Traffic-habits and local descent groups: Broadening the scope of ethnographic research into land rights after land claims

Abstract

Anthropologists have been assisting in the identification of ‘traditional owners’ in Northern Territory land claims for 50 years. This is becoming a lesser part of their workload as most outstanding claims have now been resolved. A key element of traditional ownership as statutorily defined is the ‘local descent group’. This phrase arose in anthropological analyses of Aboriginal society, but was introduced as a criterion of traditional ownership into the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. This paper considers the importance for applied anthropology of recognising the differences as well as links between statutorily recognised local descent groups and Indigenous understandings of relationships to land, especially as we move further in time from the land claims in which particular groups were originally described. Throughout history, abstract categories for people (such as ‘local descent group’) have been used in ways that direct the physical flow of populations through institutions, leading to what Anderson (1991, p. 169) has termed ‘traffic-habits’ that ‘gave real social life to the state's earlier fantasies’. Based on my direct experience as a land council anthropologist, I argue that the contemporary form of many of the local descent groups with which the land councils consult is at least partially the result of ‘traffic-habits’ that reify the ‘demographic topographies’ that exist in claim documents and meeting reports. In this context, ethnographic analysis of the political and institutional aspects of Aboriginal lives is required for applied anthropologists to deliver sound advice as to how local descent groups operate.