of an active and creative relation (ars inveniendi) between the subject and the world. He does, however, suggest the priority of experiences, for example, early childhood ones, which he thinks prevail in the systems of disposition that constitute habitus and lead to relative closure to others (1994:134). With notions of habitus and field and the concept of symbolic violence, Bourdieu provided an alternative perspective to (especially early) determinist Foucauldian “domination” of subjects by regimes of knowledge and power. In these and other terms, social theorists have tried to explain our orientations to the world as encultured beings.9
It is useful to loosen up a rather undifferentiated notion of “habitus” by considering a gradation, spectrum, layering, or differential sedimentation of practices: their relative significance to the way people act and the kinds of awareness people have of them. One might think of “habitus” or embodied dispositions, some of which are more firmly incorporated and entrenched, but others of which are more unstable and temporary; some that people are aware of and others less so. Let us imagine some dispositions may perfuse a range of distinguishable practices, without the underlying common thread necessarily being itself salient or recognizable to actors. The notion of a spectrum of more and less entrenched habitual orientations, permeating assumed knowledges and forms of practice, could usefully be associated with a modulated concept of dimensions of subjectivity more or less open to fashioning and refashioning (whether by self-conscious “reflexive transformation,” willed change, or otherwise). To entertain such dimensions would also help to cast personhood in more sociohistorical terms and culture in more distributive ones, that is, as distributed in forms of action and conceptualization. This would also allow a more diversified picture of the varying, overlapping, and sometimes conflicting ways in which people apprehend contexts and are shaped and transformed, profoundly or in more transitory ways.
Time and Resonance
The indigenous people with which this chapter began reacted to sightings of outsiders in a number of ways: by brandishing spears, by flight, by direct gazing, and, on occasion, no (evident) response at all. Nonrecognition was the most difficult for explorers to define as an event. They had awareness of themselves—they had made themselves visible, sometimes waved, called out—but the indigenous people failed to react in circumstances in which reaction seems fully expectable. Was this a kind of (non)response that indigenous people would have named or described? We cannot know. At some point the indigenous people must have seen enough of Cook’s ship and men to concert, whether explicitly among themselves or “instinctively,” a nonresponse that lasted over an unknown but extended period of time—minutes if not longer. The same is true of the encounter with Sturt. On that occasion, the explorers tried even harder to elicit response, so indigenous nonresponse must be seen as deliberate ignoring of repeated efforts on the part of the outsiders to attract attention.
Processes relevant to meaningful human action, notes Stanton Wortham (2006:8), take place across characteristic time intervals, from milliseconds (for neuromuscular activity), to seconds, days, years, and centuries (cf. Lemke 2000). Over what times may nonrecognition, the refusal of exchange of gaze and awareness in the context of immediate copresence, characteristically take place? In the episodes that I have recounted, I suspect, the characteristic interval of nonrecognition in face-to-face situations occurs only over a very limited time span. Where people come together for longer periods of time and do not interact or react, it is usually in terms of a clearly framed and recognized kind of activity: a long and deliberate coming together in which initial talk is uncharacteristic and even held to be rude or proscribed for some reason; or where introspection rather than outward engagement is normative, as in a Quaker meeting. It is hardly likely that nonrecognition endured very long in early colonial encounter without turning into another form of action (as we shall see). It was probably relatively fleeting and sometimes culminated in indigenous people leaving the scene, moving away if they could, or something else.
Such early encounters probably resonated well beyond their brief occurrence. Indigenous people would no doubt have talked about them among themselves. Each event of this kind is likely to have been reported in particular ways by those who were present. We are unable to know exactly what their reports were like or how varied they were. But we may assume they would gradually have become part of regular accounts to others who had not yet seen explorers or other colonials, perhaps involving interpretation of the clothes, animals, and other aspects of the outsiders’ behavior. Where violence occurred—and it often did, as further discussed below—this would have also been reported in some form.
For a considerable time, in different parts of Australia, there would continue to be people who had never seen outsiders such as these Europeans. But that was to change, as was the range of responses. “First” moments were platforms for subsequent ones. Phillip Parker King of the British Royal Navy in 1821 was greeted by Aborigines in a harbor at King George’s Sound on the south coast of the present Western Australia by “Indians … hallooing and waiving to us” (Shellam 2009:4). This bold greeting, so different from nonrecognition, has to be understood in the knowledge that these people had been visited the year before by another ship, from which they had learned the word “water” from the Port Jackson (Sydney) language (ibid., 5) on the other side of the continent. The area had also been briefly visited by explorers George Vancouver in 1791, Matthew Flinders in 1801 and 1802, who went inland and met Aboriginal groups, and French navigator Nicolas Baudin in 1803, who found a sealer brig in a bay. The question that we might be able to answer is not: when was first contact here? But: what variable responses emerge and go forward from early encounter?
Earlier in this chapter, I discussed some approaches to first contact in which indigenous “culture” resulted in at least temporary alignment of Europeans with indigenous gods. To consider culture as a spectrum of action and disposition of which actors are more and less aware enables us to imagine forms of first response as at various points on the spectrum; it also suggests that responses would, correspondingly, be more and less likely to change if and when interaction continues and depending on the course it takes. Such encounters are nothing if not “historical,” and so the notion of what is “cultural” in them needs to be flexible. Let us experiment with some of these ideas by considering what seems to have been a much more widely remarked commonplace of colonial contact in Australia—the idea that whites were ancestors or returned ghosts.
Were We Dead?
In many cases of colonial contact, outsiders seem to have been identified with out-of-the-ordinary beings. In the case of Hernán Cortés, Todorov’s typecase in Mexico, the conquistador is said to have been taken to be a returning god, and this to have rendered the Mexicans incapable of response. We also saw an identification of Cook with Lono in Hawaii. In North America, something different is commonly recorded: first European arrivals are cast by narrators as already foretold in story or legend (Ramsey 1983; Miller 1985). Perhaps casting encounter in this way mitigated the shock of impact or had the effect of attributing power or distinction to the foretellers.10
Indigenous people, not universally but very commonly across the Australian continent, first applied to Europeans words that otherwise referred to “ghost,” “spirit” of the dead (also, sometimes, terms the principal meaning of which was “white”). This suggests that, to some degree, they cast the new arrivals in terms of the persons and spirits of their imaginative and cosmological peripheries, mainly the dead. A mapping of terms for (Pama-Nyungan) Australian languages reveals their continent-wide distribution. The pattern is also common in other11 languages of the continent, including in the region of my own field experience. We have a few explicit accounts of this sort of identification.
George Grey—soldier, explorer, colonial governor in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—led two (fairly disastrous) expeditions into uncharted country in northwest Australia (presently Western Australia) in 1837 and 1839. He was observant, but also much assisted by an accompanying Nyungar Aborigine (from the southwest area of present Western Australia), Kaiber, who undoubtedly helped him understand a good deal in their interactions with indigenous
