Since Bronislaw Malinowski wrote The Sexual Life of Savages, anthropologists have sought to understand the cultural complexities of human sexuality, especially why what is considered "abnormal" in the west is a valued part of another society's cultural life. In recent years, however, with the critical influence of lesbian, gay and bisexual studies, anthropologists are more interested in demonstrating, on the one hand, how representations of sexuality-sexual identity (homo, hetero, bi, trans), s exual pra ctices (rational, ordered, irrational, perverse, queer), sexual value (productive, unproductive)-aid dominant groups in securing authority over minority groups and, on the other hand, how the binary opposition between same-sex and cross-sex sexuality obscures other cultural uses and understandings of sexual intercourses. In short, the critical study of sexuality goes beyond sexuality itself, and shows how sexual understandings and representations work with other forms of social intercourse, identity, and p ower.
The importance of a critical approach to sexuality in understanding the relationship between culture and power is suggested by a recent Australian High Court ruling on indigenous land title (Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland). In 1992 the Australian High Court overturned the doctrine that Australia was settled as terra nullius `a land belonging to no one' and hence empty. In the colonial period Aborigines were portrayed as culturally and sexually incoherent and thus unable to produce the so cial order that would "fill" the continent. In Mabo the High Court recognized the value of the traditional Aboriginal social order but juxtaposed it to contemporary Aboriginal communities, which were represented as sites of sexual and social disorder wrought from contact with Settler culture. More importantly, the High Court found that native title had never been completely extinguished on the Australian continent and that native Australians still retained rights to a significant portion of their tradition al lands. The critical study of sexuality, however, allows us to see that this seeming "victory" for indigenous Australians is but another way in which the state has managed to maintain authority over Aboriginal society by imbricating discourses of race and sexuality.
In Mabo the majority argued that only those Aboriginal groups who retain their "traditions" can be granted native title over their traditional lands. Therefore, it argued that "tribunals" be established to determine, among other things, whether the "general [traditional] nature of the connection between the indigenous people and the land remains" and thus whether a land claim is viable (Brennan 1992, 59).
A question then arises: On what basis will a tribunal decide this question? We find a hint in how the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, 1976 (an earlier act that has served as a model for land rights in Australia) dealt with such issues. In the ALR(NT)A, an Aboriginal group must prove that it is the "traditional Aboriginal owners" of the land under claim-a "local descent group" with "common spiritual affiliation" and "primary spiritual responsibility" for a sacred site on the land.
In more common parlance, the local descent group is a heterosexually defined genealogical family group reckoned through the mother or father's line (or, in some recent decisions, both) which has as its apical ancestor a Dreaming (or totem, say a Long Yam Dreaming) whose spiritual center (the `sacred site', say a rock or banyan tree) is on the land under claim. The Dreaming is defined as the Aboriginal belief that the extant world was formed by the actions and travels of Dreamtime men and women (say, the Blue Crab Man and the Stringbag Woman) who, at certain places in the countryside, left a mark (e.g., stone, banyan tree, waterhole) and remain there today. In a marriage of social theory and western law, it is a conceptual method for reckoning a group's relationship to land and each other. In the best of all legal worlds, land commissioners, anthropologists, and local indigenous groups construct a genealogical map, draw a circle around the descent group, locate that group's Dreaming (sacred site) on a map and the case is settled. That group owns that land. No where else; no one else.
How then are these western legal frameworks rearticulating, in their misapprehension, local Aboriginal understandings of sexuality and social intercourse more generally? Two domains merit attention: how indigenous Australians conceive of the "sexual" ordering of human-human relations and how they understand the "sexual" relationship between humans and the Dreaming landscape. The following can only suggest the complexity of these uses and understandings of sexuality.
Aboriginal understandings of human-human sexuality and erotics are usually described as fitting within a kinship and alliance system. For all practical purposes, all persons are socially fixed to one another by kinship and Dreaming (sacred site) references. Both references are, in part, a set of prohibitions and commands. They produce certain kin as a potential set of erotic partners, just as American kinship (including "nonkin") produces potential erotic and nonerotic partners. Importantly, within an A boriginal system, kinship is the critical determinant of sexual desire and erotic relations, not the sex of the body. Thus, at Belyuen, where I work, both my female and male "cross-cousins" are erotic partners, although it is with my cross-sex partner that I reproduce-along with the reproductive agency of the Dreaming landscape. The court has not recognized the economic and political rights that accrue to Aboriginal persons through affective relations between same-sex "husbands" or "wives."
While Aboriginal understandings of human-human sexuality and erotics will provide some problems for tribunals, Aboriginal understandings of human-land relations will provide them with somewhat different problems. Human-land relations (reproduction, desire, bodily pleasures), or The Dreaming, are implicated in, but escape current legislative definitions of, sexuality in two main ways. First, northern Aboriginal groups do have what are usually called descent Dreamings (the "sacred site" of the "local desc ent group") and these Dreamings are linked to reproductive heterosexuality. For example, the Long Yam Dreaming instantiates itself through my father's line. For a new Long Yam Dreaming to come into the world I would have to reproduce-or it would have to reproduce through me. This descent of Dreamings through heterosexual reproduction is the basis of the local descent group which the Australian High Court has recognized as grounds for granting Native Title.
But while the courts essentialize Aboriginal human-land relations to this form of reproductive heterosexuality-conversant with its own notions of the genealogy of emotional obligations and legal property-Aborigines have many forms of human-land, or Dreaming, relations, none of which are essential in the sense of reducible to the other. For instance, northern Aboriginal groups also recognize a Dreaming relationship between persons and places based on conception. In many Aboriginal communities, conception Dreamings are said to "catch" people hunting, camping, and traveling through the countryside. As people go along, a conception Dreaming hears them or smells their sweat, then manifests itself as a food. Sometimes men are said to catch the food and give it to their wives; at other times women are said to come upon the Dreaming, hidden in the food, themselves. Either way a woman unintentionally eats or otherwise comes into contact with the Dreaming. It then creates a child, marking the fetus in the process with a birth anomaly. Through this sign, parents or other knowledgeable persons establish a link between the child, the Dreaming species, and the place where the Dreaming appeared. The child then has potential rights and obligations, affection and duties towards that place. The relationship between persons and the places where they were conceived, like the relationship between persons and their descent Dreamings, is described as the place/landscape/Dreaming wanting ("being hungry for") the persons-a subjec tive Dreaming seeking out its human object.
Thus more important than the quantitative restriction (from many totems to the one totem) that the courts impose is the qualitative perversion of the meaning of the Dreaming in relation to Aboriginal notions of bodies, desires, and land. It is a narrowing of the sense of which land-human affectivity and desire is understood, as a contextually based, emergent and ongoing relationship between people and places: something that cannot be known a priori or fixed by genealogical referent. Northern A boriginal people discuss human-land relations, like they discuss human-human relations, as a problem of how to get people and places to desire one another and thus form flexible but dense bonds of attraction-an abundance of affectivities for a multiplicity of places, rather than a dependency on one single site or region.
But as the Australian Law does not operate in a vacuum-outside its specific historical and cultural frameworks-Aboriginal culture is not removed from transnational discussions of "nonnormative" sexuality, especially lesbian and gay sex, and its relationship to citizenship. These discussions produce in everyday Aboriginal life interesting supplemental discourses on the meaning of eros. "Fringe" increasingly becomes an interior position: something within the group that cannot be shown outside and somethin g which itself is or seems to have been changed by dominant cultural views. For example, if an Aboriginal community attempts to create dense affective networks of relations predicated on a kinship system that weights more heavily degree-of-relation than sex-of-partner, but also knows from the public realm that sexual identity not kinship is the hegemonic form of subjectivity ("I am a lesbian" versus "that is my same-sex marriage partner"), into which system will it place the name of same-sex desire and ero ticism? And how will this name differ within the community, the courtroom, the media? Whereas in western society "at large," homosexuality is a counter-discourse to the hegemony of heterosexism and hetero-presumptions, in an Aboriginal context this oppositional framework undermines and transforms local systems of desire, sexuality, and economy and thus land use/ownership.
In short, the critical study of sexuality allows a new way of reading law and the social landscape in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Sexuality itself becomes internally marked by other social identities, for instance race and gender, and becomes a part of broader processes of social discrimination.
Beth Povinelli (anthropology, women's studies, and lesbian, gay, and bisexual studies) is the author of Labor's Lot: the Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action (University of Chicago Press 1993) and is currently working on a second book on issues in this essay.
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