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The Consequences of Being a Gift
Author(s) -
Bloustien Gerry
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
the australian journal of anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.245
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1757-6547
pISSN - 1035-8811
DOI - 10.1111/j.1835-9310.1999.tb00013.x
Subject(s) - identity (music) , ethnography , representation (politics) , sociology , new guinea , gender studies , self representation , aesthetics , identity formation , participant observation , history , anthropology , self concept , art , law , ethnology , political science , politics , humanities , social science
The issues of dislocated identity are epitomised in Mary's story. Brought from Papua New Guinea to Australia at a very young age as a ‘gift’, she grew up in a series of foster homes in Adelaide, South Australia. Now, as a teenager, Mary constitutes her identity through her body, emphasising her distinctive physical features, through idealised memories and through representations—photographs, cultural icons and people who ‘look like me’. The self she creates in this way sits uneasily along side another self; the Western adolescent self in trouble with the law, the self who struggles to be ‘one of the boys’ on the streets, one who ‘runs amuck’. This paper explores the process of ‘self‐making’, the ‘serious play’ that Mary has employed to constitute her identity through her juggling of and reappropriation of cultural symbols. As a participant in a wider ethnographic study into Australian youth and representation, Mary portrayed the complexities of her growing up between worlds, embedded in neither and desperate to belong to her past.