A responsible anthropology should expand its scope so as to take in the total social process in which it participates. Rather than silencing anthropology, this project will give it more to say.
Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of
Anthropology: The politics and poetics of an ethnographic event
No one should overlook the legacy of 19th century ideas in present-day views about remote communities. The contrast between civilisation and savagery, between the settlers’ self-image and their view of ‘Aborigines’, has lived on in recent debate. Initially, these arguments referenced Christianity and its superiority or otherwise to traditional Aboriginal life. With the reconciliation debate came a tendency to invoke ideas of Europe’s civilisation as a gift. Why should elderly missionaries, for instance, apologise for purveying their belief and practice in the outback? Such talk entered public discourse in the early 1990s.1 Later, with the NT Intervention, the target was not savagery as such but a thoroughgoing pathology—a new form of deviance and deficit that could not be countenanced in civilised society. Let there be no mistake: child sexual abuse and other forms of personal assault are against the law. Perpetrators of these acts should be charged, convicted and punished. This is beyond dispute. However, media portraits of remote communities commonly identified their specificity only as pathology. They invoked the idea of pathological communities per se that should be changed forthwith. For the public, these portrayals brought a moral certainty just as surely as notions of the savage comforted the consciences of settlers. In the period of the fin de siècle, some of Charles Darwin’s work gave such views his imprimatur. They have been resilient since.
For this reason the postcolonial critique, as conducted by historians and practitioners of Indigenous studies, has both value and relevance today. It provides a genealogy of popular and academic ways of thinking about remote Aboriginal people that has lingered into the 21st century. Yet this critique does more than discuss the use of ‘civilisation’ and ‘savagery’ as terms of commendation or abuse. It also names anthropology as the discipline most responsible for spreading these ideas. As the discussion below will show, this is a charge that carries some validity, but also invalidity as well. To assess anthropology’s role requires discussion of the range of texts involved and exactly what they did. Moreover, although this postcolonial critique concerns anthropology done mainly prior to 1960, the case that is made against the discipline is, by and large, a comprehensive one—for all times and places (see for example Wolfe 1999; Gray 2007). At least some postcolonial critics have come to bury anthropology, it seems.2 Yet, if this means burying the study of cultural difference, then their project is a misguided one. A grasp of difference as well as inequality is still crucial in the present. This chapter therefore has two aims: to underline the strengths of a critique of false forms of thought about Indigenous Australians, but also to confirm that studies of cultural difference can be done in postcolonial ways. This task is crucial for an understanding of the histories of, and present-day conditions in, remote Indigenous communities.
Below I discuss some writings drawn from the work of Russell McGregor and Patrick Wolfe. Both have been committed to an examination of anthropology’s focus on cultural difference as it was defined initially—in terms of an engagement between civilised Europeans and savage Australians. The discussion is focused on three portrayals of Aboriginal people which these critics judge offensive, and the product of anthropology. Attention to these representations allows an assessment of this postcolonial critique. It also provides a basis for proposing a new approach to cultural difference in the context of the state’s inequality. To this end, I call on Martin Nakata’s work and integrate some of his suggestions with my own.
The doomed race
For those interested in social analysis, one of the most intriguing features of Charles Darwin’s work is the different types of approach he brought to his study of evolution as speciation, and his study of humankind. Where one process of evolution manifested itself as proliferating species, the other—human evolution—involved passage along a shared path, at different rates, that would witness over time the survival of those more fit and, simultaneously, the extinction of the less fit (McGregor 1997:28–30). Darwin chose one evolutionary path (‘progress’) to civilisation, whereas anthropologist Franz Boas chose diverse histories that produced different cultures (see Stocking 1982:202–206).
‘Race’ and Darwin’s indecision about the concept were at the centre of his approach. Darwin’s commitment to monogenetic theory stood in a tension with his view of race as possibly a form of sub-speciation. Sensing the tension, perhaps, he proposed that the differences between races were mainly inconsequential. He sought to explain differences of phenotype and perceived moral and emotional development in terms of a ‘sexual selection’ and the development of institutions including, for instance, agriculture and governance. In this respect, Darwin was a Lockean (Darwin 2008 [1871]:261–264). On the other hand, Darwin endorsed survival of the fittest and saw hunter-gatherer groups as doomed:
Extinction follows chief ly from the competition of tribe with tribe, and race with race. Various checks are always in action . . . such as periodical famine, the wandering of parents . . . the stealing of women, wars, accidents, sickness, licentiousness, especially infanticide, and, perhaps, lessened fertility from less nutritious food, and many hardships . . . and when one of two adjoining tribes thus favoured becomes more numerous and powerful than the other, the contest is soon settled by war, slaughter, cannibalism, slavery, and absorption . . .
When civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short . . . We can see that the cultivation of land will be fatal in many ways to savages, for they cannot, or will not change their habits. New diseases and vices are highly destructive . . . until those who are most susceptible . . . are weeded out; and so it may be with the evil effects from spirituous liquors, as well as with the unconquerable strong taste for them shewn by so many savages. (Darwin 2008 [1871]:281)
Notwithstanding, Darwin was exceedingly cautious in his remarks on races as equivalents to species. He did not embrace a polygenic view. Rather, he sought to underline the primitive nature of early man:
[T]here can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians. The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the ref lection at once rushed into my mind—such were our ancestors. These men were absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint, their long hair was tangled . . . They possessed hardly any arts, and like wild animals lived on what they could catch; they had no government, and were merciless to every one not of their own small tribe . . . For my own part, I would as soon be descended from [the] heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy . . . to save . . . his keeper; or from that old baboon, who . . . carried away . . . his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions. (Darwin 2008 [1871]:332)
Darwin promoted humanity’s place in speciation by pathologising savages. Though ‘the link’ between man and other species remained illusive, savages were the likely candidate. In Australia, Darwin’s ideas prepared the ground for views that endured for generations, and among them was that branch of pseudoscience known as eugenics, that did embrace polygenic views.
In his discussion of the early anthropologists who were active in Australia, McGregor cites in particular A.W. Howitt, John Mathew and Baldwin Spencer. Howitt and Mathew (1899) fielded contemporary accounts of the racial origins of mainland residents and the Tasmanians. Howitt concluded that initially the Australian continent was populated by ‘frizzly-haired Melanesians, such as the Tasmanians’ but with ‘a strong infusion of some other race, probably a low form of Caucasian Melanochroi’. The latter term was one used by T.H. Huxley to describe dark-skinned Caucasians (see Mathew 1899; Howitt 1996:31; Baum 2008). Howitt suggested that Australians and Dravidians from southern India could have been ‘two tribes co-descendants from a common . . . stock’ (1996:30). In his view, this group overran the autochthonous people who were forced back to Tasmania. Moreover, these events occurred prior to the rise in ocean levels that formed the Bass and Torres Straits (Howitt 1996:24). Howitt’s sometime co-author, Lorimer Fison, was less engaged with issues of migration and human types. His concern was to reconcile social evolution with both science and the Bible. Therefore he was keen to establish that the evolution of the Australians should begin from a state of ‘innocence’ rather than degenerate civilisation (Fison and Howitt 1991:162). Fison treated it as plain that:
[T]he human race started from a very low point in the social scale; that certain races have made a continuous advance; nation after nation dying as men die, but always leaving their heirs behind them; that others, after making considerable progress, came to a halt and remained stationary; while others again, who, at the very beginning fell out, or were driven out, from the line of progress, are found in the present day at a point lower than that from which the start was made; degraded, therefore . . . but certainly not degraded from a civilization to which they never attained. (Fison and Howitt 1991:163)
This third path had been the one followed by Australians.
These remarks were made by men who published prior to or concurrently with Baldwin Spencer, foundation professor of biology at Melbourne University and, subsequently, highly inf luential evolutionary ethnographer. Spencer corresponded with Howitt but more importantly was mentored by James Frazer, who circulated his work with Frank Gillen among Europe’s intellectual elite. As director of the National Museum of Victoria, Spencer relegated Aboriginal Australians to the museum’s natural history display. As McGregor notes, Spencer’s intent was not to classify indigenous Australians as animals. Rather, he counted ‘the Aboriginal’ and local fauna as equally primitive versions of their respective species (McGregor 1997:41). Spencer made this clear in his 1927 preface to the revised edition of his Central Australian work with Gillen:
Australia is the present home and refuge of creatures, often crude and quaint, that have elsewhere passed away and given place to higher forms . . . Just as the platypus, laying its eggs and feebly suckling its young, reveals a mammal in the making, so does the Aboriginal show us, at least in broad outline, what early man must have been like before he learned to read and write, domesticate animals, cultivate crops and use a metal tool. It has been possible to study in Australia human beings that still remain on the cultural level of men of the Stone Age. (Spencer and Gillen 1927:vii).
Spencer’s remark evokes a particular type of fin de siècle evolutionism. Higher and lower stages of culture were attributed to the capacities of their bearers, who were seen, respectively, as more or less developed organically. These spurious ideas gained currency at a time prior to modern genetics. Not Darwinian as such, the view invoked a biogenetic ‘law’ that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ and is reflected in different phenotypes (Langness 1975:12). In other words, the more or less developed stages of a society are reflected in each stage’s component human beings. Furthermore, variations in external appearance were seen to be indicative of supposed organic variations between different human types.
The standard version of this view involved a sequence from savagery through barbarism to civilisation. Lewis Henry Morgan broke this down into seven more specific stages. Each people, nation, culture or society was assumed to move along a developmental path, not always through the exact same stages, but nonetheless in a shared direction. And as societies changed, so too did the organic nature of the concomitant human beings (Morgan 1877; Stocking 1982:116–119). In addition, the assumption was that some, and especially Western Europeans, had transitioned through these stages more readily than others. In his 1899 publication with Gillen, which followed the Horn Expedition to Central Australia, Baldwin Spencer exemplified this school of thought. He drew a parallel between forms of social practice and organic development. He was writing of the Arrernte of Central Australia:
[I]t seems that in the evolution of the social organisation and customs of a savage tribe, such features as those which we are now discussing are clearly comparable to the well known rudimentary organs, which are of great importance in understanding the phylogeny of [animals]. (Spencer and Gillen 1899:109).
The first Australians were identified as savages and, in a more Darwinian mode, as possibly representative of the link between humankind and its predecessors. In this view, Aboriginal people were indicative of Western Europe’s past—as the child might be to the adult. It was also assumed—and Darwin did—that juxtaposed in the same time-space, the ‘adult’ would eclipse ‘the child’.
Two important points contextualise these early anthropologists. First, they had contemporaries who did not share their views. For instance, Carl Strehlow, German Lutheran missionary to the Western Arrernte in Central Australia, was clearly aware of these ideas when he wrote in 1921, ‘And these people with such mental capacities should form the “missing link”? Never’ (cited in Kenny 2008:7). This comment came in the wake of Strehlow’s mastery of Arrernte language, his copious recording of indigenous myth and his Bible translations—working in conjunction with Arrernte men. His conclusion mirrored that of German émigré to the United States Franz Boas, who repudiated the comparative method of evolutionary ethnography and promoted particularism and a plural culture concept. For Boas, regional historical specification, not morphological stages, explained human social variation (Boas 1940: 281–289; Stocking 1982:195-233). Germany at the time was not the rampant imperial power that Britain was; nor did biological science as opposed to history and linguistics bear so heavily on its ethnology. Less accomplished than Carl Strehlow, but nonetheless an eager anthropologist, R.H. Mathews researched and wrote between 1893 and 1918, when he died. His writings were mainly in the form of articles published in Australia, the United States and Europe. Like Strehlow, but for different reasons, Mathews had little contact with British academia and therefore with Darwinian views. Schooled at home, he grew up on his father’s property, worked as a drover, and later became a land surveyor for a time employed by the NSW Government Railways. He had a lifetime of contact with Aboriginal people. Mathews concentrated on firsthand observation and more modest generalisations—whether or not he could always defend them (Thomas 2007). Notwithstanding their strengths as well as their weaknesses, Baldwin Spencer excoriated both Strehlow and Mathews. He pushed them to the margins of academic debate.
A second point regarding these evolutionary ethnographers is a more challenging one. Notwithstanding their adherence to false theory, Fison and Howitt, Spencer and Gillen, and W.H.R. Rivers as well, produced early research that laid foundations for later studies of kinship classification, social organisation, cosmology and ritual performance for the entire Oceania region.3 For example, Spencer and Gillen’s maps and text, which trace the topography around Alice Springs and note the unfolding of ancestral myth to explain the natural features of the land, foreshadowed modern understandings of the Dreaming (see Morphy 1997:37–38). The heated debates about moieties and marriage, including the nature and role of sections and subsections, in time brought a better understanding of Aboriginal sociality and its organisation in space and through time (see, for example, Strehlow 1965; Elkin 1979; and later McConvell 1985a, 1985b and Dousset 2005). These observations of the early ethnographers were the building blocks for contemporary social analysis. As McGregor remarks, perhaps this work’s most notable feature was dense and precise ethnographic observation—revolutionary for its time—linked nonetheless to race-based evolutionism (McGregor 1997:35–36; Morphy 1997). How to explain this paradox? Status was involved. Given the prominence of Howitt and Spencer in Australian academic circles, and Spencer’s initial training as a biologist, it is likely that this framework gave legitimacy to their research in a period when evolutionary biology was seen as a paradigm of science, at least in the English-speaking world. This anomalous setting for the practice of ethnography bears on the Boasian view that grand theory and social research are uneasy partners. All too easily, facts can be digested as a prevailing discourse. And yet, as we know, paradigms do change and discourse with them. Therefore, it cannot be theory or position alone that defines the value of research.
These two points not only contextualise the early ethnographers but also sound a caution regarding the postcolonial critique. Hot on the trail of words like ‘race’, and relatively unversed in social analysis, the enthusiast can easily ignore the ethnography in fin de siècle research. In an otherwise exemplary work, McGregor approaches this excess when he conf lates two categories of writer—evolutionary ethnographers and early 20th century eugenicists. Among the latter, Dr John Wild from Victoria presented an initial paper to the anthropology Section G of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1888. He advocated anthropology as a ‘strictly scientific’ pursuit that could reveal ‘our remote ancestors slowly toiling up towards . . . civilisation’ (McGregor 1997:34). Sydney-based Dr Alan Carroll, who specialised in the treatment of children, convened the Royal Anthropological Society of Australasia and published its journal between 1895 and 1913. Carroll was a eugenicist who thought that humanity comprised different species. For British people to breed with Aboriginal Australians would be degenerative, in his view (see McGregor 1997:46).4. Again, in 1898, Edinburgh-trained pathologist Dr W.L. Cleland presented a paper to the Royal Society of Adelaide that drew parallels between the ‘two races’ of orang-utan in the Malay and ‘the Aborigines of Australia’ (cited in McGregor 1997: 47). Finally, Dr William Ramsey Smith, trained in pathology and president of the Anthropology Section of the AAAS in 1913, proposed of Aboriginal people that ‘Centuries ago, nature “side-tracked” a race in Australia’ (cited in McGregor 1997:38). Unlike Fison and Howitt, Strehlow, Mathews, and Spencer and Gillen, these men were mainly medical doctors hypothesising not on the basis of ethnography at all but rather on the basis of morphological fantasy. Cressida Fforde records a gruesome case in which Ramsey Smith and Cleland shared between them the preserved head and penis of an Aboriginal man declared insane before he died (Fforde 2004:42). Whatever the sins of the ethnographers, they were not these.
As McGregor may have meant to underline, in the public mind there was little distinction made between eugenicists, who dignified themselves as ‘physical anthropologists’, and the early ethnographers with their race-based ideas but also their engagement with social and cultural fact. ‘Doomed race’ and ‘culture with its own moral order’ were the competing legacies of this initial engagement with difference. It would take some time to sort them out (see also Morphy 1996:183–185).
Intelligent parasites
The status of savage accorded to Aboriginal people seemed to entail the rapid extinction of both their culture and physical being. Perceptions that indigenous women became less fertile following contact with settlers were used to support the idea that the constitution of indigenous Australians could not withstand or adapt to civilisation. Moreover, their ruin was seen to be moral as well as physical and the product not simply of engagement with Europeans, but also with Chinese or ‘Asiatics’, especially in the north Australian settlement of Darwin. Federal inspectors observed that free interaction between blacks and Asiatics had ‘debased and rendered [the blacks] vicious, cunning and untrustworthy’. Traditional practices were ‘dying out’ (cited in McGregor 1997:70). In the first decade of the 20th century, Charles Darwin’s premonitions seemed to be realised.
Yet as protector of Aborigines between 1912 and 1913, Baldwin Spencer assumed a more hopeful stance. He proposed that the federal government adopt a policy of ‘preservation and uplift’ (McGregor 1997:72). Spencer recommend that both ‘full-bloods’ and ‘half-castes’ be isolated on reserves, kept apart, and offered separate and appropriate forms of training. He justified this on the basis that ‘though the half-castes belong neither to the aboriginal nor to the whites’, generally they became a part of an Aboriginal community (cited in McGregor 1997:81). Therefore they should be on reserves but, unlike full-bloods, separated from their mothers. Then they might begin to learn white ways. For Spencer, policy and science should work in tandem to protect Aboriginal people and record their disappearing world (see also Wolfe 1999:155).
As the 20th century turned into its second and third decades, the ‘doomed race’ theory proved inadequate. Increasingly, the state’s view was that something definite needed to be done to manage remote Aboriginal people, especially those drawn to camp around white settlements. Wolfe remarks, ‘[T]he romance of the dying race steadily gave way to the spectre of “the half-caste menace”’ (Wolfe 1999:30). More complex than Wolfe suggests, much policy discussion concerned the appropriate but different routes for half-castes on the one hand, and full-bloods on the other. Moreover, the view of half-castes changed over time as notions of hybrid inferiority gave way to the idea that a quantum of white blood made half-castes superior to full-bloods (McGregor 1997:139). This shift occurred in the inter-war years and paralleled the rise to prominence of A.P. Elkin, Anglican cleric and professor of anthropology at Sydney University from 1933 to 1956. While Adelaide-based J.B. Cleland, son of W.L. Cleland, and Western Australia’s A.O. Neville advocated biological absorption via the route of half-caste child removal, Elkin began to focus on assimilation and a social form of absorption (see also Anderson 2003:225–252).
Nonetheless, Elkin’s thought was definitely transitional between biology and the sociocultural. Although he came to focus on the social, in the 1930s and 40s elements of a race-based view of Aboriginal people lingered in his writing. In 1932 he could still remark that the ‘smaller brain capacity of aborigines as compared with that of the bearers of the new culture suggests at least a handicap’ (cited in McGregor 1997:197). Moreover, many years later Elkin did not discard his textbook’s introductory remarks on racial types and a ‘stone-age’ culture (Elkin 1979:1–11). Still, his focus on assimilation developed a ‘firmer faith’ in Aboriginal Australians’ capacity to advance themselves (McGregor 1997:186).
In Elkin’s publications, the best known statement of these ideas came in his essay, ‘Reaction and Interaction’, published in the American Anthropologist (Elkin 1951). It was in the course of this discussion that he coined the term ‘intelligent parasitism’, referring to a complex of behaviour often described today as Aboriginal ‘dependency’. The latter usage has been adopted by a number of contemporary writers, including Pearson (2000) and Sutton (2009a). By ‘dependency’, they mean the apparent inclination to live off a system without participating in it. Elkin’s version went like this:
Parents leave their children at the mission school to be fed while they themselves move about on tribal affairs—only to take them away, if they can, when it suits them, especially when initiation or marriage requires them in tribal life. And the natives on the Trans-Continental Railway line ply a well-developed art of ‘preying’ on the passengers, most of whom have not seen bush Aborigines before. Donning tattered garments, and borrowing babies if they have none of their own, groups of men and women visit the train stopping places to sell their own few artefacts, to amuse and to beg. The provision of clothing and ration depôts and the work of missions have failed to prevent this active, successful, interesting, and new form of ‘hunting’.
Thus, in these various ways a stage of intelligent parasitism and of equilibrium is built up in the marginal regions. Adaptation, which was formerly to nature . . . is now to the settler and other persons and institutions. (Elkin 1951:168)
Elkin first used the terms ‘parasites’ and ‘parasitism’ to describe a hunter-gatherer economy. He depicted Aboriginal man as ‘a parasite on nature; that is, he did not assist nature to produce his sustenance either by tilling the soil and sowing seed, nor by domesticating and breeding animals. He was subservient to nature’ (cited in McGregor 1996:119). Nonetheless these hunters and gatherers deliberately lived off the land. Elkin explained that ‘nomadism’ was not ‘biologically founded’ but rather involved an intentional practice integral to a particular type of economy. Moreover, this was an economy geared to consumption rather than production and this consumption was directed to ‘specific socio-cultural ends within a kinship-dominated system’. Post-settlement, this style of distribution of food and other things to kin was maintained ‘by transferring . . . dependence from the resources of nature to the goods in the station store’ (Elkin 1951).
During the 1930s, Elkin tended to characterise Aboriginal relations with white society as ones of ‘utter dependence’. In like vein, when he began to use the concept of ‘parasite’ to describe Aboriginal relations with non-Aboriginal people, he used it in the sense of an abjection: ‘Because of ignorance, hopelessness, selfishness and even callousness, on the part of some of us—the responsibility of us all—the Aborigines were disinherited and bewildered; they were made parasites, and were faced with extinction’ (cited in McGregor 1996:121). Five years later, though, Elkin wrote of parasitism in a new way. He continued to underline the ‘forced’ nature of Aboriginal adaptation. At the same time, he stressed two other things: first, that though constrained, this adaptation was intelligent, knowledgeable and skilled; and second, that with it Aboriginal people limited their investment in white society and thereby sustained their kinship and ritual life. He observed, ‘this adaptation is external and means a double role—economic parasitism on the white man, and [a] social and spiritual role within the [tribe]’ (cited in McGregor 1996:121).
‘Intelligent parasitism’ was just one stage of adaptation in Elkin’s scheme, but it was a crucial one (Elkin 1951:178). People would transition from hunter-gatherer society, through parasitism, to an appreciation of capitalism and its social order. In his view, those Aboriginal people on the south-east coast who had become mere ‘paupers’ would find this transition harder. Parasitism in fact provided a ‘short cut’ to assimilation. Elkin came to this conclusion during World War II when he observed the participation of Arnhem Landers in Australian army camps (McGregor 1996:122–124, 1997:186–187). In his view, assimilation would work best for Aboriginal people who retained a fairly integrated culture. Parasitism on remote white settlements had allowed the maintenance of this integration.
Elkin’s analysis was wrong. In fact, traditional life was not parasitic on nature. Rather, it rested on extensive and detailed knowledge organised between groups in ways that commanded a region. The ritual ‘work’ of senior men ensured the reproduction of species so far as these men and their wives and children saw it. Minimally, this world of rite and its stratified knowledge diversified relations between groups and distributed economically relevant knowledge among far-f lung peoples. The interaction between human beings and environment was a slow-moving one because this form of society and culture responded to and shored up a limited technology. Nonetheless, it was an order assiduously worked at. This intersection of ritual and mundane knowledge was undermined by sedentary life. To begin with, the new form of living rested on a complex technology mysterious to those who lived remote. They began to see their own system as the less powerful one. In addition, sedentarism brought a centralisation of sustenance that undermined the previous practice without providing new routes into a different social system of production with its own forms of knowledge and practice. The condition that Elkin described as ‘intelligent parasitism’ was in fact the dependency created by becoming sedentary and then marginalised in a more powerful socioeconomic order. In increasingly elaborate ways, state and law confirmed this status. One must stretch the meaning of ‘dependency’ almost to breaking point to apply the term to hunter-gathering and to marginalisation in a capitalist society. It is more illuminating to point to the gap in productivity between hunter-gatherer and agricultural—not to mention industrial—economies; and the consequent gross mismatch between hunter-gatherer forms of social organisation and those of late industrial capitalism.
Elkin endorsed assimilation as both required and inevitable. The only question was by what route to attain it. To him, a route through parasitic dependency seemed promising. Many disagreed. They included Baldwin Spencer, Donald Thomson, Olive Pink, Norman Tindale and W.E.H. Stanner, who recommended ‘preservation by reservation’ (Stanner 1979 [1963]:191). Reporting on his 1936 Arnhem Land research, Thomson advocated ‘absolute segregation’ on the grounds of psychology, culture and physical health:
The fact must be stressed that the difference between a nomadic race with its peculiar and specialised adaptations and social organisation, and a gardening people, with an established village life, is more than a matter of environment, it depends on deeper factors, and has a definite psychological basis. (Thomson 2003:118–119).
Olive Pink also advocated a ‘secular sanctuary’. Her views were inf luenced by contact with the Warlpiri in Central Australia and a comparison with the Arrernte of the Hermannsburg mission. Pink hoped that the Warlpiri could avoid the destiny of the missionised Arrernte. Therefore she recommended:
[A] place for them where they can call both their souls and bodies their own. For the full-bloods only—not half-castes. So they will not then be play-things of Europeans—clergy and laity alike—with as aim their being ‘labour fodder’ which can be exploited. Let us help them to be developed ‘black’ men and women and proud of it. Not sham Europeans whose ‘destiny’ . . . is to be (immorally) ‘absorbed’. (Cited in Marcus 2001:147, emphasis in original)
Of these advocates, Stanner was perhaps the most ambivalent. He proposed that policy should be aimed at securing ‘survival’ first and only then ‘civilisation’. In the early years he leaned towards separate development. In 1939 he recommended that ‘ample funds’ be supplied to reserves in order to stop malnutrition and the ‘population drift’ to white settlements (see McGregor 1997:224–225). In 1958 he voiced his displeasure at federal minister Hasluck’s assimilation policies in his seminal essay ‘Continuity and Change’. Fifteen years later, and following his Boyer Lectures, Stanner would support Northern Territory land rights as social justice. Nonetheless, he expressed some uncertainty about the separatism implied by some versions of self-determination. In 1974, he and H.C. Coombs proposed that
[P]olicy be directed to ensuring that Aborigines are not forced by economic and social pressures to accept a European style of life if they would prefer a simpler or more traditional style: i.e. that Aborigines be allowed and helped to adapt freely of their own requirements and circumstances such white Australian practices as they consider of value to them. (Cited in Hinkson and Beckett 2008:13)
Maintaining a ‘choice’ between the options of ‘staying out’ or ‘coming in’—presumed to be culturally different paths—became anthropology’s position.
Timeless dreamers (and unproductive)
The progression from doomed race to assimilation and/or separation captures the transition from biological to social and cultural notions of difference. As Elkin’s ideas about parasitic dependency show, this transition did not in itself supersede the inclination to pathologise. A fear that encouraging mainstream capabilities meant discouraging others as inferior or even pathological raised the heat of postwar debates about assimilation. Nonetheless, there were marked advances in knowledge, not least in Elkin’s own corpus, and there were ‘arguments about Aborigines’ among the anthropologists. 5 Notwithstanding, historian Patrick Wolfe has suggested that Australian anthropology will inevitably bear the imprint of colonialism. His views meet those of Povinelli’s at various points and also diverge from them (Povinelli 2002).6 Wolfe’s position is exemplified in his discussion of the Dreaming as an icon of difference for Australians, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous (Wolfe 1991). In Wolfe’s view, not only does this icon stand for Aboriginal difference in Australia, it also locates Aboriginal people as an ‘other’ beyond Australian capitalism; as beings beyond economy. In his critique of anthropology’s account of the Dreaming, Wolfe rehearses a more general argument about settler colonialism and anthropology’s complicity in it (Wolfe 1999).
The article in question is entitled ‘On Being Woken Up’ (1991). Wolfe’s focus is the Arrernte word that Baldwin Spencer transcribed as ‘alcheringa’ and translated as the ‘Dream times’ on the advice of his field associate Frank Gillen. Later anthropological accounts of this phenomenon, and especially Stanner’s mid-20th century rendering of it as an ‘everywhen’, would produce a related term: ‘the Dreaming’ (see Stanner 1979 [1953]). Today this term is used to refer to the experienced world or cosmos of traditional Aboriginal people. Many non-Indigenous Australians assume that most or all Aboriginal people who still live remote also live in a world that is best described comprehensively by this term. Reference to an Aboriginal ‘spirituality’ evokes the Dreaming: an acceptance that the ancestral beings, part human and part other species that shaped the earth and sky, are also a continuing and unseen presence in daily life. The Dreaming, in other words, is everywhere and for all time.
Wolfe’s intent is not to provide his own account of the Aboriginal ideas and experience for which Spencer and Gillen provided English terms. Rather, his focus is on the nature and dynamics of the translation process. He is not interested in the phenomenon referred to by the Arrernte or other Aboriginal peoples, but rather in the name given to this phenomenon by British settlers and their descendants, and its connotations. Wolfe sees a specific process of change between the context of Spencer’s initial translation at the fin de siècle and the later context in which Stanner wrote. The similarity and the differences between these contexts and the usages involved—as the ‘Dream times’ became ‘the Dreaming’—are central to Wolfe’s argument. Importantly, the second of these contexts, from the 1960s to the present, has been the one in which numerous Northern Territory land claims were settled under the Land Rights Act.
He associates the initial translation with the period of evolutionary theory in early anthropology discussed above. In particular, Wolfe links this period with the work of writers such as Adolf Bastian and British evolutionist E.B. Tylor (see Tylor 1903; Köpping 1983). Tylor and others proposed that the source of primitive ideas about causality was an animated or enlivened view of nature which he called ‘animism’. He argued that the context for these ideas came not simply from intimate contact with the natural environment but also from dreams which were treated as continuous with waking life. Dreams suggested vital interactions in a world beyond mundane experience. The natural world which men inhabited was animated by unseen forces that also were present in dreams. Wolfe argues that Tylor’s account of magic and natural religion encouraged Spencer’s view of the Aboriginal past as ‘vague’ and ‘Dreamy’ and, according to Wolfe, definitely pre-rational (Spencer and Gillen 1927:592; Wolfe 1991:203). Moreover, the idea that savages were pre-rational beings ‘provided a bridge between the animal and the human’—the missing link once again—for Spencer and the evolutionists who inf luenced him (Wolfe 1991:206).
Wolfe connects this usage with another one from rural popular culture: the rendering of Aboriginal mobility across a region as ‘walkabout’ (Wolfe 1991:210–211). ‘Jack’s gone walkabout’ could have been a remark in the white Australian outback up to and including the 1970s. Such an observation would have implied unpredictable and aimless wandering that made Aboriginal people unreliable employees and therefore deserving of payment that was well below the white award. This rural terminology became urban in the popular Australian magazine Walkabout, published from 1935 to 1972. Designed for restless urbanites, Walkabout was replete with images of the outback Aborigine used to romanticise Australian rural life. Wolfe argues that the ‘Dream times’ and ‘walkabout’ both contributed to a ‘theme of precolonial somnambulance’ which white settlers and their descendants ascribed to the first Australians. And in this pre-colonial milieu, as rendered by white settlers, ‘land was but a spatial condition’ rather than a force of production to be both valued and owned (Wolfe 1991:211). The impact of these representations, in Wolfe’s view, was to locate Aboriginal people in a time-space of unproductive life prior to European settlement. Productive civilisation only began with the arrival of the British.
In Spencer and Gillen’s original usage ‘the dream times unequivocally referred to the past’ (Wolfe 1991:212). From the late 1950s, however, and in the work of Stanner, Elkin and others, increasingly the view was that the Dreaming was not just past but also ever-present. This reinterpretation came with the intensification of research in remote Australia that preceded and then accompanied the land claims period. Wolfe notes that (classical) ethnography produced a portrait of Aboriginal life consisting mainly of ritual and kinship, which involved points of striking difference with a European world. Yet, he remarks, ‘the great majority of anthropological data was collected from people who were dependent upon the settler economy’ (Wolfe 1991:213). Maddock had acknowledged this in his text when he wrote that ‘Rite and myth—and the information stored in them—can stay alive long after the hunter-gatherer economy has collapsed’ (Maddock 1982:29).
However, that ‘collapse’ was of no concern to Maddock. As we have seen, Maddock’s account excluded all those factors that Cowlishaw’s (1999) account included: Aboriginal involvements with the state and with cash and forms of employment. In Wolfe’s view these exclusions meant that Aboriginal people became ‘ritually constituted entities’ in classical ethnography. Wolfe would describe this representation as a ‘superorganic Aboriginality’ (Wolfe 1991:213, 1999:178). Equally important, even in the 1970s and 80s much ethnography seemed to suggest that the time-space of this ritualised and unproductive life was not only past but also present in remote northern and Central Australia.
Wolfe’s conclusion is that, as translations, a common feature holds the ‘Dream times’ and ‘the Dreaming’ together. Both versions underline aspects of Aboriginal life that have little connection with the post-settlement economy on which both settlers and Aboriginal people came to depend. Either as ‘precontact idyll’ or as ever-present ‘otherness’, these representations of Aboriginal life became estranged from the ‘economic realities’ (Wolfe 1991:214).
There are some major errors and elisions in Wolfe’s argument. To begin with, a considerable range of Aboriginal languages have terms which map out a semantic field comparable to the Arrernte one that Spencer and Gillen recorded (Morphy 1996:177). The rapid spread of ‘Dream times’ among other anthropologists is therefore not surprising, though initially such translations may have been based on slim evidence. This does not mean that they were wrong. In addition, the polysemy of the relevant terms in Arrernte and in other Aboriginal languages includes those juxtapositions of meaning that so offended Wolfe. Spencer’s alcheringa and related terms carry both the sense of past times and of dreaming while asleep. Through dreams, Arrernte people, for instance, connect with the ancestral realm which is both past and ever-present. This is not a European imputation about irrational ‘dreaminess’ but rather a real feature of Aboriginal experience for many people past and present. Language ref lects this (see Dussart 2000:139–176; Green 2007). Again, the shift between Spencer’s and Stanner’s rendering of this indigenous phenomenon was not simply a ref lex of changes in Australia’s socioeconomic conditions. It also reflected conceptual developments in the practice of ethnography. Morphy remarks:
Anthropological discourse has progressed by . . . shifting the meaning away from ‘dream’ and ‘time’ towards a more generalized conception of the relationship between cosmology and society. The connotation of a simple past time was rebutted through the development of phrases such as the ‘eternal dream time’, and there was a shift from time to place to event signified in Stanner’s ‘Everywhen’ and away from dreaming in [the] ‘ancestral past’ . . . Discourse over such terms became a means of modifying the concept of the Dreamtime: not merely as a term of art in Western anthropology but as a ref lection of more sophisticated and detailed understandings of phenomenological meaning to Aboriginal people. (Morphy 1996:179)
Finally, Wolfe makes no clear distinction between popular usage and disciplinary analysis, treating both as aspects of popular culture. Consequently, the ‘Dreaming complex’ and ‘walkabout’ are given the same status, though one is integral to sustained research and the other is just a popular usage. For this reason, in Wolfe’s hands ethnography becomes no more than an artefact of a popular and dominant discourse (Morton 1998:368–369). While history remains above the fray, anthropology becomes intrinsically an invalid enterprise (see also Morphy 1996:169). Wolfe creates his own conditions for this position by reading very little 20th century ethnography except where the texts support his position.
Wolfe treats classical ethnography roughly and unfairly. Yet there is something to gain from two of his more general positions. The first I have noted already: his account of the product of classical ethnography as a ‘superorganic Aboriginality’ that masks the fact of dependence on, but limited engagement with, a capitalist economy. This position is equivalent to Asad’s initial postcolonial critique of African ethnography that bounded and reified colonial subjects (Asad 1973). Likewise, only part of an Aboriginal subject is allowed to appear in Australia’s classical ethnography. And contrary to Maddock (see above), the ritual life of Aboriginal people could not be sustained unchanged and intact once the indigenous economy ‘collapsed’. Integral to this position is Wolfe’s perception that the invasion of Australia is in fact ‘a structure not an event’ (Wolfe 1999:163). In other words, the inequalities established by the imperialism that came to Australia—as capitalism and the state—have been reproduced and at best ameliorated. On this point, Wolfe’s analysis meets Povinelli’s when they both underline that even land rights proceed on the state’s terms because the possibility of other terms is lost (see Povinelli 2002). Furthermore, Wolfe’s account of the ‘repressive authenticity’ in land rights that limits the scope of Aboriginality and those to whom that status might apply echoes points made by Cowlishaw as early as 1987. With his usual overstatement, Wolfe is ready to suggest that land rights therefore are no more than domination. Merlan (1997) has contested this in terms of the experience and aspirations of Aboriginal people themselves.
Wolfe’s second point bears directly on my critique, which is also a defence of anthropology. It concerns his view of anthropology and the ethnographic task as such. Alone among the disciplines, Wolfe assumes that anthropology’s empirical records and its analysis of them will always be infused with notions of difference dictated by the more powerful culture from which the anthropologist (often) comes. Anthropology will speak for the other, misrepresent the other, and not be aware of it. Wolfe has sought to demonstrate this with his discussion of two foci in Australian anthropology—the Dreaming and Aboriginal nescience concerning procreation (Wolfe 1991, 1999:9–42). ‘Dreaminess’ and false notions of ‘virgin birth’ have stood in contrast to the productive and science-based society from which the anthropologist generally comes. This is Wolfe’s way of suggesting that there is an insurmountable problem at the heart of rendering difference. In order to interpret cultural difference, anthropologists must take their own culture as the reference point and thereby skew analysis, often in potent political ways. As Max Weber once observed, what is interesting and value relevant tends to ref lect the interpreter’s position. Weber wrote:
Order is brought into this chaos [of causes] only on the condition that in every case only a part of concrete reality is interesting and significant to us, because only it is related to the cultural values with which we approach reality. Only certain sides of the infinitely complex concrete phenomenon . . . are therefore worthwhile knowing. They alone are objects of causal explanation. And even this causal explanation evinces the same character; an exhaustive causal investigation of any concrete phenomena . . . is simply nonsense. (Weber 1949:79, emphasis in original)
Weber’s comment is in fact tough-minded. He proposes that there will be no accounts in a social science that are not value relevant. Ordered analysis can proceed only on the condition that particular values (and not some others) are in play. Nonetheless, there can be debate about what is ‘interesting’ and what forms of value relevance should be brought to an analysis.
The postcolonial critique has in fact been such a debate. It needs to be vigorous and far-reaching and from time to time renewed. Nonetheless, it does not obviate the need for or the viability of comprehending forms of cultural difference—especially in Australia. Below I argue that a better integration of historical and ethnographic method can assist in this task.
Beyond pathology and stereotypes
The argument of the preceding section does not deny that colonialism has been both a powerful and negative force in the lives of Indigenous peoples. In his account of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, Martin Nakata notes some ways in which fin de siècle evolutionism distorted the findings of science (Nakata 2007). His account shows why the descendants of the Islanders might place shadow quotes around the word ‘science’ as it was deployed among them in the 1890s. In addition, Nakata demonstrates the manner in which the fact of this research, whether or not it is read today, acts to interpolate a people. As a consequence, their own critique of the society and state of which they are now a part struggles for salience. Nakata’s task is to ‘savage the disciplines’ that described his forebears as ‘savages’. A significant part of his discussion concerns W.H.R. Rivers, trained as a psychologist and, once in the Torres Strait, intensely interested in kinship terminology and in the sociological study of relatedness. In anthropology, Rivers is regarded highly, notwithstanding his f lawed scientific accounts of so-called savage sensory abilities and his ‘histories’ of marriage and other forms of practice. Like Spencer and Gillen, Rivers presents the confronting paradox of gross error juxtaposed with insight.
Rivers and his colleagues arrived in Torres Strait determined to test the visual and aural acuity of Islanders. These tests would be followed by others concerning ‘taste and cutaneous sensations’, blood pressure and the like (Nakata 2007:43). Nakata’s account points to the use of measurement to render Islanders as native subjects of a European science (see also Anderson 2003:229–244). He also underlines the elaborate ideological context of this measurement, ostensibly worthy but also hedged about with European ambivalence: ‘The first task . . . was to counter claims that native people were closer to animals than they were to civilised people. Only after this was incontrovertibly established could these scientists proceed to show precisely how the savage mind interpreted the senses.’ The logic behind this research was that the natives could be similar to the civilised but not their equal. Faced with inconsistent results, Rivers resorted to ad hominem argument (Nakata 2007:43–47). Nakata is less convincing when he discusses Rivers’s kinship research and its significance. His notes Rivers’s propensity to describe the kinship terminology of Islanders as ‘complex’—to the outsider, Nakata suggests, but not to a Torres Strait Islander child (Nakata 2007:109–112). This is true of most classifications, kinship or otherwise. Forms of classification that we take for granted and can use ‘without thinking’ are seldom used so readily by those from another culture. Moreover, Nakata nowhere allows that there was something more to Rivers’s interest in this terminology. Rivers developed a ‘concrete’ or empirical method of recording genealogies from a number of related individuals. With it, he was able to confirm Lewis Henry Morgan’s point that terminologies are in fact indices of normative practice. In his own words, Rivers sought to demonstrate ‘the close connection between the terminology of the classificatory system of relationship and forms of social organisation’ (Rivers 1914:5). These forms of social organisation were conceived, after Morgan, as social systems that were more than mere domestic life. In sum, Rivers’s work was a major early contribution to a comparative sociology. He stood midway between the work of Morgan and Radcliffe-Brown in the growth of an understanding of small-scale, stateless societies.
Yet Rivers’s contribution did come amid spurious theories of evolution and diffusion. In his history of ethnology, American anthropologist Robert Lowie wrote of this aspect of Rivers’s work, ‘From beginning to end it rests on pure fantasies ingeniously interwoven’ (Lowie 1937:175). Meyer Fortes, professor of anthropology at Cambridge from 1950 to 1973, was equally critical. He remarked at length on ‘the preposterous theories’ involved in Rivers’s History of Melanesian Society (Fortes 1969:27). I cite these two critics within anthropology because they came well before Langham’s book-length and discriminating appraisal of Rivers in 1981, and Stocking’s more succinct but revealing account in his essay ‘The Ethnographer’s Magic’ (Langham 1981; Stocking 1992). None of these sources are cited by Nakata. Rather, the impression he leaves is that anthropology accepted the entire corpus of Rivers’s work, which was of uniform, negligible significance. This failure of scholarship obscures the more important parts of Martin Nakata’s book.
In its second section, Nakata demonstrates the adverse legacy of early missionary and scholarly writing on educational policy for the Torres Strait Islands. Post World War II decolonisation across the Southern Hemisphere brought changes in ideas about Indigenous Australians and the pedagogic task. Nakata traces a shift from early racist ideas to ones concerned with disadvantage. Still, this apparent advance brought its own problems. Islanders came to be seen almost solely in terms of disadvantage and deprivation (Nakata 2007:158). Time passed and ideas of cultural difference began to supersede those of disadvantage. One outcome was that ‘[previous] pedagogical practices were recognised as culturally inappropriate and incongruent with Islander learning styles and cultural ways. The use of English as the language of instruction was questioned’ (Nakata 2007:159). Parallel curricula were devised for the teaching of history, language and culture. As well-intentioned teachers sought to become culturally relevant, they also inscribed their pupils with their own ideas of difference. Worse, the preference of Torres Strait Islander parents for a mainstream curriculum in schools was interpreted by these teachers as a desire for a ‘white’ education (Nakata 2007:160–161). Nakata is right to be angry about this succession of failures, bequeathed in part by colonialism. The crucial feature of formal education in English is not its imagined ‘white’ status. Rather, the crucial feature is its role as a tool of knowledge and power within Australian society, the milieu of which Islanders are now a part. Nakata confirms that Torres Strait Islanders desire this tool for their children.
His discussion implies that analyses in universities can have a bearing on policy. The humanistic social sciences need to have a positive and not a negative inf luence on public domain knowledge. Therefore they should avoid the migration of both reification and naïve relativism into the policy domain. To this end, Nakata proposes forms of analysis framed historically and not as simply bounded accounts of ‘others’.7 He suggests that, henceforth, research on the Torres Strait Islands should take ‘the Cultural Interface’ as its focus. By this term Nakata intends a move away from approaches that present portraits of cultural wholes located in a distant past. Rather, the starting point should be the engagement that began with colonisation; a set of relations between groups. Nakata employs the term ‘trajectory’ to underline that Islanders, rather than being specified by a timeless culture, are instead specified by a structured process of historical engagement. The trajectories that different Islanders pursue articulate and re-articulate the relations between Torres Strait society and regional and global milieus. Nakata proposes to ‘give primacy to the Islander lifeworlds as a complex terrain of political and social contests. In this terrain we have developed a reading of ourselves at the interface of colliding trajectories; we continue to maintain our values as a people of tradition; we have actively shaped new practices and adapted our own to deal with the encroaching [world]’ (Nakata 2007:197). Given his own account of a Torres Strait history of change and cultural continuity, Jeremy Beckett would probably agree (Beckett 1987:18–23).8 I would simply add to Nakata’s formulations that histories of difference within the state will inevitably be mediated by histories of inequality in which minorities—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—work to supersede hegemonies and assert their own agency. This is a social, economic and political progress as well as one of representation. It bears on the cultural continuity produced. A scholar who is not an Islander or Aboriginal will quite likely write from a standpoint or an interest somewhat different from Nakata’s, although not necessarily so (Nakata 2007:214). Either way, forms of value relevance, as Weber termed them, can be argued about, and are, and will continue to be. This is the nature of humanistic social science.
What has the postcolonial critique achieved and what is its significance as a debate principally within the universities? For the purposes of my argument, two achievements are especially significant. First, the critique offered by history and Indigenous studies has provided a genealogy of the discourse of pathology in Australia regarding Indigenous peoples. From discussions of the savage as missing link, to parasites, dreamers and the intrinsically disadvantaged, this literature distils the legacy of popular culture and some scholarship for debates today. McGregor’s writing is seminal in this regard. Second, Wolfe and Nakata also provide valuable comment on the present. Wolfe underlines the marginalisation of remote Aboriginal people in Australia’s capitalism and the way in which land rights were as much a bounded welfare measure as they were restorative justice or equalitarian politics. His critique of anthropology is, in fact, a critique of the classical ethnography of the land rights period which, by virtue of its positioning, could not fulfil his request to address ‘the total social process’ of which it was a part (Wolfe 1999:178). As an educationist, Nakata’s critique fastened on issues he knows well. His discussion of schooling and curricula underlines that though Torres Strait Islanders may occupy a space of difference, they are also located within an Australian society. As citizens, Islanders require an education that provides them with the capabilities to be autonomous agents rather than mere clients of the state. Noel Pearson has had similar concerns for remote communities. Wolfe and Nakata reintroduce a politics of equality to the account of communities that for some time has been beholden only to a politics of difference. In this, their writings are consistent with the broader thrust of the postcolonial critique, which has placed the emphasis on Indigenous peoples as historical subjects rather than as timeless icons of difference. Their positions confirm that Indigenous Australian difference as recorded in ethnography has always been a difference mediated by the state and capitalism’s inequities.
I have described the postcolonial critique as a debate within the universities because it has been in major part a war of position between disciplines. This has been especially unfortunate for anthropology. A critique of the discipline as a colonial one was launched by some who played with the possibility of superseding it. As I have sought to show, the arguments put by both historians and practitioners of Indigenous studies have been overstated. At the same time, other important points have not been carried through. It is unfortunate, for instance, that Wolfe’s critique of the way in which classical ethnography has masked economic marginalisation did not take up more specific critiques written by Peterson and Beckett (see Peterson 1985 and Beckett 1987, 1988). In particular, Peterson’s observation that the communal property of land rights is anomalous in a capitalist society and therefore needs some explanation as a political and policy fact received little attention from Wolfe. Again, there has been little comment, if any, about the convergences between Wolfe’s work and Povinelli’s critique of the state (Povinelli 2002). Both have proposed that representations of Aboriginality have been mediated by the politics of state. Above I remarked that Wolfe’s concept of ‘repressive authenticity’ could apply equally to Povinelli’s account of the ‘cunning’ of the state’s recognition.9 This lack of analytical follow-through on the part of anthropology itself has also applied to the work of Cowlishaw and Beckett. Both anthropologists have worked in remote Australia as well as in the south-east. Each has theoretical points to make that are not specific to a region but rather to the practice of ethnography generally. Yet their forms of anthropology have not been trialled in a serious way for research in remote Australia.
As a result, although classical ethnography has been rejected as anthropology’s sole method, it has remained ensconced in research devoted to the homelands. Historians and practitioners of Indigenous studies have been disengaged from this field of research—which has been seen as a focus that involves enthnographers in the main. Where anthropology itself is concerned, classical ethnography has continued to supply the descriptions of communities that homelands consultancy responds to. Therefore, anthropology was poorly equipped, both conceptually and politically, to address a new round of pathologising used to highlight inequality at the expense of difference. Anthropology’s reified account of cultural difference would prove very hard to defend in the remote communities debate.