LAYERED IDENTITIES

[Australian] multiculturalism asserts that people with different roots can coexist, that they can learn to read the image-banks of others, that they can and should look across the frontiers of race, language, gender and age without prejudice or illusion, and learn to think against the background of a hybridized society. It proposes – modestly enough – that some of the most interesting things in history and culture happen at the interface between cultures. It wants to study border situations, not only because they are fascinating in themselves, but because understanding them may bring with it a little hope for the world.

– Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint (1993)

 

Bonding and bridging

In a 2006 essay I introduced the idea of layered identities as a way of understanding identity in pluralist societies. I thought the dominant metaphors of the “melting pot” and the “patchwork quilt” were too simplistic, the former implying some kind of muddy soup and the latter a diversity of patches held together in a united whole – but losing the idea that within each of these patches are layers of identity that extend beyond the patches, and sometimes across the whole quilt.

My thought was that by visualising identities as layers we would appreciate the richness and complexity of social identity. It enables us to see individuality and commonality. We can see what is common to members of groupings and what is individual to each member.

National identity is one layer – the largest and most significant within our country – but we can also identify as citizens of the world, or as members of the Anglosphere, the Jewish diaspora and so on. Although we are Australians, we are not just Australians: some of us are Queenslanders and others are South Australians. And we are not just Queenslanders: for some purposes, we are North Queenslanders or, more specifically still, Cape Yorkers.

And of course our identity as indigenous Australians is equally layered. At a continental level, we all think the black, red and yellow flag is a magnificent expression of our identity, but at a regional level we are also Kooris, Nyungars or Murris, and so on. At the traditional level, the layers are even more complex, comprising nations or tribes, language and dialect affiliations, clan and extended family estate groupings – encompassing songlines and common mythological tracks that traverse vast distances and involving numerous groupings.

At a linguistic level, there are commonalities that unite ancestral languages across Australia. The Guugu Yimidhirr I speak is part of a family of languages linguists call Pama-Nyungan (pama being the word for person in the languages of Cape York and nyunga being the word for person in the Nyungar languages of southwestern Australia). The ancient languages of the Pama-Nyungan family are spoken from Cape York down to the homelands of the Wiradjuri of New South Wales and across to Perth, and roughly from Mount Isa to Broome. Languages to the north and south of this largest grouping represent different families. This is why Guugu Yimidhirr from Cape York startle when they speak to Pitjantjatjara people from central Australia: the similarities between their languages are striking.

How people answer the question “What is your indigenous identity?” is therefore context-dependent. Whether people zoom in on their narrow clan affiliations or zoom out to a pan-Aboriginality depends upon the circumstances.

While ethnic and religious identities are primary layers, there are many other layers of shared identification: geography, historical association, recreational and social groups, intellectual and artistic communities, as well as sexual orientation and political and other modern cultural affiliations.

Some of these – such as sporting affiliations – may seem trivial compared to, say, ethnic identity, but actually they play important roles in creating connections across the more primary affiliations. These more ephemeral and seemingly unserious affiliations add to the great fund of capital in society which underpins social cohesion. That we may treat these affiliations with playful seriousness probably helps us to have a perspective that would be missing if we only had primary layers of identity. Sporting and other recreational codes and teams are not unimportant layers of identity.

My idea of layered identities complemented Amartya Sen’s analysis in Identity and Violence (2006), where he referred to the “illusion of singular identity.” Sen argued we should recognise “competing affiliations” and “competing identities,” not in the sense of divided allegiances or a lack of loyalty to the sovereign state, but in recognition of the plurality of identities in any society.

Sen was particularly insightful in respect of multiculturalism. Although Australian conservatives have at times sought to criticise multiculturalism, the policy remains well regarded here. The electoral consequences of trying to abandon it, and the fact that leading liberals and conservatives are champions of its history, make their critique unlikely to prevail.

Yet Sen’s analysis allows us to see what can be a problem with multiculturalism if you are concerned for national unity. When there is a singular focus on culture, as defined by ethnicity and religion, and a lack of emphasis on other layers of identity and affiliation, a problem can arise. Cultures become identity blocs when ethnicity and religion are seen as the single dominant affiliation.

Sen shows how opponents and supporters of multiculturalism often share the same illusion: the illusion of culture as a singular identity. There are therefore not just two possibilities – monoculturalism or multiculturalism – but a third as well: plural monoculturalism. This is when several singular identity blocs within a society are isolated and disconnected from each other. Having weak or no bonds with one another, these monocultures end up insular and resistant to a larger mutuality.

This is the potential weakness, not multiculturalism proper. Societies should guard against and work to prevent multiculturalism degenerating into plural monoculturalism, where groups end up raising cultural ramparts against each other.

An antidote to this is what Robert D. Putnam calls “social capital.” In his Bowling Alone (2000), Putnam identified those things that contribute to bonding within religious, ethnic and socio-economic groups. But he also identified those things that contribute to bridging between groups, strengthening ties among disparate groups. His examples of such bridging include the civil rights movement and ecumenical religious organisations.

Plainly, Putnam’s idea of social capital is directly applicable to an analysis of identity. Individuals and groups form bonding and bridging affiliations, and, as with the warp and weft of a multi-layered fabric, a society is all the stronger for them.

 

Fundamentalism and orthodoxy

Identity fundamentalism is the enemy of commonwealths. When individuals and groups elevate one layer of their identity to the exclusion of all others, then we have a problem. Such chauvinism can arise at the level of subgroups, and at the national level.

While fundamentalism is a problem, orthodoxy is not. Nations such as Australia have orthodox Christian, Jewish and Islamic communities without this being inconsistent with multicultural harmony. Political and cultural conservatives play the role of upholding the country’s Anglo culture and inheritance. Like their non-Anglo counterparts, the conservatives of Quadrant and the Samuel Griffith Society are a minority, but they uphold traditions that serve society as a whole. Without a core of orthodox conservatives, modern societies would descend into a soulless cosmopolitanism. Conservatism respects memory, tradition, ritual and values that we have inherited, over and above an enthusiasm for the future and indulgence in the present.

T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1921) captures the vital presence of tradition in the contemporary productions of European artists:

 

He must be aware that the mind of Europe – the mind of his own country – a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind – is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsman …

Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.

 

But orthodoxy that reduces to fundamentalism is not conservatism. True conservatism equips societies and peoples to contend with the modern world and change: it is not obscurant to the changing world. Conservatism understands that fundamentalism is antipathetic to the commonwealth.

Galarrwuy Yunupingu is an Australian conservative, and he desires to hold on to things older than Homer and the Bible. “Where would we be without Homer and the Old Testament?” Don Watson asked in a February 2014 essay in the Monthly. I think this is what Yunupingu means when he says of the song cycles of his culture: “My inner life is that of the Yolngu song cycles, the ceremonies, the knowledge, the law and the land. This is yothu yindi. Balance. Wholeness. Completeness.” Yunupingu’s question equivalent to Watson’s is: where would my people be without the Yolngu song cycles? This question sits within a larger question: where would Aboriginal Australians be without the song cycles of Aboriginal Australia? And this question in turn sits within the largest question: where would Australia and Australians be without the song cycles of Aboriginal Australia?

At the 2014 Garma festival, I heard the renowned indigenous film-maker and broadcaster Rachel Perkins give an arresting account of urgent work she is doing to record the remaining knowledge of songlines held by women in central Australia:

 

In Arrernte country, we were lucky to have a very big desert that kept the colonisers back for a further 100 years than the southern states.

Although we pride ourselves on holding onto elements of our classical culture – and although we have our language – the truth is, we are one generation from losing our songs.

These songlines connect us with other tribes – and most importantly connect us with each other in the Arrernte world.

 

She described how in 2013 she became aware of the desperate need for action:

 

The women were required to perform and open a festival in Alice Springs at Werlayte Thurre, the place of the Two Sisters Dreaming, where my father was born.

Gathered together to discuss the arrangements, we realised that the song for that place had been lost – an old lady had died, taking the song with her. Our neighbours, the Pitjantjatjara women, could teach us – as they knew the verses that connected their part of the songline with ours – but it was in their language, not ours. It wouldn’t be appropriate, so it was unable to be performed. Of course people and culture innovate and we adapted.

However, this realisation galvanised us into action.

 

She went on:

 

We are working strategically, woman by woman, to create an inventory of our songlines, and then we intend to record and fully annotate them for future generations.

Yet we have identified perhaps only ten to twenty women, from the thousands of Arrernte women, who are still holders of these songs.

There is no funding for this type of project, so we dress it up as a documentary, or an online multi-platform project, when really what we want to do is record the songs, our dreamings, the first stories, the heritage that is the true and original Australian culture.

 

And then she laid out the big vision:

 

Our hope is that in 200 years a young Arrernte women, who may not have her language or her grandmother to teach her, will be able to listen and learn from these recordings made by her great-great-grandmother and sing the songs of her country: her birthright.

Our hope is that these songs will also be there for all Australians. So we can carry the ancient memory that binds us to this land we share.

Our hope is to create a model that might be used by other Aboriginal nations.

There is such great need for this work at this critical time to ensure the songlines continue to connect us all.

 

On this level, Perkins is a conservative in the sense that Yunupingu is. It is one layer of her cultural identity as an Arrernte woman. Her concerns, her valuation of what is important, her anxieties and energies are channelled into a conservative project: to keep the songlines of her people and Aboriginal people traversing the heart of the continent. Her sense of responsibility is that of a conservative.

But she is mostly known for another layer of her cultural identity: that of film-maker and artist. In this layer she is thoroughly modern, working at the boundaries of indigenous culture and the wider currents of global culture. Her politics are more leftist than not, making her more orthodox cultural concern even more striking for its obvious conservatism.

Perkins’ layers of indigenous identity are complex and sui generis to her own choices and orientation.

 

The bicultural vision

Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s brother Mandawuy probably did most to articulate biculturalism as the goal for the Aboriginal future in Australia. It was a vision which inspired me, and which we adopted in our thinking about the future of our children in Cape York Peninsula.

We see our future as living in two worlds and moving between each: the Aboriginal world and the wider world. These worlds are not just physical or geographical – though the homeland of the Aboriginal world provides its foundation. These worlds are a matter of mind-frame, and one can move between these two worlds in many contexts, not just physically. Just as the Orthodox Jew might be a lawyer or an entrepreneur during the week, but retreat for the Sabbath from sundown on Friday, Aboriginal biculturalism involves the ability to switch between layers of identity – from Mandawuy’s participation in the ceremonial life of the Yolngu, to his leading a rock and roll band blending the modern forms of popular music and the language, dance and song of the Yolngu.

We should make two important observations about layered identities and the preservation of Australia’s most ancient cultural heritage.

The first is that Aboriginal people desire a bicultural future and there is no monocultural past that we can return to. The Yunupingu brothers recognised this, and their life’s work has been to show the viability and excitement of this vision – which they have done – and to secure the conditions for its realisation in the long-term – which they have not. Not yet.

The second is that, as Perkins said, the songlines of the women of central Australia are also the heritage of non-Aboriginal Australians. It is this culture that is the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia. It is these mythic stories that are Australia’s Book of Genesis. For the shards of the classical culture of this continent to vanish would be a loss not only to its indigenous peoples but also to all Australians, and to the heritage of the world generally. We would all be the poorer for the loss.

It is in this sense that Australians all have a layer of their identity that connects them to the cultures, languages and lands of the continent. This is the true meaning of commonwealth.