The name is absent

CHAPTER IX

Identificationznaming of aborigines by

MAINSTREAM SOCIETY, PRE-1967

South Australia is the best state in Australia.
Don Dunstan ^,s the one that helped us up the
ladder, our Premier. He^,s put us on the map,
mate. We^,s Kangaroos and emus, before that.
We got counted since then. They counted every
bullock and sheep in Australia but they never
counted Aborigines. See? (Elphick, in Gilbert,
1977:100).

In Chapter VIII legislation and policy were examined as
components of theorizing about the Aboriginal world by mainstream
society.

A further powerful component of theorizing of the dominant
group in society, which acts to structure the ’world’ of meaning
with which individuals interact^ is that of ’naming’.

Naming bestows an identity by locating individuals within
a particular group.

9.1 Identity and Identification

In the social construction of reality, the naming of an
individual or group is seen as the prerogative of the dominant
group in society, who are able to name minority groups from their
point of view, and thus incorporate them into the symbolic
universe of the majority groups in a manner seen to be of advantage
to the latter.

Identity has been defined^ as the location of the self in
a particular world of meaning, both by the self and others, the
recognition of one’s self-sameness and continuity in time, the
perception of the recognition of this self-sameness by others and
the location of the self within a specific social structure.

¹See p. 36 above.

I

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