The Politics of Difference and Equality: Remote Aboriginal Communities, Public Discourse, and Australian Anthropology

The growth of a network of remote communities in Australia's Northern Territory followed the success of an Aboriginal land rights movement in the 1970s. In the course of the past two decades, there have been increasing reports of distress in these communities interpreted differently by anthropologists and opinion writers in the national press, some of the latter of a neo-liberal bent. This article examines critically the position of anthropologists and the relations between a politics of difference and equality as they bear on the position of remote Aboriginal Australians.