Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan

      CHAPTER 2

      Imitation as Relationality in Early

      Australian Encounters

       Mere (?) Imitation

      Europeans came to new lands such as Australia prepared to see and emphasize radical cultural, indeed civilizational difference. Sometimes, they succeeded in doing otherwise and recognized the quickness, the observational acuity, the mirth, and other characteristics of the people they were meeting. In many early journals of exploration, Europeans in direct, face-to-face contact with indigenous people remarked on those people copying what they themselves had done: imitation at close quarters. They recognized the model, the source material, as their own actions, copied by their indigenous interlocutors.

      For example, Nicolas Baudin, the leader of the French expedition to map the coast of Australia, 1800–1803, reported that Bruny Island natives came to them in the vicinity of what he called Port Cygnet, in the southern part of present Tasmania, in the hopes of obtaining presents (or so he thought), and they received “what we gave them with great outbursts of joy.” He goes on, “They imitated easily and with gestures, and repeated clearly several French words” (1974:345).

      The natives’ repetition of words of foreign languages and of the texts of songs accurately amazed Europeans. The outsiders considered it something they themselves could not easily do. The French explorer and naturalist with the Baudin expedition, François Péron, candidly compared himself with Bruny Islanders (Tasmanians) in this regard: “Generally, they appeared to me to have much intelligence; they grasped my gestures with ease; from the very first instant they seemed to perfectly understand their object; they willingly repeated words which I had not been able to seize at first, and often laughed when, wishing to repeat them, I made mistakes, or pronounced them badly” (in Roth 1899:36). “Imitation” implies not only a model and copy of it but also mutual awareness of this copying in some degree. Imitation, like nonrecognition, is best seen as a family of relational practices. Imitation requires focused attention upon what another is doing, and in this sense it differs from nonrecognition examined in the previous chapter. However, refusal of uptake also involves attentiveness, but presentation of oneself as not attending. The two modalities are therefore not completely opposite.

      Early accounts of imitation sometimes noted it as a talent characteristic of primitive people. Contrary to this view, this chapter argues that imitative behavior may be a practice especially oriented to identification and relationship. As well, the occurrence of imitation in early encounter suggests that it was highly honed and developed in indigenous Australia.

       Common to Men in a Savage State?

      Early observers of indigenous Australians saw their imitative (mimetic) behavior as evidence of their primitive character, mere imitation, rather than creativity. During the long voyage of the Beagle (1831–36) Charles Darwin visited the locales of many groups then considered primitive, including Patagonia, Chile, New Zealand, and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). He had both an evolutionist and comparativist perspective. In his Journal of Researches he says of the Tierra del Fuegians:

      They are excellent mimics: as often as we coughed or yawned or made any odd motion, they immediately imitated us. Some of our party the officers began to squint and look awry; but one of the young Fuegians (whose face was painted black excepting a white band over his eyes) succeeded in making far more hideous grimaces. They could repeat with perfect correctness each word in any sentence we addressed them, and they remembered such words for some time…. All savages appear to possess, to an uncommon degree, the power of mimicry. I was told, almost in the same words, of the same ludicrous habit among the Caffres: the Australians, likewise, have long been notorious for being able to imitate and describe the gait of any man, so that he may be recognized…. How can this [mimetic] faculty be explained? Is it a consequence of the more practiced habits of perception and keener senses, common to all men in a savage state, as compared with those long civilized? (1896:206)

      At the end of his stay in Australia, Darwin witnessed a White Cockatoo “corrobery” (“great dancing-party”),¹ which he characterized as “rude” and “barbarous.” He noted the dancers’ close imitation of the emu in one dance, of the kangaroo in another, and though he was otherwise unable to find in the performance “any sort of meaning,” he observed that “the [indigenous] women and children watched the whole proceeding with the greatest pleasure” (Darwin 1896:451).

      To see imitation as a particular talent, or capacity, of such “primitive” people as Australian Aborigines is a recurring theme in colonists’ observations. The report of the New South Wales Board for the Protection of Aborigines for 1910 (Legislative Assembly 1911) noted that children in the school at Ngoorumba (near Bundarra, New South Wales) display great interest in gardening, though it “is new to them,” and make fair progress “in such subjects as give scope to their imitative faculties.” The primitives’ imitative faculty is one item in a wider apprehension of their weakness. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas about Australian Aborigines were often cast narratively, in terms of civilizational difference between “them” as primitives being overwhelmed by “us” as civilized people. In Darwin’s time, the assumption was generally made that primitives were to disappear and would be unable to survive the changes overcoming them. Tasmania astonished Darwin, in this respect: “I do not know a more striking instance of the comparative rate of increase of a civilization over a savage people” (1989:329). To most readers of our time, this seems an intolerable amalgam of direct naming of wrongs perpetrated upon and by indigenous people, followed by a scientific-sounding objectification of events in terms of inexorable forces: “rate of increase” and the like.

      In later views of the vulnerability of Aboriginal society, its collapse was due to the high degree of integration among societal institutions: if one thing gives, so do all the rest (see Chapter 1, n. 6). The idea that change entails collapse has been countered (in a usually fraught and politicized atmosphere) in recent decades by an equally mistaken position that continuity entails no deep change (or at least none that can be readily admitted to discussion). And, rather than regard them as “primitive,” Australian Aboriginal society has been promoted as one in which the person-land relation is primary and continuous, and indigenous social practice is fundamentally to be seen in terms of kinship and relationality (cf. Glaskin 2012). In re-presenting Aborigines as kinds of persons, this revised account also suggests that their capabilities persist through major alterations in context.

      The alternative to these collapse and survival tropes is to acknowledge that the person is a social category continually reconstituted—though partially rather than entirely—as social circumstances change. On this view, imitative behavior is historically and socially specific and exists in relation to other practices at particular times. But practices and dispositions are certainly not entirely mutable. Imitativeness is also clearly part of a general human repertoire. Persistence of such cultural phenomena may be in terms that are not explicit but more tacit, as discussed in the previous chapter.

      We should recognize the relevance of a general human capacity for mimesis, while also attending to its sociohistorical specificity. This opens the way to theorize different forms of the phenomenon and to suggest, if not fully illustrate, a spectrum of imitative behavior. In such a spectrum questions of the structure and dimensions of variation become interesting and