During two days in July, Professor Fred Myers (NYU) and Tim Rowse (Western Sydney University) convened a workshop at NYU’s beautiful Sydney site, funded by the Australian Research Council as part of a Discovery Project Grant.  Entitled “Australian Cultural Fields: the Difference that Identity Makes,” the workshop had 21 presenters and focused on Indigeneity across several different Australian fields of cutlural production — Sport, Media, Visual Arts, Music, Heritage — and one paper on Taste.  The presenters included academic presentations and also practitioners’ reflections in recognition of the importance of participant knowledge of the fields in which they work.  Some of the participants skyped in, but the technology did not fail!!!  Professor Faye Ginsburg skyped in from New York, and PhD student Rowena Potts was able to attend in person.  It was a fabulous event and a wonderful coordination between NYU Sydney and Western Sydney University, the home of the research project.  We want to thank the staff at NYU Sydney for all of their support and hospitality and the research manager of the project, Dr. Michelle Kelly for coordinating.

The rationale for the workshop was framed explicitly

“We hope that participants will be able to present and share their experience of participating in these fields and their knowledge about how such fields operate. We will draw on social theory, but our workshop will be animated by personal experience and intimate knowledge of working in these fields.

We believe it is important to think about the terms, within these five Australian cultural fields, in which the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction is recognised – whether in terms of Indigenous cultural producers or Indigenous cultural works.

In each of the above five fields of Australian culture, it now makes a difference whether a sportsperson, network, monument, artwork or performance is known as ‘Indigenous’. Indeed, people have, at times, made a great effort to assert that ‘Australian’ culture has Indigenous and non-Indigenous variants – that is, to make ’the Indigenous’ visible, to challenge habits of thought that allowed ‘the Indigenous’ to be repressed from sight and from memory. To assert the relevance of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction has been, at times, a passionate political cause.
However, the politics of this ‘difference’ is never simple, and it is clear that power and domination are characteristics of each of these five fields.  We think it may be useful to ask such questions as:

• In what terms are we being asked to imagine ‘the Indigenous’ as different?
• Why are some representations of ‘Indigeneity’ controversial and others easily accepted?
• When an Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction is made, what is implied about the ‘non-Indigenous’?
• Whose interests are served by sustaining any particular version of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction?
• What institutions are built upon (invested in) the deployment of any way of making the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction?
• Are there circumstances in which it is better not to assert the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction? Is this a question of tactics, as agents (athletes, artists, critics, curators, sponsors) manoeuvre through fields of cultural production?

To pose these questions (and any other questions that participants wish to raise) is to adopt a critical, politically aware approach to the politics of identity. We will hear from a variety of speakers, including both university-based and industry-based commentators.

Fred would like want to thank all of the presenters, who took time off from other work to join him and his colleagues.  Friends and colleagues from many years generously agreed to share their thoughts.