Winner of the Joel S.

Kahn Memorial Essay Prize 2019

Critique of Anthropology
2019, Vol. 39(3) 371–388
Locating a zeitgeist: ! The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
Displacement, becoming sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X19856420
and the end of alterity journals.sagepub.com/home/coa

Melinda Hinkson
Deakin University, Australia

Abstract
As displacement and dislocation become increasingly widespread human experiences,
the future-focused analytic of becoming is gaining considerable traction in anthropo-
logical theorising. This article explores what an emphasis on becoming precludes from
view. As anthropologists chase fine-grained understandings of human life on the move,
while also attempting to account for the discipline’s colonial legacy, it is increasingly
common to find place-based alterity dismissed as no longer relevant, or to find it
reduced to little more than abstract products of colonial imaginaries, forms of domi-
nation and totalising social theory. Ethnography of Warlpiri displacement describes
vigorous practices through which people creatively draw forth, refashion and deploy
place-based certainties of the past to tackle the pressing challenges of the present.
Exploring this ethnography against diverse settings of displacement, I argue that a fully
engaged contemporary anthropology would attend to the ways in which people
under duress continue to draw upon distinctively place-based concepts, principles
and associations to endure and reimagine the circumstances of their lives.

Keywords
Displacement, becoming, borders, cosmopolitanism, Aboriginal Australia

A long moment of uncertainty has settled on the world. (Agier, 2016: 6)

Against the causality of origins and the weight of memory, our analyses must reveal
mobilization and flight into indeterminate futures. (Biehl and Locke, 2017: 323)

Corresponding author:
Melinda Hinkson, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood, Victoria 3125, Australia.
Email: melinda.hinkson@deakin.edu.au
372 Critique of Anthropology 39(3)

If displacement hits the nerve of our time, this should encourage questions about how
it is constituted. (Lems, 2018: 17)

At once a complex set of pressing human, political and environmental dilemmas of

vast scale, displacement in its multiple manifestations has become a compelling
phenomenon for anthropological attention. In this article, I take up an influential
strand of recent anthropological work that promotes the conceptual frames of
uncertainty and becoming for an anthropological perspective geared towards the
dislocating circumstances of our times. At the interstices of displacement and
becoming, we find some riveting and politically engaged contemporary anthropo-
logical writing. Yet, in this article, I am concerned to explore an analytic move that
often occurs at the conjunction of displacement and becoming that is deserving of
critical consideration. As anthropologists simultaneously examine fine-grained
understandings of human life on the move and in profound states of destabilisation
while also attempting to account for anthropology’s colonialist legacies, it is
increasingly common to find place-based alterity described and dismissed as
either left behind or reduced to little more than the abstract products of colonial
imaginaries and forms of domination. Against what are identified as coercive
nativist imaginaries of unchanging difference, a mobile, future focused, flexible
subjectivity is promoted and attributed a positive, generalised, normative status.
Paradoxically, this bifurcation has the effect of closing down attention to the dis-
tinctive place-based practices and orientations that are invariably a target of state
interventions, and that displaced persons themselves actively draw upon as they
endure and push back against their dislocation and imagine differently constitut-
ed worlds.
The ethnographic impetus for this article is an enquiry into the circumstances of
displaced and hyper-mobile Warlpiri people whose customary lands cover a vast
area of the Central Australian desert. Warlpiri displacement to and centralisation
on government settlements in the early to mid-20th century was not an isolated
event of colonial dispossession but a chapter in an ongoing process that continues
in varied, uneven and pressing ways to the present (Hinkson et al., 2012; Wolfe,
2006). Warlpiri and other Aboriginal people are encouraged by recent corporate-
state (Kapferer, 2005) pressures to loosen their kin-based attachments to the land
whose ownership was only legally recognised and bestowed upon them four dec-
ades ago. They are encouraged to pursue a style of life organised by more flexible
relations to place and each other and to assent to developmentalist projects on
their territory (Sullivan, 2011). Simultaneously, new technologies of surveillance
and the governance of their mobility accompany such development discourse
(Hinkson and Vincent, 2018). In this respect, Warlpiri hardly find themselves in
an exceptional situation; contradictory conjunctions of flexible identity and the
governance of mobility have become ubiquitous pressures in human life (Bauman,
2000, 2004). Yet, Warlpiri ethnography can make a compelling intervention in the
analysis of these wider circumstances. Intergenerational Warlpiri responses to
forces and technologies of displacement demonstrate a vigorous and reflexive
Hinkson 373

dialogue between the terms and ways of relating to place associated with
different social formations. The cases explored below suggest that attention to
practices and principles of the past is a vital element of responses to dislocation
as well as its analysis. In this way, Warlpiri political theory and practice fractures
the ‘becoming’ frame and suggests a different kind of accommodation between
the terms of the past, present and future and the associated workings of cultur-
al processes.
In recent anthropological theorizing, becoming is put forward by its proponents
as an analytic in support of a transformative politics, both for the persons and
communities with whom anthropologists work as well as for humanity at large.
Yet, the open-ended subjectivity it promotes paradoxically shadows the hegemonic
form of contemporary technologically mediated capitalism; the processes and
practices at the heart of the most recent stage in the long global history of dis-
placement. Ultimately, I argue that an analysis that would do justice to the circum-
stances of displaced persons would also draw attention to the practices by which
persons navigate fragmentary, coexisting, differently configured social formations,
while not insisting upon their equivalence. It would be alert to the prevailing risk of
adopting tropes that mimic the dominant cultural forms of our times rather than
provide a critical insight into them. In the sections that follow, I frame my discus-
sion of these issues via a consideration of the work of two recent anthropological
projects, each of which functions as a kind of manifesto for contemporary ethnog-
raphy: Jo~ao Biehl and Peter Locke’s contributions to their 2017 edited collection,
Unfinished and their related 2010 Current Anthropology essay, ‘Deleuze and the
Anthropology of Becoming’, and Michel Agier’s (2016) book Borderlands. I then
turn to two brief cases from the intergenerational Warlpiri experience of displace-
ment to describe elements of the reflexive and recuperative practice that these
deployments of becoming shield from view.

Becoming: Locating a zeitgeist

Uncertainty, turbulence, becoming: these are the emergent interpretive frames of
our times. These tropes speak to diverse conditions of life in the present, acting as
lenses through which we glimpse ongoing colonial brutalities (Bessire, 2014),
consequences of post-industrial collapse (Stewart, 2012), racialized poverty and
abandonment (Biehl, 2005), environmental calamity (Petryna, 2015), and more
diffuse ‘dissolving assurances’ (Berlant, 2011). These dislocations have not come
about suddenly, but for some anthropologists their discovery has evinced a new
concern with how to respond to them. For them, ‘becoming’ has emerged as a key
concept as well as an ethical and political stance. In the words of Biehl and Locke,
‘becoming’ is a conceptual project attuned to both ethnographic and political
imperatives, a response to the struggle of marginalised communities for ‘full polit-
ical recognition of their personhood’. Such an analytic acquires galvanizing polit-
ical appeal at a time of resurgent xenophobia and the expansion of brutal
transnational regimes of surveillance, incarceration and exclusion. Becoming is
374 Critique of Anthropology 39(3)

an approach that also claims new paradigmatic status. To adopt the lens of becom-
ing requires cutting through what Biehl and Locke refer to as the ‘flat realism’ of
contextualisation and historicization as well as the ‘dark determinations’ of social
theory. ‘Becoming’, they suggest, ‘troubles and exceeds ways of knowing and
acting’. It concentrates attention on desire before power, immanence over history
(2010: 317).
Biehl and Locke laid the foundations for their edited volume Unfinished in a
lengthy article ‘Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming’ published in Current
Anthropology in 2010. The basis of their collaboration lies in similarities in both
anthropological sub-discipline and ethnographic observation – Biehl in Brazil,
Locke in the former Bosnia-Herzegovina – where each details the effects of
psycho-social and biomedical diagnosis on the lives of persons in contexts of tur-
bulent change. Dissatisfied with the way structural accounts of violence fail to
convey the messy conjunctions of social process and individual creativity in each
of these fields, they turn to Deleuze’s future focused philosophical analysis. They
introduce Unfinished by establishing schematically what they see as the contempo-
rary terms of ethnographic engagement: they call for approaches that deploy
cartography not archaeology, rhizome not structure, leaking not closed social
fields (2017: 6–7), and which conceive society as ‘constantly escaping in every
direction’ (p. 9). ‘Becoming’ destabilizes the ‘primacy of being’ (p. 8), privileging
movement, emergence, immanence; it foregrounds unknowability and is profound-
ly future-focused in orientation. The human subject of this universe is ‘an always
unstable assemblage of organic, social, and structural forces and lines of flight’ (p.
8). Drawing directly from Deleuze, to become, they observe, is ‘not to attain a
form’ but to find ‘a zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or differentiation where one
can no longer be distinguished from a[nother] woman, an animal, or a molecule’
(p. 9).
All that is solid – in terms of social formation, cultural identity or structural
certainty – melts into air. The enclosure of culture and identity is understood
through this lens as the product of violent colonial governance regimes, or the
construction of militarised-post-industrial nation states, working in tandem with
totalising social and psycho-social paradigms (pp. 19–21). Creative responses of
individuals can be brought fully into view, their potential liberation from con-
straint can be authentically imagined via a perspective that embraces plasticity
and open-endedness.
This body of ideas is taken up and explored in some riveting ethnography,1 but
here I am concerned to ask, what this focus on ‘becoming’ precludes anthropolo-
gists from attending to? Most obviously, as in Biehl and Locke’s explicit refutation
of history and social theoretical analysis, becoming does not encourage us to ask:
becoming from what? Biehl and Locke offer fleeting readings of the anthropolog-
ical archive. The first reading, while not referencing any particular sources,
dismisses earlier approaches that work with models of bounded social fields
(p. 7, 9, 17), thus enlisting shadowy straw figures in their stark differentiation of
Hinkson 375

becoming from the constitution of form. The second reading conscripts select
ethnographers – from Malinowski and Mauss, to Bateson, to Comaroff and
Comaroff – to the project of becoming via anthropology’s enduring interest in
plasticity (pp. 12–13). In drawing out these continuities, Biehl and Locke make
clear that becoming is not about understanding large-scale change, either in
anthropological approach nor in ethnographic circumstances, over time.
Becoming, in this way, immerses its adherents in the circumstances it describes.
It eschews the very possibility of a more distanced vantage point for observation
and analysis.
There are paradoxical political consequences of such an approach to which
I shall return to below. In passing it is worth noting that Biehl and Locke warn
anthropologists of the dangers of allowing philosophy to channel ethnographic
theorizing (pp. 31–32), while they simultaneously promote a zealous adoption of
Deleuzian theory. Yet, their own work, and especially Locke’s, indicates more
subtle attention to the entanglement of future focused hope with ‘a sociality that
resembles, together with lessons learned in the crucible of violence, fragments of pre-
war values’ (Biehl and Locke, 2017: 335, emphasis added).

Becoming on the border

If Biehl and Locke’s work serves as a call to anthropologists to critically reorient
their ethnographic attitude to appreciate the emergent, the contingent and the
immanent, Agier’s Borderlands might be read as a case study of such an approach
in action. While Agier writes independently of the Biehl and Locke project, the
shared analytic ground of these works is suggestive of the pervasive appeal of
Deleuzian philosophy to anthropologists who are critically engaged with disloca-
tion as a human experience.
Agier’s book is the outcome of extensive ethnographic work with refuges and
asylum seekers in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. In his earlier work, On the
Margins of the Refugee Experience, Agier laid the foundations for the present study
with what he described as an ‘alarm call’ in respect to the plight of displaced people
who had been left ‘waiting at the margins of the world’, at the nexus of war, exile
and humanitarianism (2008: vii). In Borderlands, he fashions ‘the border’ as a
primary concept for understanding contemporary place-based encounters and sub-
jectivity. He presents the border as the new ‘ordinary place’; as well as a category
that ‘includes uncertain places, uncertain times, uncertain identities . . . , indetermi-
nate or in-between situations, uncertain relationships . . . ’ The borderland becomes
‘a pole of reference for persons in movement who do not find a natural place
within the societies or cities that they wish to reach’ (Agier, 2016: 8; Vigh,
2009). Agier’s project focuses on the emergence of a new future-focused cosmo-
politan subject. In short, borderlands are places, concepts and communities ‘in the
process of making’.
376 Critique of Anthropology 39(3)

Like the ‘becoming’ project, Agier’s turn to borderlands is informed by an

explicit critique of an earlier anthropology’s complicity in spatialized colonialism,
the production of ‘identity enclosure’ (p. 6). He writes:

the other-subject is not a being frozen in a distant elsewhere, closed, inaccessible or

incomprehensible; he or she is on the border, actually here, in a contemporaneity and
spatial continuity of the world that makes it possible to establish a relationship with
them. (p. 157)

In this passage, we hear echoes of Talal Asad’s (1973), Johannes Fabian’s (1983)
and Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson’s (1997) critique of the kinds of repressive
place-based culture-making practiced by colonising nations. Agier’s attention to
the border as place and concept might also be read as an intensification of focus
established two decades earlier by anthropologists of globalisation (see for example
Hannerz, 1997; Kearney, 1995). Agier clearly has a specific political project in
mind; France’s colonial history and its more recent policies that target racialized
difference and enforce certain distinctions between citizens and non-citizens.
Again, the seeds of this critique were planted in earlier work, where Agier
argues that banishment is shored up by the intellectual misrepresentation that
transforms related worlds into realities that are irreducibly other (Agier, 2008: viii).
The task of a politically responsible anthropology, thus, involves not ‘exhibiting
irreducible differences, but rather in reducing their alterity’ (Agier, 2008: ix). While
not citing them directly, Agier writes in the company of other critically engaged
anthropologists working on issues of forced displacement and asylum in the pre-
sent, including Catherine Besteman (2019), whose compelling conceptualisation of
‘Militarized global apartheid’ traces the transnational workings of the global
security-industrial complex through which nation states in the ‘global north’ act
to enforce their borders against the insecure mobility of people in the ‘global
south’. Significantly, in the elaboration of her argument Besteman also criticizes
‘an essentialized cultural logic that ties people to place through racial and nativist
ideologies and discourses’ (Besteman, 2019: S29, emphasis added).
What I wish to draw attention to here is the way in which emplacement – or, the
idea that there are distinctively organised practices through which people order
their relations between each other and the environments they inhabit or otherwise
relate to – has become a casualty of contemporary critique. In an age marked by
displacement and identity-based mobility (Bauman, 2000), emplacement figures
not as an alternate prism through which to interrogate the experience of disloca-
tion and trace out the creative work undertaken by groups and individuals in
navigating such experience, but rather as continuous with the colonial-capitalist
precedent of identity containment. In citing Besteman’s work in this context, how-
ever, it is important to highlight that her remarkable ethnography of displaced and
resettled Somali Bantu includes an explicit critique of the language of emergence,
mobility and becoming at the expense of description of ‘the value systems, beliefs,
and practices’ that displaced people take with them (Besteman, 2016: 289).
Hinkson 377

Agier’s foregrounding of the border, however, entails no such equivocation. It is

accompanied by a methodological proposition for what he calls a situational
anthropology in which:

what you see is what there is, there is no hidden identity-based or ‘cultural’ truth that
the ethnologist has to reveal, behind the contemporary truth of what is observed.
(Agier, 2016: 103, emphasis added)

At the border, Agier proposes, the displaced other-subject is ‘a priori without

identity, having lost this with their departure and exile, and is still in the process
of seeking or rebuilding it’ (p. 6). What you see is what you get. Agier even renders
this approach as acronym: WYSIWYG (p. 100). While his earlier writing also
impugned cultural holism as inextricably caught up in the dehumanisation and
confinement of marginalised populations by nation states, in that work he called
for ‘the slow discovery of the complexity of different lives’ (p. ix). His situational
approach adopts a rapidly accelerated temporality, with attention to the immedi-
acy of circumstances. He renounces anthropology’s misguided commitment to an
ethnographic present in favour of ‘contemporaneity’: ‘What I see, hear and note is
the reality of what I share, in its true context and true temporality’ (p. 102). The
job of the contemporary anthropologist is to follow ‘the trace of movement, of
change, of the first breath of what is to come’ (p. 103).
Agier’s situationalist approach is inspired by, but in certain respects breaks
with, Gluckman’s foundational work with the same concept. He shares with
Gluckman the view that human life is in a process of constant change
(Kapferer, 2008: 120), dismissing the reifications of structural functionalism. In
this context, we might note Bruce Kapferer’s observation that Gluckman’s own
situationalism shares ‘a degree of correspondence’ with Deleuze and Guattari’s
poststructuralism (Kapferer, 2008: 135). But where Gluckman’s model of a situa-
tion required an interrogation of ‘a total context of a crisis’, including looking to
history as a means by which to understand revolutionary change, Agier’s disavow-
al of depth and his focus on the visibility of phenomena implies an implicit rejec-
tion of the historical perspective and of recognition of large-scale change. Here his
approach resonates most strongly with that of Biehl and Locke. Agier’s attention
to the surface of a situation recalls the anti-ritualism of the 1968 situationalist
movement (Debord, 1977) and Baudrillard’s (1983) simulacrum, where the
hyper-real, the image, is more real than the real. It also overlaps with Kwame
Anthony Appiah’s (2018) philosophical argument that proposes religious, nation-
al, racial and cultural identities be reconceived as ‘labels’.
From one perspective it might seem a logical move for an anthropology that is
engaged with rapidly unfolding situations of displacement to attend to visible/
audible phenomena. Attention to what can be seen rather than to hidden depths
might also be projected as a politically redemptive move, explicitly refuting struc-
tural-functionalism’s excavation and revelation of restricted, sacred knowledge.
However, to suggest that contemporary anthropology should be conducted on
378 Critique of Anthropology 39(3)

the plane of the empirically see-able ignores a large body of work that highlights
the complex relationship between legibility and illegibility as a core feature of state
practice (for example Das and Poole, 2004), as well as camouflaging instances and
workings of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011). On a different note, an emphasis on
‘what you see’ overlooks the very idea that ways of being human necessarily
involve practices of concealment and revelation, containment and openness, and
at times give rise to intercultural encounters that are undercut by incommensura-
bility and failures of recognition.
Agier’s insistence on visibility minimizes the possibility of interrogating the very
scenes he draws attention to (Cabot, 2018), while diminishing observation of the
‘ambiguous loyalty’ displaced persons necessarily wrestle with as they navigate the
terms of daily life after resettlement, where facing constant tests of ‘alterity’
constitutes a singular labyrinthine experience (Agier, 2016: 71). The ‘labyrinth’ is
figured as a space in which relocated people’s ‘consciousness of belonging to the
world is formed, while their distance from inherited identities grows’ (p. 72).
Agier establishes a clear relationship between the emergence of the border as the
constitutive space/surface of identity-making, the receding of distinctive deep
place-based identifications and practices as relevant in the lives of persons strug-
gling to make a way in a new environment, and the idea that the experience
of foreignness has itself become a shared condition, giving rise to an ‘ordinary
cosmopolitanism’, such that we might recognise ‘a culture of borders as a global
culture in the process of becoming’ (p. 79).
There are many dimensions of this supposed ‘shared condition’ that are not so
easily seen.
In opening up a critical engagement with these analytics it is not my intention to
deny future-focused attention per se. Rather, my concern lies with how this
approach closes down attention to the elements of elsewhere persons carry with
them to a ‘here’ (Berger, 2005), and thus to the distinctive place-based practices
and orientations that displaced persons draw upon as they approach any kind of
border, and through which they reflexively navigate the transforming terms of life.

Cosmopolitanism in another guise

In looking for a way through this impasse, Joel Kahn’s early intervention in
anthropology’s take up of the concept of cosmopolitanism offers some useful
guidance. In his 2003 article ‘Anthropology as cosmopolitan practice?’, Kahn
takes up the concept of cosmopolitanism in its Kantian formation, specifically
the idea that

taken collectively . . . it is a multitude of persons, existing successively and side by side,

who cannot do without associating peacefully and yet cannot avoid constantly offend-
ing one another. Hence they feel destined by nature to [form], through mutual
Hinkson 379

compulsion under laws that proceed themselves, a coalition in a cosmopolitan society

. . . a coalition that, though constantly threatened by dissension, makes progress on
the whole. (Kant, 1974: 190–191, quoted in Kahn, 2003: 408)

Is the relative peace that is realised in such circumstances, Kahn asks, ‘the result of
the imposition by the nation state or external powers or international institutions
of the ‘rule of law’, the principles of good ‘global governance’ based on republican
principles?’ Hardly, he retorts (see also Colson, 2007: 215). Kahn’s project is to
transcend the implied presentism and Eurocentrism of cosmopolitanism as a mode
of subjectivity – the idea that cosmopolitanism is straightforwardly a product of
globalisation – and to ask what kinds of ‘popular’ ways of relating, locally among
people and their institutions, are at play in realising genuine cosmopolitan practice.
Kahn urges anthropologists to look to local and regional antecedents rather than
the ‘disembedded, supposedly universal, culturally neutral forms of power, juris-
prudence and so on’ that are attributed to liberal versions of the cosmopolitan
ideal (2003: 409).
The key insight I take from Kahn is deceptively simple: situations are never only
the product of recent or visible phenomena, and so long as anthropology continues
to be figured as a discipline for understanding diverse and changing ways of being
human it is vital to keep a wider, and longer, interpretive frame in view. More
pointedly in terms of the interests of this article, Kahn indicates that cosmopolitan
practice is something that gets wrestled out of interactions between neighbouring
persons and social institutions. In short, cosmopolitanism is not necessarily an
outcome of,nor must it result in the diminishment or end of, alterity. It is a process
through which people meet and generate shared understandings, enter into
exchanges, but not at the expense of those distinctive practices through which a
self-identifying group of people relates to each other. In this way, Kahn also
advocates for an anthropology with critical distance on the concepts that animate
the zeitgeist.
Kahn’s analysis is suggestive rather than schematic. In the section that follows
I take up the ethos of his writing in a brief consideration of two Warlpiri responses
to displacement. The first case explores one woman’s recent navigation of the
pressing challenges of her displacement from the desert to the city. The second
considers one man’s philosophical interpretation of and creative response to the
early and ongoing settler-colonial displacement of his community. Each case dem-
onstrates that the transcendence of the terms of forced displacement involves iden-
tifying and refiguring resources from earlier social formations to tackle pressing
challenges of the present in order to shore up the terms of the present and to shape
a liveable future. In other words, when the very ground of subjectivity is fractured,
qualitatively distinctive ways of relating continue to coexist (Sharp, 1993). Paying
close attention to the nature of that conjuncture emerges as a pressing anthropo-
logical problem.
380 Critique of Anthropology 39(3)

A situation and beyond

Several years ago, following a complex confluence of events, a Warlpiri woman
with whom I have been close friends across two decades was forced to leave her
desert township. She relocated to the outer suburbs of the South Australian capital
city of Adelaide (Hinkson, 2018a, 2018b). I knew her as a confident and com-
manding figure in the desert and on my early visits to Adelaide I was struck by her
radically transformed bodily and psychological disposition. Slimmed down, sped
up, emotionally volatile – these were outcomes, I surmised, of day to day stress,
poverty and the navigation of diffuse forms of ontological disembedding with
which she was struggling. It was equally striking that she was living in the company
of and drawing comfort from closely held memories of her life in the desert. As we
walked the streets and parklands of the suburb in which she was living, Nungarrayi
introduced me to Adelaide through her eyes; drawing my attention to continuities
she saw between this new place and her beloved country 2000 kilometres north.
She was fixated on a sequence of memory from her childhood when she spent an
intense period of several months living at her family’s small desert outstation in the
company and care of her father and grandparents. Her knowledge of places, songs
and seasonal change was held close to the surface, easily recalled, while being
emotionally weighted in ways that I had never known to be the case two decades
earlier when she lived in close proximity to kin and country.
Nungarrayi was trying to find her feet. She had an energetic vision of the kind of
cosmopolitan life she wanted to pursue – a house to call her own, a job, a sense of
acknowledgement in the local community – but was held in excruciating limbo by
the slow workings of government support programs, transitional housing, job
search allowance, case manager meeting attendance and ‘job active’ reporting
requirements. One day in November 2017, Nungarrayi and I spoke on the
phone four times as she recounted her distress and fury over having discovered
that her fortnightly job search payment had been cancelled, yet again, raising the
prospect of power being cut to her transitional accommodation. Wrestling against
the sense of entrapment such circumstances inevitably give rise to, she boarded the
bus to head down to Centrelink2 yet again, and called me on her mobile phone to
say she wanted to tell me a story.
The story went like this: Once upon a time an old man had been drinking at a
town camp in the central Australian regional town of Alice Springs. He called out
to all his adult sons and told them to accompany him to Centrelink where he
would collect a cheque and share his largesse among them. They arrived at
Centrelink and waited their turn to see a case manager. The old man addressed
the case manager, telling him with the assistance of one of his sons acting as
translator that he was there to collect his cheque. The case manager consulted
his database and told the old man his details were not on the system; he would
need to register as unemployed before being eligible for any payments. He was
asked to take a seat. The old man and his sons sat. They waited for a long time.
The old man was a little bit drunk and began tapping his foot on the floor with
Hinkson 381

growing agitation. His sons got in on the foot tapping and joked that they could
enlist their father in their rock band. Finally, the old man was invited to come
forward. He approached the counter, again in the company of his interpreting son.
The case manager told them that unfortunately there was a problem with the
database and as a result they would not be able to register the old man today.
The case manager was apologetic, explaining that they needed to ‘wait for Otto to
refresh’. Alarmed and ready for a fight the old man bristled and started yelling.
What about Otto? What’s he doing getting mixed up in my private business? The
bewildered case manager tried to calm the old man down. Otto was not a person,
he told him, Otto was the computer database. The group left Centrelink; the father
unsettled, the sons in uproarious laughter. The story quickly circulated among
their extended kin.
This story distils a series of familiar features in Warlpiri people’s encounters
with bureaucracy and government processes. But to invoke Agier’s terminology,
the situation – Nungarrayi’s telling of this story and her summoning forth of a
memory of a particular assembly of kin while she herself sits alone on a bus jour-
neying through suburban Adelaide talking to me on her mobile phone – does not
reveal itself simply in her telling. It is not possible to ‘get’ the import of her story
simply by hearing it. The situation leaks by virtue of our shared orientation to it
and those leakages need to be traced along their trajectories, requiring an enquiry
through space and time, across social formations and anthropological paradigms
(Navaro-Yashin, 2009). My interpretation of this scene necessarily involves draw-
ing upon diverse fieldwork experiences across a two-decade period as well as from
a variety of contesting anthropological perspectives and other sources read
across time.
What is important to draw out of this situation? First, from within the story
itself, is a Warlpiri theory of government, an expectation, from an earlier era, that
government would provide help when help is required, and that a visit to
Centrelink would deliver a bountiful cheque. Related to this is the expectation
that government largesse is infinite. Third is a particular understanding of social
causality: people, people wielding ancestral power or ‘black magic’, not database
systems and bureaucratic processes, are understood as actors in the world. And
finally, as suggested by Nungarrayi’s humorous recounting of this story to me in
the midst of her own Centrelink-induced headache is a sense of transforming and
transformative intergenerational familiarity with governmental practices and tech-
nologies and a sense that its processes of change are themselves challenges to be
faced in the nurturing company of kin. It is to such a setting of familiarity and
nurture that Nungarrayi retreats when her cosmopolitan aspirations are blunted
(Hinkson, 2017: 527). Each of these observations, made here in shorthand, indexes
a setting and related social formation that escapes the situation itself, but is vital to
understand its significance.
As is clear, Nungarrayi is separated in time and place from the situation of
dense sociality that her story turns upon. She attempts to settle herself by conjuring
into being an instance of the kin-based social constellation from where she acquires
382 Critique of Anthropology 39(3)

her taken-for-granted sense of herself. Enduring the gruelling entrapment of

Centrelink’s bureaucratic stranglehold becomes less painful when she can consti-
tute such an experience as a familiar Warlpiri plight. The triangulation produced
by my participation in her telling of the story, as the listener who is able to rec-
ognise and interpret the features of the story and what is at stake in its telling,
recognising the existential stress she endures, is crucial to the process.

The perils and possibilities of being ‘free to the world’

If Nungarrayi’s endurance of exile involves an intense and intuitive holding on to
the terms of subjectivity from which she finds herself physically separated, a dif-
ferent Warlpiri case provides a glimpse of a more reflexive version of that process
in action. In the mid-1990s and again in the mid-2010s, I had a series of discussions
with Warlpiri artist, teacher, football coach and ceremony man, Japangardi
Poulson. Japangardi was a sharply attuned observer of European ways and the
world at large. During our discussions, he reflected upon the experiences of his
forebears who had been driven from their hunting grounds and into brutal situa-
tions of subjugation by settlers and prospectors in the 1920s. His grandmother had
as a young girl survived the horror of watching her father shot dead in the punitive
raids led by mounted police and pastoralists that would come to be known as the
Coniston Massacres. He also shared his observations of his people’s intergenera-
tional adaption to the evolving terms of life on government settlements, places that
would later become known as communities, later towns, and for one short period
even ‘growth towns’ (Musharbash, 2017). At the heart of Japangardi’s attention to
the past was a relentless desire to come to terms with ongoing legacies of settler
colonial domination, and in more concrete terms, how it was that Europeans
consistently claimed an upper hand in their dealings with Warlpiri.
Japangardi was an optimist, a future-focused man, one who loved to travel and
embraced new technologies and techniques for picturing and grappling with the
world around him. He loved school and made close friends with more than one
European teacher. He consistently pushed the bounds of acceptable practice, cut-
ting across conservative Warlpiri social conventions. Like other indigenous critics
of colonial and settler colonial dispossession (Fanon, 1952; Freire, 1970), he
regarded the acquisition of close knowledge of white people’s ways as a vital
strategy in any Warlpiri attempt to reclaim some semblance of power over their
own lives. In applying his analytic and strategic focus to contemporary dilemmas,
Japangardi was often moved to look to what he regarded as core Warlpiri princi-
ples and tenets learned on the ceremonial ground, to marshall these to new pur-
poses. He spoke at length about his endeavour to come to terms with the hidden
agendas of white people’s ways, telling me of the epiphany he had while at
Teacher’s College while watching the film Neverending Story:

I could see, you know, I was looking for this notion of a hidden agenda. [I was
thinking] What are these people doing to make this work? I remember [the teachers]
Hinkson 383

taught us how to get this idea of a hidden agenda. We were watching the Neverending
Story . . . . Every time you watch a movie, we’re thinking [what’s happening] inside.
You can see the picture, but inside, what’s there? . . . Picture’s alright, but what’s
really there? There gotta be two, maybe three answer to the plot.

As he reflected on it further, Neverending Story’s narrative struck Japangardi as an

instance of jaalparra, a Warlpiri term that identifies a series of ways of referring to
objects and persons that are indirect, distant, polite, and in some contexts secretive.
Jaalparra is enacted in prohibitions around use of the names of recently deceased
persons. It refers to other forms of indirect and parabolic speech that invokes
an individual person through reference to their country, car, relatives, bodily
dispositions or clothing. Jaalparra ways of talking enact Warlpiri social etiquette;
they also enable sensitive matters to be discussed in such a way that some listeners
will be kept from understanding their specificity. Jaalparra in this sense puts cer-
tain things out of sight, below the surface. It might be understood as a technique
for the wielding and withholding of power.
Japangardi’s analysis shares ground with Aninshinaabe scholar Gerald
Vizener’s notion of survivance as ‘a theory of irony’ (2008: 11). It also resonates
with the practice of cultural redevelopment that philosopher Jonathan Lear (2006)
speculates on in his exploration of the transcripts of Crow Chief Plenty Coups that
were recorded in the wake of the Crow being violently dispossessed of their land
and their capacity to organise their lives and their world as they had previously
done. Japangardi’s attention is most explicitly to that which cannot be seen. He
adopts a cultured way of looking for the power that lurks beneath the surface of
things – a way of seeing honed on the ceremonial ground and in the classroom –
and applies that to the transforming world around him. He takes up the Warlpiri
concept of jaalparra and stretches it to apply to the new world of intercultural
problems. In this creative redeployment of a concept drawn from a body of moral
philosophy, he would describe as ‘Warlpiri way’, Japangardi guides his country-
men towards a new field of intercultural co-existence. He found a way to reach
deep into ‘culture’s thick understanding’ (Lear, 2006: 146), to stretch it thin and
apply it in novel ways to novel challenges.3

Locating resources for remaking a world

Scholars of displacement and forced migration often identify nostalgia, diverse
modes of looking back to times and places now out of reach, as central to exilic
experience (Berger and Mohr, 2010; Boym, 2007; Jansen and L€ ofving, 2009; Said,
2001). Yet, Paul Carter (2013, nd) alerts us to the possibility that what we gloss as
nostalgia might actually involve a theory of integration. In a different setting of
racialized violence (see also Feldman, 1991), Laurence Ralph invokes a similar
process at work when he writes of the ‘qualia of pain’, the qualitatively distinct
experiences of embodied violence, pain and police torture that black Chicagoans
come to terms with as they produce communal narratives of injury and in the
384 Critique of Anthropology 39(3)

process produce their social world (2013: 104–105). Nungarrayi and Japangardi’s
existential and political wrestling with the terms of displacement are suggestive of a
similar process at work. These grapplings with cultural inheritance operate in
a different register to the reifications of culture we might gloss as strategic essen-
tialism (Spivak, 1999) or conversely repressive authenticity (Wolfe, 1999).
Displacement necessarily involves a newly distanced, reflexive relationship to erst-
while practices, ways of relating, and principles for life. Nungarrayi conjures the
kin-based ground of her subjectivity, while Japangardi undertakes a sharply
focused excavation and redeployment of Warlpiri principles of visuality. Each of
them is hopefully engaged with an expanding field of social life while understand-
ing the possibility of being ‘free to the world’ (as Japangardi would describe it), as
turning upon a close and considered practice of ‘looking back’.
Readers might protest that there is too much distance between this Warlpiri
ethnography and the urgent circumstances of border crossing asylum seekers to be
convinced of the utility of my comparison, especially with the work of Agier. Yet,
in this era of technologically mediated transnational governance regimes, the racial
essentialism inherent in border security regimes and the new technologies of sur-
veillance that govern Australian Aboriginal people’s mobility might be identified
as related forms of containment (Hinkson and Vincent, 2018). Further, the dis-
persed forms of displacement glossed as ‘precarity’ have roots in the settler colonial
dispossession of Indigenous peoples (During, 2015; Veracini, 2018). Indigenous
political theory makes its own vigorous critical response to the proposition that
liberation is to be found within the terms of fluid, open-ended identity (Coulthard,
2014; Simpson, 2014; Vizener, 2008), as well as to Agier’s provocation that identity
is ‘lost’ with departure and exile. A larger body of recent ethnography of displace-
ment confirms Kahn’s observation that cosmopolitan practice is brought about in
the creative refiguring of erstwhile orientations and ways of relating, as displaced
persons and those they come to live alongside negotiate the terms of their coexis-
tence (Besteman, 2016; Coutin, 2016; Fuglerud, 1999; Lems, 2018; Peteet, 2005;
Wise, 2011).
For some scholars, the urgency of humanitarian crisis and of environmental
calamity is carrying anthropological theory forward, imbuing it and the lives it
engages with volatility and uncertainty, while deriding attention to the past as so
much misguided distraction. Yet, what is less well recognised is that this super-
charged temporality and its associated future-focused directionality share an
uncanny resemblance with the cultural logic of techno-capitalism and its digitally
networked means of operation (Cooper, 2008). To make mobility, ‘flight’, and
transparency (of lives) the basis for a cross-cultural liberatory practice is to over-
look that this form of mobility is associated with its own qualitatively distinct way
of being human, one that turns upon the temporary contract, fluid subjectivity,
and flexible relations to place. Modelled as liberation from entrapment, the
‘becoming’ analytic and Agier’s figuring of the border paradoxically entrench
the sensibility of displacement rather than enable a critical vantage upon it.
Hinkson 385

As Kapferer has observed in other contexts, we ignore the emergent social forms
through which we practice anthropology at our peril, lest we risk becoming ‘ideo-
logical agents in new hegemonic processes’ (2000: 176–177; 2005). Transnational
structures of brutal and systematic exclusion that prevent so many of the world’s
people from being able to pursue lives with dignity continue to draw their force
from models of cultural difference. As anthropologists continue to track and
expose the expanded workings of these repressive regimes, we face an additional
challenge: how to adequately attend to the coexistence – including within individ-
ual persons themselves – of differently constituted orientations and ways of relat-
ing, including embodiments of structural violence and domination, even if only
attenuated traces of such coexistence are apparent. At stake are concerns that go to
the heart of the anthropological project: what is it to be a person, a community, or
human in the present? What makes a life liveable? What are the terms by which a
differently ordered world might be imagined and brought into existence?

Acknowledgements
I owe a singular debt of gratitude to Joel Kahn for igniting my interest in anthropology as a
first-year undergraduate student at Monash University in 1988. Joel was an inspiring teacher
on several fronts, but especially in his wide-ranging thinking and generosity. Our paths
diverged when I transferred to another university to complete my degree. I subsequently
approached Joel to supervise my doctoral project, but he dismissed my approach; as he saw
it, he did not have the necessary expertise for a project in Aboriginal Australia. I remain
convinced that he would have made a formative impact on the shaping of that work.
The development of this article has benefitted greatly from discussions with Jon Altman,
Lucas Bessire, Paul Carter, Ute Eickelkamp, Chris Houston, Kalpana Ram and Eve
Vincent, as well as with colleagues at two exceptionally stimulating events convened by
Heath Cabot and Georgina Ramsay at the European Association of Social
Anthropologists meeting in Stockholm in August 2018 and at their ‘De-exceptionalising
Displacement’ workshop at University of Pittsburgh in March 2019.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was supported by an
Australian Research Council Future Fellowship FT130101280.

ORCID iD
Melinda Hinkson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9259-0401
386 Critique of Anthropology 39(3)

Notes
1. It is beyond the scope of this article to address the continuities and disjunctures between
Biehl and Locke’s argument and the diverse and compelling ethnographic projects they
collect between the covers of Unfinished.
2. The Australian federal agency that operates under the Department of Human Services
tasked with governing the unemployed and managing the distribution of social security
payments and related services.
3. This discussion is drawn from and further elaborated in Hinkson (2017).

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Author Biography
Melinda Hinkson is an associate professor of anthropology and Australian
Research Council Future Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship
and Globalisation, Deakin University.