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Turbulent dislocations in central Australia:
Author(s) -
HINKSON MELINDA
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1111/amet.12706
Subject(s) - desert (philosophy) , metropolitan area , sociology , state (computer science) , aesthetics , gender studies , history , political science , archaeology , law , art , algorithm , computer science
A Warlpiri woman is exiled from her community in Australia's Central Desert and pursues a new life in metropolitan Adelaide. The state promises that Aboriginal people will have better life prospects beyond their remote territories, but the grueling disruptions of their relationships to place shows otherwise. To be caught between alternate and transforming subjectivities associated with the desert and the city is to inhabit a particular kind of exile. Under contemporary conditions, exile acquires new ambiguities and intensities, as anxious mobility and digital communication enable people to participate in aspects of life from which they have been physically separated, albeit in attenuated ways. Exile is a contradictory experience of liberation and entrapment that generates, but ultimately withholds, new possible selves and lives.