The Difference Identity Makes

Through the struggles of Indigenous Australians for recognition and self-determination it has become common sense to understand Australia as made up of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and things. But in what ways is the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction being used and understood? In The difference identity makes thirteen Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics examine how this distinction structures the work of cultural production and how Indigenous producers and their works are recognised and valued. The editors introduce this innovative collection of essays with a pathfinding argument that 'Indigenous cultural capital' now challenges all Australians to re-position themselves within a revised scale of values. Each chapter looks at one of five fields of Australian cultural production: sport, television, heritage, visual arts and music, revealing that in each the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction has effects that are specific.

Fred Myers is the Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University, and he lives in New York. Myers has been involved in research with, living with, and writing about, Western Desert Aboriginal people since 1973. His work over the last fifteen years has been focused principally on studying and explaining the significance of art and material culture as a point of articulation - aesthetic, political, developmental -- between the values and expectations of Indigenous people and institutions of the outside world.