The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism
352
The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism
352Paperback(2002)
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Overview
Povinelli draws on seventeen years of ethnographic research among northwest coast indigenous people and her own experience participating in land claims, as well as on public records, legal debates, and anthropological archives to examine how multicultural forms of recognition work to reinforce liberal regimes rather than to open them up to a true cultural democracy. The Cunning of Recognition argues that the inequity of liberal forms of multiculturalism arises not from its weak ethical commitment to difference but from its strongest vision of a new national cohesion. In the end, Australia is revealed as an exemplary site for studying the social effects of the liberal multicultural imaginary: much earlier than the United States and in response to very different geopolitical conditions, Australian nationalism renounced the ideal of a unitary European tradition and embraced cultural and social diversity.
While addressing larger theoretical debates in critical anthropology, political theory, cultural studies, and liberal theory, The Cunning of Recognition demonstrates that the impact of the globalization of liberal forms of government can only be truly understood by examining its concrete—and not just philosophical—effects on the world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822328681 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press Books |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2002 |
| Series: | Politics, History, and Culture |
| Edition description: | 2002 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.13(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Cunning of Recognition-CL
By Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2002 Elizabeth A. PovinelliAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822328537
Chapter One
Mutant Messages
INTRODUCING (THE THING)
In the 1880 introduction to the ethnology Kamilaroi and Kunai, the Reverend Lorimer Fison described a sensation he experienced studying the "inter-sexual arrangements" of indigenous Australians. He described feeling "ancient rules" underlying the Kamilaroi and Kunai's sexual practices, catching fleeting glimpses of an ancient "strata" cropping up from the horrific given conditions of colonial settlement, sensing a "something else, ... something more" Kamilaroi and Kunai than even the Kamilaroi and Kunai themselves, a some thing that offered him and other ethnologists a glimpse of an ancient order puncturing the present, often hybrid and degenerate, indigenous social horizon. Fison pointed to this ancient order as the proper object of ethnological research, and he used the promised feelings this order produced to prod other ethnologists to turn its way. But Fison cautioned, even admonished, other researchers that to reach this order and to experience these feelings they had to be "continually on the watch" that "every last trace of white men's effect on Aboriginal society" was "altogether cast out of the calculation." Only by stripping from theirethnological analysis the traumatic effect of settlement on indigenous social life could the researcher reach, touch, and begin to sketch the outline of that thing, which was not the present corrupted Aboriginal social body but an immutable form that predated and survived the ravage of civil society.
The emergent modern ethnological epistemology Fison promoted bordered on the paranoid. Every actual indigenous practice was suspect. All "present usages," even those seemingly "developed by the natives themselves" and seemingly untouched by "contact with the white man," might be mere mirages of the investigator's own society. They might be like the "present usages" of the "Mount Gambier blacks," the desperate social acts of men and women who had watched their society be "reduced from 900 souls to 17" in thirty years, and who were "compelled to make matrimonial arrangements as [they could], whether they be according to ancient law or not." But even "present usages" untouched by the ravages of British settlement were little more than mere chimera of the ancient thing Fison sought. They taunted him with glimpses of what he truly desired-a superceded but still signifying ancient society shimmering there just beyond him and them, settler time and emergent national history.
The proper ethnological thing Fison sought would always just elude him, would always be somewhere he was not. Maybe this ancient order survived in the remote interior of the nation, but it was never where he was. Where he stood the ancient rules were submerged in the horror of the colonial present and were mediated by the faulty memory of a "few wretched survivors [who were] ... obliged to take such mates as death has left them, whether they be of the right classes or not." Or the ancient rules were heavily encrusted with the autochthonous cultural debris generated by the inexorable tectonic shifts Fison's colleagues called social evolution. Not surprisingly, a restlessness pervades Fison's ethnology. Irritation and humiliation punctuate the rational veneer of his text as he is forced to encounter his own intellectual limits and to account for his own conceptual failures. Time after time, Fison is forced to admit that what he feels and desires cannot be accounted for by what he sees, reads, and hears.
Whatever Fison was chasing, Australians still seemed in desperate pursuit of more than a hundred years after Kamilaroi and Kunai was first published. At the turn of the twentieth century, most Australians had the distinct feeling that some decisive national drama pivoted on their felicitous recognition of an ancient indigenous law predating the nation and all living indigenous subjects. 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). As a result, native title still existed where the state had not explicitly extinguished it; where Aboriginal communities still maintained its foundation-namely, the "real acknowledgment of traditional law and real observance of traditional customs"; and where those real traditions did no violence to common law principles.
As I will discuss at greater length in chapter 4, in the fantasy space coordinated by these two legal decisions, traditional and modern laws seem to coexist without producing conceptual violence or social antagonism. The legitimacy of native title is granted; its authority is rooted in the ancient rules, beliefs, and practices predating the settler nation. The object of native title tribunals is merely to judge at the "level of primary fact" if native title has disappeared "by reason of the washing away by 'the tide of history' and any real acknowledgment of traditional law and real observance of traditional customs" and to judge whether any of these real ancient customs violate contemporary common law values. This is why the Wik decision on pastoral property was so important: the vast hectares under pastoral lease were "the parts of Australia where [native] laws and traditions (important to sustain native title) are most likely to have survived." These places were the spaces perceived as least touched by modern society.
The moral and legal obligation of the nation to its indigenous population was foregrounded in another well-publicized debate; namely, the moral and economic claim of the "Stolen Generation" on the Australian nation. The Stolen Generation refers to the 10 to 30 percent of the total population of Aboriginal children between 1910 and 1970, who were forcibly removed from their parents as part of the state's policy of cultural assimilation. Members of the Stolen Generation filed a federal class action lawsuit against the state, arguing that it had violated their human and constitutional rights. A Royal Commission investigated the intent and effect of these assimilation policies. It found that past state and territory governments had explicitly engaged in what could most accurately be called a form of social genocide, a cultural holocaust as defined by the 1951 Genocide Convention-an analogy made more compelling by the age of the Aboriginal applicants, many of whom had been taken in the early 1940s. Australians looked at themselves in a ghastly historical mirror and imagined their own Nuremberg. Would fascism be the final metaphor of Australian settler modernity? In 1997 the High Court ruled that the 1918 Northern Territory ordinance allowing Aboriginal and "half-caste" children to be forcibly removed from their mothers was constitutionally valid and did not authorize genocide de jure, although in retrospect it was misguided and morally questionable.
This Australian drama would not surprise most liberal theorists of the global travails of liberal forms of nationalism, and settler nationalisms in particular. 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? What is it about the thing of "indigenous tradition" that produces sensations, desires, anxieties, and professional, personal, and national optimisms? What is this thing that is only ever obliquely glimpsed and that resists the bad faith of the liberal nation while at the same time does no violence to good civil values, indeed crystallizes the best form of community "we" could hope for? What is the glimmering object the public support of which can produce, as if by magical charm, the feelings necessary for social harmony in the multicultural nation, for good trading relations with the Asia-Pacific, and for a new globally inspirational form of national cohesion? How is this thing socially produced and politically practiced? Why must Aboriginal persons identify with it to gain access to public sympathy and state resources?
To understand what the nation is seeking to recognize, touch, feel, and foreground through its recognition of an ancient pre(ter)national order, this chapter tracks (across multiple state and public domains) the public debates over the worth of ancient aboriginal law, legal mandates on the form traditional culture must take, and mass-mediated portraits of traditional indigenous culture. In this chapter I focus specifically on the intersection of mass-mediated public representations and political debates over land redistribution. As I track the transformations of the object "traditional indigenous law" across these public, state, and commercial domains, I map the political cunning and calculus of cultural recognition in a settler modernity. More than ten years ago, Kaja Silverman noted the "theoretical truism that hegemonic colonialism works by inspiring in the colonized subject the desire to assume the identity of his or her colonizers." Perhaps this is what fundamentally distinguishes the operation of power in colonial and (post)colonial multicultural societies. Hegemonic domination in the latter formation works primarily by inspiring in the indigenous subject a desire to identify with a lost indeterminable object-indeed, to be the melancholic subject of traditions.13
To understand this new form of liberal power, I examine how recognition is at once a formal meconnaissance of a subaltern group's being and of its being worthy of national recognition and, at the same time, a formal moment of being inspected, examined, and investigated. I suggest this inspection always already constitutes indigenous persons as failures of indigeneity as such. And this is the point. In certain contexts of recognition, Aboriginal persons must produce a detailed account of the content of their traditions and the force with which they identify with them-discursive, practical, and dispositional states that necessarily have a "more or less" relationship to the imaginary of a "real acknowledgment of traditional law and real observance of traditional customs." What are the social consequences of the noncorrespondence between the object of national allegiance, "ancient tradition," and any particular Aboriginal person, group, practice, memory, or artifact?
INTERROGATIONS
Meaghan Morris noted that 1992 marked a certain watershed in the Australian national stance toward indigenous people. In 1992, in Eddie Mabo v. the State of Queensland, the Australian High Court overturned the doctrine that Australian was terra nullius (a land belonging to no one) at the point of settlement and ruled that Aboriginal Australians had and retained native title interests in the law. In a subsequent ruling (The Wik People v. the State of Queensland, 1996) the court further ruled that the granting of a pastoral lease did not necessarily extinguish native title. In 1993, in response to the Mabo decision, public pressure, and its own political strategy, the Labour government passed the federal Native Title Act, which legislated the mechanisms by which indigenous groups could claim land.
A year later the conservative Liberal-National coalition, which promised to protect the interests of (white) miners, farmers, and landowners from deleterious native title claims, defeated the Labour Party for the first time in nearly a quarter century. During the first session of the new Liberal parliament, Pauline Hanson, an independent minister from Queensland, vehemently attacked the basic tenets of the state's twenty-year-old multicultural policy, especially two of its central tenets: self-determination for indigenous Australians and increased Asian immigration. She claimed that multiculturalism was a guilt-based ideological program doing little more than partitioning the country into drug- and crime-ridden Asian and Aboriginal enclaves. In what would provoke a national scandal, Hanson argued that indigenous self-determination was just another name for a massive and massively misconceived social welfare program, transferring through taxation national wealth generated by hardworking (white) Australians to socially irresponsible (black) Australians. It was time for white outrage. "Ordinary Australians" should reject "the Aboriginal industry's" insistence that they feel guilty for past colonial policies they were not responsible for and, instead, proudly embrace what was for Hanson the obvious point: that white Australians made the modern nation, no matter that present-day white Australians had as little to do with past economic policies as they did with past colonial policies. In hailing what she often referred to as "ordinary Australians" Hanson constituted a political space for all who desired to be such and to have such define the motor of Australian settler modernity.
Pauline Hanson went to the heart of the traditional thing. In a series of public addresses and interviews, Hanson argued the "ordinary" Australians should ignore the romantic image of traditional Aboriginal society and instead examine what she believed were the real conditions of present-day indigenous social life: third-world health and housing conditions, dreadfully high infant mortality rates, rampant substance abuse, sexual disorder, and truncated life spans-namely, the horrific material conditions that, she claimed, indexed a tremendous "waste" of "our" tax dollars. In 1998, the Melbourne Age reported that census figures indicated that one in two Aborigines would be jobless by 2006. What was this thing "Aboriginal tradition," which was never wherever anyone was? What did "self-determination" mean when so many Aboriginal communities and individuals would be destitute without massive government financial support? Indigenous social conditions had barely budged, she argued, in the thirty-odd years since Aboriginal men and women had been made citizens, had been removed from ward rolls, and had been given the right to vote, receive social security benefits, and drink. Indeed, she and other conservative critics argued that indigenous social life had gotten worse since full citizenship had been extended to Aborigines. The availability of social security benefits increased drug and alcohol addiction and lessened the incentive for Aboriginal women and men to become working members of the national economy.
Most public and political spokespersons labeled Hanson and her followers "fringe" and "extreme," and called their views dangerously antiquated. They wrung their hands and rang warning bells, cautioning the nation that a line of tolerance was being approached that, if crossed, would bring grave social and economic consequences. But although Hanson was politically marginalized and her views historicized, mainstream political officials were also recorded as publicly questioning the value of an ancient indigenous law for a modern technological society. Just days before Liberal Party Prime Minister John Howard appointed Liberal Senator Ross Lightfoot from Western Australia to the coalition backbench Committee on Aboriginal Affairs, he forced the senator to apologize to parliament for claiming "Aboriginal people in their native state are the lowest colour on the civilisation spectrum." The Liberal Party's Aboriginal Affairs Minister, John Herron, nearly lost his portfolio after publicly supporting the assimilation policies of the 1950s, including the forced removal of indigenous children from their parents. Herron argued that forced assimilation had had positive social effects: "Half-caste" children had been given an economic and social head start over their "full-blood" cousins who were handicapped in the race to civil society by their adherence to outmoded beliefs and practices.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Cunning of Recognition-CL by Elizabeth A. Povinelli Copyright © 2002 by Elizabeth A. Povinelli. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Critical Common Sense
1. Mutant Messages
2. The Vulva Thieves (Atna Nylkna): Modal Ethics and the Colonial Archive
3. Sex Rites, Civil Rights
4. Shamed States
5. The Poetics of Ghosts: Social Reproduction in the Archive of the Nation
6. The Truest Belief is Compulsion
Notes
Selected Works Cited
Index
What People are Saying About This
Elizabeth Povinelli's The Cunning of Recognition is a breakthrough work that has major implications for redefining the relations between cultural studies and anthropology. With a consistently high level of intellectual excitement and commitment, Povinelli draws together work from a variety of fields in new and provocative ways.
— Benjamin Lee, author of Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity
“Elizabeth Povinelli’s The Cunning of Recognition is a breakthrough work that has major implications for redefining the relations between cultural studies and anthropology. With a consistently high level of intellectual excitement and commitment, Povinelli draws together work from a variety of fields in new and provocative ways.”
An intelligent, valuable, and absorbing study. Povinelli relentlessly dissects the legal and affective bases of contemporary multicultural liberalism, while bringing the Australian case squarely into an ethics debate that has up to now been dominated by the North American experience.
— James Ferguson, coeditor of Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology
“The Cunning of Recognition is one of the most challenging books I have read in years, a passionate and moving account of what the practice of multiculturalism looks like on the ground. Along the way, Povinelli inventively reframes debates within anthropological theory over kinship, culture, and the state. Without platitudes or readymade postures of critique, she shows us an impasse in liberal thought that stems not from its weaknesses, but from its strongest ethical sense of obligation toward those who are different. This is dialectical thinking at its best, painfully and excitingly honest.”
“An intelligent, valuable, and absorbing study. Povinelli relentlessly dissects the legal and affective bases of contemporary multicultural liberalism, while bringing the Australian case squarely into an ethics debate that has up to now been dominated by the North American experience.”
The Cunning of Recognition is one of the most challenging books I have read in years, a passionate and moving account of what the practice of multiculturalism looks like on the ground. Along the way, Povinelli inventively reframes debates within anthropological theory over kinship, culture, and the state. Without platitudes or readymade postures of critique, she shows us an impasse in liberal thought that stems not from its weaknesses, but from its strongest ethical sense of obligation toward those who are different. This is dialectical thinking at its best, painfully and excitingly honest.
— Michael Warner, author of The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life