Loi et culture en pays Aborigenes: anthropologie des resaux autochtones du Kimberley, Nord-Ouest de l'Australie

This thesis concerns Indigenous agency, socio-political and cultural systems, and their reproduction by means of performances within the contemporary Australian state. It examines the cultural politics of Indigeneity developed by Kimberley Aboriginal people through their regional organisations. It presents an ethnographic study of Indigenous modes of representation and organisation based on fieldwork carried out with the Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture Centre, a grass-roots Indigenous regional organisation federating thirty distinct groups, between 2005 and 2007. As such, the thesis gives particular attention to contemporary Indigenous practices of cultural representation and political action. The study aims at providing an anthropological understanding of the continuing cultural and political salience of the difference between Aboriginal people and Kartiyas. Engaging with the concept and practice of Law and Culture, initial research questions have been reframed in terms of the reproduction of the Kimberley as a set of Indigenous countries. Developing a relational approach, using a regional and a local perspective, the thesis provides with accounts of the relational field of interdependencies between the Australian State and its Indigenous habitants. Experiential and historical constructions of Country, cultural logics of Indigenous ritual and political agency, processes of indigenisation of the Australian modernity and current models of Indigenous sustainable development in the Kimberley are successively examined in order to allow for a processual and performative understanding of Indigenous articulations of their subjectivity, agency and identity. The thesis develops a theoretical framework discussing intercultural and ontological models of Indigeneity and argues for a territorialising and performative approach to the definition of Indigenous singularities, drawing on the Indigenous concepts of Country and Law and Culture to frame anew notions of orality, culture and land