To Know One's Place: Belonging and Differentiation in Alice Springs Town

Åse Ottosson*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    9 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Based on research in the town of Alice Springs in Central Australia the article explores how social and material aspects of the town generate meaningful understandings of oneself and differentiated others. Drawing on anthropology of place and space and analytical notions of belonging, I explore shared and divergent ways in which a range of people in town come to 'know their place' both in a socio-cultural sense and in the sense of relating to the built environment. Paying just as detailed attention to non-indigenous experience as scholars have long paid to indigenous lives, the article suggests that a focus on how people form material and social attachments to place can facilitate more open-ended understandings of changing forms of indigenous-settler relations than the more common focus on difference and division between categories of indigenous and non-indigenous people and domains of life.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)115-135
    Number of pages21
    JournalAnthropological Forum
    Volume24
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Apr 2014

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