Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan
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that to their own experience. The views of indigenous people tend to be less known, less accessible. At least, some of the most impressive indigenous people I knew were unlikely to articulate their views in ways that reach nonindigenous publics, partly for lack of opportunity, but not only for that reason. Some older people were shaped by particular local circumstances, at particular times, and some of those circumstances have changed or will change, making them less likely to address nonindigenous publics than their descendants who are the products of different times.
Relationship, Mediation, and Power
The first chapters in this book concern encounters of explorers, colonists, and indigenous people, and depict meetings that certainly had a stark, even shocking, face-to-face dimension: some of them involved people coming into each other’s presence with little or no prior warning, producing visceral reactions, shouts, embrace, tremblings, evasions, and so on, none of which could have been premeditated or enacted in conventional ways. But there was an entire repertoire wielded by explorers, as we will see, a range of ways of thinking about and dealing with “Indians,” “natives,” “savages” that sprang from forms of organization and the systematization of understandings about what kinds of reactions might be encountered and how to steer them in particular directions. Likewise, indigenous people had a store of ideas about the strange, uncanny, and unknown that they brought to bear on these meetings to some extent and clearly also proceeded on occasion to further engage outsiders more fully.
Later chapters reflect on encounters that retain a dimension of the face-to-face, but in which indigenous-nonindigenous relations are mediated by “things,” material objects that explorers and settlers pressed upon indigenous people and today are often a main basis for evaluations of indigenous difference. Here too there is obvious contrast and a great deal of incomprehension in how materiality figures in encounter, early and later. Further chapters reflect on the changing nature of indigenous-nonindigenous relations when a much more clearly demarcated, geographical set of frontier spaces bounded by hostility had been established and there was an ever larger number of settlers who consider themselves to be on one side of it, wherever they may be geographically. In this circumstance settlers produced and circulated widely among themselves understandings of indigenous persons, behavior, and character, while an ever smaller proportion of the former had any significant face-to-face interaction with indigenous people. Several later chapters deal with what I have experienced as indigenous responses to these frontier events and to intensifying conversion of social spaces and persons into ones infiltrated by and linked to settler institutions. This includes the emergence of persons of mixed race, what indigenous and nonindigenous people made of it, and state efforts to control it.
The final chapters consider the nature of relationships in recent years when Australian governments had changed their modes of dealing with indigenous people to the point of consulting them with respect to resource development projects. Power becomes stretched across a more complex set of linking relations between indigenous and nonindigenous people and institutions; and indigenous people deal on a personal level with those who come close to them but also increasingly apprehend the difference among levels and people as representing them rather than as authoritative or powerful in their own personal right. Through an analysis of a particular prominent “sacred sites” dispute, Chapter 7 shows, mutatis mutandis, how persons as highly placed as the prime minister of Australia have interpreted aspects of disputatious situations in terms that they took to be reflective and respectful of indigenous action and belief very foreign in character, in that case with decisive political consequences. There as in other cases there was a chain of mediated links across a complex set of relations.
In all forms of action it is often the case that the interacting parties are unequally resourced, endowed with forms of technological and other material, as well as ideological and social backing, sources of inequality between them. We regularly talk of differences in power. What do we mean by this? Power, though a notoriously contested notion, is often referred to by Max Weber’s (1947:152) formulation: “the probability that one actor within a social relation will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance.” Despite undefined notions of “will” and “resistance,” this statement usefully points to the issue of unequal capacity. In the encounters studied in this book, such unequal capacity shaped thinking and acting, but it did so in different ways at different times.
As noted above, mobility—global and local—on the part of outsiders was a first key indicator of power differential. Explorers and settlers were able to arrive on the continent with a “pre-accumulation” (Wolfe 2016) of ideas, preconceptions about who the natives might be and how to deal with them, technical expertise, and plans. None of this would have been evident to indigenous people for some considerable time. Settlers were able to make use of it in order to press on with exploration and expansion even under the direst of circumstances, which indigenous people obviously sometimes misjudged as likely to extinguish their efforts. Never was that the general outcome, although individual explorations were occasionally disastrous. Also locally mobile wherever they went, explorers were able to co-opt people to assist them, but in specific and sometimes ambiguous, evasive, and duplicitous terms, as Chapter 4 illustrates. Settlers were able to move, resettle, and introduce large numbers of animals whose presence put indigenous-nonindigenous relationships on a collision course (Roberts 1969; Reid 1990: chap. 4; Barta 2008:524–26).
There are instances of direct, physical effects of power upon indigenous people, obviously in the form of physical violence but also, more subtly, in the ideas and ingenuity by which outsiders attempted to engage them and win their compliance. There were accumulations of power in the relationships that growing settler numbers and institutions were able to actualize among themselves and from which indigenous people were excluded. In episodes of the recent past and present, structural conditions enabled government officialdom to determine the separation of children from families based on categorizations of human types and associated ideas of education and improvement; indigenous people were and are variously allocated and reallocated outside and inside bureaucratic and administrative schemes of management. Late in the piece, in the final decades of the twentieth century, indigenous people come to be “recognized” as meriting a role in processes that channel the exploration of natural resources, ostensibly in the name of community consultation.
Sometimes, outsiders’ forms of power become structuring conditions of indigenous people’s lives, without their necessarily focusing on how that has come about and without these conditions being directly taken account of in their forms of action. However, when indigenous families seek to avoid the police or regularly occupy town spaces so as to minimize interaction with whites and with other indigenous people, we see people dealing knowingly with structures of power. It is more difficult, but important, to render account of how forms of power and influence operate when social landscapes, sound-scapes, money transactions, and many other kinds of events and actions penetrate people’s lives in new ways.
We need a general term for a form of life that persists in difference, having and recognizing qualities of its own, while it is lived in the shadow of potentially dominant power and hegemonic cultural influences, whether the latter come in the form of foods, labor, music, visual culture and technology, welfare, or churches. Neither “autonomy” nor “subordination” describes this form of life. I have sometimes referred to this general condition as “intercultural” (Merlan 1998, 2005) with reference to relations between indigenous people and communities and wider Australian society, but that deliberately leaves such a space open to be specified more closely. To do so is difficult. It is important to recognize forms of indigenous difference, both continuous and innovative, in people’s lives, but without resorting to holistic concepts of continuous cultural logics that fail to account for change and conditions.
Difference is partly an effect of power. While the history of indigenous-nonindigenous relations includes some encounters with the potential for equality at the personal, often corporeal level, these moments were fragile before the larger forces in play. In longer-term colonization, zones and boundaries of difference are demarcated in a power-laden regulatory way that indigenous people were to observe as persons and collectivities. We see indigenous people responding