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CHAPTER 1

Nobodies and Relatives

Nonrecognition and Identification in Social Process

This chapter examines two modalities of indigenous-nonindigenous engagement in early encounter. One was their complete refusal to engage. The second was identification by indigenous people of Europeans as spirits of the dead. The Europeans were at an advantage. They had some general reports concerning Australia’s natives and some reported knowledge and experience of other Pacific peoples. Aborigines probably had variable experiences and ideas about degrees of otherness on the part of people outside their immediate region and within the range of their own form of life,¹ but they had no inkling of the existence, cultural repertoire, and mind-set of these strangers. Thus the outsiders had enormously greater power to control the terms of engagement between themselves and the Aborigines. I will argue that nonengagement is a major modality of social orientation, fundamental to building and maintaining social boundaries. Nonengagement is arguably part of a family of practices, a spectrum of involvement. In the historical context examined here, the nonengagement, or deliberate indigenous refusal of engagement, was a first-response tactic, before some other kind of response became imperative. The identification of people with spirits, I will argue, was often relationally specific: Europeans were identified as specific personalities or attributed particular social characters. Though deeply embedded in indigenous practices concerning people’s identification with others, the identification of Europeans with spirits could be rapidly questioned in this new context, as we will see.

They “Scarce Lifted Their Eyes”

Joseph Banks, the botanist accompanying Captain James Cook’s first great voyage (1768–71), observed parties of indigenous people in what came to be called Botany Bay, an area only a few kilometers south of what is now Sydney’s central business district. From the ship Endeavour, Banks saw the natives fishing from small boats within easy sight of the English. Despite that proximity the Aborigines paid no attention to them. Banks (1962: vol. 2, p. 54) observed that they “scarce lifted their eyes” as the Endeavour passed “within a quarter mile of them” (Banks 1962: vol. 2, p. 54).²

There were other sightings of indigenous groups by the English. Yet twice in his journal entry for 28 April 1770, Banks mentions the ship being within close proximity of “Indians” who appeared “totaly unmovd at us.” A few days later, Banks describes how twenty or so natives, seen walking along a beach, “pursued their way in all appearance intirely unmovd by the neighbourhood of so remarkable an object as a ship must necessarily be to people who have never seen one” (ibid., 63).

Perhaps the strangeness of a ship, a watercraft of an entirely unfamiliar kind, allowed this “remarkable object” to be unseen. While a ship would have been unfamiliar, we cannot leap to the conclusion that the natives did not physically see it. The diary does tell us that the “Indians” made different responses to the English over the period of several days, including these nonresponses. The entry of the same day, 28 April 1770, makes it clear that the ship had indeed been noticed by some “Indians” gathered about a fire. That they had seen it was inferred by Banks from the fact that they retired to an eminence from which they could watch it. Earlier in the day, the sailors were also waved at, invited to land, and menaced by men brandishing “pikes and swords.” It was only later, when the ship entered an inlet, that it was completely ignored by people within easy eyesight. That vision was good at the mentioned distance of a quarter mile is shown by an entry of 8 June in which things went quite differently at a location on the ship’s northward travel along the coast: “Still sailing between the Main and Islands; the former rocky and high lookd rather less barren than usual and by the number of fires seemd to be better peopled. In the morn we passd within ¼ of a mile of a small Islet or rock on which we saw with our glasses about 30 men women and children standing all together and looking attentively at us, the first people we have seen shew any signs of curiosity at the sight of the ship” (ibid., 76). Thus, “not seeing” was only one kind of early event among others.

There are other recorded instances of indigenous people’s refusal on early encounter to make sensory contact, even on occasions when outsiders, men of ordinary stature, were physically copresent or in close proximity with them.

In 1844, India-born Charles Napier Sturt (1795–1869), soldier, pastoralist, then explorer, set out from Adelaide northward on his third and final Australian expedition. Notwithstanding the seven decades’ difference between his incursion and Cook’s, he was moving into uncharted parts of the continent.³ His party frequently encountered Aborigines who had not seen Europeans before; and it seems likely that 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 situations have prompted indigenous people to think and respond in alternative ways, and produced something new?

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) certainly intended habitus as a theorization of generativity rather than determination, 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 people as they moved across country. Grey (1841: vol. 2, p. 129; see also p. 363) mentions a man, apparently one just encountering whites for the first time, asking him repeatedly in the “Swan River language” (i.e., Nyungar, near present Perth, Western Australia), “Were we dead?” The asker apparently took it to be quite possible that the dead may have human form and be able to engage with others and answer such questions. There are many clear instances of indigenous people having made an identification of this kind in early contact, on the basis of an understanding that ghosts and ancestral beings (with whom arriving colonials were often first identified) could exist in the same space-time with living people.¹² But notice that, though evidently presupposing such an identification, in the situation of encounter, which he clearly takes to be extraordinary, the man is moved to ask, “Were we dead?”—questioning the identification directly of a being who, he supposes, may be of this kind. The query “Were we dead?” is also a kind of meta-question as to whether these creatures belonged to a category of “spirit” usually referred to by that term, already imaginatively prefigured? Possibly, but it is hard to know how consistent ideas about spirits of the dead may have been. It is important, in any case, to see this as the man’s questioning matters previously assumed as commonplace but probably rarely put to such a salient, startling practical test.

Figure 2. Map of Australia showing distribution of “ghost” and “ancestor” terms in Pama-Nyungan languages. CartoGIS, Australian National University. Courtesy of Claire Bowern at Yale University Pama-Nyungan Laboratory.

It seems that identifications often did not remain at the level of a broad category of ancestral spirits, but were person specific. In another place, Grey (1841: vol. 1, pp. 300–302) recounts how an old man (north of Perth, and belonging to an apparently newly contacted group) gazed at him with great curiosity, then went off to fetch his wife, who, “throwing her arms round me, cried bitterly, her head resting on my breast…. At last the old lady, emboldened by my submission, deliberately kissed me on each cheek, just in the manner a French woman would have done; she then cried a little more, and at length relieving me, assured me that I was the ghost of her son.” Again, Grey was no doubt assisted by local interpreters in understanding this fairly intricate message.

These stories evoke the interacting parties’ differing perspectives. The old man (and woman) look at Grey, see him as their son because of his appearance and on the basis of acceptance of the possibility of the dead appearing among them, and they communicate this to him. Notice that difference in “color” was not prohibitive to their identification of Grey; in fact, they may have expected “ghosts” to be somewhat pallid. They seem to have seen other similarities, perhaps in features. Identification of a newly arrived European as ancestor might appear preposterous to readers who imagine racial difference would prevent the identification of personalities across such a solid-seeming barrier—to say nothing of the underlying notion involved, that a personality may resurface later in time as another individual.¹³ Grey wrote that he was loath to disabuse them of their notion; he left the conviction with them, or at least did not firmly answer the question put to him in the negative.

In any case, the parties appear to be interacting over who or what Grey is, with the old lady firmly persuaded that he is her returning son. Grey realizes this and allows himself to be embraced and kissed. His conscience-ridden response neither completely confirmed this identification nor dispelled it, but this seems unlikely to have altered the old woman’s certainty.

Indigenous identification of outsiders with the dead sometimes persisted well beyond early contact, even after the white outsiders were more numerous and their presence had become more widely known. Mary Bennett (1928:109), daughter of Robert Christison, who from 1863 established a station he called Lammermoor in far north Queensland, recounts that one old man wanted to claim him as a “defunct brother” who had “jumped up whitefellow.” This reflects more explicitly an idea involved in the episode above: that their own people who had died could return as (what were by then called in Pidgin English and understood to be) “whitefellows” (not simply, that whitefellows generically were spirits of the dead). Presumably, however, identification of whitefellows with the dead and with specific personalities at some point became less common or thoroughgoing, even with respect to outsiders who were in close contact with indigenous people. This kind of assertion of identity is now rare or takes a somewhat different form in my experience.¹⁴

The identification illustrated by these episodes seems to have been highly asymmetrical. I know of no instance of Aborigines’ regarding someone of their number as the ghost of a white person; always the converse, Aborigines regarding a white person as someone known to them. Nor are there reports of any white person claiming an Aborigine as a predecessor. These forms of interaction, early and late, seem to have been strictly unidirectional and sometimes phrased as claims by Aborigines of relationship or identification with whites.

The reasons for the asymmetry of this identification were, first, that Englishmen and Europeans would not have entertained notions of the dead as regularly capable of reappearing in everyday life, nor would they have identified people of different generations as embodying the “same” social personality; and, second, that they would have seen Aborigines as different in kind from themselves and found implausible specific identification of Aboriginal persons with themselves in life or death. Aborigines would surely have differed on the first count; and these episodes indicate that they did on the second as well. They did not draw a boundary around human “kinds” in the same way as did their “whitefella” contemporaries.

This difference in conceptualization and practice concerning human kinds as self and other is related to questions of power and influence. Clearly whites saw themselves as separate and distinct from Aborigines; while the latter, in circumstances that permitted, entertained the question whether they might not be the same or identifiable with each other. Solidification of a category difference as “racial” in Australia was by no means immediate or unbridgeable on the part of Aborigines (see Chapters 5 and 6). Race was not a fixed, given dimension of otherness for indigenous people but emerged as a historically and interactionally produced category. Racial difference was possible, from the indigenous side, because they noticed certain differences of the outsiders (alongside certain similarities); for the outsiders, “race” built on a “preaccumulation” of ideas about the kind of category to which natives belonged.

For Aborigines, things were different. Accustomed as Aboriginal people were to living in small-scale regional systems and patterns of movement, with modalities of extension outward beyond familiar populations, their relational repertoires were fine-grained as well as channeled in social categories (Chapter 5). This combination facilitated attention to differences, as well as building upon widely available relationship or social category types as means of social reckoning with people with whom they came in regular contact. This kind of practice of relationships did not tend toward absolutism, categorical solidity, or complete boundedness; rather it encouraged modalities of identification according to minor differences and similarities. Clearly many Aborigines rapidly resorted to categorizing outsiders as “ghosts” or “spirits” and also experienced fright and dread of them, probably partly because of this sense. Nevertheless the association of outsiders with the dead was also subject to question (as by the Nyungar man) in what were undoubtedly experienced as unusual events of contact and possibly to change and dislodgement. Casting whites in terms of an available cosmologically peripheral category occurred widely and immediately, given that complete and unexpected unknowns coming in unfamiliar guise was simply not an available idea on this continent (nor apparently one that could be projected onto a particular transcendent figure, as happened with the Cook-Lono identification in Hawaii). The category itself may have been without neat empirical correlates: what do ghosts look like? And how do they act? Thus the labeling of outsiders may have been spontaneous and definite, but their identification with whatever was taken to be the general sense of the category seems to have been open to modification in the course of events.

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 women internalizing a sense of caution about behaving in ways that would invite aggression. Language encodes invasive direct gaze in a term of opprobrium that indigenous people translate as “lookin’-at bugger,” that is, one who causes a feeling of disquiet and makes one ill at ease by looking too directly. Anybody who has spent time in communities of (remote?) Australia will recognize the demand for appropriate behavior in the “growl”:¹⁸ “No more lookin’ at!” (i.e., don’t look, stare).¹⁹

In many places in the continent, particular relationships are constituted through norms of circumspection and avoidance. Some of these are also highly normative and ideologically salient. In southern Arnhem Land, women are to avoid their brothers, not speak directly to them, nor give them anything except through intermediaries (W. L. Warner 1937; Hiatt 1966; Burbank 1985; Merlan 2016a). Women who fail to live up to norms are threatened with violence. Stages of life—initiation into adulthood, as well as bereavement—were also marked by circumspection, avoidance, retreat into silence, and deliberate blockage of the visual and other senses.

Older sources on greeting behavior among local groups or persons coming into contact after a period of time report typical forms of spatial and bodily circumspection that suggest the constitutive and channeling quality of this dimension on forms of practice. An ethnographic report on the Edward River in Cape York in the early twentieth century renders the muted tenor of encounter:

Three men, each carrying a bundle of spears, spear-thrower and fire stick, appeared out of the scrub to the north of the camp. Although their approach was at once observed, causing an under-current of excitement in camp, no apparent notice whatever was taken of the men, who approached slowly to within about 40 feet of the northern fringe of the camp, where each squatted on the ground a few feet apart, placing his weapons in front of him. Not a word was spoken, and apparently no notice whatever was taken of their presence for about 10 or 15 minutes. Then a “big” man left the camp unarmed and strolled casually towards the man on the left, scraped a shallow depression in the ground close to him with his foot, as a native does before sitting down, and then squatted on the ground about a yard away from the visitor. Still not a word was spoken. They did not even look at one another, but kept their eyes downcast. After a few minutes had elapsed the old man of the camp spoke a few words in a low tone—inaudible to me where I stood a few yards away—and the other replied in the same casual way. Still neither looked up—lest he might betray to the watching camp the slightest interest or emotion. At length the old man called the single word Bat (fire) and a boy brought out a small piece of smouldering wood which he handed to the old man from the camp. This fire the old man then placed on the ground between himself and the visitor to whom he had spoken. In former times this no doubt concluded the ceremony, but on this occasion a tobacco pipe was lighted and handed to the visitor. A second man now left the camp, strolled casually over and spoke to the man at the other end of the line, making a present, which was reciprocated. A little later all entered the camp, to be followed in the evening by a larger party of which they were the forerunners. (Thomson 1932:163–64)

From Central Australia, based on observations of the late nineteenth century, we learn that visits to people with whom interaction was sporadic or irregular were characterized by the visitors first making smoke so that their intention to approach was made clear; then by placing themselves within sight of the camp. The visitor

does not at first go close up to it, but sits down in silence. Apparently no one takes the slightest notice of him, and etiquette forbids him from moving without being invited to do so. After perhaps an hour or two one of the older men will walk over to him and quietly sit down on the ground beside the stranger. If the latter be the bearer of any message, or of any credentials, he will hand these over, and then perhaps the old man will embrace him and invite him to come into the camp…. Very likely he may be provided with a temporary wife during his visit, who will, of course, belong to the special group with which it is lawful for him to have marital relations. (Spencer and Gillen 1927: vol. 2, p. 505)²⁰

These examples from different regions indicate that bodily and orientational circumspection, including silence, downcast gaze, and the damping down of sensory availability in close proximity of others, was a highly developed dimension of the conduct of relationships and of special events in which the question of ongoing or resumed relationship was sensitive (Stanner 1937). This may be called “cultural.” In contemporary settings that have undergone much change, such behavior is evident. In camps and settlements that I have visited indigenous people consider it intrusive to directly enter an indigenous camp or housing area where one is not a regular resident or otherwise well known. This is especially so for a white person, but this etiquette is observed and demarcates boundaries of greater and lesser familiarity among indigenous people themselves. Preferred protocol involves sitting or standing some distance away to await recognition; or a circumspect and very visible, slow approach while remaining at some distance. One’s gaze is best indirect or averted (Burbank 1994:84). Yasmine Musharbash (2016) describes a contemporary Central Australian community, Yuendumu, in which improved opportunities for Aboriginal people to access housing now sometimes result in their living next door to white service personnel. But in her experience of twenty years’ observation in the community, Warlpiri do not attend to nonindigenous neighbors visually or in any other way, nor do they talk about them, she reports, in their own daily conversations.

One of the most widely remarked emotions associated with indigenous social life is that of “shame” (Myers 1986; Harkins 1990; Burbank 1994), and this seems relevant. Shame is often manifest as a bodily enacted shyness (involving aversion of gaze, withdrawn demeanor) and sometimes explained by indigenous people as what comes from uncertainty, public exposure, a feeling of inadequacy or wrongdoing. To be guided by shame, to be withdrawn in these ways, removes from others the opportunity and reason, as indigenous people might say, for “lookin’ at.”

Nowadays, physical and sensory circumspection is an aspect of indigenous behavior that is often judged to require modification by schoolteachers (Harkins 1990) and others seeking to make indigenous children conform to valued models of attentive and productive behavior. This has helped to make it a subject of conscious awareness and a dimension of what indigenous people see as proper behavior, informing their explicit understanding of themselves. They often contrast circumspection with the outgoing behavior of nonindigenous others who “got no shame.” As indigenous people, over a long period, have been made to feel inadequate and subordinate, circumspection may have been amplified or taken on special salience in relations with nonindigenous people.

Circumspection in all forms is very much part of what is abandoned by indigenous people under the influence of excessive alcohol: drunken behavior often seems to flaut the usual norms of deportment by deliberate intrusiveness and provocation (and is also often marked by complaints of social abandonment by others; Merlan 1998:198).

Indigenous forms of life have been radically altered in all parts of the continent, varying somewhat with the extent of colonial-era and later disruption and relocation of indigenous people, their conversion into semisedentary workforces, their institutionalization in missions, schools, and so on. However, it seems plausible to claim that sensibilities concerning bodily practices based upon the modulation of gaze, proximity, and other forms of bodily orientation continue to be significant through (and to some extent as a result of) some of these quite dramatic changes. They have acquired contrastive significance and value for indigenous people as specifically “blackfella” behavior.

Summing Up

Meeting aliens, indigenous people had to shortly adapt and adopt practices, change what they did, and perhaps explicitly change their minds. In the first instance, they sometimes refused perceptual contact and may have thought that these apparitions would go away. But of course they did not. We have posed questions about nonrecognition: Was it deliberate? Was it concerted? In what sense was it cultural? In relation to identification of whites as spirits of the dead, we have more specific guidance from the accounts. It often seems to have been very explicit and specific; and it was certainly based on quite explicit prior conceptions and categories. We noted also, however, that it seemed to be immediately available for questioning in unusual circumstances, either in terms of the general category, or whites’ identification with it, or both.

Vignettes of refusal of sensory uptake and the identification of outsiders as spirits of the dead have provided material for exploration of culture and what is cultural. Preexisting cultural practice is important to all encounter, but accounts that examine it in such terms have been problematic in the extent to which they narrow the discussion to categories and changes in them. This works to thin out the notion of what is cultural and limits a historicizing approach. While attention to preexisting cultural influences reproduced in ongoing social process is important, scholarship has been principally oriented toward the question “What remains the same?” Attention to the preexisting practice does not provide the material for understanding the evident disequilibration, both positive and negative, that often accompanied encounter across boundaries of difference (Chapter 3).

Our concept of culture must enable a relational account of interaction across considerable boundaries of difference. Our perspectives on social process need to recognize culture’s potential for openness, historicity, multiscale temporality, and its power-laden character. Culture refers to practices that are differentially entrenched, layered, or sedimented and differentially available to reflection and change. Change may occur through taken-for-granted assumptions being suddenly cast into question by events—such as the startling emergence of explorers whose initial identification as “ghosts” certainly did not settle ongoing questions of what to make of them and how to deal with them. Modalities such as nonrecognition and aversion continue to perfuse and constitute forms of everyday practice across perceived boundaries of difference whether these are internal or with respect to people seen as outsiders.

In the final part of this chapter I returned to its first theme—the somewhat unexpected form of encounter manifested in nonrecognition and refusal of sensory uptake. I suggested that this response is distinctly “cultural,” in that sensory circumspection (e.g., “greeting behavior,” “in-law avoidance”)²¹ is regarded by indigenous people as highly marked and as value bearing and worthy of mention as part of who they are, as part of their “culture,” or “blackfella rule” now contrasting with “whitefella.”

The chapter suggested that, in its wide and diverse distribution, sensory circumspection marks out a dimension of conduct that is deeply culturally entrenched, different from some more common acceptations of “culture” in being a modality of behavior rather than identifiable as thinglike. Some forms of this circumspection were and are more extreme than others and may merit being called “avoidance.”²² I sketched the general conditions under which such cultural forms became fundamental. These involved a small-scale and often highly dispersed, only periodically intensified, kind of sociality. This kind of life was supported in specific cultural forms (such as inclusive, extensible kinship and social categorization) that enabled long-term interdependence, continuity of connection, mitigated small scale and dispersal, and enabled seasonal and social flexibility (see Stanner 1958).

Such circumspection, deeply sedimented and distributed in indigenous practice, is more enduring under particular and even changing conditions of life than is any specific practice (such as avoidance of certain categories of kin or specific ways of showing respect). Forms of action in encounter—sensory circumspection, particular kinds of categorization—have some element of prior cultural content and shape, but the range of matters to which people may orient as new or salient is too varied for us to insist that responses are contained in distinct or necessarily accessible cultural terms. Change in these forms points to changes in indigenous-nonindigenous relationship, as an increasingly shared (but unequal) social world and mutually recognized forms of action were taking shape.

There is another question that can be asked, which continues to acknowledge the importance of the past but is less insistent concerning continuity: What gets repositioned and revalued and how? The ethnographer may also ask, what is happening now, what happens next, how do people see it? Thus inherently these questions make us pay attention to temporalities at different scales and recognize a plurality of patterning.

The next chapter focuses on first encounter that proceeds quite differently from sensory circumspection: the often-discussed issue of imitation between “primitives” and “civilized” parties in encounter. The chapter attempts to repose the question: not “What does imitation say about the indigenous other?” but “Is imitative behavior a practice especially oriented to identification and relationship?”