Timothy Neale - Böcker

Other People’s Country thinks through the entangled objects of law – legislation, policies, institutions, treaties and so on – that ‘govern’ waters and that make bodies of water ‘lawful’ within settler colonial sites today. Informed by the theoretical interventions of cosmopolitics and political ecology, each opening up new approaches to questions of politics and ‘the political’, the chapters in this book locate these insights within material settler colonial ‘places’ rather than abstract structures of domination. A claim to water – whether by Indigenous peoples or settlers – is not simply a claim to a resource. It is a claim to knowledge and to the constitution of place and therefore, in the terms of Isabelle Stengers, to the continued constitution of the past, present and future of real worlds. Including contributions from the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, cultural geography, critical legal studies, and settler colonial studies, this collection not only engages with issues of law, water and entitlement in different national contexts – including Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, New Caledonia and the USA – but also from diverse disciplinary and institutional contexts. This book was originally published as a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies.

Since the nineteenth-century expeditions, Northern Australia has been both a fascination and concern to the administrators of settler governance in Australia. Neighboring Southeast Asia and Melanesia, its expansive and relatively undeveloped tropical savanna lands are alternately framed as a market opportunity, an ecological prize, a threat to national sovereignty, and a social welfare problem. Over the last several decades, while developers have eagerly promoted the mineral and agricultural potential of its monsoonal catchments, conservationists speak of these same sites as rare biodiverse habitats, and settler governments focus on the “social dysfunction” of its Indigenous communities. Meanwhile, across the north, Indigenous people themselves have sought to wrest greater equity in the management of their lives and the use of their country. In Wild Articulations, Neale examines environmentalism, indigeneity, and development in Northern Australia through the recent controversy surrounding the Wild Rivers Act 2005 (Qld) in Cape York Peninsula, an event that drew together a diverse cast of actors—including traditional owners, prime ministers, politicians, environmentalists, mining companies, the late Steve Irwin, crocodiles, and river systems—to contest the future of the north. With a population of fewer than 18,000 people spread over a landmass of over 50,000 square miles, Cape York Peninsula remains a “frontier” in many senses. Long constructed as a wild space—whether as terra nullius, a zone of legal exception, or a biodiverse wilderness region in need of conservation—Australia’s north has seen two fundamental political changes over the past two decades. The first is the legal recognition of Indigenous land rights, reaching over a majority of its area. The second is that the region has been the center of national debates regarding the market integration and social normalization of Indigenous people, attracting the attention of federal and state governments and becoming a site for intensive neoliberal reforms. Drawing connections with other settler colonial nations such as Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand, Wild Articulations examines how indigenous lands continue to be imagined and governed as “wild.”

Beginning with the nineteenth-century expeditions, Northern Australia has been both a fascination and concern to the administrators of settler governance in Australia. With Southeast Asia and Melanesia as neighbors, the region's expansive and relatively undeveloped tropical savanna lands are alternately framed as a market opportunity, an ecological prize, a threat to national sovereignty, and a social welfare problem. Over the last several decades, while developers have eagerly promoted the mineral and agricultural potential of its monsoonal catchments, conservationists speak of these same sites as rare biodiverse habitats, and settler governments focus on the “social dysfunction” of its Indigenous communities. Meanwhile, across the north, Indigenous people have sought to wrest greater equity in the management of their lives and the use of their country. In Wild Articulations, Timothy Neale examines environmentalism, indigeneity, and development in Northern Australia through the controversy surrounding the Wild Rivers Act 2005 (Qld) in Cape York Peninsula, an event that drew together a diverse cast of actors—traditional owners, prime ministers, politicians, environmentalists, mining companies, the late Steve Irwin, crocodiles, and river systems—to contest the future of the north. With a population of fewer than 18,000 people spread over a landmass of over 50,000 square miles, Cape York Peninsula remains a “frontier” in many senses. Long constructed as a wild space—whether as terra nullius, a zone of legal exception, or a biodiverse wilderness region in need of conservation—Australia’s north has seen two fundamental political changes over the past two decades. The first is the legal recognition of Indigenous land rights, reaching over a majority of its area. The second is that the region has been the center of national debates regarding the market integration and social normalization of Indigenous people, attracting the attention of federal and state governments and becoming a site for intensive neoliberal reforms. Drawing connections with other settler colonial nations such as Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand, Wild Articulations examines how indigenous lands continue to be imagined and governed as “wild.”

Other People’s Country thinks through the entangled objects of law – legislation, policies, institutions, treaties and so on – that ‘govern’ waters and that make bodies of water ‘lawful’ within settler colonial sites today. Informed by the theoretical interventions of cosmopolitics and political ecology, each opening up new approaches to questions of politics and ‘the political’, the chapters in this book locate these insights within material settler colonial ‘places’ rather than abstract structures of domination. A claim to water – whether by Indigenous peoples or settlers – is not simply a claim to a resource. It is a claim to knowledge and to the constitution of place and therefore, in the terms of Isabelle Stengers, to the continued constitution of the past, present and future of real worlds. Including contributions from the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, cultural geography, critical legal studies, and settler colonial studies, this collection not only engages with issues of law, water and entitlement in different national contexts – including Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, New Caledonia and the USA – but also from diverse disciplinary and institutional contexts. This book was originally published as a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies.

Each year, Australia faces increasingly unprecedented wildfires, marked both by their scale and the intense public disagreements about the political, cultural, and ecological causes of the fires. How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent is a critical and ethnographic exploration of wildfire management in Australia and the technoscientific systems of control that shape its current and future possibilities. Timothy Neale observes how two seemingly opposing forces, an entrenched sense of crisis and widespread normalization, combine to form an apparatus of institutional fire management that increasingly centers technical control and militarization. While sympathetic to the double binds many fire management professionals find themselves in, Neale ties contemporary wildfire problems to ongoing colonization and Indigenous dispossession, exploring Indigenous-led land management and cultural burning as a practical assertion of sovereignty. Through dialogue and collaboration with professional fire managers and Indigenous environmental stewards, Neale calls for a collective movement beyond control thinking by fostering new alliances and modes of coping with, rather than commanding, our flammable world.

An Anthropogenic Table of Elements provides a contemporary rethinking of Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements, bringing together "elemental" stories to reflect on everyday life in the Anthropocene.Concise and engaging, this book provides stories of scale, toxicity, and temporality that extrapolate on ideas surrounding ethics, politics, and materiality that are fundamental to this contemporary moment. Examining elemental objects and forces, including carbon, mould, cheese, ice, and viruses, the contributors question what elemental forms are still waiting to emerge and what political possibilities of justice and environmental reparation they might usher into the world.Bringing together anthropologists, historians, and media studies scholars, this book tests a range of possible ways to tabulate and narrate the elemental as a way to bring into view fresh discussion on material constitutions and, thereby, new ethical stances, responsibilities, and power relations. In doing so, An Anthropogenic Table of Elements demonstrates through elementality that even the smallest and humblest stories are capable of powerful effects and vast journeys across time and space.

An Anthropogenic Table of Elements provides a contemporary rethinking of Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements, bringing together "elemental" stories to reflect on everyday life in the Anthropocene.Concise and engaging, this book provides stories of scale, toxicity, and temporality that extrapolate on ideas surrounding ethics, politics, and materiality that are fundamental to this contemporary moment. Examining elemental objects and forces, including carbon, mould, cheese, ice, and viruses, the contributors question what elemental forms are still waiting to emerge and what political possibilities of justice and environmental reparation they might usher into the world.Bringing together anthropologists, historians, and media studies scholars, this book tests a range of possible ways to tabulate and narrate the elemental as a way to bring into view fresh discussion on material constitutions and, thereby, new ethical stances, responsibilities, and power relations. In doing so, An Anthropogenic Table of Elements demonstrates through elementality that even the smallest and humblest stories are capable of powerful effects and vast journeys across time and space.