Premium
Swimming in and out of Focus: Second Contact, Vietnamese Migrant Others and Australian Selves
Author(s) -
McKenzie Peter
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.tb00025.x
Subject(s) - vietnamese , identity (music) , ethnography , focus (optics) , sociology , gender studies , reading (process) , aesthetics , anthropology , political science , linguistics , law , art , philosophy , physics , optics
Anthropologists and others have always used the Other to define themselves. Using Michael Taussig's idea of ‘second contact’, I argue that this is inappropriate and that the imagined borders between us and them in relationships between Vietnamese and other Australians are less than stable, continually losing their polarity and swimming in and out of focus. In light of the Vietnamese migrant case, I argue that similar ethnographic research projects cannot rely on stable boundaries between the host and the migrant community to organise explanations. Rather than simply registering ‘cultural contacts’, we have to engage the interplay between the strange and the familiar in specific contexts. Furthermore, my reading of Vietnamese migrant identity obliges us to listen to Vietnamese Australian voices as they attempt to respond to the fluctuating interstices of an intercultural borderland. This implies the mutual anthropological interrogation of both self and other.