Native Title in Australia: An Ethnographic Perspective

Peter Sutton highlights fundamental anthropological issues concerned with customary rights, kinship, identity and spirituality that are highly relevant to land claim cases. Native land claims continue to be one of the most controversial political, legal and moral issues in contemporary Australia. Ever since the High Court's Mabo decision of 1992, the attempt to understand and adapt "native title" to different contexts and claims has been an ongoing concern for all involved.

Discusses fundamental anthropological issues to do with customary rights, kinship, identity and spirituality.

Professor Peter Sutton is an Australian Research Council Fellow at the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Museum, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He is an anthropologist and linguist. He has lived and worked with Aboriginal people in remote areas of Cape York Peninsula and the Northern Territory, but also in urban and rural centres, since
1969. Professor Sutton has assisted with over fifty indigenous land claim cases in many different parts of Australia since
1979. He is an author or editor of eleven books and has published over a hundred academic and other papers, mainly in the fields of Aboriginal land tenure, languages and art, and indigenous policy.