Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan

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.