many had not yet received reports of them. On one such occasion the explorers ascertained that “some natives were encamped at a little distance above us; but although we went to them, and endeavoured by signs and other means to obtain information, we could not succeed; they either did not or would not understand us; neither, although our manner must have allayed any fear of personal injury to themselves, did they evince the slightest curiosity, or move, or even look up when we left” (Sturt 1849: vol. 1, p. 414).
Sturt’s party tried to engage the Aborigines face-to-face, but evoked little reaction. This lack of reaction, we are entitled to assume, must have been deliberate. Perhaps even more surprising, when the party abandoned those efforts and were leaving, the Aborigines seemed to take no notice of them at all. They appear to have been looking down, not up or at them.
This null reaction is recorded often enough, in different parts of the continent. We immediately suspect studied avoidance, but what is to be made of that as a form of relation?
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962:361) wrote that “the refusal to communicate is still a form of communication” and that recognition is a sociocultural practice, effected through habituated bodily practices, and embedded in social convention and experience. By refusing to look, Aborigines were denying the others a subject status and refusing to engage with what they might be doing. The reciprocity inherent in exchanging visual recognition was being blocked from the outset. To meet the gaze of another, as Merleau-Ponty (1968:142) puts it, is to see oneself from without, that is, to acknowledge an external perspective on oneself.4 Thus not to see is also to defer being seen and the redefinition that occurs when one places oneself in the gaze of another. Though in near face-to-face contact, Aborigines were constituting the other as outside the sphere of what social theorist Alfred Schutz (1967:164–72) calls a “We-relationship.” Avoidance here apparently involves attending but presenting to the avoided other as if not doing so.
A relation constituted by nonrecognition is usually asymmetrical and power-laden, involving incipient or established dimensions of power, perhaps also awe and fear. In this case there is a politics of withholding on one side (the Aboriginal one), and (typically) what was an eager attentiveness to the possibility of direct interaction, if not invasiveness, on the other. Nonrecognition is a denial of the other as encounterable, of commonality or (in a broad sense) common objects that could be the subject of negotiation between them.
How long can nonrecognition go on, under what circumstances, and what may it morph into?
Nonrecognition at early encounter was a tentative, transitory experiment. Would the ignored strangers disappear or at least remain distant? The indigenous people may have dealt with other unfamiliar or unexpected creatures in this way. They may have felt themselves to be in the presence of something weird or threatening. They were not eager to further the engagement (while the outsiders typically were), but they no longer had the capacity to shape their actions autonomously of those outsiders. Their nonresponse was under external influence.
First Contact
The phrase “first contact” often refers to first contact between entire peoples previously unknown to each other, usually “moderns” and “preindustrials.” In commenting on various terms applied to the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus’s Bahamian landing, Caribbeanist anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995:114–15) noted that the term “conquest” was challenging the conventional term “discovery.” He considered the rising popularity of the term “encounter” as evidence of “the capacity of liberal discourse to compromise between its premises and its practice.” “Encounter” sweetens the horror, he argued, as it evokes give-and-take. A reminder of indigenous agency, “encounter” is part of recent rehabilitation of the category of the indigene who had all too long been portrayed as simply vanquished. Trouillot objected that emphasis on give-and-take fails to acknowledge the hugely unequal resources and outcomes that “conquest” places more clearly in focus. There is much about the historical outcomes, as Trouillot observed, that refuses sweetening.
For Tzvetan Todorov, author of The Conquest of America (1999), what took place after 1492 was not only the invasion and progressive subjugation of one group of peoples by another; it was principally, and perhaps predictably, the fatal meeting of two different sign systems, two ways of interpreting the world. The predominantly preliterate Aztecs lived in a world that, according to Todorov, was tradition- and past-oriented and with an inherent or internal relation to what we call “nature” rather than one of externality. In what probably counts as the dénouement of the book, the Aztecs, confronting a critical situation in which “the art of improvisation matters more than that of ritual” (p. 87), were unable to counter the arrival of Cortés because they were paralyzed in the conviction that he was a god. Europeans were able to assert themselves through their different (let us follow some of Todorov’s wordings and say “superior”) ability to use and manipulate signs; logos over mythos.5 Indigenous people and conquistadors lived in different worlds of meaning.
Todorov’s story of European capacity to understand others better than those others’ capacity to understand Europeans is pervaded by moral critique, and he refers to the resulting destruction of pre-Columbian society. But is this the only way to narrate processes of culture change? Studying the Yucatecan Maya, following the Spanish conquest and throughout the colonial period, William F. Hanks (2010) provides evidence of the adoption of aspects of an originally alien culture. He thus offers an alternative to Todorov’s story of cultural collapse. To raise this point does not downplay the drastic nature of colonial impact—in Mexico or in Australia. However, positing of complete collapse implies that little or nothing of interest remains in its wake, and it fails to deal with the specific courses of colonial histories.6
Perhaps the best-known first contact account to North American and European academia is Marshall Sahlins’s (1985) treatment of the Hawaiian adventure, then misadventure, of Captain Cook. In his last voyage to the South Pacific (1777, after his first visit to Australia in 1770), Cook was (mis)recognized as Lono, the deity of seasons whose arrival Hawaiians awaited and celebrated annually. Sahlins’s “first contact” theorem is that people greet the unexpected or novel in categories and forms of action already familiar to them. There is evidence that after first associating with the annually returning god, Hawaiians rapidly found this identification contentious and became disabused of it. The seeming felicity of Hawaiian and English coincident identities imploded (partly because of competition between priestly and chiefly factions that came to involve Cook), and Hawaiians killed him and some of his crew at Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawaii in 1779.
Sahlins suggested that the events of encounter proceeded, initially at least, in terms of a Hawaiian cultural logic (Sahlins 1985). The assertion was, for him and some others, important for its preservation of the relevance of “culture” and as a riposte to other analysts seen as reducing or fitting non-European histories to the history of global capitalism (cf. Wolf 1982). Just as important, however, seems to be the fact that the original identification was short-lived. According to Nicholas B. Dirks (1996), Sahlins deals only with a dramatic first moment of culture contact; he argues that the notion of distinct “cultural orders” survives Sahlins’s analysis relatively intact. His emphasis is on the question how cultural categories change, rather than on the openings produced in the historicity of social life.
Though their accounts differ in some ways, both Todorov and Sahlins emphasize indigenous people’s dealing with otherness by deploying conventional, preexisting forms of categorization: in both Mexico and Hawaii, this involved misrecognizing arriving Europeans as gods. Even accepting the likelihood that this may have occurred as part of the spectrum of first contact responses, what part does this play in our understanding of the relationships that went forward from those moments? We need to recognize greater openness in what is meant by “culture” and to be wary of holistic notions of culture/s. Of course people will bring aspects of their existing ways of thinking and doing to engagement with the strange and unknown. But perhaps the
