Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention by Tess Lea

Author:Tess Lea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 8. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Karrabing Annual General Meeting. By Joel Tarling and Tess Lea.

As we sat sketching out new storyboard possibilities and corporation business on bits of canvas and cardboard, with plastic milk crates and empty frying-oil drums as furniture, a fleet of Toyota Land Cruisers circled a single-story air-conditioned building nearby. I was curious. What was going on over there?

Figure 9. A training center. By Joel Tarling and Tess Lea.

This was the training center, its keys denied to us. That day it was hosting a gathering of functionaries to plot the education, training, and employment needs of “the community” as we sat in the dirt and heat and activated the same issues. Our apartness was real, yet fictive too, for we are enjoined, not only in an ostensibly shared focus but through the transnational tributaries creating that wagon circle of Toyotas and the well-salaried bodies within.

Karrabing work explores the flows that connect colonial extractive industries with shifts in schemes for community development through such devices as the provision of public housing and tenancy reforms, welfare control, education, or training and employment programs. Without being explicitly policy focused, for that is my concern, not theirs, Karrabing work nonetheless shines a torch on social policy unfurlings in urban, regional, and remote settings, moving from microethnographic to macrolevel accounts of the connections between Indigenous circumstances and the welfare of others in Australia and supranationally. Their successful reassertion of a probative analysis of why things are as they are and what they are becoming operates in the meso. Karrabing work unpicks taken-for-granted faiths in the key institutional forms of betterment—such as the provision of housing, or enterprise facilitation—through the analysis that takes place beforehand, when improvising, and once a film assumes new forms of life as a product for unknown viewers. As Povinelli has put it,

Perhaps the central purpose of Karrabing’s films is to discover what we never knew we knew by hearing what we say in moments of improvisation. We suddenly see what we have been saying, what we have been sensing. But knowing something is not equivalent to solving something if by solving we seek an intelligible action. (Povinelli 2015b, n.p.) Povinelli’s conclusion about the importance of hesitation—not promising to problem-solve in any normative sense—points to my lingering proposition, to the “no” of good social policy: namely, that the militarily enabled conditions of global extractive trade subtending human existence, especially but not only in countries like Australia, remain to be reckoned with.

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