An Ethnography of Stress: The Social Determinants of Health in Aboriginal Australia

229 Pages·2011·1.787 MB·English

by  Victoria Katherine Burbank (auth.)

An Ethnography of Stress
Culture, Mind, and Society
The Book Series of the Society for
Psychological Anthropology
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in Three Neighborhoods
Naomi Quinn, editor, Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods
Anna Mansson McGinty, Becoming Muslim: Western Women’s Conversion
to Islam
Roy D’Andrade, A Study of Personal and Cultural Values: American,
Japanese, and Vietnamese
Steven M. Parish, Subjectivity and Suffering in American Culture: Possible
Selves
Elizabeth A. Throop, Psychotherapy, American Culture, and Social Policy:
Immoral Individualism
Victoria Katherine Burbank, An Ethnography of Stress: The Social
Determinants of Health in Aboriginal Australia
An Ethnography of Stress
The Social Determinants of Health in
Aboriginal Australia
Victoria Katherine Burbank
AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF STRESS
Copyright © Victoria Katherine Burbank, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11022-9
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-29259-2 ISBN 978-0-230-11722-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230117228
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burbank, Victoria Katherine.
An ethnography of stress : the social determinants of health in
aboriginal Australia / Victoria Katherine Burbank.
p. cm.—(Culture, mind, society)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Health—Social aspects—Australia—Case studies. 2. Social
medicine—Australia—Case studies. 3. Indigenous people—Health
and hygiene—Australia—Case studies. 4. Stress (Psychology)—Social
aspects—Australia—Case studies. 5. Medical anthropology—
Australia—Case studies. I. Title.
RA418.3.A8B87 2011
362.10994—dc22 2010023205
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: February 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Transferred to Digital Printing 2011
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
Map 1 xiv
Chapter 1 Introduction: Using Social Determinants of
Health, Using Ethnography 1
Chapter 2 At Numbulwar: Blackfellas and Whitefellas 21
Chapter 3 Life History and Real Life: Fetal Origins of
Disease, Ethnography, and History 57
Chapter 4 Feeling Bad: Everyday Stress 79
Chapter 5 Identity 105
Chapter 6 Selves and Others 133
Chapter 7 Conclusion: A Tentative Answer to a
Fundamental Epidemiological Question 155
Notes 161
References 183
Index 203
Preface and Acknowledgments
The first thing, of course, is to survive . . .
—Sahlins 2000:493
When someone dies in an Australian Aboriginal community, peo-
ple, usually, cease to use the name of the deceased from the moment
they know of the death. In the remote Arnhem Land community of
Numbulwar, the site of this ethnography, the deceased was often
referred to as “body.” One day when I was in the center of town, I
heard a Council official announce on the town’s loud speaker that
“body comin’.” Bodies often came to Numbulwar, usually from the
Darwin hospital where people had been sent by health personnel
in vain attempts to prolong their lives or with hopes that the severe
medical conditions from which they suffered could be reversed. A
background of ill health and death pervaded my fieldwork. There
were constant reminders, the regular stream of bodies comin’,
the bodies I heard of between visits, often of people I had known
since their youth, the days of “respect,” and the weeks in which
a body awaiting burial lay in the local mortuary. There were also
the absences of people I had long known either because they were
away for medical treatment, visiting another community to attend
a funeral, or because they were dead. And these reminders insured
that neither I nor others would spend a day, but rarely, without
thinking and talking about our fellows’ ill fortune.
I think of this book as an ethnography of stress. Both during
the fieldwork and in this presentation of that material, I have been
oriented by a social determinants of health framework. This frame-
work draws our attention to social arrangements, particularly those
generating social inequality and injustice that have physiological
effects. A disturbing, but important, finding of this body of research
is the long-term, even intergenerational, potential that social rela-
tionships have to harm. It is not simply the case that something like
poor housing or poor diet causes ill health. The feeling that one is
forced to inhabit an inferior house or eat an inferior diet may, in and
of itself, makes us ill. It is feelings such as these that are increasingly
viii Preface and Acknowledgments
seen as a kind of stress, and as I shall argue in these pages, these feel-
ings must be always be regarded as in some way cultural.
I have had two sets of readers in mind as I have written An
Ethnography of Stress. First is the group of anthropologists and
students of anthropology who are largely unfamiliar with current
developments in biology and psychology, and often wary of their use
by psychological anthropologists like me. I hope that my extended
and detailed treatment of what we generally regard as the cultural
and the social via frameworks regarded as biological and psycho-
logical will persuade at least some readers that the integration of
these distinct but highly relevant efforts greatly aids our attempts to
comprehend our subject matter while circumventing both biological
and cultural determinism.
My second imagined group of readers consists of people engaged in
the study and practice of health, development, or some combination
of these two fields, particularly those whose efforts have relevance
for people who so far have been excluded from global prosperity.
My intention in presenting a detailed ethnography is that it will act
as something of a substitute for the years normally required to even
begin understanding what life is like for people whose life experi-
ence diverges so dramatically from one’s own. If this book enables
greater well-being for the Indigenous people in Australia, I would
be especially pleased, but I also hope that both the ethnographic
material and the arguments I make about it may cast light on the
predicaments of many disadvantaged groups.
Most of the material for this book was collected on three field-
trips to Numbulwar, a remote Aboriginal community of about 800
people located in southeast Arnhem Land on the western shore of
the Gulf of Carpentaria. Between 2003 and 2005, I spent about
seven months there and another three weeks in Darwin, Northern
Territory, where some people from Numbulwar live on a temporary
or permanent basis. Over these months, I engaged in what anthro-
pologists call “participant observation” or just plain “fieldwork”.
As the former term implies, I both observed and participated, inso-
far as I was able, in the life of the community.
Shortly after I arrived for my third and final field stint in 2005, I
made the following journal entry:
At least two strategies for living here. What I think of as the 9–5 crowd
and the night life crowd. 9–5 have jobs, more education, live more
by Western clock, more involved, e.g. jobs, with Western institutions.
Night lifers sleep until late, stay up late, night probably long been
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
a way of escaping white gaze. These are drinkers, ganja folk, more
likely living off unemployment vs. CDP [a form of welfare]. Younger
people, perhaps, likely, more male than female. Christians would be
9–5. Not always clear cut divisions, e.g. card players in both. Re: well
being, night life crowd may diminish this for 9–5 crowd, diverting
money for gambling, drugs, alcohol, unnecessary? consumer goods.
Making noise at night when 9–5 trying to sleep. Over burdening with
childcare, hygiene, subsistence activity. (2005 I:49)
Most of the people I spent time with, and interviewed, would fit
into the 9–5 crowd. But the night life crowd is not absent from these
pages. As my journal entry indicates, these are not hard and fast cat-
egories. Some people with jobs may drink alcohol. Parents of school
children, leading a 9–5 life, may nevertheless smoke, and even occa-
sionally sell, ganja, that is, cannabis; those worried about their
teenagers’ drinking and smoking may once have sniffed petrol them-
selves. Christians who no longer drink, gamble, or smoke ganja may
once have done so; an increasing number of Numbulwar’s church
population are just such people. People in the 9–5 group, especially
younger ones, might well attend the discos and concerts that are
occasionally held in this small town. They might also walk around
after dark to meet friends or a lover. Almost everyone I know, except
the most devout Christians, gambles in the seemingly ubiquitous
card games held day and night. In addition, I can think of no family
that does not include night lifers, if only because all families have
numbers of younger people in them. Sadly, I can also think of no
family that has not been touched by the kinds of trauma so pervasive
in this community today: dysfunction, disease, and death.
During the three field trips, I spent my time visiting people but
mostly being visited, shopping in the shop, picking up mail, and
using the cash machine in the Council office, visiting the school and
the community health clinic, arranging parties and meals for the
Aboriginal family that has counted me among their number since
my first trip to Numbulwar in 1977. Near sunset, I walked along
the beach, tide permitting, exchanging a few words with children or
groups of women as they returned from collecting pandanus leaves
or mussels, noting in passing those fishing in the Gulf’s channel and
the motorized dinghies that might be returning with a dugong, a sea
turtle, or the alcohol and cannabis obtained sometimes from Groote
Eylandt just kilometers across the water. I also attended funerals, all
that were held during my visits. These, of course, were funerals of
kin. For the most part, however, my time and energy were devoted
x Preface and Acknowledgments
to conversation, particularly to doing the kind of careful listening
my interests in person, psyche, and experience require. I was able
to do a substantial amount of this although my time at Numbulwar
was relatively short, no doubt because of my long association with
the community and number of previous visits there.1
This work was supported by an Australian Research Council
Discovery Grant (#DP0210203) received with Professor Robert
Tonkinson and Dr. Myrna Tonkinson, titled “Inequality, Identity
and Future Discounting: A Comparative Ethnographic Approach
to Social Trauma.” As the grant title implies, our intention is to
write a comparative ethnography of Numbulwar and Jigalong—the
Tonkinsons’ principal research site for this study. To produce such
a comparison, however, we first need to analyze and interpret our
respective field materials. The results of these first analyses for
Jigalong have appeared in a series of papers.2 To present the bulk
of my material on Numbulwar, I have written this book. Only in
a text of this length have I felt able to contextualize the material in
the manner I think it requires and begin to present readers with the
details I deem necessary to understand my argument and my experi-
ence in this community.
Those who are up on Australian happenings will notice that
the fieldwork for this book was collected before what is known as
“the intervention,” or the “Northern Territory National Emergency
Response,” a series of actions taken on the part of the conservative
Australian federal government in 2007—the last year of its eleven
years of power—as a response to reports of sexual abuse of children
in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. What effects
it may have had on Numbulwar and how circumstances there may
have changed since the time of the research are not clear. Phone
conversations during the writing period suggested that besides a
couple of community meetings with an intervention team and medi-
cal examinations for all children, little has occurred. A news item on
the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 7:30 Report, however,
suggests that the intervention may not be off to a good start; a pri-
vate company it contracted had “dug a pit toilet on a sacred site” at
Numbulwar. “I been hurting myself inside because I saw this toi-
let,” said one of the Aboriginal men interviewed. If such an event
presages the kinds of changes that the intervention will bring, then,
regrettably, this book will only become more pertinent.
Numbulwar began as the Rose River Mission in 1952. It has long
been a relatively homogeneous community. The majority of people
living there, with “country” contiguous to the settlement or nearby,