A number of anthropologists have recently emphasised the intercultural character of Aboriginal life-worlds across northern and central Australia (see Hinkson and Smith 2005a). The empirical and theoretical accounts presented by these scholars move away both from a previous anthropological distinction between an ‘Aboriginal domain’ and a (socially if not culturally dominant) Australian ‘mainstream’. This parallels the distinction prevalent in the popular imagination between the life-worlds of Aboriginal people living in very remote areas and the norms, values and practices that predominate elsewhere in Australian life—a distinction that underlies much Indigenous policy.

Such a distinction—also commonly made by many Aboriginal people themselves—has found more nuanced expression in various anthropological accounts of the ‘Aboriginal domain’. This domain is understood to exist variously as a space in which social closure acts as a form of Aboriginal resistance to non-Indigenous dominance (e.g. Trigger 1986, 1992) or a set of practices (von Sturmer 1984) in which:

Both in these anthropological accounts, and (often with less nuance) in popular understandings and the ‘administrative imagination’ (cf. Rowse 1992), this Aboriginal domain, space or life-world is contrasted to a putative ‘mainstream’, broadly taken to indicate the commensurate dominance of social life and cultural production^[1] by ‘white’, ‘European’, ‘Anglo-Celtic’, ‘modern’ or ‘Australian’ forms of knowledge, language (‘Standard English’) and a predominantly non-Indigenous public.^[2]

Conceptualising a distinct Aboriginal domain differentiated from this ‘mainstream’ has proved useful in treating ethnographic accounts of social interactions and hegemonic relations in remote majority Aboriginal settlements. In his discussion of Aboriginal governance, for example, Keen (1989: 21) notes the usefulness of ‘treating the Aboriginal domain as a conceptual isolate … distinguishing it from its [wider social and political] environment’. But the increasing interpenetration of Aboriginal and ‘mainstream’ life-worlds in places like central Cape York Peninsula means that this kind of treatment now provides only a partial account of the character of Aboriginal governance.

For this reason, when writing about the central Peninsula I have reservations in treating ‘Indigenous Community Governance’ in terms of a central core of informal and formal aspects of Aboriginal governance, located within a surrounding ‘governance environment’ (Hunt and Smith 2006a: 39–42; and compare Keen, passim). Rather, whilst there are spaces, spheres of thought and styles of behaviour (Trigger 1986: 99) in the central Peninsula that are readily identifiable as constitutive of an ‘Aboriginal domain’, a more even-handed analysis of governance—in its fullest sense—must account for these as moments within a broader social field.

The concept of the social field has a relatively long history in social anthropology. It is perhaps most closely associated with the work of Max Gluckman and the ‘Manchester School’ (e.g. Gluckman 1968), whose work included accounts of interethnic relations in the context of governance in sub-Saharan Africa. More recently, the term has been taken up by anthropologists working in Aboriginal Australia (e.g. Smith 2007; Sullivan 2005).

Following Gluckman, it is possible to understand events and institutions associated with a particular ‘domain’ as part of a wider social field. Such an understanding entails the analysis of:

Nonetheless, more careful examination of such events and interactions may well reveal:

In the analysis that follows, I take up Gluckman’s model of a social field in relation to Indigenous community governance as it has developed in the central Peninsula, but with some qualifications.

My first qualification is that Gluckman’s use of the term ‘institution’ should be read here as inclusive both of formal and informal social institutions and of instituted forms of behaviour, knowledge and the like; in what follows, I understand ‘institutions of governance’ to form parts of a socio-cultural field. Secondly, I understand Gluckman’s use of the term ‘haphazard’ to indicate, on one hand, the relatively open trajectories of socio-cultural production in fields marked by the interplay of originally distinct (Aboriginal and settler) socio-cultural forms. On the other hand, the term ‘haphazard’ also marks the unexpected results of interventions by those within this shared field. In particular, I am thinking of the interventions of non-Indigenous agencies, the ‘haphazard’ results of which often seem unpredictable to those working within these agencies. Lastly, I am reticent to discuss the endurance of those ‘institutions’ that together mark the ‘Aboriginal domain’ in terms of their ‘parts’. Notions of ‘parts and wholes’ as they are often applied to Aboriginal socio-cultural production are extremely problematic (cf. Strathern 1992). Indeed, the imposition of notions of parts and wholes marks one of the principal ways in which non-Indigenous socio-cultural production forces radical changes within the field of Indigenous community governance, such that it is near impossible for aspects of the Aboriginal domain to persist within this wider field.

This last point concerns a key problem within the wider field of Indigenous governance in the central Peninsula—the contrasting (and culturally-shaped) expectations and enactments of leadership in relation to governance arrangements involving wider sets (or ‘groups’) of Aboriginal people. Again, I am reticent to use the language of ‘groups’ here because—as Keen (1989) insightfully argues—although ‘leadership’ is clearly identifiable within those parts of the field of governance that we might identify as the ‘Aboriginal domain’, within that domain, leadership does not operate in relation to a social structure of pre-given ‘groups’. Instead, such leadership is linked to a more fluid or processual articulation of ‘social networks and fields’ (Keen 1989: 26). However, in recent years it has become increasingly apparent that, despite their incommensurability, originally exogenous (‘outside’) understandings of Aboriginal social life (ideas about ‘tribal groups’ for example) have folded back onto Aboriginal people’s own reckonings of sociality and governance within the region’s shared social field. The result is commonly what Gluckman (1968: 223) describes as the haphazard outcome of the intervention of one institution ‘in the operation of another institution … as far as the systematic interdependencies of the recipient institution are concerned’. Put more simply, the folding back of such reckonings of sociality into local usage leads to a problematic—and often antagonistic—articulation of the socio-cultural modes of the Aboriginal domain and those introduced from the ‘mainstream’ within the shared field of governance.

The manner in which these differing conceptualisations of leadership, social networks, groups and the like come to affect each other indicates the cultural complexities of the contemporary field of governance. The ongoing interplay of originally distinct Aboriginal and settler socio-cultural forms has led to this field now possessing a profoundly intercultural character. Whilst the character of this field remains heterogeneous, the intermesh of its various social and cultural ‘institutions’ is such that even seemingly autonomous aspects of Aboriginal cultural production are, in fact, deeply shaped by their exposure to aspects of the ‘mainstream’.^[3] For this reason, the field of governance is intercultural in the sense that this term is used by Merlan (2005).^[4] That is, the various ‘institutions’ and forms of thought, action and personhood which together constitute this field are deeply interwoven, but are by no means heterogeneous. Rather, the interweaving or ‘mutual exposure’ (Smith 2007) through which this field is constituted is marked by ongoing forms of socio-cultural difference, similarity, and mutual engagement and transformation. And, as Gluckman’s earlier analysis of social fields suggests, such intercultural fields are marked by ongoing changes, reconfigurations and realignments.

In order to better understand how such an intercultural field has developed, its contemporary complexities, and the changes that continue to be enacted within it, I now turn to relationships of governance within a particular area of the central Peninsula—the homelands of the Kaanju people of the upper Wenlock and Pascoe rivers. More particularly, what follows focuses on the history of decentralisation—the reoccupation of homelands or ‘outstations’—and the forms of governance that developed in relation to this ‘outstation movement’.