Brand Nu Way

As the world learns important lessons from the excesses of the present dominant paradigm – that which emerged from an alliance of capitalism and the modern nation-state – we begin to look around to see what alternatives there may be for the twin task of:

 

1. repairing the damage caused by modern excesses
2. Repositioning our Being - finding new Ways by which we may live better lives.

 

 

The task of comprehensively reforming the means by which Australia is governed – and governed for the benefit of all -  is not one which has been seriously taken up by many conceptual craftspeople in Australia.

 

The “Republican” debate has been skilfully restricted by the ambitions of an Anglo-Australian elite to replace the English Queen Head of State with one of their one kind. This frankensteinian monster would usher in another chapter of disaster for Australia’s First Peoples.

 

The most likely means by which non-indigenous people will arrive at new forms of organisation is through a process of praxis involving new forms of identity on the conceptual level (on the one hand) and experiments with new forms of practice (on the other). 

 

One way of thinking about this is in terms of a repositioning of Being.

 

There is much for non-indigenous people to learn about this process from the Ways of First Peoples – these Ways are all about such considerations.

 

However, there is a lack of real knowledge about First Peoples actual practices both generally and professionally. Much of what is known is cast in Western terms and one is left with a feeling that something vitally important has slipped through the hand that tries to hold …

 

BUCKLEY’S CHANCE

William Buckley was a English convict who escaped from a ship in what is now Victoria and lived with First Peoples for 32 years, before that area was colonised. His account provides a clear case of how Australia's First Peoples regarded Europeans:

… and prayed long and earnestly to God, for his merciful assistance and protection. All night the wild dogs howled horribly, as if expressing their impatience for my remains: even before death, I fancied they would attack me.

At daybreak I went again onward, looking for any kind of food by which to appease my hunger, and at length came to a place the natives call Maamart, where there is a lake, or large lagoon, surrounded by thickly growing scrub and timber. Whilst searching for the gum already mentioned, I was seen by two native women, who watched me unperceived. At length I threw myself down at the foot of a large tree to rest. On observing me thus prostrate, and helpless, these women went in search of their husbands with the intelligence that they had seen a very tall white man. Presently they all came upon me unawares, and seizing me by the arms and hands, began beating their breasts, and mine, in the manner the others had done. After a short time, they lifted me up, and they made the same sign, giving me to understand by it, that I was in want of food. The women assisted me to walk, the men shouting hideous noises, and tearing their hair. When we arrived at their huts, they brought a kind of bucket, made of dry bark, into which they put gum and water, converting it by that means into a sort of pulp. This they offered me to eat and I did so very greedily They called me Murrangurk, which I afterwards learnt, was the name of a man formerly belonging to their tribe, who had been buried at spot where I had found the piece of spear I still carried with me. They have a belief that when they die, go to some place or other, and are there made white and that they then return to this world again for another existence. They think all the white people previous to death were belonging to their own tribes, thus returned to life in a different colour. In cases where they have killed white men, it has generally been because they imagined them to have been originally enemies, or belonging to tribes with whom they were hostile. In accordance with this belief, they fancied me to be one of their tribe who had been recently killed in a fight, in which his daughters had been speared also. As I have before said, he was buried at the mound I saw and my having the remains of his spear with me, confirmed them in this opinion. To this providential superstition, I was indebted for all the kindnesses afterwards shown me. In a short time they went away, making signs for me to remain and on returning, they brought with them several large fat grubs, which are found buried in decayed trees, and more particularly about the roots. These grubs they gave me to eat, and by this time, so changed was my palate, that I did so, thinking them delicious.”

Optical text scan from pages 38-39 “The life and adventures of William Buckley” (Thirty-two years a wanderer amongst the Aborigines of the then unexplored country around Port Phillip) by John Morgan and edited by Tim Flannery. First published 1852 – Flannery edition 2002 The Text Publishing Co Melb. ISBN 1 877008 20 6

Supra, infra and equi-positioning

Pierre Clastres wrote:

"In South America, those who butchered the Indians pushed this condition of the Other to the limit: the Indian savage (sic-BR) is not a human being, but simply an animal. The murder of an Indian is not a criminal act, racism doesn't play any part in it, since in practice it effectively implies the recognition of a minimum humanity of the Other. The monotonous repetition of a very ancient infamy: Claude Levi-Strauss, addressing ethnocide before the term existed, recalls in Race and History how the West Indians asked themselves whether the newly-arrived Spanish were gods or men, while the Whites argued over the human or animal nature of the natives." ('On Ethnocide', Art and Text 28 1988:53)

In both cases we learn crucial lessons about the situation of life in Europe and in the Americas as a result of what they are capable of projecting onto other peoples.

How instructive is it, then, of the humanity of Australia's First Peoples that when faced with a similar dilemma, they regarded the newly-arriving Europeans as dearly missed deceased family members returning from the land of the dead?

Australian history since 1788 demonstrates what Europeans thought of Australia's First Peoples in the scheme of things.

Isobel Coe, an indigenous activitist, says "End the psychic war."

One task for life's conceptual craftspeoples - as a step towards planetary healing - is to make this psychic war visible.

Life is the only true master

Given the choice between investing in our next lives and investing in comfortable retirement in this, how many of us would choose investing in the next life?

Not many, I suspect.

And that points to one of the core problems of our times. Our own sense of who we are is so narrow and restricted. While our little lives – our sense of identity as socially constructed – no doubt ends at some stage, the underlying life force which supports this fashionable outer garment is eternal.

Life is soul-energy endless recycled.

Our other lives are all around us, as we hear in the songs of whales. So too in the lives of other peoples. Nothing is surer than that when we cease to be in this life, life itself will re-emerge ready to take on a new identity.

That we (as part of life) cannot realise this about life demonstrates that who we are is also the outcome of ethnocidal processes which have oppressed the means by which we (as part of life) may relate with ourselves.

Ethnocide towards other peoples was first carried out in relation to what we are now encouraged to regard as ‘at home’ – as constituted by the modern nation-state.

And before that, the ‘spread’ of Indo-European represents a major shift to the polarising ‘vertical’ metaphors necessary for the establishment of unearthed elites.

No doubt these also existed in post ‘neo-lithic’ times but in a less pronounced - more earthed way as life remained within the bounds of good faith which we know as "Paleolithic times".

There was a long process of suppression of the better parts of our Being to produce empires, hierarchies and – more recently - the modern nation-state.

The resulting ‘culture’ we acquire, in our compulsory State schools and universities, has the better parts of our Being excluded.

The creation of a landless working class in the United Kingdom (note well the title!) has been very well documented by scholars such as Hill. Writers like D. H. Lawrence were alive to the amputation of Being which passes as part and parcel of a ‘normal’ human Being.

For the greater part, “making it socially” (and even eating and having a place to live) requires creative people to fashion themselves to the norms they imagine lie at the core of life – but these as the cuckoo norms of a false meta-DNA cloned into living cells and kept in place (since rejection is the healthy response) by the use of force.

In joining the healing task of removing ethnocide from the lives of First Peoples, Westerners are also engaging in the challenge of overcoming the damage done to our lives by our own tradition.

Why? So that they-we may live their lives without the suffocating domination which has been imposed upon them-us over the last five centuries (and longer).

In seeking to fashion forms of representation which treat as sacred that which others insist is sacred - in rejecting as adequate forms of representation which made secular fetishes out of sacred life - we invariably have to re-activate that which is 'divine' within ourselves as Earth-Beings.

This is what we can do to ensure that the re-emerging life can gain from the long processes of realisation which are part of the cosmic challenge life sets for itself.

Life is the only true master.

Becoming Otherwise – ending an ethnocidal epoch.

One of the life challenges which faces us, as ‘we’ who live Western lives move away from ‘modern’ arrangements, is to creatively fashion the means by which we can relate with people with Ways different to our own.

What is necessary for this is a sense of ‘self’ which can realise that ‘we’ are those ‘others’ – and a sense which neither makes us feel obliged to change our other-selves to be like us nor for ‘us’ to abandon our Ways to become like ‘them’.

Exchanges need to be respectfully carried out between cultural partners, with the things being exchanged being of real value. There is no place for forms of capitalism which institutionalise – and invite us to regard as ‘normal’ - systematic short-changing of one trading partner to produce ‘profits’ for the other.

Co-existence is a fine art, and one not much practiced within ‘modern’ nation-state arrangements. Their alignment, in the West at least, with capitalism is regarded by Pierre Clastres as a root cause for their ethnocidal treatment of people in other Ways of life (having already relied on a more localised form of ethnocide to bootstrap themselves up).

The deal is this: People – other versions of ourselves - who are different from us have a ‘right’ to Be just as we too have a ‘right’ to be.

But it is nor merely a ‘right’ – this kind of thinking has to attain an ontological status – that is, to have that degree of privilege by being built into the core of the epistemologies by which we know our cosmos.

We are Earth-Beings.

And our cosmic composition is better characterised by a ‘yin-yang’ complementary-opposition than by the prefabricated senses of identity which come from membership of modern nation-states.

The task of earthing our Being – bringing a dangerously unstable civilisation safely back to ground – is one which requires us to find new senses of identity.

These new senses of identity, as we learn from life over some centuries now, must provide spaces for our Other-Selves.

We must become wise to the ways of Others – Otherwise.

Being and Cosmos

In this blog i will add some thoughts on reconnecting Being and Cosmos using insights i have acquired from both Western and indigneous Australian sources.

Reconnecting our Being with Cosmos is a healing challenge.

At present i am writing "Becoming Otherwise" about the need to end ethnocide - and will post my initial materials here for comment and feedback.

From my former anthropological teacher, Prof Jan Pouwer, i learnt much about the importance of complementary opposition as a useful tool for looking a life - an inclusive both-and healing approach in comparison to the exclusive either/or divisive logic which is part of the self-styled "age of reason'.

From Warumungu/Alyawarrea senior men i learnt the need to try to get non-indigenous Australians (and others) to understand their true surroundings.

My other blogs include one on Cosmology (in the wider sense).

Lately, as part of the Darwin 200 celebration, i have been writing about Darwin, naturalism and related matters. See http://songlinesoz.spaces.live.com/

And, as part of a peoples well-being movement, Songlines htpp://www.songlines.org.au

cheers

Bruce
22 may 2009