- Title
- Embodied selves and social selves: Aboriginal well-being in rural New South Wales, Australia
- Creator
- Heil, Daniela
- Relation
- Pursuits of Happiness: Well-Being in Anthropological Perspective p. 88-108
- Relation
- http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=MathewsPursuits
- Publisher
- Berghahn Books
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2009
- Description
- What does it mean for Australian Aboriginal people to experience wellbeing and to understand themselves through their conceptions of wellbeing? Drawing on my ethnography of the small all-Aboriginal village of Murrin Bridge in rural central-western New South Wales, this chapter illustrates ways in which these Aboriginal people understand wellbeing in response to the quality of their relations with significant, mostly kin-related others. The dominant focus in the neocolonial Australian nation-state, in which indigenous Australians make up 2.4 percent of the national population, is on the well-being of people as individuals - what others and I have termed "embodied selves", encompassing the physical and mental state of individuals, their individual bodies and experiences. While Aboriginal people negotiate and respond to this individualistic conception of well-being, they themselves understand and refer to "being well" (the expression they use when paraphrasing what we gloss as "well-being") in relational terms, as an outcome of one's capacity to make and meet the demands and obligations that constitute and reconstitute self-other relationships.
- Subject
- indigenous Australians; wellbeing; embodied selves; social selves
- Identifier
- uon:8580
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/918334
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781845454487
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