Subject: Re: Marxism, etc.
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 98 00:15:10 +1000
From: dale & ruth <daleha-AT-spook.cia.com.au>


Soren,

> The "real" 
>aboriginal is a myth, he says. Imagine if this myth suddenly 
>materialized in reality, meticulously constructed, digitally 
>programmed, from antecendent historical bits and bytes.

That's exactly my point, it already has. To such a point where people who 
identify as Aboriginal are placed under scrutiny because they don't 
confer with the notion of "the Aboriginal". It's these debates about the 
real that strike me as interesting; in purely political terms 
authenticity has to be based upon the identification of the individual, 
as the history of Australia is one of covert and overt genocide in which 
aboriginal people were massacred, had their children taken from them  and 
were systematically removed from their homelands all in the casue of 
cleansing the race....!!! Therefore to be subject to such things as such 
things as genetic tests or even identifying "how much of you is 
Aboriginal" (there used to be a system of halfcaste/quartercaste/quadroon 
and octoroon) is anathema to most aboriginal people - and yet in the 
media and popular parlance terms like these are still being used. 
Whenever an article about aboriginal health appears on the news they 
always use the same stock footage of aboriginal people sitting in dusty 
outback environs 

This is similar to the point made about the third world earlier. Or th 
eold chestnut that I'm surprised hasn't been posted..."what about the 
holocaust"

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