Overview

During the 1970s a wave of 'counter-culture' people moved into rural communities in many parts of Australia. This study focuses in particular on the town of Kuranda in North Queensland and the relationship between the settlers and the local Aboriginal population, concentrating on a number of linked social dramas that portrayed the use of both public and private space. Through their public performances and in their everyday spatial encounters, these people resisted the bureaucratic state but, in the process, they also contributed to the cultivation and propagation of state effects.

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9781782386834

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- a rich ethnography that tracks the social, cultural and spatial becoming of a place. Clearly inspired by the powerful emergence of place studies and consciousness around the constructed nature of place and place meaning - Henry does her discipline's primary method of ethnography proud and offers a riveting account of life in place through the lens of multiple stakeholders, place contestants and vested interests - A stratigraphic peeling away of these layers, from their origins in Indigenous ancestral making to the contemporary construction of meaning and value in architectural efforts and forced social arrangements, reveals much about Australia's past and present and the politics of reconciliation and intercultural dialogue. * European Journal of Communication This is a detailed, closely argued ethnography, which points at a potential way forward. The notion that identities are co-constituted and should not be treated as pre-existing or monolithic is, in itself, not new. But Henry's event-centred analysis of their reproduction in a single Australian town is interesting, as is her work on the various kinds of white people that belong in Kuranda, and whose identities are formed as much in relation to each other, as they are against racialised difference. * Oceania This book makes an original contribution to contemporary ethnography in a number of ways. It is a detailed documentation of the historical emergence and transformation of the alternative lifestyle movement and so it will be of interest not only to anthropologists working on western society but also to other social scientists interested in contemporary popular culture. * Andrew Lattas, University of Bergen

Author Information

Rosita Henry is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and a Fellow of the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Australia. She is coeditor of The Challenge of Indigenous Peoples: Spectacle or Politics? (2011) and author of numerous articles on the political anthropology of place and performance.

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