has carriage of most of the Peninsula's Native Title claims.

(15.) Several examples of the foregrounding of contemporary 'tribal' identities at odds with the conjoint presentations of identity that predominated prior to colonial encompassment are found across the Central Peninsula. In the coastal Princess Charlotte Bay area, tracts of land and the clans that own them were previously named by Aboriginal people, but indigenous language varieties themselves often lacked conventional indigenous names (Rigsby and Hafner 1994:67-69. 74). In recent years, however, the major grouping apparent in land claims, and in other dealings with the state and with Aboriginal organizations, has been the Lamalama language-named "tribal' group. This group named after a particular language variety from lower Princess Charlotte Bay area "emerged as a distinct group ... through the amalgamation of people from upwards of forty [clans], perhaps five indigenous languages, [and] an unknown number of local groups' (Rigsby and Chase 1998:194; see also Smith 2000a on the comparable emergence of the neighbouring Ayapathu "tribal" group).

(16.) This process of identification occurs, in part, on the basis of "social mapping' work undertaken by anthropologists and other experts.

(17.) The 'families" discussed here accord with Sutton's (2003) description of 'families of polity"--cognatically recruited "groups' marked by their continuities with earlier 'clan" identities.

(18.) The "stolen generations' are those Aboriginal people whose forebears were removed from their homelands by state intervention. In the Central Peninsula, such removals were made under the auspices of the 1897 "Act' and subsequent legislation.

(19.) In both cases, the emphasis placed on reified tribal identities seems to mark a stronger need for forms of 'legibility of the self" that mirror the administrative requirement fur legible Aboriginal 'groups' and group identities.

(20.) In North Queensland, as already noted, these 'dimensions of contrast' have traditionally focused on linguistic constructions that denote a set of people as 'belonging to', 'pertaining to', or 'associated with' particular places, areas or aspects of the landscape. Importantly. these constructions or presentations do not identify "groups" in any determinate sense. Rather,

 they are simply names of kinds of distinctions and they operate
 across a range of levels of inclusiveness and are therefore
 themselves not fixed. Peter Sutton more recently remarked that
 "there is often little evidence as to whether such terms are
 relatively precise or highly loose and usage is an enduring element
 in a naming system or an ephemeral one used for an occasion or a
 period' ... As [Roy] Wagner suggests in an analogous Papua New
 Guinea case.... 'We cannot deduce from the conceptual distinctions
 an actual correspondence of the terms with discreet and consciously
 perceived groups of people' (Weiner 2005:7).