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The Extending Arm of Aboriginalism

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Aboriginalism is still a force in non-Aboriginal society, seen at its most extreme in the New Age attempts to harness ‘Aboriginal spirituality’ within a fuzzy but lucrative ideology. There are several ways in which non-Aboriginals have attempted to benefit (financially or otherwise) from a claimed affinity or connection with an Aboriginal community or a vaguely defined culture: from t-shirt manufacturers using recognisable motifs; to well-regarded overseas-based writers (the most famous being Bruce Chatwin) or authors of self-discovery books claiming deep understanding or close connections with communities they only briefly visited; to the celebrated cases of local writers and artists such as B Wongar presenting themselves as Aboriginal. In its broadest sense, Aboriginalism can be a pre-conceived appreciation, rather than an informed understanding, of Aboriginal people or cultures. It can also include, however, archaeological and anthropological studies, and arguably the academic field of Aboriginal Studies. In his Introduction to the collection Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, Bain Attwood argues that it is now possible to work in some of these areas, with the benefit of Foucauldian hindsight, in a “post-Aboriginalism” context. Attwood is, however, extremely critical of the dominance of Aboriginalism within anthropology and literature: Aboriginalism exists in at least three interdependent forms: first, as "Aboriginal studies" - the teaching, research or display of scholarly knowledge about indigenes by European scholars who claim that the indigenous peoples cannot represent themselves and must therefore be represented by experts who know more about Aborigines than they know about themselves; second, as a style of thought which is based upon an epistemological and ontological distinction between "them" and "us" - in this form Europeans imagine ‘the Aborigines’ as their "other," as being radically different from themselves;

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