Susanna, why I cry for you: ‘native’ viewpoints

In its edgy new combative format, yesterday’s RMAP Argument quizzed whether ‘native’ viewpoints had more legitimacy than environmental activists’ when it comes to mining.

Opening the batting, native informant (her words) KLD asked whose minerals are they anyway that there should be a question of who represents the interests of the locals?

It wasn’t a bad knock. KLD lofted the spinners well over the boundary at the City of London end and glanced the quicks to all parts of the field (in the form of concessions to ‘increasingly nuanced academic understanding’). Bravo. However, in the middle of her innings I’m sure I spotted three nicks into the keeper’s gloves that none of the fielding side appealed for.

First, ‘Native informants’ are only applauded when the commentator (government, resource developer, investment analyst) finds it convenient to agree with them. This usually happens when they have the appearance of being the simplest folk possible (’ordinary villagers’). If they don’t, or there is any form of political complexity, they get re-labelled as ‘trouble-makers’ or ‘activists’. It is extremely hard - read, it takes a sophisticated PR campaign - to put this straight. ‘Native informants’ (KLD apart, of course) don’t always succeed in this.

Second, local politics is often concealed from casual observers and you have bend your back a bit to disentangle it from the viewpoints people present. Susanna was the 75 year old mother of a landowner association chairman I knew. The whole community and I looked on as her son whacked her on the head when she was in the middle of explaining the bit of village history he was trying to conceal. She’s dead now so he won’t need to silence her viewpoint any more. In another landowner association I am obliged to deal with, at one of the biggest mines in our region, a man murdered his father when he didn’t like his opinion. He was never brought to court and is today the association chairman. At still another project RMAP has been involved with, the landowner council members all took facilitation payments. Whose are the local viewpoints here? The best ones money could buy?

Third, there’s no such thing as an ‘advocacy anthropologist’. You don’t hear of an ‘advocacy doctor’ - all doctors have to strive to protect the best interests of those who come to them, and this includes discovering what those interests are in the the most diligent way possible. The Australian Anthropological Society has a Code of Ethics, as do its sister societies in other countries, binding members to get informed consent and not to collude in selecting methods designed to produce misleading results. KLD couldn’t resist that dodgy shot, the reverse sweep, to ask if involvement with mining might be ‘the desperate last cry of some anthropologists to stake out a territory in the post-colonial world’. Not if they are real ones - and the chances of anthropologists being out of work in any kind of world are about the same as the paperless office in our lifetime. In sum, dot ball.

Incidentally,

Oh, Susanna, don’t you cry for me
For I come from Alabama,
With my banjo on my knee.

banjo A shovel; an entrenching tool. Chiefly Austral. and N.Z.

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