Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan
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sit down on the ground beside the stranger. If the latter be the bearer of any message, or of any credentials, he will hand these over, and then perhaps the old man will embrace him and invite him to come into the camp…. Very likely he may be provided with a temporary wife during his visit, who will, of course, belong to the special group with which it is lawful for him to have marital relations. (Spencer and Gillen 1927: vol. 2, p. 505)20
These examples from different regions indicate that bodily and orientational circumspection, including silence, downcast gaze, and the damping down of sensory availability in close proximity of others, was a highly developed dimension of the conduct of relationships and of special events in which the question of ongoing or resumed relationship was sensitive (Stanner 1937). This may be called “cultural.” In contemporary settings that have undergone much change, such behavior is evident. In camps and settlements that I have visited indigenous people consider it intrusive to directly enter an indigenous camp or housing area where one is not a regular resident or otherwise well known. This is especially so for a white person, but this etiquette is observed and demarcates boundaries of greater and lesser familiarity among indigenous people themselves. Preferred protocol involves sitting or standing some distance away to await recognition; or a circumspect and very visible, slow approach while remaining at some distance. One’s gaze is best indirect or averted (Burbank 1994:84). Yasmine Musharbash (2016) describes a contemporary Central Australian community, Yuendumu, in which improved opportunities for Aboriginal people to access housing now sometimes result in their living next door to white service personnel. But in her experience of twenty years’ observation in the community, Warlpiri do not attend to nonindigenous neighbors visually or in any other way, nor do they talk about them, she reports, in their own daily conversations.
One of the most widely remarked emotions associated with indigenous social life is that of “shame” (Myers 1986; Harkins 1990; Burbank 1994), and this seems relevant. Shame is often manifest as a bodily enacted shyness (involving aversion of gaze, withdrawn demeanor) and sometimes explained by indigenous people as what comes from uncertainty, public exposure, a feeling of inadequacy or wrongdoing. To be guided by shame, to be withdrawn in these ways, removes from others the opportunity and reason, as indigenous people might say, for “lookin’ at.”
Nowadays, physical and sensory circumspection is an aspect of indigenous behavior that is often judged to require modification by schoolteachers (Harkins 1990) and others seeking to make indigenous children conform to valued models of attentive and productive behavior. This has helped to make it a subject of conscious awareness and a dimension of what indigenous people see as proper behavior, informing their explicit understanding of themselves. They often contrast circumspection with the outgoing behavior of nonindigenous others who “got no shame.” As indigenous people, over a long period, have been made to feel inadequate and subordinate, circumspection may have been amplified or taken on special salience in relations with nonindigenous people.
Circumspection in all forms is very much part of what is abandoned by indigenous people under the influence of excessive alcohol: drunken behavior often seems to flaut the usual norms of deportment by deliberate intrusiveness and provocation (and is also often marked by complaints of social abandonment by others; Merlan 1998:198).
Indigenous forms of life have been radically altered in all parts of the continent, varying somewhat with the extent of colonial-era and later disruption and relocation of indigenous people, their conversion into semisedentary workforces, their institutionalization in missions, schools, and so on. However, it seems plausible to claim that sensibilities concerning bodily practices based upon the modulation of gaze, proximity, and other forms of bodily orientation continue to be significant through (and to some extent as a result of) some of these quite dramatic changes. They have acquired contrastive significance and value for indigenous people as specifically “blackfella” behavior.
Summing Up
Meeting aliens, indigenous people had to shortly adapt and adopt practices, change what they did, and perhaps explicitly change their minds. In the first instance, they sometimes refused perceptual contact and may have thought that these apparitions would go away. But of course they did not. We have posed questions about nonrecognition: Was it deliberate? Was it concerted? In what sense was it cultural? In relation to identification of whites as spirits of the dead, we have more specific guidance from the accounts. It often seems to have been very explicit and specific; and it was certainly based on quite explicit prior conceptions and categories. We noted also, however, that it seemed to be immediately available for questioning in unusual circumstances, either in terms of the general category, or whites’ identification with it, or both.
Vignettes of refusal of sensory uptake and the identification of outsiders as spirits of the dead have provided material for exploration of culture and what is cultural. Preexisting cultural practice is important to all encounter, but accounts that examine it in such terms have been problematic in the extent to which they narrow the discussion to categories and changes in them. This works to thin out the notion of what is cultural and limits a historicizing approach. While attention to preexisting cultural influences reproduced in ongoing social process is important, scholarship has been principally oriented toward the question “What remains the same?” Attention to the preexisting practice does not provide the material for understanding the evident disequilibration, both positive and negative, that often accompanied encounter across boundaries of difference (Chapter 3).
Our concept of culture must enable a relational account of interaction across considerable boundaries of difference. Our perspectives on social process need to recognize culture’s potential for openness, historicity, multiscale temporality, and its power-laden character. Culture refers to practices that are differentially entrenched, layered, or sedimented and differentially available to reflection and change. Change may occur through taken-for-granted assumptions being suddenly cast into question by events—such as the startling emergence of explorers whose initial identification as “ghosts” certainly did not settle ongoing questions of what to make of them and how to deal with them. Modalities such as nonrecognition and aversion continue to perfuse and constitute forms of everyday practice across perceived boundaries of difference whether these are internal or with respect to people seen as outsiders.
In the final part of this chapter I returned to its first theme—the somewhat unexpected form of encounter manifested in nonrecognition and refusal of sensory uptake. I suggested that this response is distinctly “cultural,” in that sensory circumspection (e.g., “greeting behavior,” “in-law avoidance”)21 is regarded by indigenous people as highly marked and as value bearing and worthy of mention as part of who they are, as part of their “culture,” or “blackfella rule” now contrasting with “whitefella.”
The chapter suggested that, in its wide and diverse distribution, sensory circumspection marks out a dimension of conduct that is deeply culturally entrenched, different from some more common acceptations of “culture” in being a modality of behavior rather than identifiable as thinglike. Some forms of this circumspection were and are more extreme than others and may merit being called “avoidance.”22 I sketched the general conditions under which such cultural forms became fundamental. These involved a small-scale and often highly dispersed, only periodically intensified, kind of sociality. This kind of life was supported in specific cultural forms (such as inclusive, extensible kinship and social categorization) that enabled long-term interdependence, continuity of connection, mitigated small scale and dispersal, and enabled seasonal and social flexibility (see Stanner 1958).
Such circumspection, deeply sedimented and distributed in indigenous practice, is more enduring under particular and even changing conditions of life than is any specific practice (such as avoidance of certain categories of kin or specific ways of showing respect). Forms of action in encounter—sensory circumspection, particular kinds of categorization—have some element of prior cultural content and shape, but the range of matters to which people may orient as new or salient is too varied for us to insist that responses are contained in distinct or necessarily accessible cultural terms. Change in these forms points to changes in indigenous-nonindigenous relationship, as an increasingly shared (but unequal) social world and mutually recognized