Richard White has coined the term “middle ground” to draw attention to the new culture generated beyond the “first contact.” In The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, the “middle ground” is “some common conception of suitable ways of acting” (White 1991:50). It is not entirely anybody’s, but a product of European-Indian interaction. The “middle ground” was a historical phase, entailing that each “side” (complex assortments of Indian and European actors and groups) strove to attain cultural legitimacy in terms that the other could recognize, under conditions in which neither side could achieve its ends solely through force. This produced outcomes in which Frenchmen and Algonquians act more as they think the other will recognize, in ways thus influenced by them, than they otherwise would. This asserts the importance of dimensions of mutuality in circumstances of ongoing contact across boundaries of difference—continual awareness of being (visible) in an interactive zone.
Australian historian Henry Reynolds (2006:7) has denied the existence of any such “middle ground” in Australia in which those in encounter sought to achieve mutual recognition and intelligibility. Effectively, the power relation was at no stage as nearly equal as in the Great Lakes case. Reynolds is correct insofar as the scale and density of settler-indigenous relations in Australia gave less opportunity for whites’ enculturation into indigenous ways. With the possible exception of subsistence graziers and dingo scalp hunters on the most marginal pastoral country (Finlayson 1952:116), there was no Australian frontier equivalent to the continual involvement of French fur traders with Indians on the Great Lakes. Nevertheless, White’s historicization of frontier culture invites us to consider the roles of violence and material exchange in the quest for mutual intelligibility in all encounter material.
The Openness of Copresence, and Interaction Rituals
We need to consider the timescales at which nonrecognition occurs and its social extension: how does something that initially happened between small encountering groups such as these become characteristic of a broader relationship? And what role does it play there, as in indigenous-nonindigenous relations in contemporary Australia? Encounter between indigenous people and outsiders proceeded and intensified over the following decades from such moments as the nonresponsive ones discussed at the start of this chapter. Expansion of interaction resulted in changes in the ways that these people “on the ground” dealt with each other and fed back into and accompanied other changes occurring elsewhere in the larger frameworks in terms of which they did so, over time producing changes in kinds of persons, understandings and surmises concerning each other resulting from such interactions.
While contemplating nonrecognition and its possible persistence, we also find evidence of the extent to which participants in early encounters did engage and did manage to comprehend each other’s meanings and intentions, despite great gulfs of difference, typically, the absence of any common language and, frequently, of any verbal mediation. Within minutes of encounter participants were gesticulating to each other: sometimes to warn each other off, to discourage approach; but also sometimes to convey messages concerning details and immediacies of direction of travel, nature of the landscape, availability of water, and presence of people in other locations. All of these communications would have involved basic elements of “interaction ritual” (Goffman [1967] 2005) between the different parties to the extent of trying to make themselves comprehensible to each other through gesture, tone of voice, gaze, positionings, and (no doubt with considerable room for misunderstandings) indications based on assumptions about what the other party was asking or wanted. No doubt many verbal statements were uttered, a large number of which would have remained unintelligible or sometimes intelligible to an extent via intermediaries whom explorers and settlers engaged to accompany them. It would go against everything we know to assume that capacity to interact is completely blocked off, even in cases of minimum commonality in background; a great deal can be conveyed, particularly in face-to-face mode, including aspects of orientation, emotion, intention, and propositional meaning. Yet we must also assume that there were great gulfs of intended meaning, evaluation, and substance that were not conveyed.
Indigenous nonrecognition as a first way of dealing with outsiders suggests a number of questions. How deliberate was it? How concerted? How “cultural,” that is, how can it be contextualized in relation to other practices? We need theory that allows us to understand how these interactions could be both determined by the cultural formations in which agents were embedded and yet not determined by them, so that agents changed as they interacted. We get some help here from “practice theory” and some of its predecessors engaged with the effort to come to grips with social process understood as relatively open and dynamic rather than as enclosed and channeled. Another helpful source is phenomenologically based conceptualizations of differential “sedimentation,” or more versus less entrenched and incorporated quality of practices and their openness to change. Let us briefly consider these two theoretical topics.
Culture and Sedimentation
Thinking about the concept of “culture” as it evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has had to grapple with the issue of conscious awareness and the depth of actors’ awareness of practices as meaningful. For some major culture theorists, culture has never been simply a matter of products, material or otherwise. Anthropologist Franz Boas, in reinterpreting the “culture” notion away from evolutionist as well as broad, traditional humanist usage (such as that of E. B. Tylor) and identifying it instead with the burden of custom and tradition, attributed to “culture” a strenuous hold over people’s behavior (Stocking 1966), a kind of “second nature.” In his hands, culture was transformed into a comprehensively behavior-determining medium that was no longer to be a basis for demeaning (such as primitivizing) comparisons, but understood as a word for a common human condition, considered extremely difficult for people everywhere to get outside of. It was also in these Boasian transformations that “culture” became definitively, anthropologically pluralized (into “cultures”).7
Boas’s transformative usage, in representing people as subject to their culture/s, also involved a new apprehension of the role of unconscious social process. It became no longer necessary (or even plausible) to attempt to explain customs in terms of “conscious reasoning” or a directly utilitarian origin; rather, in Boas’s (1904) terms, culture was rooted in general conditions of life.8 In fact, Boas (1904:246, 253–54) argued that the more a piece of behavior was repeated and unconsciously imitated, the more difficult it was for people to break with it. Secondary rationalizations or explanations of custom—why do we do X?—though not “true,” came to the fore especially at generational or other breaks at which, for example, children might ask questions or in other circumstances that denaturalize custom. Thus, for Boas, reflexive appreciation and articulability involve a state of exception that breaks through ordinary practice, or culture, which is largely associated with unconscious, routinized, or taken-for-granted behavior.
Boasian notions of culture as largely second nature have some parallels with Pierre Bourdieu’s (1972) much later concept of habitus. Bourdieu drew on phenomenology, and it served for him to incorporate the social into the body (a dimension that did not play an explicit part in Boas’s views of culture). By “habitus,” Bourdieu refers to the inculcated and accumulated dispositional structures that social actors come to incorporate or embody: why do we feel at home in certain kinds of environments rather than others, or act in certain ways rather than others we feel to be unfamiliar? The concept of habitus was aimed at circumventing what Bourdieu saw as both objectivist and subjectivist fallacies in social theory: attributing to ethnographic subjects the analyst’s objectifications on the one hand; and the limitations of a personal perspective on the other.
There has been considerable debate over how dynamic (or otherwise) the concept of habitus may be, whether it manages to overcome the enclosures of notions of “structure” and the implications of conceiving habitus as deep-seated bodily disposition without representational content and only limited availability to reflection. Bourdieu (1994:122)
