Povenelli/ week 4

To understand Povenelli's arguement, it seems first important to understand Marx's conception of labor in the Western world. Marx believed that through capitalist modes of production, labor itself became a commodity and that this drastically restructured power in society to the point where an almost unbridgable divide between the burgeious and proletariat developed. This capitalist structure directly informs our current economic policies and philosophies- Povenelli's work takes issue with the way in which the government has applied a "Western political- economic framework" to the Aboriginal Belyuen community of Northern Australia and attempts to assess its labor practices determine its land rights according to Western models of productivity that cannot really be applied to them in a fair or meaningful way.

It seems helpful, also, to discuss Levi-Strauss' concept of the engineer and bricoleur here. I tend to agree with Maureen. As she stated in her post:
"Levi-Strauss seems to have observed a cosmetic difference--perhaps in varying types of 'labor'--and spun a mythology of his own."

How might this be applicable to the Australian government's catagorization of the Belyuens as transient people- hunter-gatherers?

According to Povenelli:
"From a perspective of classical political economy, "Fourth World" hunter-gather peoples neither sufficiently produce(or differentiate) themselves as subjects in relation to natural objects and animals nor are they sufficiently productive in terms of transforming objects and animals into depositories of value. At most they 'own' (because they in some way make) the things they hunt and gather but not the land on which they pursue these practices."


How can "anthropologies and histories and cultural and political-economic approaches" account for the "entanglement of cultural expression"- specifically Aboriginal and Western- in political economies?

How are dominant government institutions such as law and economic policy used to discredit indigenous perspectives?

How has ethnography played a role in discrediting indigenous perspectives or creating a ethnocentric binary between indigenous societies and the western world? And how can we reverse or prevent this?

How are the gleaners in Varda's film like the Belyuens? and how can their rejection of capitalism and relationship to the land be related to Povenelli's article?