Assimilation as acculturation: A.P. Elkin on the dynamics of cultural change

[Extract] The anthropologist A P Elkin was surely Australia's most longstanding advocate of Aboriginal assimilation. For half a century he pushed the policy, from the late 1920's and 1930s, when socio-cultural assimilation was an innovative and challenging doctrine; through the post-war decades, when it gained the imprimatur of the state; into the 1960s and 1970s, when assimilation came into increasingly bad odour among those committed to Aboriginal welfare. Inevitably, over such a vast time-span, his conceptions of assimilation were not entirely consistent Indeed, he did not use the term at all until the late 1930s, and not until the late 1940s as a general term to encompass the processes of sociocultural change facing Aboriginal people. However, there is sufficient consistency of terminology and conceptual content to allow the word 'assimilation' to stand. Throughout his career, he urged the inclusion of Aboriginal people as equal citizens within the Australian nation, and their acquisition of the cultural forms and social norms of modernity.

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Contesting Assimilation

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978-1-920845-15-5

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