style="font-size:15px;"> To consider the British as ghosts neither shielded the Aborigines from their troubling otherness nor enabled practical dealings with them. There is much evidence that early categorization of the outsiders occurred in the context of a good deal of uncertainty, as well as disequilibration (Chapter 3). The question by an indigenous person whether someone is dead, or a particular returned ancestor, is not only a practical effort to achieve understanding but a particular platform with respect to what comes next. What role does identification of outsiders with ghosts play in an ongoing process? How does its ideational and emotional content change?
The category (white man as “ghost”) is historical in the sense that its meaning changes as indigenous circumstances change. In my own research I have known older Aboriginal people who have memories of the first white, or whites, they ever personally saw. But by their time—the early twentieth century—it was widely known that whitefellas were about, ran stations, mines, or other businesses, were often dangerous or problematic to deal with, but had important resources. Older people I have known have told of first meetings with whites, reporting that they were afraid. The substance of meetings as they remember them had to do with whites showing them how to use matches, giving them flour and sugar and tea to try, and so on, often paired with humorous accounts of how thoroughly they misunderstood these things—using flour for body decoration as if it were white ochre, mistakenly putting sugar in water and dissolving it all, and so on,15 almost a narrativization of their own inexperience and simpleness. One gets the impression from such older people that they saw these whites as “other,” perhaps even as somewhat uncanny. But in many cases they began to live (usually on unequal terms) alongside them and with them—some of the women having their children in more or less routinized domestic arrangements. The example of whitefellas as “ghosts” also helps us to consider what happens when preexisting cultural categories are put to work. Processes of encounter with whites may have unsettled understandings about the dead in general; they may also have led (more immediately) to questioning of the identification of outsiders with the category of the dead. In many places in Australia whitefellas are still referred to by Aborigines as they were in the past, but they are not assumed to be dead. Many northern indigenous people I know continue to sense the presence of spirits of “old people” in their vicinity and in the landscape (but this too is changing). What seems to have shifted definitively is this way of proposing commonality with whites, coinciding with a longer term of common awareness and new ways in which self-other boundaries are shaped. I have commonly encountered the conviction on the part of indigenous people that they think and experience differently than do whites and are much more likely to encounter and believe in spirits.
An appropriately historicizing view of encounter must recognize that, over time, Aboriginal people have been incorporated into a larger, colonizing world. The relations over time have typically been asymmetrical (unequal) with the consequence that, in one form or other, indigenous people and their sociality have been changed more than that of the now nonindigenous majority. By illuminating the temporally and spatially specific sources of inequalities, this book will develop some general conception of power and influence in a context of fundamental and foundational inequality.
Practices as Cultural: A Return
If we notice the plasticity of “culture,” its openness to history, why should we continue to frame the underlying logic of responses to the unexpected as “cultural”? Let us review this chapter’s examples: early “nonrecognition” of outsider presence, the recognition of whites as ghosts, and the identification of accessible whites as particular indigenous personalities. Can we find in the ethnographic record of “classical” Aboriginal culture the precedents of these responses?
Refusal of sensory contact is not recorded frequently in documentary accounts, but it appears often enough to suggest the systematic nature of this response. That is, it seems to have been patterned (not simply contingent) and recurrent. Therefore, in some sense it belongs to an interactional and socially transmitted repertoire within specific populations. There is much evidence for continental Australia suggesting that refusal of sensory uptake is a significant dimension of a spectrum of practices, some of which lie in the background of actors’ perception and capacity for explicit articulation. What follows suggests a long-term historical context for indigenous Australia that seems to have fostered this as a constitutive dimension of practice.
Precolonially, indigenous copresent groupings were typically of relatively small scale (varying with seasonal availability of resources, livelihood rounds, and events of meeting, celebration, and the like). Most were mobile over seasonal cycles within regions and meaningful landscapes well known to them. People moved in and out of local groups according to specific personal connections and circumstances.16 Ubiquitous modes of kinship and social classification provided the social means for continuing bonds and ways of orienting people’s relations with each other in this situation of generally small scale, mobility, and regular dispersal across a known, meaningful landscape.
The setting of small group life in which some people, intimately related, saw each other and cooperated every day, was/is nevertheless not aptly characterized by what is sometimes romantically imagined to be immediacy or unmediated availability of persons to others. First, there were always significant others who were not immediately present. Second, there was variation and specificity in how persons were understood, and there were relationships along dimensions of kinship and other kinds of social classification and relation, age, and gender. Some relationships were stereotypically characterized by closeness and intimacy, others were lived out at least partly in terms of highly formulated prescriptions of behavior. Consider, for example, the “joking relation,” with its “organized obscenity” enjoined in some regions between grandparents and grandchildren (Thomson 1932), and the explicit “avoidance” relations enjoined between categories of affines, notably son- and mother-in-law, on a very wide continental basis.17
Everyday life was lived with minimal built structures and other material means of separation within camp spaces. In these circumstances, direction of attention and orientation to others, on the one hand, and nonorientation, on the other, seem to have been major modalities for formulating, reproducing, and practicing relationships in differentiated ways. In terms of maximal contrast, with some people one could be physically close and involved. In relations with certain others, especially in-laws (with whom one might nevertheless be encamped) one had to maintain explicit physical and sensory nonengagement, conforming to notions of the proper behaviors among people related in this way. Such avoidance behavior cannot be understood as people just “staying away” from each other; it signals deliberate nonorientation that is socially significant and marked (Merlan 1997b). “Avoidance” is at one end of the sedimentation spectrum, where what one does is considered imaginatively and ideologically salient and highly communicable as a marker of what is important in social relations.
The famously complex social category systems of Australia—valued by indigenous people as foundational—can be understood as the context for their practiced modulation of directness versus indirectness, or for avoidance. Their continuing practice inculcated a more or less articulable sense of sensory circumspection. Their aversion of gaze and their other bodily orientations were relevant to culturally particular forms of agency and social relationship. These modalities developed as cultural under specific conditions of life. While their variable persistence today is conditional on life circumstances, circumspection and aversion still play a significant role in many indigenous settings.
For example, among all Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory I have known, direct gaze is considered intrusive and impolite; in the thought repertoire of older people, not explicitly reproduced as far as I know among younger people, direct gaze may even be lethal in some circumstances. Women I have known shared the idea that senior men could kill a child in utero by looking intently at the body of a pregnant woman. Women had to act appropriately to prevent this. Paperbark coverings were worn for the purpose; but more important, this was one dimension of gendered sensibilization, with
