Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan

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