I consider two forms of governance imposed on the Western Arrernte people of central Australia in the periods of assimilation and self-determination respectively. One form of governance involved the Hermannsburg Lutheran mission and its domestic economy; the other, federal and territory secular administration in the midst of a cash and commodity world. The experience of the Arrernte shows that just as the mission was not alone in bringing radical change to the Western Arrernte, so recent forms of governance could not alone ensure self-determination. In one case, a voracious pastoralism and, in the other, inclusion but marginalisation in rural capitalism have been central forces in the Arrernte’s lives.

I deploy a concept of ontology, derived from both Heidegger and Marx, in order to explore the impact on a people’s experience of radical economic change. The discussion raises issues of change, materiality, assimilation and self-determination as they apply to the Western Arrernte today. Although their history is a specific one, an implication of the paper is that these issues apply in different but related ways to other remote Aboriginal groups.

The violence that is poised between humanitas and inhumanitas speaks to the metaphysical ordering and phantasms of everyday political terror. Are practices of political aggression separable from the Western metaphysical divide between human and animal, and what are the ideological utilities of this divide? Does political animality point to an anthropological sovereignty that only acquires positivity, tangibility, and figuration through its displacement onto, and passage into, the extimacy that is animality? And why does subjugated or expelled animality perennially threaten anthropological plenitude as an uncontainable negativity? These questions imply that the many thresholds of language, labour and finitude that have repeatedly delimited, governed and consigned the animal and human in metaphysical thought and practice can be remapped as a properly political dominion: a wildlife reserve in which philosophical, ethological, and anthropological declaratives and descriptions encrypt zoopolitical relations of power and force, and where the animal predicate circumscribes a concentrated time and space of subjugation, exposure, disappearance and abandonment.