Breaking the Great Australian Silence: How Durkheim Finally Makes Room for Australian Indigenous Peoples’ Religious Life

Authors

  • Marion Maddox Macquarie University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11157/rsrr1-2-434

Abstract

Australian processes for recognising Indigenous sacred sites and, in some cases, land ownership, often offer claimants an invidious, lose-lose choice. On the one hand, claimants can support their claim by producing evidence of religious knowledge that they may be culturally required to keep secret. On the other hand, as a series of landmark cases has demonstrated, the material, once revealed, runs the risk of being rejected as not religious enough. The representation of Indigenous religion in Durkheim’s Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse arguably contributed to these impasses. But the same work, particularly when read in conversation with his moral and political writings, also offers a way forward—not as an ethnographic source, but more for its theoretical conception of the relationship between individuals, religion, society, and state.

Author Biography

Marion Maddox, Macquarie University

MARION MADDOX (PhD, PhD) is Director of the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie University, Sydney. She writes widely on religion and politics, including God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 2005).


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Published

2012-02-24

How to Cite

Maddox, M. (2012). Breaking the Great Australian Silence: How Durkheim Finally Makes Room for Australian Indigenous Peoples’ Religious Life. Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception, 1(2), 231–42. https://doi.org/10.11157/rsrr1-2-434

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Section

Articles