Having gong back to re-read Islands of History during my trip to Hawaii, I decided to go in with both feet and re-read the entire debate, starting with Obeyesekere’s The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, followed by How “Natives” Think, and ending with Borofsky’s “Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere, and Sahlins” and the ensuing discussion in Current Anthropology. Unlike my usual posts here, I feel a need to summarize my reactions to this debate rather than simply providing some key quotes from the texts. Suffice to say that while I can’t judge Obeyesekere’s knowledge of Hawaiian history, I can make judgements based on his readings of Sahlins. It seems to me he fails to understand Sahlins arguments, misrepresents his use of historical material, and ignores his nuances with regard to structuralism. Moreover, I remain unclear as to the importance of his central claim.
Why should it matter that Cook was “god-like” and not just a “god”? Here Sahlins seems to be on much firmer ground, as his work is largely an exploration of how the role of the Hawaiian cosmology changed as a result of contact. I think that some of these arguments become much clearer, however, through his debate with Obeyesekere. I also think that Chapter 4 of How “Natives” Think and his reply to Borofsky are interesting texts in their own right.
I also feel that Obeyesekere never really makes a case for the importance of the apotheosis myth within the European context. If his work is largely about Europeans as he claims, it is not very satisfying in this regard. Obeyesekere’s reply to Sahlins (in the the revised version of his book), as well as his reply to Borofsky, did more to damage my esteem of him than did his book itself, which I found interesting in parts. I found particularly useful his account of Cook’s voyage before and after Hawaii, as well as the political context on Hawaii before and after Cook’s arrival. A lot of this is missing from Sahlins, and I think Obeyesekere is right to criticize Sahlins for constructing a particular type of argument where such information is seen as irrelevant. But his own failure to really engage with Hawaiian culture (the heart of Sahlins’ argument) means that he is never able to demonstrate the importance of such information for better understanding Sahlins. Instead, he uses this context to try to discredit Sahlins by attacking what seems to me to be a rather unimportant aspect of his work.
Finally, I also find very frustrating his technique of trying to construct a seemingly plausible alternative narrative so as to cast doubt on the original narrative. This strikes me as analogous to how creationists try to cast doubt on evolution by trying to show that it is “just a theory.” All-in-all, while I learned a lot from the fringes of this debate, I find the debate itself rather uninteresting, even if it did offer some wonderful, venomous, witticisms.
Part of a special issue on Social Movements in Contemporary Taiwan
Disability Rights
Instead, it would be more accurate to regard this pattern in a more nuanced fashion, recognizing that a major goal of the disabled rights movement was not merely to win budgets, but to change the cul-tural understandings of the disabled as persons who were suffering from bad karma of one some sort.
In fact, the problems faced by the disabled were very much not individual issues as much as familial ones, since it was the family that was traditionally the social unit that was obliged to care for the disabled. The government thereby could justify what little responsibility it took for the fate of the disabled as a group. And at all levels, the cultural meaning of disabled was em-bedded in the notion of retribution. The economic crisis that faced the disabled due to their loss of in-come when the Patriot Lottery ended provided the disabled with an opportunity to reveal that the karma frame no longer was a valid one through which to understand disabled persons’ fates. Government policy decisions structured the outcomes the disabled experienced in markets, not karma like “retribution”. Disabled persons’ needs were not ones that could or should be resolved via charities that treated them as persons with a nature given minimum set of abilities. Demands for more than charity or low skilled job training sprung from a collective redefinition of self as an unintended outcome of the government’s decision to end the Patriot lottery in 1989.Kaoshiung Museum of Labor
you will find the Kaoshiung Museum of Labor, right next door to the Kaoshiung Museum of Fine Arts. Upon entering the former, visitors are immediately confronted with radical placards from the Paris Commune (!), exhibits featuring the labour union movement history from around the world side by side with ones on Taiwan’s labour movement activism history and videos that showcase current efforts to organize young servers in the fashionable cafes that serve Taiwanese of all classes. There is even an exhibit that recounts the struggles of state-owned enterprise workers against the privatization rage of the 1990s and early first decade of the new millennium. The problem for anyone who is familiar with the trajectory of Tai-wan’s two decade old liberal democracy is the air of unreality that ac-companies such phenomena. For it seems, much like the feminists’ relationship with the families of the 25 women workers, Taiwan’s Museum of Labor has no concrete ties with Taiwan’s labour movement (or labourers?). The reason is rather transparent; the institution is run by a city government that, while now legitimated by free and competitive elections, has no interest in promoting the cause of a present-day labour movement.Neoliberalism
Neo-liberalism was, ironically, solidified via the most symbolically important transition (i.e. Chen’s presidential swearing-in) since Taiwanese democratization commenced in the late 1980s. Structural unemployment, capital flight, slashed welfare budgets, flexible union organizing rules, and increasing inequality continue as the norm.
Chapters 6 of Elizabeth Povinelli’s The Cunning of Recognition.
Public Reason
From the point of view of this principle, the aim of public reason is not understanding, let alone agreement, but the sequestering of some often inexpressible (moral) thing from reflexive judgment. In other words, in its ideal form civil society continually invokes three ordering principles often in tension with one another: public scrutiny, individual disinterest, and collective moral limits.sociology of belief ascription
To answer this and other questions I seek a sociology of belief ascription. I do not seek so much the referential content of beliefs, nor the correspondence between belief ascription and truth. Instead I seek the manner in which belief is formed as believable, true, and accurate, and the manner in which the believable is hinged to national senses of justice and the justifiable distribution of rights and material goods. I ask therefore a set of simple questions: how do various indigenous people produce beliefs that are judged to be true?“conceivable” arguments
At a minimum, local beliefs are intelligible as local only insofar as they are embedded in a widespread, longstanding, and well-known anthropological and public debate about the “strange” nature of Aboriginal beliefs about human reproduction and ceremonial practices and insofar as they are embedded in “conceivable” arguments.the local must be translatable
We see in these two brief examples how jurists interpret law as a demand that cultural beliefs be intelligible (that they be like known and accepted principles of Aboriginal social organization and culture) but not too believable (the difference remains the mythopoetic); that they lie within a set of preexisting legal frameworks but not be oriented to them (opportunistic, interested). In other words, the local must be translatable into a certain form and a certain content,Punishment
Punishment for violating the law could happened anywhere, at any time, but was especially likely to occur in men and women’s ritual business. No one asked for or provided details of the specific form that this ritual punishment took in open public segments of the evidence.Archaic illusions
early modernist ethnological accounts sharply distinguished so-called primitive allegiances to cultural forms from civil allegiances to the same. They engaged in what Levi-Strauss would later call an archaic illusion. Following Levi-Strauss’s general insight if not his model, I have elsewhere argued that all subjects of discourse are subjected to some law of compulsion, although its location, form, and content are liable to historical change. This is to say little more than what critical western social theory has already described as doxa and hegemony.Secrets
Rather, it means that a secret is a mandated marker of authentic indigeneity and reminds us that the truth of this secret is already circulating in public. As a result Aboriginal subjects face the task of deciding not only what to tell non-Aboriginals, but also how deeply they must establish an abject relation to traditions and identifications that are deemed legally and publicly abhorrent.
Chapters 4 & 5 of Elizabeth Povinelli’s The Cunning of Recognition.
Critique of Liberalism
Jacqueline Rose, who note that the ideals of liberalism are not about knowledge and its exposure to truth and revelation, but about the fantasies necessary to act in a liberal society and how these fantasies are protected and projected into social life through specific textual practices? The critique of liberalism does not begin with where it fails or where subjects know or do not know this failure, but rather where it seems to be succeeding.
Native Title
Thus, today native title in Australia can be extinguished if the genealogical and occupancy relationship to land is severed and, in addition, if the customary beliefs and practices of the group claiming native title are severed more or less. In the United States and Canada, legal proof of native title rests on demonstrating a genealogical connection to the original owners of the land and continued occupancy or use of the land not on demonstrating a cultural continuity with these original owners. This legal grounding of native title reflects nineteenth-century notions of usufruct. But although the law of recognition is not grounded in the performance of cultural continuity in the United States, it is supplemented by public accounts of the justice of granting “special rights” to native Americans who appear to be too culturally and socially like nonnative Americans. Finally, in Brazil courts demand some proof of distinct cultural difference as the grounds for the legal recognition of customary native title rights and interests. The indigenous people of Brazil face the question of the commonsense meaning of difference. But they are not compelled to demonstrate an unbroken connection between contemporary beliefs and practices and the beliefs and practices of their genealogical ancestors.
techniques of cultural discrimination
The techniques of cultural discrimination established by the court have a fairly straightforward structure. First, they separate and make relative Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultural systems even while establishing a formal relationship of value among types of Aboriginal cultural performance. Next, they differentiate the site from which European-based and Aboriginal legal systems obtain their value and seek their telos. And, finally, they bind the attainment of native title rights to the successful judicial performance of this fantastic separation, origination, and destiny.
Native Law vs. Common Law
For, although the court demands “real acknowledgement of traditional law and real observance of traditional customs” as the basis for a successful native title claim, real customary being must be free of any sense of a repugnant that would “shatter the skeletal structure” of state law, that would provoke an affective relation to a cultural or social otherwise, an experience of fundamental alterity. The cunning of recognition lies exactly in this play of the parentheticals: Be (not) Real; Be (not) Alterior.
Compare the statements “the true being of their culture adjusts in time” and “the true being of our culture adjusts in time” is translated “as their law adjusts to history it looses its true being” but as our law adjusts to history it gains its true apotheosis. The authorizing temporal frame of customary law is a past-perfect ideal form. The authorizing temporal frame of common law is a future-perfect ideal form.
Localization
At this point I should briefly say how I am using the terms “local,” “localize,” and “localization.” A number of scholars have recently attempted to model the extralocal nature of localities, not the least of whom is Arjun Appadurai in his groundbreaking volume Modernities at Large.’ These scholars have noted that the nominal form “local” differs from the verb forms “localize” and “localization” on the basis of the two suffixes, which signal the manner in which a local is produced; that is, how a nominal abstraction, the local, is manifested or projected as a specifiable state. Emphasizing the processes by which locals are produced allows scholars entry into the pragmatics of social production and reproduction that seem at the surface transparent processes of self (and social) revelation and disclosure.
Wangga
Not much seems to be there. Wangga usually consist of only a few short sentences, whose morphological structure has been “tangled-up” or “twisted” in Belyuen terms. In linguistic terms, normative syntactic structures have been purposively violated in order to force listeners to reconstitute the message by rearranging morphemic units if they want to make sense of the text.
intercourse of the living and the dead
Rather than through heterosexual reproduction in the first or even last instance, corporeality and territoriality is (re)produced through the intercourse of the living and the dead, the textual and corporeal. If, that is, people remain who know how to read the semantic and pragmatic codes embedded in songs like Duwun, and if these cultural practices of interpretation are themselves embedded in contexts that afford them performative force.
Danggalaba
Danggalaba is a Larrakia term in most accounts used to refer to a crocodile Dreaming (durlg) on the northwest coast of the Cox Peninsula. The Belyuen refer to this same durlg as Kenbi. According to the authors of the Kenbi land claim book (1979); before European settlement, the territory, or “estate,” of the Larrakia- speaking Danggalaba clan may well have included only a small northwest section of the peninsula, a claim later disputed by a number of Larrakia claimants. As surrounding patrilineal estate groups died out, were killed, or moved away from the area as a result of the settlement of Darwin, their estates were gradually absorbed by the Danggalaba.
traditional Aboriginal owners
In its final form, however, the LRA stipulated that to be found to be a “traditional Aboriginal owner” a person must be a member of a “local descent group.” It was in this legislative context that the authors of the Kenbi claim put forward the smaller Danggalaba group as the “traditional Aboriginal owners” of the claim area.
Larrakia
The Larrakia were now said to be a cognatically defined “new tribe” rather than a “language group.”
fluent speakers
These women are the last fluent speakers of Emiyenggal, Mentha, and Wadjigiyn-the languages of the wangga. But the very linguistic expertise that these women will use to unlock the riddle of the Belyuen wangga shines a bright light on the tenuous, even scandalous, nature of their land claim. Emi, Mentha, Wadjigiyn, Marriamu: these are languages of countries to the south. Most anthropologists, lawyers, the interested public, and Aboriginal persons believe that the historical “language” of this country was Larrakia.
“Negotiating power: Elections and the constitution of indigenous Taiwan” by Scott Simon
Action-sets
Ideally, in the past, each household was self-sustaining. When collective activity was needed, several households formed larger groups for labor in agriculture, house construction, weaving, rituals, and other tasks. Martin Nettleship found that these groups were ego-based, temporary, lacked institutional leadership, and were ad hoc formations of kin, neighbors, and friends. He called these transactional groups “action-sets” (Nettleship 1971:112). Labor exchange, known as madas jiyax, remains the basis of most collective labor in these societies, although the practice is now perceived in terms of a preference for group-based activity. Cash is also used to reward participation and the frequent sharing of meat and alcohol strengthens the dyadic relations at the core of action-sets.
Alang
In nationalist narratives of redemption, the alang represents the pristine Adamic condition before relations with the state caused a fall from grace. There is a significant overlap between alang of origin and church membership.
A territorial grouping or band was known as an alang, or “a group of people who gather together” (Wang 2006:56).
Tribe
The highest level of social organization described in the literature, the qotux or otux, or tribe (Ger. Stamm), was based on a strong sense of identity and collective territory.
Taroko nationalists, who are developing a political philosophy as part of their quest for regional autonomy, refer to the “tribe” as “klgan sejiq.” Gudula Linck-Kesting (1979:70) argued that the Atayal had 40 tribes during the Qing Dynasty, but they were weakened over time…
Gaya
the moral code known as Gaya was crucial for maintaining social equilibrium (Huang 2000). The term also referred to the ritual group (Atayal, rutux gaya; Taroko, lutut gaya) responsible for the moral behavior of its members. According to Michael Rudolph (1993:49), this group was more important than the genealogical lineage but lost its importance with the industrialization of Taiwan and indigenous migration to cities.
Power
Although the word egalitarian suggests that all individuals were equal, there were social distinctions based on gender, age, personal charisma, and ability. What is important is that there were no institutionalized positions of power
…Even today, people have difficulty finding an appropriate answer when asked for the Seediq or Taroko gloss for “leader.”
Toumu
It was only after the Japanese pacified the Taroko (1910–14) and consolidated bands into villages that they were required to select village chiefs (Masaw 1998:42). These became elected positions responsible for relations with the exterior, internal control, and ritual activities (Masuda 1944:29). There was strong pressure, however, not to monopolize this power.
Fights break out if there is even a misperception that someone has received a larger than equal portion. The ability to share is a major part of the moral dis-tinction between good people (malu sejiq) versus evil people (nagih sejiq).
Oral history shows that, in Nantou, where the Seediq had contact with the Qing, the Qing established some form of chiefdom for the purpose of indirect rule. The Japanese established chiefdoms and band councils across the island (Huang 2000:12).
The word for chief, kashira in Japanese and toumu in Chinese, was translated in the communities I studied as ludan mklawa, meaning “the highest of the elders.” This word is also used for elders in the Presbyterian Church.
ROC Elections
In 1950, under the principle of “local autonomy,” the ROC established an electoral system for the township magistrate, the members of the township council, and village heads. In mountain townships, only indigenous people were eligible to run for magistrate. In the beginning, it was difficult for the government to find candidates for these positions. Nettleship characterized the village heads of the early ROC period as “relatively wealthy but politically impotent men all of whom seemed well enough liked but not highly respected in their villages” (1971:132).
Indigenous legislators
In 2005, the constitution was revised to reduce the total number of legislators from 225 to 113. The number of indigenous legislators was reduced from eight to six (three for mountain and three for plains tribes), which still gives indigenous politicians greater weight in the legislature than their demographic weight in the population. There has been criticism of the system from within the indigenous community, especially based on the argument that only large tribes can mobilize enough votes to win. Among the ten mountain indigenous legislators elected since 1992 (often repeatedly in subsequent elections), six have been Atayal, including Seediq and Taroko politicians. Three were Paiwan, and one was Bunun. The Amis, Taiwan’s largest tribe, have been successful in electing plains indigenous legislators. The small tribes have little chance to see their members elected (Allio 1998:47). The DPP has never elected a legislator in mountain districts, although it has won a plains indigenous seat and has elected indigenous legislators on its nationwide candidate list.
Community Development Associations
There is a direct link between the electoral system and community development associations,12 as development association leaders often become candidates for village head or township council. Politicians use development associations to increase political capital, a strategy that can back-fire if development associations are mismanaged. Community development associations are formed of groups of people who set goals for their communities and apply for state funding to carry out projects.
Soong’s dissertation
James Soong, a Mainlander from Hunan, was secretary-general of the KMT from 1989 to 1993 and provincial governor from 1993 to 1998.15 Soong earned a doctorate in political science at Georgetown University, where he studied Chinese Communist policies toward ethnic minorities in Inner Mongolia. He found that ethnic minority groups were of strategic importance because their territory covered a vast portion of the country. The Chinese Communist Party thus cultivated networks of local elites to implement its governance on minority terri-tory (Soong 1975). Using the same strategies as governor, Soong created clientelistic networks in indigenous regions by giving lucrative infrastructure contracts to loyal support-ers. In 2000, Soong wished to run for president and was passed over in favour of Lien Chan. He quit the KMT, taking many supporters with him, and formed the PFP . Since then, indigenous politics has been divided largely between factions related to the PFP and the KMT.
What Goes Around … : Some Shtick from “Tricky Dick” and the Circulation of U.S. Presidential Image (Currently available online for free.)
circulatory fate
Through the analysis of a news article reporting one remarkable—and seemingly revealing—incident during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, and its circulatory fate, we can gain insight into the vicissitudes of “message”—as of any entextualized semiotic form—as it traverses the socio-spatiotemporal realm in which it is shaped.
grotesque
Mr. Nixon was a grotesque, a term we should take in the literary sense of someone with glaring character problems and personality dysfunc-tions, ones that in fact drove, or animated, the very plotlines of his biography. Such a grotesque can never leave well enough alone.
Girls in slacks
Helen Thomas: “Helen, are you still wearing slacks? Do you prefer them actually? Every time I see girls in slacks it reminds me of China.”
Gentleman of the old school
“[I’m just a] gentleman of the old school” was widely understood as a hackneyed and caricatured attempt at self-excuse uttered by a man for being a “male chauvinist pig,” as feminists and their sympathizers saw it. That it is used in description of Mr. Nixon in the lede is, then, quite telling, precisely the kind of polyphonic ‘double-voicing’ that Bakhtin (1981:301–308) demonstrates is the hallmark of Dickensian parodic stylization, where the heteroglossic particular phrasings of narrated-world characters break out of their proper world to become the very descriptive terms of the authorial world of narration.
Revenge
Of course, the chief UPI reporter at the White House was none other than Helen Thomas herself. This is what we term “payback” time. Mr. Nixon has humiliated Ms. Thomas with his antics. Ms. Thomas uses the institutionalized form of circulation of White House news through her wire service to re-tell the story, a story that reveals Mr. Nixon naked in his worst characterological ugliness
Tricky Dick!
As if to highlight the outrage, it has a nice UPI colleague’s telephoto shot of Ms. Thomas, in her rather fetching outfit, sashaying along the North Portico of the White House after the bill signing ceremony. “Take that, Tricky Dick!” as if to say on behalf of its women readers. For surely all this is not by chance: mass communication news is targeted to those imagined to be interested in particular ways.
Semiotic flotsam
These particular semiotic flotsam, the design elements of “message,” become what we term emblems of identity that can be deployed to remind the folks of who—that is, of course, sociologically speaking, what—the political figure is.
Chapter 3 of Elizabeth Povinelli’s The Cunning of Recognition.
nonpassage
First, this case, and other cases like it, caused settler Australians to experience a nonpassage between understanding-based ideologies of justice and subjective-based ideologies of morality in the given time of constitutional liberal democracies. Second, this type of experience was subjectively, textually, and institutionally mediated. Failure to understand the social specificity of each of these forms of mediation and their interaction leaves us with a very shallow account of the historical sociology of metaethical discourses like multiculturalism. Finally, these cases suggest that this ideological and experiential nonpassage - rather than dilemma or contradiction - was deferred rather than resolved. Multiculturalism would not relieve the nonpassage but simply figure its relation differently.Aborigines in the constitution
Two places mention Aboriginal persons: section 51 (26), which excluded people of the “Aboriginal race” from the special race power of the Commonwealth government; and section 127, which excluded “aboriginal natives” from being counted in the census. Under the 1901 Constitution, states retained the right to formulate their own policies regarding Aboriginal persons within their territories, including the ability to pass legislation excluding them from the franchise; something most states did. Thus, although considered de facto British subjects, most persons classified as “aboriginal natives” were not afforded full citizenship rights in Australia.’ The few Aboriginal persons who did obtain the right to vote in South Australia were effectively barred from the Commonwealth and state vote by the Commonwealth Franchise Act, 1902, which enfranchised white women.The Lost Generation
It was under this act that between 1910 and 1970, 10 to 30 percent of children of mixed parentage were taken away from their Aboriginal parents.understanding vs. judgement
mainstream anthropologists sharply distinguished “understanding” proper to the academy from the practical political and social “judgment” proper to civil man, the categorical being more proper to national humanity.”Human
In other words the “human” as a categorical imperative of emergent modern nationalism could contain indigenous people but not all their practices in civil society.bad objects
Aboriginal men and women to devalue some of the “bad objects” of culture that, in critical ways, anthropologists themselves were valuing by showing such intense interest in them.“Tribe” and pay
Employers used these commonsense indexes of tribal function to justify their practice of paying Aboriginal laborers meager rations, arguing that a worker’s extended Aboriginal family could forage for any extra provisions that might be needed during the work season and during periods when no work was available.” Governments likewise justified paltry budgets for indigenous health, housing, and welfare by referring to the fantasy of the tribal function.Expressive Culture
Aboriginal expressive culture (rather than Aboriginal people per se) slowly emerged as a national value, as something that belonged to the nation and thus merited federal protection.Anthropologists assess.
Police constables were simply required to take careful notes from which other people would form critical judgments. Underlings collect. Anthropologists assess. Courts make judgments.Malinowski
Bronislaw Malinowski was likewise subjected to research and employment restrictions due to his outspoken views on colonial life.Aboriginal law vs. contact
Harney testified that “gang rape” and “murder” were two customary penalties for the violation of men’s sacred grounds by uninitiated women. Harney argued that the sanctions were wholly within an ancient Aboriginal law. But he also noted that the rate with which they were being used had risen dramatically because “contact with civilization tends to make the native women disobey the laws and taboos of the tribe, knowing they are protected by the law, or the white people of that part.sex as a symbolic tool
According to Stanner, from Aboriginal men’s perspective, sex was simply a symbolic tool, one of a number of powerful and transformative corporeal and noncorporeal actions and substances of which they chose to vehiculate their cosmological values: “The vehicles or symbolisms are not themselves the symbols … the things to which the symbols point are metaphysical objects”; they are about ontological questions such as “man’s being.”” Semen, sweat, blood, songs, and clay penetrated initiates’ bodies and sacramentally reformed them into ancestral beingsNeed for a more “suitable vehicle”
According to Stanner, neither Aboriginal subjects nor Aboriginal cosmology (“the Dreaming”) could take their rightful place in Australian civil society unless a more suitable vehicle than sex for symbolic locomotion were found. Citizenship would elude Aborigines until cosmology and sexuality were separated and properly relegated to their public and private domains.Big Sunday
The moniker “Big Sunday” provided an uncanny clue to the origin of the ceremony for those who dared read it. Stanner confirmed a nation’s worst nightmares-the “fertility Mother cult” sprouted up, like the flu and venereal disease, in response to European settlement. The good and the bad of this new high culture, Stanner claims, is the miscegenous progeny not of bodies but of beliefs -capitalism, humanism, and Christianity perversely folded outside themselves, mistranslated, misheard, or maybe heard all too well. White men were always already involved in the murders and sexual assaults they witnessed because they had created the very practice that terrorized them.The “half-caste problem”
The “half-caste problem” underscored the potential injustice of punishing black men but not white men for their illicit and illegal sex acts.Culture vs. connivance
For Turner, the Kunapipi ritual was nothing less than a cunning use of a ceremonial masquerade for disciplining Aboriginal collaborators. The Kunapipi ritual mocked the state’s ability to discern culture from connivance and was a testimony to the uncanny ability of Aborigines to take advantage of the good intentions of settlers.Interest in tradition
This understanding might be purely instrumental (seen as the best means of accomplishing a social transformation) or purely accidental (the “against which” the prohibition becomes legible), but in either case it wrote over the prohibition with interest. … On the other hand, interest in traditional social practices and ceremonial complexes frequently included some form of prohibition. Often this prohibition was an overt act of repression. Some aspect of a social practice or ceremonial complex was considered “repugnant,” recorded in field notes but suppressed in practice and in field reports. Ethnologists had many reasons for these overt acts of suppression. Some scholars seemed to think that it was in the interests of Aboriginal persons to emphasize the philosophical versus the erotic or sexual side of ceremonies -even though ritual uses of gender and sexuality were considered traditional components of Aboriginal (read: male) “high culture.” Others, following the lead of Fison and Howitt, seemed to think that the sexual “perversions” they witnessed in ritual and social organization were an effect of colonial contact and, therefore, excisable from discussion of precontact traditions. Still others documented, to the best of their knowledge, the linkages between culture and sexuality.
Chapter 2 of Elizabeth Povinelli’s The Cunning of Recognition.
Anthropology discovers itself through obligation
In short, Hamilton’s ethics of the colonial archive is built on her sense certainty about how compulsory aspects of attitude should translate into compulsory aspects of behavior. In this case, a hypothesized Aboriginal subject “would be” offended or, worse, be fundamentally violated by the textual reproduction of the frog totem. Anthropologists should not, therefore, indeed must not - perhaps more interestingly cannot-reproduce the image. Something holds back the hand. Indeed, the “proper” of anthropology discovers itself retrospectively in each anthropologist’s discovery that she or he is subject to an obligation.
Citation and something other than the Aboriginal subject
My point is simple: something other than the Aboriginal subject risks being fundamentally violated when parts of the colonial archive are cited verbatim. Reading and reproducing the colonial archive risks the liberal subject’s experience of the necessity of liberal intolerance and its translation into domineering force. And yet these uncitable sections continue to play a vital role in the evaluation of contemporary indigenous subjects and groups (as we will see in subsequent chapters) and the national celebration of tradition (as discussed in the last chapter). Land commissioners, native title tribunals, and formal and informal students of indigenous society read them and use them as the grounds from which contemporary practices are calibratable deviations.
radical interpretation
I use these two cases, on the one hand, to reflect on the expectations, exhilarations, frustrations, and tediousness of moments of “radical interpretation,” or the fantasy of being in a moment of radical interpretation. On the other hand, I use these cases to question a persisting liberal model of communicative rationality, perhaps best and most radically summarized by Jurgen Habermas’s notion of ideal communicative action (communicative versus practical reason) and Richard Rorty’s poetic proposition for liberal society, namely, that liberal society treat as “true whatever can be agreed upon in the course of free discussion and waving aside the question of whether there is some metaphysical object to which the result of such discussion might or might not correspond.”
anthropologicals vs. ethnologists
The debates between the “anthropologicals” of the Anthropological Society of London and the “ethnologists” of the Ethnological Society pivoted in part on the stance scholars should take toward sex (how it should be treated and talked about); and the emergent discipline’s relationship to a politics of respectability.”
the horror of moral alterity
Only by experiencing the horror of moral alterity could the science of man sketch a sociology of morality itself, the real of human(e) society.
Are you man enough?
We should not underestimate the intellectual stakes behind the gauntlet thrown down by this neo-Kantian wager. The challenge was issued as a simple proposition and a simple interrogative to Victorian ethnologists and colonial administrators: They are men. Are you man enough to know them? Both answers could well be “no.”
“that”
-the historical substitution of the lexical noun “sex” for the demonstrative pronoun “that.” If “sex” secured headdress to head, it did so only after “that”
indexicality
Even non-sense presuppositional indexicality is not initially secure (if it is ever finally secure) in moments of radical interpretation any more than is presuppositional meaning because the point of reference, the thing itself, is not yet (does not yet exist), because it is still embedded in two different fields of denotation, predication, and practice (figure 6).
Search for truth
Rorty has argued that “what matters to the search for truth [is] the social (and in particular the political) conditions under which that search is conducted, rather than the deep inner nature of the suspects doing the searching.”“
Improper talk
Over time, the domain of excluded improper talk would include the very actions Spencer and Gillen were so fascinated by and were, I suggest, creating: ritual sex, sex in public, sex out of the institutions of monogamous “marriage.” Arrente and other indigenous groups learned what that was and learned simultaneously not to discuss that. Indeed, Gillen would comment on the quickness with which the Arrente and other northern indigenous groups assessed white cultural assessments: “In doing work such as we are engaged upon one has to be careful not to let the savage perceive that you disapprove of or disbelieve in his ideas for if he once gets that idea into his head he will shut up like an oyster and wild horses will not drag reliable information out of him.”
Corporeal practices
All these corporeal practices fashioned and reoriented the body, fastening it to a place, a memory, a people. Trauma may well have been the necessary condition for the production of an engwura orientation, indeed an engwura body. For trauma would turn mind and body again and again to the engwura, sticking headdress to head. In other words, the interiority and exteriority of the initiates’ body was remade in rituals, not simply symbolically but compulsorily, the body and mind returning to the scene not simply because the ideas of the engwura are compelling in and of themselves, but because the body and psyche were as a result of being compelled by the scene. These men are not men any more than this body will ever be a singular human self again.
Economy of the body
In this economy of the body, sex may have been just another form of attachment, a fastening, a fascination; an incitement through intensity; a subjective restructuring based on some engwura operation other than “sex.” Further, was sex one form of incitement and attachment, or was it not in the above scenes at all? Can we imagine a corporeal practice and discourse that would displace “sex” and replace it with another model of the body’s excitement based on tunnels, flows, and intercourses through veins, vaginas, waterholes, tunnels, throats, voices?
Reader beware
But let the reader beware. Surely the precolonial meanings and techniques of Arrente ritual have not been captured by the above description. I have merely created a way of thinking about central desert ritual practices.
How can I horrify the reader?
If I cannot present passages that would continue to horrify liberal readers, how can I convincingly demonstrate how these same liberal subjects are now haunted by the specter of historically mistaken intolerances, and by the severed grounds of any and every modal imperative? How can I produce in the reader the impossible conditions of being rent by the two moral imperatives of late liberalism: I must be tolerant of cultural difference; I must not allow the repugnantly illiberal?
Chapter 1 of Elizabeth Povinelli’s The Cunning of Recognition.
Wik
In two crucial, nationally publicized and debated decisions, Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland (1992) and The Wik Peoples v. the State of Queensland (1996), the Australian High Court ruled that the concept of native title was not inconsistent with the principles of the Australian common law (the Mabo decision) and that the granting of a pastoral lease did not necessarily extinguish native title (the Wik decision).
What is “ancient law”?
The works of Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas, and Will Kymlicka, among others, pivot on the question of whether and how a multitude of modern liberal nation-states should recognize the worth of their interior ethnic and indigenous cultural traditions. In this chapter I turn away, however, from the question of whether and how the settler nation should recognize the worth of indigenous customary law. Instead, I ask more fundamental questions: What is the state and nation recognizing and finding worthy when it embraces the “ancient laws” of indigenous Australia?
Indigenous vs. ethnic identity
But an indigenous identity would not be considered the same as an ethnic identity because traditional indigenous culture has a different relationship to national time and space 39 Indigenous modifies “customary law,” “ancient tradition,” “traditional culture,” and so forth by referring to a social practice and space that predates the settler state.
These scars are what Aborigines are
The category of indigeneity came into being in relation to the imperial state and the social identities residing in it, and it continues to draw its discursive value in relation to the state (and other states) and to other emergent national subjects (and other transnational subjects). To be indigenous, therefore, requires passing through, and in the passage being scarred by the geography of the state and topography of other social identities. Producing a present-tense indigenousness in which some failure is not a qualifying condition is discursively and materially impossible. These scars are what Aborigines are, what they have. Legal and popular questions coagulate there: Is the scar small or large, ancient or recent, bleeding or healed, bleeded out or passed on?
A strata existing before but now intercalated in the multicultural nation
[Artists like Midnight Oil] refigured Australian modernity through an archetypical ancient law sensual and perduring, lying under the physical and social space of the nation and gestating in the bodies and practices of Aboriginal people living in remote bush, in fringe communities, in urban centers. Traditions were a level, a layer, a strata, existing before but now thoroughly intercalated in the present symbolic and material conditions of the multicultural nation.
Another wounded subject
In part, this object is the easily recognized wounded subject of the modern liberal state. The political drama of an ancient law’s battle for recognition is refigured as a series of personal traumas suffered by innocent indigenous citizens. … Another wounded subject stands behind the scarred indigenous body: the liberal subject who wielded the frontier blade and nearly fatally wounded himself in the process.
Four points about Indigenous traditions
(1) The survival of good indigenous traditions transforms liberalism’s bad side into a weak, inconsequential historical force. The very social weakness of Aboriginal people reinforces this fantasy. If even they could survive liberalism’s bad side, this bad side must be weak indeed. (2) When good traditions appear before the nation, liberalism’s good side also appears as a strong supporting force. … (3) Resilient Aboriginal traditional law provides a fantasy space for non-Aboriginal subjects to imagine their own resilience in the face of the brutal conditions of liberal capital and to hope that things will get better without the painful process of social transformation.… (4) And, finally, the survival of some Aboriginal traditions confuses the question of who or what is responsible for the loss of other traditions. If some Aborigines were able to resist the “tides of history,” why weren’t most? Responsibility for the continuity of native title is shifted from the state to the “activities and will of the indigenous people themselves.”
Transported from the present to the past
If conjuring this impossible indigenous subject were not itself an arduous enough semiotic task, Aboriginal men and women are also called on to give national subjects an experience of being transported from the present to the past, including the nation’s failed promise to the very persons carrying them along.
Forestall the collapse of the fantasy
But speaking the “truth” to fantasy, such as Barradjap tries to do, or creating an ironic hypertext about law and identity, as Raelene and I do, does not upset the practice of primarily valuing Aboriginal subjects in relation to their ability to afford for national subjects a language and experience of “before all this.” It only shifts the register, only sets into motion a chain of signs whose object is to forestall the collapse of the fantasy: o.k., right, but what about “before the white man,” about “traditional law,” about the “real Aboriginal way.”
Microdisciplinary tactics
My own reminder to Raelene to describe Chantelle as “daughter” rather than “niece” provides further evidence of the microdisciplinary tactics constantly operating within the Aboriginal social field.
Introduction to Elizabeth Povinelli’s The Cunning of Recognition.
Sickness scatters the self
National subjects find that no matter the heroic rhetoric of enlightenment understanding, “their ways” cannot cease to make “us” sick. And this sickness scatters the self (I, us) across contrasting obligations to public reason and moral sensibility.
Postcolonial vs. multicultural struggles
I think it is important to differentiate postcolonial struggles from multicultural ones.’ Frantz Fanon and members of the school of Subaltern Studies have suggested how colonial domination worked by inspiring in colonized subjects a desire to identify with their colonizers.’ The Australian example suggests that multicultural domination seems to work, in contrast, by inspiring subaltern and minority subjects to identify with the impossible object of an authentic self-identity; in the case of indigenous Australians, a domesticated nonconflictual “traditional” form of sociality and (inter) subjectivity.
Critical discourse vs. moral feeling
Rational critical discourse refers to a type of talk, so it is a form of language used to refer to an instance of language. But moral feeling, or moral sensibility, refers to a social phenomenon outside or other than discourse - even though, technically, it may be a form of inference. And insofar as it refers to something other than itself, what moral sensibility “is” is always in excess of what enunciates it and what is enunciated.
Conditions of possibility for doubt
Peirce also thought that particular forms of society provided the conditions of possibility for the arrival of particular forms of doubt and irritation - not for critique in general but for specific forms and modalities of critique. And I agree to this extent-social institutions and relations incite or mitigate against thinking particular modes of otherwise. They influence whether and when critical thought takes place.
Law and Order
Let me turn to the representation of procedural reason in an episode of the American television drama Law and Order in order to concretize this point. In “God Bless the Child” (22 October 1991), the ailing child of members of a thinly disguised sect of the Church of Christ, Scientist dies because her parents, believing in the healing power of prayer, refuse all medical intervention. The police are faced with the question of whether or not to prosecute the parents for manslaughter. The episode discusses at length whether doubt - a crisis of faith in times of emergency-opens religious belief to legal prosecution. If the parents doubted their faith, but nevertheless withheld medical aid, was the action constitutionally protected in the space of doubt? …These questions are not to be answered (the judge has the last word, ruling the prosecutor’s questions “out of bounds”). The questions are performative marks of the line past which the procedures of public reason should not tread, the Pandora’s box opened by not heeding our perceptual judgments in moral domains.
Brief history of Aboriginal Law
the 1901 Commonwealth Constitution, which set up the Australian federation government and formally founded the Australian nation, mentions Aboriginal persons in just two places: section 51 (26), which excluded people of the “Aboriginal race” from the special race power of the Commonwealth government; and section 127, which excluded “aboriginal natives” from being counted in the census. …In 1911, a year after the Commonwealth assumed governance of the Northern Territory from South Australia, the Aboriginal Ordinance further eroded the social autonomy of “Aboriginal natives” in the north through the office of Chief Protector of Aborigines. The act granted the Chief Protector authority over Aboriginal employment, movement, marriage, and social intercourse; and it gave the position power as the “legal guardian of every Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal child under the age of eighteen years.”33 It was under this act that between 1910 and 1970, 10 to 30 percent of children of mixed parentage were taken away from their Aboriginal parents - a group that would later become known as the Stolen Generation 34 Within a few years of the passage of the Northern Territory Welfare Act, 1953, 8o percent of the indigenous population had been declared wards of the state, which they remained until 1963, the year Martin Luther King Jr. led a civil rights protest march on Washington, D.C35 It was not until 1962, in the face of persistent, organized, national and international criticism from indigenous activists such as Bobby Sykes and Charles Perkins, as well as nonindigenous groups, that “aboriginal natives” were allowed to vote in federal, Northern Territory, and South Australian elections (Queensland did not follow until 1965)
“Such practices”
The phrase “such practices” acts to expand the field of shame and cast a pall over unnamed subaltern practices where no national-popular collective will would be possible and over entire continents where such practices are imagined to occur.52 In sum, they took a stance on how a citizen ought to understand his or her experience of the fundamental alterity of other moral orders-that is, what is and should be the proper attitude of persons to their own and others’ modal feelings (what they should, ought, must act) - and how these attitudes should determine the distribution of rights, sympathy, and resources in national and global contexts. It is exactly the metamorphosis of these ethical feelings that I track in this book.
