Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan
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messages. They were fleeting and unstable and also evidently frequently asymmetrical. Asymmetry in imitative relationships is a dimension that figures in both Taussig and Bhabha and calls for further comment here.
Of course, our data are themselves asymmetric: they come from one side. They suggest that indigenous people imitated outsiders more than the reverse (although instances are reported of Europeans engaging in imitative behavior, often a response to what they clearly took as imitative on the part of indigenous people). No doubt native imitation drew upon capacities strongly developed culturally among Australian indigenous people—in hunting, dancing, everyday sensibilities and capabilities developed in cultural forms of observation, body movement, and interaction (see, e.g., Ellis 1980, 1984; Marett 2000; von Sturmer 1987; Wild 1977–78). However, the reported imitation must be placed in the context of the instability, volatility, and uncertainty in the relations between the parties. In that world-historic context, there was—as the journals show—great attentiveness on the part of outsiders and indigenes to each other’s emotional states. In such circumstances, imitation is one way of recognizing and drawing out and probing the condition of the other, as well as signaling identification with him.
That the economy of mimetic behavior was typically unbalanced, in that the Europeans were more imitated than imitating, is not surprising. It may be partly explained in terms of the wider framing in which imitative behavior occurred. Europeans came equipped with prior (“framing”) ideas about what savages were like and, accordingly, were less oriented toward building bridges to them than were indigenous people toward the Europeans; and Europeans were certainly inclined to see their interaction with indigenous people in channeled, experimental, purposeful, and often quite overtly instrumental terms.
To engage in some of the kinds of imitation we see described in various colonial journals—copying of the other, understood by the parties as such—was not to use signs to convey some kind of question or message formulated outside the encounter. Many of these acts of imitation were not conventional nor tokens of regular expression-content relationships but focused upon the immediate encounter itself, making it interactive and at least fleetingly collaborative by doing what the other does and having the effect of creating and prolonging a moment, temporarily deferring questions of what was to come next.
This suggests a view of mimesis in early encounter as a way of relating to the unknown other by becoming an experiential analogue of him, at least temporarily, at the same time persisting in observation of one’s interaction with him as participant in it. This by no means excludes—indeed, the possibility of continuous reflexivity positively includes—the kind of playful and ironic behavior we observed on the part of the woman who sang after M. Bellefin, expanding the occasion to include byplay with her peers, of which he was the apparent target.
Imitation seems to have been a readily available modality of establishing engagement, some commonality of an immediate sort. It created a bridge between oneself and another in the “copying,” embodying the other in a way that was noticed. To the extent that it was noticed, imitation was a means of relating self and other, among other things, in the mutual realization of the imitative behavior itself. By miming and reproducing what the other does, one can literally feel oneself to be building a collaborative activity. Thus, to elaborate on Taussig’s formulation, this is a production of the self-other dialectic, with potentials for both identification and differentiation with and from others. It seems crucial that imitative behavior be recognized as such by one’s interlocutor. Indeed, given the extent of attention paid to the phenomenon in European explorers’ journals, it seems that indigenous people’s acts were regularly recognized as imitative. And in such moments of recognition, some of the questions about the instability and indeterminacy of relationship that were so salient in early encounters (but not only then) were, at least temporarily, deferred.
This enactment of mutual identification, then, coexisted with refusal as an early type of response. In the next chapter we will expand our view of the range of other kinds of mediations in early and later relationships and in so doing attempt to locate some principal differences between indigenous and nonindigenous forms of action that become heightened in their intersection.
Imitation is another aspect of power relations unfolding in asymmetrical performance, as was the one-sidedness of refusal of sensory uptake on encounter. These early moments in which those in encounter had little experience of each other and came to it from quite different points of view were characterized, as the discussion has shown, by lability and instability, as well as attentiveness of outsiders and locals to emotional states of joy, anger, and so on that they imputed to each other. Imitative behavior of a more affective rather than reflective kind was deployed in the unstable and uncertain contexts of early encounter, often characterized by great intensity and reciprocal attention on the part of outsiders and indigenes to each other’s emotional states. At the same time, we have seen in a number of examples indigenous people’s turning imitative action initiated with Europeans as their focus toward their own audience, often for comic effect, exemplified by the woman who sang for/in relation to Bellefin.
Attending to others requires complementarity—a relation “between,” unfolding in time and space—which can exist as a matter of degree and quality and thus imply questions of power and influence. Sometimes in the first instance indigenous people acted the other, creating a recognized ground of commonality. The indigenous people seem to have been more prepared to do this and habitually more at home with imitative action than the outsiders. Yet while we need to recognize imitative capacity as cultivated culturally in indigenous practices, it should not be taken as evidence of fundamental difference of human civilizational kinds, a property of a kind of society or kind of person. Imitation as in these examples is much better understood as grounded in honed cultural capabilities, relational and inevitably transitional between and dependent upon other modes of action.
To refute the interpretation of early imitative behavior as evidence of primitivity is perhaps not difficult to do, as few admit nowadays to ideas of others as “primitives.” We nevertheless have to remember how it was interpreted then, as by Darwin; and we must remember that it continues, in altered ways, to be so interpreted to this day—more in the guise of persisting otherness. Even the Benjaminian orientation of Taussig, toward an understanding of the ways in which outsiders and locals become mutually entangled, assumes an original degree of otherness in terms of which imitation is linked with naturalistic powers of copying, rather than as a basic and culturally highly developed framework for sociability. Otherness there is, no doubt; but sociability tends to get overlooked.
I return here to the suggestion made earlier that a more appropriate understanding of imitative behavior is as both generically human and a specific, culturally developed capacity, and that the interaction between these levels and its changing character need to be couched in a wider view that acknowledges kinds of person as social categories continually reconstituted—though partially rather than entirely—as social circumstances change. The persistence of the conventional interpretation of imitative behavior as primitive is part of the historical imbalance shaped by preconceptions, lived in the encounters themselves, and surviving them in some of the ways that these encounters have been subsequently understood.
CHAPTER 3
Mediations
In no Australian indigenous language that I know or know of is there a word that can be readily translated by the multipurpose English word “thing”; nor is there a word that readily translates as “work.” While one always has to exercise caution in reading from language to culture, in this chapter I aim to show how this observation relates to historically deeply entrenched differences between indigenous social and cultural formations and those that have come to Australia with its colonization.1 I return to amplify this observation in the conclusion of this chapter, which I hope will have shown how the evidence of indigenous-nonindigenous relations over time must unsettle some of our taken-for-granted assumptions concerning valuation of “things” and how indigenous interests in the bodiliness of outsiders were an extension of their orientation to the social potentials of relationship.
There was, to begin with, considerable difference between outsiders and indigenous people in the extent of their intentional orientation toward meeting previously unknown people.