This book explores how Australian Indigenous people's histories and cultures are deployed, represented and transmitted in post-Mabo children's literature authored by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers. The author examines how this literature acts as a form of resistance and helps to transform cultural relations in Australian society.

Fields, Capitals, Habitus provides an insightful analysis of the relations between culture and society in contemporary Australia. Presenting the findings of a detailed national survey of Australian cultural tastes and practices, it demonstrates the pivotal significance of the role culture plays at the intersections of a range of social divisions and inequalities: between classes, age cohorts, ethnicities, genders, city and country, and the relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The book looks first at how social divisions inform the ways in which Australians from different social backgrounds and positions engage with the genres, institutions, and particular works of culture and cultural figures across six cultural fields: the visual arts, literature, music, heritage, television, and sport. It then examines how Australians' cultural preferences across these fields interact within the Australian 'space of lifestyles'. The close attention paid to class here includes an engagement with role of 'middlebrow' cultures in Australia and the role played by new forms of Indigenous cultural capital in the emergence of an Indigenous middle class. The rich survey data is complemented throughout by in-depth qualitative data provided by interviews with survey participants. These are discussed more closely in the final part of the book which explores the gendered, political, personal and community associations of cultural tastes across Australia's Anglo-Celtic, Italian, Lebanese, Chinese and Indian populations. The distinctive ethical issues associated with how Australians relate to Indigenous culture are also examined. In the light it throws on the formations of cultural capital in a multicultural settler colonial society, Fields, Capitals, Habitus makes a landmark contribution to cultural capital research.

Through the struggles of Indigenous Australians for recognition and self-determination it has become common sense to understand Australia as made up of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and things. But in what ways is the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction being used and understood? In The difference identity makes thirteen Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics examine how this distinction structures the work of cultural production and how Indigenous producers and their works are recognised and valued. The editors introduce this innovative collection of essays with a pathfinding argument that 'Indigenous cultural capital' now challenges all Australians to re-position themselves within a revised scale of values. Each chapter looks at one of five fields of Australian cultural production: sport, television, heritage, visual arts and music, revealing that in each the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction has effects that are specific.

This book argues that the basic component of any societys social security and sustainability is cultural capital and its ability to fully recognise diversity in knowledge production and advancement. However, with regard to African societies, since the dawn of racial slavery and colonialism, cultural capital indigenous knowledge in particular has iniquitously and acrimoniously suffered marginalisation and pejorative ragtags. Increasingly since the 1990s, cultural capital informed by African knowledge systems has taken central stage in discussions of sustainability and development. This is not unrelated with the recognition by America and Europe in particular of the central role that cultural capital could and should assume in the logic of development and sustainability at a global level. Unfortunately, action has often failed to match words with regard to the situation in Africa. The current book seeks to make a difference by exploring the role that African cultural capital could and should assume to guarantee development and sustainability on the continent and globally. It argues that lofty pan-African ideals of collective self-reliance, self-sustaining development and economic growth would come to naught unless determined and decisive steps are taken towards full recognition of indigenous cultural capital on the continent.

This book shows how Zapotec peasants migrating to Mexico City utilize paisanazgo--which prescribes solidarity among people from the same locale--as the basis for cooperation and mutual aid within a new environment. This study focuses on three groups of Mountain Zapotecs to explain why migrant associations were created and why they took different forms, citing regional variations in ethnicity, solidarity, occupational pursuits, and sociopolitical articulation to the nation in the three points of origin.

Examining the restitution of cultural property to Indigenous Peoples in human rights law, this book offers a detailed analysis of the opportunities and constraints of international law as a tool of resistance and social transformation for marginalized groups. In accordance with an increasing insistence on respect for diverse cultures, and through their own international mobilization, Indigenous Peoples have participated in the construction of a distinct human rights framework. Significant academic inquiry has focused on the substantive gains made by Indigenous Peoples in this context; along with its impact on a body of law that had previously denied Indigenous Peoples a basis for claims to their own cultural materials and practices. Accordingly, this book acknowledges that Indigenous Peoples, as non-state actors, have generated greater substantive and procedural legitimacy in human rights law making. Offering normative insights into the participation of non-state actors in international law making, it also, however, demonstrates that, despite their significant role in constructing the legal framework of human rights in the 21st century, the participation of Indigenous Peoples continues to be structurally limited. With its interdisciplinary approach to the field, this book will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of law, politics, anthropology and indigenous studies.

Research on Indigenous issues rarely focuses on life in major metropolitan centers, failing to account for large swaths of contemporary Indigenous realities, including the increased presence of Indigenous people in cities. The contributors to this volume explore the implications of urbanization on the production of distinctive Indigenous identities in Canada, the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia.

This book explores the contextual, particularly cultural-related, factors that may impact reading outcomes of young Indigenous learners in their early years, underpinned by the conceptual framework of cultural capital originated by Bourdieu. By drawing upon a participatory and exploratory case study, conducted at a regional school in Australia over a period of six months, it highlights the challenges that Indigenous students face in reading, and how the contextual factors contribute to Indigenous students’ development in reading skills and their reading performance. This book helps readers to gain a better and deeper understanding of Indigenous culture, the importance of the role that culture plays in Indigenous children’s literacy education, and how it shapes the way they learn and think.

The essays here explore a variety of post-contact identities, including indigenous Christians, "mission friendly" non-Christians, and ex-Christians, thereby exploring the shifting world of Native-white cultural and religious exchange. Rather than questioning the authenticity of Native Christian experiences, these scholars reveal how indigenous peoples negotiated change with regard to missions, missionaries, and Christianity. This collection challenges the pervasive stereotype of Native Americans as culturally static and ill-equipped to navigate the roiling currents associated with colonialism and missionization."--pub. desc.

Circulating Cultures is an edited book about the transformation of cultural materials through the Australian landscape. The book explores cultural circulation, exchange and transit, through events such as the geographical movement of song series across the Kimberley and Arnhem Land; the transformation of Australian Aboriginal dance in the hands of an American choreographer; and the indigenisation of symbolic meanings in heavy metal music. Circulating Cultures crosses disciplinary boundaries, with contributions from historians, musicologists, linguists and dance historians, to depict shifts of cultural materials through time, place and interventions from people. It looks at the way Indigenous and non-Indigenous performing arts have changed through intercultural influence and collaboration.