Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan
under what circumstances, and what may it morph into?
Nonrecognition at early encounter was a tentative, transitory experiment. Would the ignored strangers disappear or at least remain distant? The indigenous people may have dealt with other unfamiliar or unexpected creatures in this way. They may have felt themselves to be in the presence of something weird or threatening. They were not eager to further the engagement (while the outsiders typically were), but they no longer had the capacity to shape their actions autonomously of those outsiders. Their nonresponse was under external influence.
First Contact
The phrase “first contact” often refers to first contact between entire peoples previously unknown to each other, usually “moderns” and “preindustrials.” In commenting on various terms applied to the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus’s Bahamian landing, Caribbeanist anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995:114–15) noted that the term “conquest” was challenging the conventional term “discovery.” He considered the rising popularity of the term “encounter” as evidence of “the capacity of liberal discourse to compromise between its premises and its practice.” “Encounter” sweetens the horror, he argued, as it evokes give-and-take. A reminder of indigenous agency, “encounter” is part of recent rehabilitation of the category of the indigene who had all too long been portrayed as simply vanquished. Trouillot objected that emphasis on give-and-take fails to acknowledge the hugely unequal resources and outcomes that “conquest” places more clearly in focus. There is much about the historical outcomes, as Trouillot observed, that refuses sweetening.
For Tzvetan Todorov, author of The Conquest of America (1999), what took place after 1492 was not only the invasion and progressive subjugation of one group of peoples by another; it was principally, and perhaps predictably, the fatal meeting of two different sign systems, two ways of interpreting the world. The predominantly preliterate Aztecs lived in a world that, according to Todorov, was tradition- and past-oriented and with an inherent or internal relation to what we call “nature” rather than one of externality. In what probably counts as the dénouement of the book, the Aztecs, confronting a critical situation in which “the art of improvisation matters more than that of ritual” (p. 87), were unable to counter the arrival of Cortés because they were paralyzed in the conviction that he was a god. Europeans were able to assert themselves through their different (let us follow some of Todorov’s wordings and say “superior”) ability to use and manipulate signs; logos over mythos.5 Indigenous people and conquistadors lived in different worlds of meaning.
Todorov’s story of European capacity to understand others better than those others’ capacity to understand Europeans is pervaded by moral critique, and he refers to the resulting destruction of pre-Columbian society. But is this the only way to narrate processes of culture change? Studying the Yucatecan Maya, following the Spanish conquest and throughout the colonial period, William F. Hanks (2010) provides evidence of the adoption of aspects of an originally alien culture. He thus offers an alternative to Todorov’s story of cultural collapse. To raise this point does not downplay the drastic nature of colonial impact—in Mexico or in Australia. However, positing of complete collapse implies that little or nothing of interest remains in its wake, and it fails to deal with the specific courses of colonial histories.6
Perhaps the best-known first contact account to North American and European academia is Marshall Sahlins’s (1985) treatment of the Hawaiian adventure, then misadventure, of Captain Cook. In his last voyage to the South Pacific (1777, after his first visit to Australia in 1770), Cook was (mis)recognized as Lono, the deity of seasons whose arrival Hawaiians awaited and celebrated annually. Sahlins’s “first contact” theorem is that people greet the unexpected or novel in categories and forms of action already familiar to them. There is evidence that after first associating with the annually returning god, Hawaiians rapidly found this identification contentious and became disabused of it. The seeming felicity of Hawaiian and English coincident identities imploded (partly because of competition between priestly and chiefly factions that came to involve Cook), and Hawaiians killed him and some of his crew at Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawaii in 1779.
Sahlins suggested that the events of encounter proceeded, initially at least, in terms of a Hawaiian cultural logic (Sahlins 1985). The assertion was, for him and some others, important for its preservation of the relevance of “culture” and as a riposte to other analysts seen as reducing or fitting non-European histories to the history of global capitalism (cf. Wolf 1982). Just as important, however, seems to be the fact that the original identification was short-lived. According to Nicholas B. Dirks (1996), Sahlins deals only with a dramatic first moment of culture contact; he argues that the notion of distinct “cultural orders” survives Sahlins’s analysis relatively intact. His emphasis is on the question how cultural categories change, rather than on the openings produced in the historicity of social life.
Though their accounts differ in some ways, both Todorov and Sahlins emphasize indigenous people’s dealing with otherness by deploying conventional, preexisting forms of categorization: in both Mexico and Hawaii, this involved misrecognizing arriving Europeans as gods. Even accepting the likelihood that this may have occurred as part of the spectrum of first contact responses, what part does this play in our understanding of the relationships that went forward from those moments? We need to recognize greater openness in what is meant by “culture” and to be wary of holistic notions of culture/s. Of course people will bring aspects of their existing ways of thinking and doing to engagement with the strange and unknown. But perhaps the situations have prompted indigenous people to think and respond in alternative ways, and produced something new?
Richard White has coined the term “middle ground” to draw attention to the new culture generated beyond the “first contact.” In The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, the “middle ground” is “some common conception of suitable ways of acting” (White 1991:50). It is not entirely anybody’s, but a product of European-Indian interaction. The “middle ground” was a historical phase, entailing that each “side” (complex assortments of Indian and European actors and groups) strove to attain cultural legitimacy in terms that the other could recognize, under conditions in which neither side could achieve its ends solely through force. This produced outcomes in which Frenchmen and Algonquians act more as they think the other will recognize, in ways thus influenced by them, than they otherwise would. This asserts the importance of dimensions of mutuality in circumstances of ongoing contact across boundaries of difference—continual awareness of being (visible) in an interactive zone.
Australian historian Henry Reynolds (2006:7) has denied the existence of any such “middle ground” in Australia in which those in encounter sought to achieve mutual recognition and intelligibility. Effectively, the power relation was at no stage as nearly equal as in the Great Lakes case. Reynolds is correct insofar as the scale and density of settler-indigenous relations in Australia gave less opportunity for whites’ enculturation into indigenous ways. With the possible exception of subsistence graziers and dingo scalp hunters on the most marginal pastoral country (Finlayson 1952:116), there was no Australian frontier equivalent to the continual involvement of French fur traders with Indians on the Great Lakes. Nevertheless, White’s historicization of frontier culture invites us to consider the roles of violence and material exchange in the quest for mutual intelligibility in all encounter material.
The Openness of Copresence, and Interaction Rituals
We need to consider the timescales at which nonrecognition occurs and its social extension: how does something that initially happened between small encountering groups such as these become characteristic of a broader relationship? And what role does it play there, as in indigenous-nonindigenous relations in contemporary Australia? Encounter between indigenous people and outsiders proceeded and intensified over the following decades from such moments as the nonresponsive ones discussed at the start of this chapter. Expansion of interaction resulted in changes in the ways that these people “on the ground” dealt with each other and fed back into and accompanied other changes occurring elsewhere in the larger frameworks in terms of which they did so, over time producing changes in kinds of persons, understandings and surmises