7 Minutes on Value: Paper presented to the Centre for Native Title Anthropology Annual Conference, Queens College, University of Melbourne, Victoria Australia, 6-7 February 2020.

The word ‘value’, like the words ‘culture’ and ‘economy’, has discursive formations. Quite aside from individual constructions of value, the values that social groups may ascribe to things tend to vary according to context. In order to understand value (and, specifically, the value ascribed to a thing for the sake of native title or post-determination agreement making) we need to understand how values are ascribed and negotiated in dynamic fields. The negotiation of value is not always overt. In Indigenous Australian communities (not to the exclusion of others) we often find that the negotiation of values is mediated through rituals to which only senior men or women, or senior landowners and caretakers, have access. Very often the values are subtly negotiated through narratives that are only partially verbal.