Entangled Territorialities

"This is an excellent collection of essays by Australian and Canadian anthropologists on the interaction of Aboriginal peoples with the dominant settler society in their countries." -- Peter Russell, University Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto "Entangled Territorialities advances discussions of the position of Indigenous people in contemporary liberal nation-states, exemplified by Canada and Australia. In particular, the volume attacks the complexities of attempts to consider continued Indigenous presence and rights to territory and it moves beyond claims of pure sociocultural continuity towards an understanding of the ways in which Indigenous people pursue life-projects which embody some kind of autonomy for themselves." -- Fred R. Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology, New York University

Entangled Territorialities offers vivid ethnographic examples of how Indigenous lands in Australia and Canada are tangled with governments, industries, and mainstream society.

Entangled Territorialities offers vivid ethnographic examples of how Indigenous lands in Australia and Canada are tangled with governments, industries, and mainstream society. Most of the entangled lands to which Indigenous peoples are connected have been physically transformed and their ecological balance destroyed. Each chapter in this volume refers to specific circumstances in which Indigenous peoples have become intertwined with non-Aboriginal institutions and projects including the construction of hydroelectric dams and open mining pits. Long after the agents of resource extraction have abandoned these lands to their fate, Indigenous peoples will continue to claim ancestral ties and responsibilities that cannot be understood by agents of capitalism. The editors and contributors to this volume develop an anthropology of entanglement to further examine the larger debates about the vexed relationships between settlers and indigenous peoples over the meaning, knowledge, and management of traditionally-owned lands.