TY - JOUR
T1 - To Know One's Place
T2 - Belonging and Differentiation in Alice Springs Town
AU - Ottosson, Åse
PY - 2014/4
Y1 - 2014/4
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Alice Springs
KW - Indigenous-settler dynamics
KW - Place-making and belonging
KW - Urban ethnography
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84900029506&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/00664677.2014.901212
DO - 10.1080/00664677.2014.901212
M3 - Article
SN - 0066-4677
VL - 24
SP - 115
EP - 135
JO - Anthropological Forum
JF - Anthropological Forum
IS - 2
ER -