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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 2
Imitation as Relationality in Early
Australian Encounters
Mere (?) Imitation
Europeans came to new lands such as Australia prepared to see and emphasize radical cultural, indeed civilizational difference. Sometimes, they succeeded in doing otherwise and recognized the quickness, the observational acuity, the mirth, and other characteristics of the people they were meeting. In many early journals of exploration, Europeans in direct, face-to-face contact with indigenous people remarked on those people copying what they themselves had done: imitation at close quarters. They recognized the model, the source material, as their own actions, copied by their indigenous interlocutors.
For example, Nicolas Baudin, the leader of the French expedition to map the coast of Australia, 1800–1803, reported that Bruny Island natives came to them in the vicinity of what he called Port Cygnet, in the southern part of present Tasmania, in the hopes of obtaining presents (or so he thought), and they received “what we gave them with great outbursts of joy.” He goes on, “They imitated easily and with gestures, and repeated clearly several French words” (1974:345).
The natives’ repetition of words of foreign languages and of the texts of songs accurately amazed Europeans. The outsiders considered it something they themselves could not easily do. The French explorer and naturalist with the Baudin expedition, François Péron, candidly compared himself with Bruny Islanders (Tasmanians) in this regard: “Generally, they appeared to me to have much intelligence; they grasped my gestures with ease; from the very first instant they seemed to perfectly understand their object; they willingly repeated words which I had not been able to seize at first, and often laughed when, wishing to repeat them, I made mistakes, or pronounced them badly” (in Roth 1899:36). “Imitation” implies not only a model and copy of it but also mutual awareness of this copying in some degree. Imitation, like nonrecognition, is best seen as a family of relational practices. Imitation requires focused attention upon what another is doing, and in this sense it differs from nonrecognition examined in the previous chapter. However, refusal of uptake also involves attentiveness, but presentation of oneself as not attending. The two modalities are therefore not completely opposite.
Early accounts of imitation sometimes noted it as a talent characteristic of primitive people. Contrary to this view, this chapter argues that imitative behavior may be a practice especially oriented to identification and relationship. As well, the occurrence of imitation in early encounter suggests that it was highly honed and developed in indigenous Australia.
Common to Men in a Savage State?
Early observers of indigenous Australians saw their imitative (mimetic) behavior as evidence of their primitive character, mere imitation, rather than creativity. During the long voyage of the Beagle (1831–36) Charles Darwin visited the locales of many groups then considered primitive, including Patagonia, Chile, New Zealand, and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). He had both an evolutionist and comparativist perspective. In his Journal of Researches he says of the Tierra del Fuegians:
They are excellent mimics: as often as we coughed or yawned or made any odd motion, they immediately imitated us. Some of our party the officers began to squint and look awry; but one of the young Fuegians (whose face was painted black excepting a white band over his eyes) succeeded in making far more hideous grimaces. They could repeat with perfect correctness each word in any sentence we addressed them, and they remembered such words for some time…. All savages appear to possess, to an uncommon degree, the power of mimicry. I was told, almost in the same words, of the same ludicrous habit among the Caffres: the Australians, likewise, have long been notorious for being able to imitate and describe the gait of any man, so that he may be recognized…. How can this [mimetic] faculty be explained? Is it a consequence of the more practiced habits of perception and keener senses, common to all men in a savage state, as compared with those long civilized? (1896:206)
At the end of his stay in Australia, Darwin witnessed a White Cockatoo “corrobery” (“great dancing-party”),1 which he characterized as “rude” and “barbarous.” He noted the dancers’ close imitation of the emu in one dance, of the kangaroo in another, and though he was otherwise unable to find in the performance “any sort of meaning,” he observed that “the [indigenous] women and children watched the whole proceeding with the greatest pleasure” (Darwin 1896:451).
To see imitation as a particular talent, or capacity, of such “primitive” people as Australian Aborigines is a recurring theme in colonists’ observations. The report of the New South Wales Board for the Protection of Aborigines for 1910 (Legislative Assembly 1911) noted that children in the school at Ngoorumba (near Bundarra, New South Wales) display great interest in gardening, though it “is new to them,” and make fair progress “in such subjects as give scope to their imitative faculties.” The primitives’ imitative faculty is one item in a wider apprehension of their weakness. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas about Australian Aborigines were often cast narratively, in terms of civilizational difference between “them” as primitives being overwhelmed by “us” as civilized people. In Darwin’s time, the assumption was generally made that primitives were to disappear and would be unable to survive the changes overcoming them. Tasmania astonished Darwin, in this respect: “I do not know a more striking instance of the comparative rate of increase of a civilization over a savage people” (1989:329). To most readers of our time, this seems an intolerable amalgam of direct naming of wrongs perpetrated upon and by indigenous people, followed by a scientific-sounding objectification of events in terms of inexorable forces: “rate of increase” and the like.
In later views of the vulnerability of Aboriginal society, its collapse was due to the high degree of integration among societal institutions: if one thing gives, so do all the rest (see Chapter 1, n. 6). The idea that change entails collapse has been countered (in a usually fraught and politicized atmosphere) in recent decades by an equally mistaken position that continuity entails no deep change (or at least none that can be readily admitted to discussion). And, rather than regard them as “primitive,” Australian Aboriginal society has been promoted as one in which the person-land relation is primary and continuous, and indigenous social practice is fundamentally to be seen in terms of kinship and relationality (cf. Glaskin 2012). In re-presenting Aborigines as kinds of persons, this revised account also suggests that their capabilities persist through major alterations in context.
The alternative to these collapse and survival tropes is to acknowledge that the person is a social category continually reconstituted—though partially rather than entirely—as social circumstances change. On this view, imitative behavior is historically and socially specific and exists in relation to other practices at particular times. But practices and dispositions are certainly not entirely mutable. Imitativeness is also clearly part of a general human repertoire. Persistence of such cultural phenomena may be in terms that are not explicit but more tacit, as discussed in the previous chapter.
We should recognize the relevance of a general human capacity for mimesis, while also attending to its sociohistorical specificity. This opens the way to theorize different forms of the phenomenon and to suggest, if not fully illustrate, a spectrum of imitative behavior. In such a spectrum questions of the structure and dimensions of variation become interesting and significant. Clearly, not all instances of imitation are equally intentional (one may sometimes imitate something about a model without meaning to), nor are they equally accessible to reflective consciousness of the parties involved or equally exact replicas of given models.
Imitation as Human Capacity
Imitation is a focus of research in many disciplines: in experimentally oriented fields including comparative, cognitive, developmental, evolutionary and social psychology; cognitive neuroscience; ethology; primatology; and robotics. In the more traditional human sciences, from Aristotle to Erich Auerbach, imitation, or mimesis, has been treated as a topic in ontology, philosophy, and aesthetics. Imitation has been recognized as fundamental in interaction as a modality for the linking of phenomenal experience and shared meaning in a way that creates a platform for more conventional, systematic, and symbolic expression-content linkages and kinds of interaction (Zlatev 2005).
Whatever the phylogenetic distribution of the innate bases of imitation, higher primate observational and experimental data suggest that these are “open programs” requiring substantial environmental input before there develops a significant imitative capacity. Imitative behavior is seen not as definitive of the difference between humans and other animals but as a modality that, strictly defined, is not easily or fully attributed to even higher animals, despite the fact that some of our common imagery of imitative behavior is based on ideas of it as animal-like, simian in particular. With such experimental and primatological evidence there is no contradiction between seeing imitative capacity as phylogenetically (though not uniquely) human and seeing it as strongly susceptible to long-term contextual (cultural) influence.
Relatedly, imitation is seen by many of these experts as a possible key to understanding empathy. While there is still much debate around the extent to which babies and higher primates imitate, or merely emulate, outputs,2 there is good evidence for the ubiquity of unconscious imitation or mimicry in human interaction. This phenomenon, dubbed the chameleon effect, refers to the unconscious or subliminal tendency to mimic the postures, mannerisms, and facial expressions of one’s interaction partners. This level of imitation often seems to be “under the radar,” or relatively unavailable to reflection.
Measures of electromyographic (EMG) activity show that people rapidly and unconsciously imitate the facial expressions of others, even when the presentation of these faces is not consciously perceived (Chartrand and Bargh 1999). Social psychological studies show that the mere perception of another’s behavior seems to increase the likelihood of engaging in that behavior, facilitating interactions and increasing liking between interaction partners. High scorers on empathy tests are more likely to exhibit the chameleon effect. Unconscious mimicry could lead to an empathic response by biasing the facial motor system, which has been shown to influence mood. Contributing to the picture of the role of unconscious imitation are well-attested imitation deficits associated with autism, hypothetically related to early inattention to social stimuli (including adults imitating the autistic infant) and deficits in joint attention reducing the frequency of synchronous movement (Williams et al. 2001). Together, these results suggest that perception, socially relevant imitation (even if unconscious or only liminally perceived), emotional experience, and empathy are highly integrated. Integration of imitation and affect is relevant to evidence of mutual attention to emotional states from the early colonial encounter material.
However, much of what is recorded as imitative behavior in early Australian encounter, as we shall see, is at a different level than any chameleon effect, more “on the radar”: in most events recorded (usually indigenous) people are described as engaging in imitation in which one person’s action—typically complex in a sensorimotor sense and sometimes experimental, that is, seemingly intended to elicit reaction—is directly imitated, and this imitation is apprehended by the imitated person as such. Imitation is to this extent shared, entailing an exchange of perspectives between those in the imitative action: model action, interlocutor imitation, model apprehension of the imitation and the intent to imitate. The imitation remains pre- or only loosely conventional, experiential, and often evidently emotion-laden but unschematized, perhaps in some instances not completely voluntary, but in many others clearly so; cross-modal (involving sensorimotor coordination), highly iconic of the “original,” and seemingly not oriented to making any particular statement or representation, but simply analogical. More examples of early journal recordings of such imitative behavior follow below.
Anthropologists on Imitation
The work of psychologists on imitation (e.g., Piaget and Inhelder 1969; Donald 1991; Zlatev 2005) has tended to focus on issues of bodily and cognitive capacity, on the question of human distinctiveness or otherwise in capacity to imitate, on the implications of imitation for definition of self and other, on spatiotemporal variations (immediacy, deferral) in imitation, on its proto-conventional and nonrepresentational character, on its relation to consciousness, on the capacity to imitate, on the relationality that imitation presupposes, as necessary to other aspects of human communication and interaction. Anthropologists, on the other hand, have tended to focus on imitation as a modality of relating to and defining oneself in relation to others at relatively high levels of social categorization of relationship between self and other. Recent explorations of this kind have therefore, not surprisingly, tended to come from consideration of the highly asymmetrical relations of colonialism.
In Mimesis and Alterity, Michael Taussig (1993) not only rejects primitivizing views of imitation that see it as animal-like; his focus on the fundamentally social, relational, and power-bearing enabled his critique of a colonial politics of representation of the other as completely different and separate. He argued that imitation is a useful trope for getting at processes of producing alterity, the mutually involved differentiation of self and other. Taussig (1993:19) epitomizes the “ability to mime … [as] the capacity to Other.” He cites Walter Benjamin’s remark that the “mimetic faculty” is the rudiment of a former compulsion of persons to “become and behave like something else” (Benjamin 1982). Taussig retains from Benjamin the insight that mimetic practice appears in every form of life, but also his conviction that it is diminished in modernity.
Taussig’s commitment to this idea is rooted in romantic yearning. He aims to “reinstate in and against the myth of Enlightenment, with its universal, context-free reason, not merely the resistance of the concrete particular to abstraction, but what [he deems] crucial to thought that moves and moves us—namely, its sensuousness, its mimeticity’ (Taussig 1993:2). Related to this is his concern to challenge capitalist reification, to restore tactility in order to understand how the world may be comprehended through the body. Little islands of imitativeness, sensuousness and tactility make themselves manifest everywhere, even if adults among us discover this by entering into what we imagine to be the child’s world (Taussig 1993:77).
While Taussig follows a Benjaminian line grounded in the idea of sensuous correspondence between something and that which repeats it mimetically, Derrideans contest the kind of totalization that would allow for there to be an original to copy. They value continuing deferral and argue that anything that seeks that kind of totalization produces a radical and disruptive concealment and some form of excess. Performative repetition and inherent instability are the conditions of always-partial identity.
Homi Bhabha belongs to this Derridean camp in the way that he has made widely cited use of the notion of not mimesis broadly speaking but mimicry—his focus is on the artifice of imitation and the asymmetry that underlies it. A key textual provocation for him is British politician and essayist Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous “Minute on Indian education” (1835) in which he had written of creating “a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Bhabha 1994:87).
Bhabha’s point is that mimicry produces people who are anglicized but emphatically not English, meant to be “almost the same, but not quite. This gives rise to what he calls the “ambivalence of mimicry … which fixes the colonial subject as a ‘partial’ presence” but ensures that there is a strategic limitation that makes mimicry “at once resemblance and menace” (86). Bhabha considers mimicry not a harmonization but a resemblance that is not presence. This does not seem to directly deny the original as presence in the way that some Derrideans might, but to delimit the possibility of imitation. “Sly civility” arises in the gap between colonizers and their mimicked versions, accompanied by desire on both sides: on that of the colonizer, for the colonized to become more like them; and on that of the colonized, for quite a range of things, sometimes amounting to Anglophilia, and for what we might call the ideal “real,” such as British justice, which they want to be realized as promised. Hegemony exists in the structure of colonial dependence that reinforces this gap, that is, power rules through a surrogate synthesis.
For Taussig imitation is dialectical, an exchange. He accentuates the joint and continuing production of otherness rather than simply its prior existence as brute fact—the position he intends to counter. Bhabha as theorist of colonialism places strongest emphasis on the impossibility of totalizations, both at the levels of “original” and “copy,” as a function of power relations. Both Taussig’s opening of the space of production of otherness and Bhabha’s concept of power-laden partial resemblance are useful. Also useful are the impulses, briefly mentioned above, from cognitive psychology, which suggest to us the utility of closer attention to identifying the dimensions of imitation as psychosocial action.3
Prevalence of Imitative Behavior
We can consider early Australian encounters by attending to the framing that both parties applied and that affected how they understood the “empirical situation.” By “framing” I mean the ideas brought to interaction that strongly affect how it is understood. Here I examine two framings of mimesis: instruction and comic. Such ideas were provisional and experimental, and humor was one way for those interacting to try out framings.
There were many circumstances in which diarists record indigenous people imitating some kind of action they had seen the Europeans perform, observing them, as it were, from a less directly engaged perspective; and in noting their intention, the Europeans sometimes assisted them to perform the action more effectively. This was not direct imitation by indigenous people of Europeans in interaction with themselves but based on observation by indigenous people of what Europeans did or sometimes what Europeans explicitly showed them. For instance, La Billardière (in Roth 1899:29) observed several forms of imitation and collaboration:
A native, to whom we had just given a hatchet, displayed great dexterity at striking several times following in the same place, thus attempting to imitate one of our sailors who had cut down a tree. We showed him that he must strike in different places, so as to cut a notch, which he did immediately, and was transported with joy when he saw the tree was felled by his strokes. They were astonished at the quickness with which we sawed the trunk in two; and we made them a present of some hand-saws, which they used with great readiness, as soon as we had shown them the way. These savages were much surprised at seeing us kindle the spongy bark of the Eucalyptus resinifera in the focus of a burning-glass. He, who appeared the most intelligent among them, was desirous of trying the effects himself, threw the converging rays of the sun upon his thigh by its means; but the pain he felt took from him all inclination to repeat the experiment.
In short order, means of using a metal hatchet, a handsaw, and a magnifying glass were imitated. This was imitative instruction of a purposeful kind. On another occasion, a person referred to as a “chief” had observed a woman using a comb that had been given to her. He wanted to use it also but could not get it through his tangled hair. He was assisted, with difficulty: “I … was soon obliged to hold his hair back with the one hand, and pull the comb with the other. From this he did not shrink, but encouraged me in my work, saying frequently, ‘Narra coopa—very good.’ And when the work was accomplished he looked at himself in a glass, with no small degree of pleasure. He was a man of an intelligent mind, who made rapid advances in civilization, and was very helpful in the preservation of good order in the Settlement” (in Roth 1899:44).
In cases that contemporary diaries record, the imitated content seems generally to have been derived from the bodily actions of Europeans and frequently their words. Such mimesis is not mere action learning, it is also results oriented. To note mimesis as imitative instruction is to depart from Darwin’s framing of Fuegians’ skill as comparable “to the instinct of animals,” as “not improved by experience” and as static (“their most ingenious work … has remained the same, for the last 250 years” [1989:178]). What would Darwin have said if he had spent time closely engaged with people, trying to modify their tree-chopping technique with a new tool? Would he have conceded a greater comparability of them with himself in respect to the improvement of their technique by experience?
Our consideration of humor can begin with West’s ([1852]1966:88) report on imitative ability as a general capacity of the natives of Tasmania: “They were fond of imitation and humour; they had their drolls and mountebanks; they were able to seize the peculiarities of individuals and exhibit them with considerable force.” The link that is made between imitation and humor is important, relatable to the extent to which good humor, drollery, and expressions of exuberance seem to have been a regular feature of some early encounters that remained of a relatively positive kind. (Many encounters did not remain so.) Playfulness did not escape Darwin’s notice. We learn from him that indigenous people appreciated capacities of Europeans to imitate: members of the Beagle’s crew in Tierra del Fuego were apparently not averse to engaging in antics and imitative behavior, we are told; although imitative of what and whether it was of the indigenes we do not learn. The Fuegians “were highly pleased by the antics of a man belonging to the boat’s crew, who danced well and was a good mimic” (in Keynes 1979:96).
Antics appear to have been most notable when visitors played with children, when opportunity arose. Gaiety and forwardness of children are mentioned on a number of occasions by Baudin. After a short time, the children behaved “as if we had known them a long time,” as if the visitors were old acquaintances. The children seem to have accommodated to the difference that the outsiders originally represented and were carrying on as usual. At least for the children, French reassurance enabled a restoration of affect as usual. And the French were able to play and engage in antics with them in a way they would not easily have done with adults.
Playfulness, antics—these seem to be exercises in bridge building. Darwin instinctively treated reproduced language in these encounters as something that is not first and foremost propositional but something uttered and taken up, a form of engagement. Similar forms of bridge building, the intent to produce shared feeling, can be seen in Darwin’s observation that Fuegians expressed: “satisfaction or good will by rubbing or patting their own, and then our bodies” (in Keynes 1979:96).
Darwin implies that they are, in effect, suggesting an affective meaning content: satisfaction is shown by their rubbing their stomachs. They then do this to the outsiders, in the absence of the latter imitating the original gesture. The intent seems clear: to establish a mutuality of experience and feeling. Rubbing and patting (so Darwin suggests) were iconic of good feeling and satisfaction. (Presumably, all were smiling or seemed amiable in other ways during this exchange.) Darwin also notes the importance of reciprocity when he writes of having accompanied an old Fuegian man, who offered him evidence of friendly intent by “three hard slaps, which were given me on the breast and back at the same time”; and who then “bared his bosom for me to return the compliment, which being done, he seemed highly pleased” (Darwin 1896:205).
Imitation could turn into parody. George Mortimer (in Roth 1899:41) gives the following account of an interview in order to make the point that French discoverers often found it difficult to open communication with the natives: “Our third mate on landing, saw several of them [natives] moving off. He approached them alone and unarmed, making every sign of friendship his fancy could suggest; but though they mimicked his actions exactly, and laughed heartily, he could not prevail upon them to stay.” Thus, imitation was not always a means of achieving greater contact with the other (by “becoming and behaving” like him). It could be a way of achieving some interaction but also bounding it off. Many diarists remarked on the great “shyness” of the natives, the difficulties of approaching them. Shyness is not what we see in the following anecdote, however. The French at Bruny Island encountered a group of women, one of whom stepped forward and made signs to the French to sit and lay down their guns, the sight of which frightened them, says Péron (2006:198). (And so it might have: Baudin [1974:323] reports having aimed at people and says he only had to shift his gun to see how much people feared it. We may guess they had experience of its use.) After they sat, the women were all vivacity, talking, laughing, gesticulating, twisting and turning—when “M. Bellefin began to sing, accompanying himself with very lively, very animated movements. The women were immediately quiet, watching M. Bellefin’s gestures as closely as they appeared to listen to his songs. At the end of each verse, some applauded with shouts, others burst out laughing, while the young girls (undoubtedly more timid) remained silent, showing nevertheless, by their motions and facial expressions, their surprise and satisfaction” (Péron 2006:199). After M. Bellefin finished, the most confident of the women “began to mimic his gestures and tone of voice in an extremely original and very droll manner, which greatly amused her friends. Then she, herself, started to sing in so rapid a fashion, that it would have been hard to relate such music to the ordinary principles of ours” (Péron 2006:199–200).
Here the woman’s action is clearly recognized as imitative of what the Frenchman did; but Péron seems to imply that she does it as much or more for her companions’ amusement as to amuse or engender any sort of commonality with the French. We may interpret this as a targeted mimicking for the benefit of the other women.
Here a participant (Bellefin) is the apparent focus of comment rather than (only) of intended communicative engagement. Where the person copied is an interlocutor like Bellefin rather than a nonparticipant in the interaction and copying is addressed to another intended audience, imitation often becomes a form of mockery and ironic comment rather than a bridge between those seemingly in direct interaction. The effect is to make an ostensible participant an outsider and to make those who receive the message the actual nearer (“in the know”) interlocutors. This episode seems to suggest a certain confidence on the woman’s part in drawing the distinction she did between insiders and the French outsiders.
Indeed, it may be that Bellefin’s attempt to engage the attention of the indigenous women had misfired or gone slightly astray. As we will see (Chapter 3), European venturers thought about how to engage the “natives,” whether by offering them various kinds of material items or by other forms of interaction. Often, imitations by indigenous people were of bodily actions that Europeans themselves deliberately deployed as part of a certain received and continually evolving set of ideas that these were the things that would captivate native audiences and serve as a way of evaluating their dispositions, a matter to which the visitors, as we shall see, paid considerable attention. This might be termed one kind of “framing” of imitative action, clearly arising from European preconceptions.
At this point, though, the woman does build a bridge more directly and materially with the French:
taking some pieces of charcoal from a reed bag, she crushed them in her hand and prepared to apply a coat of this dark paint to my face. I lent myself willingly to this well-meant whim. M. Heirisson was equally obliging and was given a similar mask. We then appeared to be a great object of admiration for these women: they seemed to look at us with gentle satisfaction and to congratulate us upon the fresh charms that we had just acquired. Thus, therefore, that European whiteness, of which our race is so proud, is nothing more than an actual deficiency, a kind of deformity that must, in these distant regions, yield to the colour of charcoal and to the dark red of ochre or clay. (Péron 2006:200)
On this occasion, then, having imitated the song in a way that seemed more directed toward her companions—though certainly provoked by and also directed to the French—the woman explicitly created a ground of commonality between herself and the Frenchman by acting on him, almost certainly with the general aim of making his skin more like hers. This identification—perhaps also partly addressed to her Aboriginal audience and almost certainly in a spirit of fun—was seemingly her intention, and Péron clearly took this, in any event, as an effort to cancel his unusual whiteness. It is more typical in these journals to read of the natives imitating the Europeans; but here we read of the natives taking the initiative to make the Europeans more like themselves, without the French having authored the exchange but with their amused acquiescence.
Further to the episode involving charcoal, above, it is notable that difference of skin color was an object of wonder for indigenous people all over the Australian continent, and they often sought to investigate it (along with some other properties of the visitors, such as sex; see Chapter 3). Indigenous people often at first apparently entertained the question whether light skin color of the Europeans was permanent or temporary, deep or superficial (and also, as in Chapter 1, whether it meant that these beings were ancestors or ghosts). We see in the woman’s gesture a play upon an issue that we might term one of relationality: what might arise interactionally from changing that color?
What Is Mimesis in These Encounters?
Imitation, in the above examples, typically involves a visible and/or audible, if small-scale and fleeting, behavioral icon of an act that thereby becomes shared. This production seems particularly significant in situations where the parties have little in common, relative to the commonalities they share with much more familiar others. The episodes reported also yield some sense of the complexity and embeddedness of imitation in larger flows of interaction. Imitation works within an emotional and affective economy of uncertainty, lability, volatility, and apparent continuous attention on the part of both outsiders and indigenes to each other’s emotional states. The visitors’ inferences of indigenous emotions are sensitive to preconceptions that they held—such as that indigenous people were coming to get “presents,” that they would react in certain ways, want particular things. The boundary between engaging and not engaging is unstable, and the journalists are unsure about what is menacing and what is peaceable. We form a picture of a moving border zone of mutual awareness between parties in which one form of action was often rapidly transformed into another and in many of which violence was either clearly feared or actually ensued.
This volatility can continue to appear, or reappear, to the extent that encounter is not stabilized, or becomes destabilized, even after a period of time. It is a zone in which action on the part of the natives may relate but is not subordinated to outsiders’ guidelines or framing ideas for the organization of interaction. These guidelines include elements of the outsiders’ evaluative and moral framework and notions based on their growing experience of the range of native behavior: what works, what is risky, how to entice and reward, and how to guard against unwelcome developments. Outsiders were constantly bringing to their assessment of indigenous action their ideas of temperament, intelligence, and of moral qualities such as generosity, cruelty, kindness. Though uncertainty can be discerned often enough in early moments of encounter, it can recur after periods in which natives and outsiders have had a certain amount, sometimes even a lot, to do with each other. Uncertainty resulted from a lack of regularization of interaction, of shared affect and understanding of intentions between parties. Initially compliant-seeming or unremarkable behavior on the part of the natives could turn into hostility.
Uncertainty and fear lie behind the journalists’ frequent relieved descriptions of indigenous “joy” and “pleasure” at the presence and presents of the visitors. For example:
As soon as the boat came, we invited some of them to go on board. After taking a long while to decide about it, three of them consented to get into the boat; but they got out again in great haste as we prepared to push off from the shore. We then saw them walk quietly along by the sea, looking towards us from time to time, and uttering cries of joy. The next day we returned in a large party. Some of the natives soon came to meet us, expressing by their cries the pleasure they felt at seeing us again. A lively joy was depicted on all their features when they saw us drawing near. (Péron, quoted in Roth 1899:28)
What emotions were these people experiencing and expressing? A mother in the group had to cover her infant’s eyes in order to calm him. Also, some of the natives in this group were concerned to prevent the French from moving in certain directions, so much so that they were entreated not to go in certain directions, with women uttering cries to alert others. Can this have been unalloyed joy? Yet it was so interpreted.
Imitative behaviors in early encounter are best understood as thoroughly relational, built upon mutual awareness. They were evocations rather than determinate messages. They were fleeting and unstable and also evidently frequently asymmetrical. Asymmetry in imitative relationships is a dimension that figures in both Taussig and Bhabha and calls for further comment here.
Of course, our data are themselves asymmetric: they come from one side. They suggest that indigenous people imitated outsiders more than the reverse (although instances are reported of Europeans engaging in imitative behavior, often a response to what they clearly took as imitative on the part of indigenous people). No doubt native imitation drew upon capacities strongly developed culturally among Australian indigenous people—in hunting, dancing, everyday sensibilities and capabilities developed in cultural forms of observation, body movement, and interaction (see, e.g., Ellis 1980, 1984; Marett 2000; von Sturmer 1987; Wild 1977–78). However, the reported imitation must be placed in the context of the instability, volatility, and uncertainty in the relations between the parties. In that world-historic context, there was—as the journals show—great attentiveness on the part of outsiders and indigenes to each other’s emotional states. In such circumstances, imitation is one way of recognizing and drawing out and probing the condition of the other, as well as signaling identification with him.
That the economy of mimetic behavior was typically unbalanced, in that the Europeans were more imitated than imitating, is not surprising. It may be partly explained in terms of the wider framing in which imitative behavior occurred. Europeans came equipped with prior (“framing”) ideas about what savages were like and, accordingly, were less oriented toward building bridges to them than were indigenous people toward the Europeans; and Europeans were certainly inclined to see their interaction with indigenous people in channeled, experimental, purposeful, and often quite overtly instrumental terms.
To engage in some of the kinds of imitation we see described in various colonial journals—copying of the other, understood by the parties as such—was not to use signs to convey some kind of question or message formulated outside the encounter. Many of these acts of imitation were not conventional nor tokens of regular expression-content relationships but focused upon the immediate encounter itself, making it interactive and at least fleetingly collaborative by doing what the other does and having the effect of creating and prolonging a moment, temporarily deferring questions of what was to come next.
This suggests a view of mimesis in early encounter as a way of relating to the unknown other by becoming an experiential analogue of him, at least temporarily, at the same time persisting in observation of one’s interaction with him as participant in it. This by no means excludes—indeed, the possibility of continuous reflexivity positively includes—the kind of playful and ironic behavior we observed on the part of the woman who sang after M. Bellefin, expanding the occasion to include byplay with her peers, of which he was the apparent target.
Imitation seems to have been a readily available modality of establishing engagement, some commonality of an immediate sort. It created a bridge between oneself and another in the “copying,” embodying the other in a way that was noticed. To the extent that it was noticed, imitation was a means of relating self and other, among other things, in the mutual realization of the imitative behavior itself. By miming and reproducing what the other does, one can literally feel oneself to be building a collaborative activity. Thus, to elaborate on Taussig’s formulation, this is a production of the self-other dialectic, with potentials for both identification and differentiation with and from others. It seems crucial that imitative behavior be recognized as such by one’s interlocutor. Indeed, given the extent of attention paid to the phenomenon in European explorers’ journals, it seems that indigenous people’s acts were regularly recognized as imitative. And in such moments of recognition, some of the questions about the instability and indeterminacy of relationship that were so salient in early encounters (but not only then) were, at least temporarily, deferred.
This enactment of mutual identification, then, coexisted with refusal as an early type of response. In the next chapter we will expand our view of the range of other kinds of mediations in early and later relationships and in so doing attempt to locate some principal differences between indigenous and nonindigenous forms of action that become heightened in their intersection.
Imitation is another aspect of power relations unfolding in asymmetrical performance, as was the one-sidedness of refusal of sensory uptake on encounter. These early moments in which those in encounter had little experience of each other and came to it from quite different points of view were characterized, as the discussion has shown, by lability and instability, as well as attentiveness of outsiders and locals to emotional states of joy, anger, and so on that they imputed to each other. Imitative behavior of a more affective rather than reflective kind was deployed in the unstable and uncertain contexts of early encounter, often characterized by great intensity and reciprocal attention on the part of outsiders and indigenes to each other’s emotional states. At the same time, we have seen in a number of examples indigenous people’s turning imitative action initiated with Europeans as their focus toward their own audience, often for comic effect, exemplified by the woman who sang for/in relation to Bellefin.
Attending to others requires complementarity—a relation “between,” unfolding in time and space—which can exist as a matter of degree and quality and thus imply questions of power and influence. Sometimes in the first instance indigenous people acted the other, creating a recognized ground of commonality. The indigenous people seem to have been more prepared to do this and habitually more at home with imitative action than the outsiders. Yet while we need to recognize imitative capacity as cultivated culturally in indigenous practices, it should not be taken as evidence of fundamental difference of human civilizational kinds, a property of a kind of society or kind of person. Imitation as in these examples is much better understood as grounded in honed cultural capabilities, relational and inevitably transitional between and dependent upon other modes of action.
To refute the interpretation of early imitative behavior as evidence of primitivity is perhaps not difficult to do, as few admit nowadays to ideas of others as “primitives.” We nevertheless have to remember how it was interpreted then, as by Darwin; and we must remember that it continues, in altered ways, to be so interpreted to this day—more in the guise of persisting otherness. Even the Benjaminian orientation of Taussig, toward an understanding of the ways in which outsiders and locals become mutually entangled, assumes an original degree of otherness in terms of which imitation is linked with naturalistic powers of copying, rather than as a basic and culturally highly developed framework for sociability. Otherness there is, no doubt; but sociability tends to get overlooked.
I return here to the suggestion made earlier that a more appropriate understanding of imitative behavior is as both generically human and a specific, culturally developed capacity, and that the interaction between these levels and its changing character need to be couched in a wider view that acknowledges kinds of person as social categories continually reconstituted—though partially rather than entirely—as social circumstances change. The persistence of the conventional interpretation of imitative behavior as primitive is part of the historical imbalance shaped by preconceptions, lived in the encounters themselves, and surviving them in some of the ways that these encounters have been subsequently understood.
