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This is part two of a series of two papers exploring a project was conducted by two Australian Aboriginal researchers, one male and one female, and might be described as ‘reverse anthropology’, in the same way that people sometimes refer to positive discrimination as ‘reverse racism’. But we would just call it anthropology; a tidal river is still a river when it flows back the other way. The project could hardly be acknowledged as anthropology though, as it was based on Indigenous methods of inquiry that do not yet belong to a formal discipline. Initially the goal was to disrupt Australian colonial narratives of ‘black-on-black violence’ and hold up a mirror to the occupying culture, by applying customary Indigenous conflict protocols to an analysis of online street fight videos featuring settlers from various colonies. However, our early encounters with the field revealed that public violence in settler communities is a lot more rule-governed than we had expected, inspiring us to a deeper investigation that went beyond critique and culture jamming. While we found a lot of common ground with settler public violence rituals, the code of chivalry we observed was unfamiliar and drew the focus of our inquiry, leading to some interesting findings about the gendered nature of non-Indigenous public violence.

This is part one of a series of two papers exploring a project that was conducted by two Australian Aboriginal researchers, one male and one female, and might be described as ‘reverse anthropology’, in the same way that people sometimes refer to positive discrimination as ‘reverse racism’. But we would just call it anthropology; a tidal river is still a river when it flows back the other way. The project could hardly be acknowledged as anthropology though, as it was based on Indigenous methods of inquiry that do not yet belong to a formal discipline. Initially the goal was to disrupt Australian colonial narratives of ‘black-on-black violence’ and hold up a mirror to the occupying culture, by applying customary Indigenous conflict protocols to an analysis of online street fight videos featuring settlers from various colonies. However, our early encounters with the field revealed that public violence in settler communities is a lot more rule-governed than we had expected, inspiring us to a deeper investigation that went beyond critique and culture jamming. These findings are reported in the second paper, while the first contains the literature review and outlines the Indigenous methods of inquiry and theoretical approach to the field, which will be of utility to researchers even in unrelated disciplines.