Culture‐making: performing Aboriginality at the Asia Society Gallery

This article presents and analyzes the construction and performance of Australian Aboriginal cultural practice, a sandpainting, at a major art exhibition at the Asia Society in New York. Drawing on an ethnography for which anthropological knowledge is part of the event itself, I examine the multiple constructions of Aboriginal identity in the performance. Such intercultural performances represent an important form of cultural production and constitute salient contexts for the contemporary negotiation and circulation of indigenous peoples' identities. The focus of the analysis is on the unsettled and pragmatic quality of the performance as a form of social action, emphasizing the goals and trajectories of the differing participants and the specificities of context and discourses involved. [Australian Aborigines, performance, intercultural, identity] 1994 American Anthropological Association