Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan
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we notice the plasticity of “culture,” its openness to history, why should we continue to frame the underlying logic of responses to the unexpected as “cultural”? Let us review this chapter’s examples: early “nonrecognition” of outsider presence, the recognition of whites as ghosts, and the identification of accessible whites as particular indigenous personalities. Can we find in the ethnographic record of “classical” Aboriginal culture the precedents of these responses?
Refusal of sensory contact is not recorded frequently in documentary accounts, but it appears often enough to suggest the systematic nature of this response. That is, it seems to have been patterned (not simply contingent) and recurrent. Therefore, in some sense it belongs to an interactional and socially transmitted repertoire within specific populations. There is much evidence for continental Australia suggesting that refusal of sensory uptake is a significant dimension of a spectrum of practices, some of which lie in the background of actors’ perception and capacity for explicit articulation. What follows suggests a long-term historical context for indigenous Australia that seems to have fostered this as a constitutive dimension of practice.
Precolonially, indigenous copresent groupings were typically of relatively small scale (varying with seasonal availability of resources, livelihood rounds, and events of meeting, celebration, and the like). Most were mobile over seasonal cycles within regions and meaningful landscapes well known to them. People moved in and out of local groups according to specific personal connections and circumstances.16 Ubiquitous modes of kinship and social classification provided the social means for continuing bonds and ways of orienting people’s relations with each other in this situation of generally small scale, mobility, and regular dispersal across a known, meaningful landscape.
The setting of small group life in which some people, intimately related, saw each other and cooperated every day, was/is nevertheless not aptly characterized by what is sometimes romantically imagined to be immediacy or unmediated availability of persons to others. First, there were always significant others who were not immediately present. Second, there was variation and specificity in how persons were understood, and there were relationships along dimensions of kinship and other kinds of social classification and relation, age, and gender. Some relationships were stereotypically characterized by closeness and intimacy, others were lived out at least partly in terms of highly formulated prescriptions of behavior. Consider, for example, the “joking relation,” with its “organized obscenity” enjoined in some regions between grandparents and grandchildren (Thomson 1932), and the explicit “avoidance” relations enjoined between categories of affines, notably son- and mother-in-law, on a very wide continental basis.17
Everyday life was lived with minimal built structures and other material means of separation within camp spaces. In these circumstances, direction of attention and orientation to others, on the one hand, and nonorientation, on the other, seem to have been major modalities for formulating, reproducing, and practicing relationships in differentiated ways. In terms of maximal contrast, with some people one could be physically close and involved. In relations with certain others, especially in-laws (with whom one might nevertheless be encamped) one had to maintain explicit physical and sensory nonengagement, conforming to notions of the proper behaviors among people related in this way. Such avoidance behavior cannot be understood as people just “staying away” from each other; it signals deliberate nonorientation that is socially significant and marked (Merlan 1997b). “Avoidance” is at one end of the sedimentation spectrum, where what one does is considered imaginatively and ideologically salient and highly communicable as a marker of what is important in social relations.
The famously complex social category systems of Australia—valued by indigenous people as foundational—can be understood as the context for their practiced modulation of directness versus indirectness, or for avoidance. Their continuing practice inculcated a more or less articulable sense of sensory circumspection. Their aversion of gaze and their other bodily orientations were relevant to culturally particular forms of agency and social relationship. These modalities developed as cultural under specific conditions of life. While their variable persistence today is conditional on life circumstances, circumspection and aversion still play a significant role in many indigenous settings.
For example, among all Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory I have known, direct gaze is considered intrusive and impolite; in the thought repertoire of older people, not explicitly reproduced as far as I know among younger people, direct gaze may even be lethal in some circumstances. Women I have known shared the idea that senior men could kill a child in utero by looking intently at the body of a pregnant woman. Women had to act appropriately to prevent this. Paperbark coverings were worn for the purpose; but more important, this was one dimension of gendered sensibilization, with women internalizing a sense of caution about behaving in ways that would invite aggression. Language encodes invasive direct gaze in a term of opprobrium that indigenous people translate as “lookin’-at bugger,” that is, one who causes a feeling of disquiet and makes one ill at ease by looking too directly. Anybody who has spent time in communities of (remote?) Australia will recognize the demand for appropriate behavior in the “growl”:18 “No more lookin’ at!” (i.e., don’t look, stare).19
In many places in the continent, particular relationships are constituted through norms of circumspection and avoidance. Some of these are also highly normative and ideologically salient. In southern Arnhem Land, women are to avoid their brothers, not speak directly to them, nor give them anything except through intermediaries (W. L. Warner 1937; Hiatt 1966; Burbank 1985; Merlan 2016a). Women who fail to live up to norms are threatened with violence. Stages of life—initiation into adulthood, as well as bereavement—were also marked by circumspection, avoidance, retreat into silence, and deliberate blockage of the visual and other senses.
Older sources on greeting behavior among local groups or persons coming into contact after a period of time report typical forms of spatial and bodily circumspection that suggest the constitutive and channeling quality of this dimension on forms of practice. An ethnographic report on the Edward River in Cape York in the early twentieth century renders the muted tenor of encounter:
Three men, each carrying a bundle of spears, spear-thrower and fire stick, appeared out of the scrub to the north of the camp. Although their approach was at once observed, causing an under-current of excitement in camp, no apparent notice whatever was taken of the men, who approached slowly to within about 40 feet of the northern fringe of the camp, where each squatted on the ground a few feet apart, placing his weapons in front of him. Not a word was spoken, and apparently no notice whatever was taken of their presence for about 10 or 15 minutes. Then a “big” man left the camp unarmed and strolled casually towards the man on the left, scraped a shallow depression in the ground close to him with his foot, as a native does before sitting down, and then squatted on the ground about a yard away from the visitor. Still not a word was spoken. They did not even look at one another, but kept their eyes downcast. After a few minutes had elapsed the old man of the camp spoke a few words in a low tone—inaudible to me where I stood a few yards away—and the other replied in the same casual way. Still neither looked up—lest he might betray to the watching camp the slightest interest or emotion. At length the old man called the single word Bat (fire) and a boy brought out a small piece of smouldering wood which he handed to the old man from the camp. This fire the old man then placed on the ground between himself and the visitor to whom he had spoken. In former times this no doubt concluded the ceremony, but on this occasion a tobacco pipe was lighted and handed to the visitor. A second man now left the camp, strolled casually over and spoke to the man at the other end of the line, making a present, which was reciprocated. A little later all entered the camp, to be followed in the evening by a larger party of which they were the forerunners. (Thomson 1932:163–64)
From Central Australia, based on observations of the late nineteenth century, we learn that visits to people with whom interaction was sporadic or irregular were characterized by the visitors first making smoke so that their intention to approach was made clear; then by placing themselves within sight of the camp. The visitor
does not at first go close up to it, but sits down in silence. Apparently no one takes the slightest notice of him, and etiquette forbids him from moving without being invited to do so. After