The present situation in Australia provides the perfect context for considering these matters if we are to avoid a purely abstract discussion of little immediate relevance.
Where better to start than an editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald after an event in Canberra on Australia Day (26 January) 2012:
The long struggle to end inequality
Sydney Morning Hearld
January 28, 2012
Opinion
EDITORIAL
TONY ABBOTT was right: it is time to move Australia's view of indigenous affairs on from the Aboriginal tent embassy. Certainly the tent embassy was a master stroke in its day. The title ''embassy'' encapsulated brilliantly the difficulties and desires of indigenous Australians in their relationship with non-indigenous Australia. The word summed up a deep fissure in Australia's nationhood, which most non-indigenous Australians had barely thought about - that the settlement of Australia from 1788 had involved an unacknowledged confrontation between two nations which had never formally concluded.
It implied not only the existence of a separate indigenous nation but a variety of demands, in particular a treaty to settle outstanding issues and claims, including land rights. It implied, too, a demand for policies to redress indigenous disadvantage.
What the Australia Day fracas outside the restaurant in Canberra, and its aftermath, have shown is the extent to which Australia has moved on from the simplistic confrontation symbolised by the tent embassy. The embassy's supporters, stuck in the us-versus-them mentality of four decades ago, had to misrepresent Abbott's words quite extensively to fire the crowd up to action. Abbott did not call for the tent embassy to be pulled down, as was claimed. Other indigenous leaders - wiser heads whose attitudes have been formed in the more constructive atmosphere that has grown up since 1972 - rightly condemned the violence. They are confident enough of indigenous Australia's position to be able to treat national political leaders with respect.
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They know that more is to be gained from working within, than from standing outside, as the tent embassy does. Indigenous issues, like indigenous culture, are mainstream in Australia in 2012.
We do not suggest, of course, that all problems have been solved, or that everything done since 1972 in Aboriginal affairs has worked. Attempts to advance the welfare of indigenous Australians have been marked in almost equal measure by their good intentions and their lack of success. Some progress has been made but the four decades since the tents went up have been littered with failure. Progress has tended to come less through government programs than other means. Native title has been recognised, and the insulting legal basis for the Crown's claim to Australian land, terra nullius - that it belonged to no one - has been annulled. The continent's Aboriginal past has entered more and more into the cultural consciousness of non-indigenous Australians through customs such as the acknowledgement of country. Kevin Rudd's apology to indigenous Australians for past ill treatment has been accepted as a significant gesture of reconciliation.
The latest step in this direction is the mooted amendment to the constitution to remove its racist provisions, to insert others that recognise Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders as Australia's original peoples, and to acknowledge the need to secure their advancement.
About the first of these measures there can be no argument. About the second there will be general agreement. About the third, though, there may well be significant opposition which the ugly scenes in Canberra on Australia Day will probably only reinforce. The problem with the proposed changes is that, though they may outlaw racial discrimination, they appear to retain race as the basis for some form of legal distinction. Many will ask, why should indigenous advancement be mentioned in the constitution specifically? How is it distinct from the advancement of the Australian population as a whole? It is a fair point - one around which opponents will rally.
The broader difficulty is that the changes appear to assume the constitution will always be a temporary document - one intended to address the transitory concerns of a particular age and, when these are no longer current, to be amended to suit the next set of concerns. Thus its racist provisions, now completely offensive to contemporary values, addressed the political concerns of the late 19th century. But the constitution is written in the language of absolutes and, as experience has taught, extremely difficult to amend. We believe it would be unwise to amend it in ways which - however justified they may seem now - would privilege indigenous Australians in ways that are not even clear. Indeed, the mere attempt to do so may be equally disastrous. What would it say about this country if a well-intentioned but half-baked attempt to right an injustice were to fail?
Progress is certainly slow - excruciatingly so, and with many setbacks. But its glacial pace should not deceive us into thinking that indigenous disadvantage is permanent, and that Australia's first people must always be outsiders, protesting outside the door of power. Least of all should Australians be diverted into enacting a constitution that assumes the various strands of Australia's population will never be one people.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/the-long-struggle-to-end-inequality-20120127-1qlre.html#ixzz1ktEIl8Gr
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Two sides of story, not one.
“ A probably unilateral analysis of dual organisation has all too often propounded the principle of reciprocity as the main cause and result …. However, we should not forget that a moiety system can express not only a mechanism of reciprocity but also relations of subordination. However, the principle of reciprocity is at play even in these relations of subordination; this is because subordination itself is reciprocal: the moiety which wins the top spot in one plane concedes it to the opposing moiety in another.” (Claude Lévi-Strauss The Elementary Structures of Kinship 1969:268 - emphais added BR)
Cutting straight to the chase – our interest lies with the process by which the ‘horizontal’ arrangement between moieties (in which the top spot on one place for one moiety is balanced by a top spot on another plane to the other) is transformed into a ‘vertical’ arrangement with a supposedly upper and superior part of the life seeking to dominate the supposedly lower and inferior other parts of life.
The attempts to impose and maintain this arrangement provide go a long way to account for much of history – a history written largely from the Upper Moiety perspective.
Life’s history, however, must include a balanced account which removes such self-privileging and provides equal representation, on its own terms, to the acts of resistance to these ‘superior’ types.
Life is best represented by an approach which honours the role of complementary opposition, rather than solely that of vertical arrangements.
In order to tease some of this out, it may be useful to look at some of the issues raised in the debate between Levi-Strauss, Dutch Anthropologists of the Leiden orientation; David Maybury-Lewis; and – his most famous opponent - Jean-Paul Sartre.
That should take us some months into 2012.
Cutting straight to the chase – our interest lies with the process by which the ‘horizontal’ arrangement between moieties (in which the top spot on one place for one moiety is balanced by a top spot on another plane to the other) is transformed into a ‘vertical’ arrangement with a supposedly upper and superior part of the life seeking to dominate the supposedly lower and inferior other parts of life.
The attempts to impose and maintain this arrangement provide go a long way to account for much of history – a history written largely from the Upper Moiety perspective.
Life’s history, however, must include a balanced account which removes such self-privileging and provides equal representation, on its own terms, to the acts of resistance to these ‘superior’ types.
Life is best represented by an approach which honours the role of complementary opposition, rather than solely that of vertical arrangements.
In order to tease some of this out, it may be useful to look at some of the issues raised in the debate between Levi-Strauss, Dutch Anthropologists of the Leiden orientation; David Maybury-Lewis; and – his most famous opponent - Jean-Paul Sartre.
That should take us some months into 2012.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
A message from life's better parts
“The myths show that when the relative superiority of one value over the other gives way to an absolute superiority, this means the end of society.” (Jan Pouwer 1992)
This quote is a good place to start as it says it all. As is often the way, some of life’s most precious insights are to be found in myth-narratives (despite the attempts of others to rewrite life’s rules to comply with narrow ambitions).
How much of history - and of present day events - can be explained by the process the myths make clear?
While I am not a modern anthropologist I approach my work from an intellectual background which was informed, in part, by the findings of modern anthropology.
It is appropriate to begin with this comment by the late Jan Pouwer on Professor Josephus Platenkamp’s paper (in Moyer and Claessen (eds) 1988 “Time past, time present, time future: essays in honour of P.E. de Josselin de Jong. Pouwer’s comment in “Fizzy: Fuzzy: FAS? A review of Leiden labour” Canberra Anthropology 15(1) 1992:87-105.))
Basically, I read that comment about the shift from relative to absolute superiority in relation to a transformation of life s lived which moves from having two complementary opposite parts of life (in dynamic balance) to systems which have one part ‘on top’ and the other parts ‘under’. From ‘horizontal’ arrangements to ‘vertical’ arrangements. Or, we can say, from earthed to unearthed Ways of Being.
The former are typified as ‘moieties’ by anthropologists, and the later cover a wide range of social and power formations in which there is an “upper” class or elite of some sort.
Jan Pouwer was my anthropological mentor, and it was his work on complementary opposition which has influenced my views over the years. It is hard to find anything he published on this theme, but it was constantly present in his lectures in New Zealand 1968-1976.
The late Claude Levi-Strauss thought that the emphasis of the Leiden school on dual organisation was a result of the area of study (or FAS – Field of Anthropological Study) they had access to as a result of the former Dutch empire in what is presently Indonesia.
Levi-Strauss himself, as the pre-eminent representative of modern anthropology, does not appear to place the same importance dual organisation as either indigenous peoples or those with close working relationships with them.
(See Jarich Oosten “A privileged field of study” 2006:para 18. www.erudit.org/revue/etudinuit/2006/v30/n2/017565ar.pdf See also Levi-Strass vis-à-vis Mayberry Lewis in the final chapter of Levi-Strauss 1995 “The Story of Lynx.”)
Irrespective of academic debates, the ‘field of study’ in the modern nation-state of Indonesia (which mapped its self-image onto the former Dutch colony) requires attention to be paid to the position of indigenous people in Papua.
Pouwer, working in New Guinea when it was under Dutch administration, found that the principle of reciprocity was a key feature of their ways of life. There is a consistent message from Papuan peoples that this is missing in the relationship imposed upon them from those who operate in the name of the modern nation-state of Indonesia.
For those of us who see the challenge as being one of reforming life (and not one of having an academic career) we have to look for ways of returning some of life’s wisdom back into our thinking and into our practices – rather than following European master narratives.
My position is also informed by my understanding of the situation of Australia’s First Peoples as captives of the modern Anglo-Australian nation-state.
Quite clearly, in the present Australian situation one part of life (Anglo-Australia) believes it occupies a completely superior position over that of the original First Peoples.
Instead of balanced exchange relationships within the whole of life – as is the case with Australia’s First Peoples – with the arrival of dominating Europeans, believing they are born to rule in Australia, genuine social life has “ended” for the original Australians.
Absolutely superiority is presumed to be found only with introduced British cultural forms.
The 1901 Anglo-Australian Constitution (which began life as a British Act of Parliament) does not recognise Australia’s First Peoples as First Peoples, and does not acknowledge the place of their cultural practices in “Australian” social and ecological formations.
This is not past tense. In the 2012 report of Expert Panel on the recognition of indigenous Australians in the Constitution, for example, one of the recommendations is:
Executive summary
Recommendations
Recommendations for changes to the Constitution
The Panel recommends:
...
5 That a new ‘section 127A’ be inserted, along the following lines:
Section 127A Recognition of languages
(1) The national language of the Commonwealth of Australia is English.
(2) The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages are the original Australian languages, a part of our national heritage.
http://www.youmeunity.org.au/uploads/assets/Expert%20Panel%20report%20-%20Executive%20Summary%20and%20Recommendations.pdf
A long campaign for the recognition of Australia’s First Peoples in the Anglo-Australian Constitution has produced a recommendation English be the only national language enshrined in the Constitution! The voices of those who speak the original languages of this country are missing from this debate. Rebalancing life has a long way to go in Australia.
The experts also found that the question of indigenous sovereignty was not to be included:
“The question of sovereignty
At consultations and in submissions to the Panel, there were numerous calls for a reappraisal of currently accepted perceptions of the historical relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians from the time of European settlement. Chapter 9 discusses one of the significant issues to have emerged during the consultation process: the aspiration of some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for recognition of their sovereign status.
The Panel has concluded that any proposal relating to constitutional recognition of the sovereign status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be highly contested by many Australians, and likely to jeopardise broad public support for the Panel’s recommendations. Such a proposal would not therefore satisfy at least two of the Panel’s principles for assessment of proposals, namely ‘contribute to a more unified and reconciled nation’, and ‘be capable of being supported by an overwhelming majority of Australians from across the political and social spectrums’. While questions relating to sovereignty are likely to continue to be the subject of debate in the community, including among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the Panel does not consider that these questions can be resolved or advanced at this time by inclusion in a constitutional referendum proposal.”
There is a notion of 'the thief's script' which has been applied to Middle East affairs. The Expert Panel has pre-empted Consitutional debate about indigenous sovereignty in order to comply with the Australian version of this script - in which an entire continent has been expropriated from the original peoples.
The surviving sovereignty of First Peoples is to be sacrificed in order to uphold the notion of a single and superior Anglo-speaking modern nation-state. Ethnocide is considered ‘normal’ in modern Australia.
European notions of sovereignty draw heavily on a one-sided and jealous notion in which only one sovereign is possible. All power is at a king of supreme apex – absolute and dominant. However, in the 21st century we can take stock of the planetary havoc wrought on life by this temporary fashion, and look for healing solutions – such as co-existing forms of sovereighty.
By looking at other forms of reason – those which have guided life outside of Europe to better balanced outcomes – we can begin to conceive of power sharing relationships based on ‘horizontal’ complementary oppositions rather exclusive ‘vertical’ hierarchies.
Based on relating rather than manipulation and control. Such is our healing challenge.
This quote is a good place to start as it says it all. As is often the way, some of life’s most precious insights are to be found in myth-narratives (despite the attempts of others to rewrite life’s rules to comply with narrow ambitions).
How much of history - and of present day events - can be explained by the process the myths make clear?
While I am not a modern anthropologist I approach my work from an intellectual background which was informed, in part, by the findings of modern anthropology.
It is appropriate to begin with this comment by the late Jan Pouwer on Professor Josephus Platenkamp’s paper (in Moyer and Claessen (eds) 1988 “Time past, time present, time future: essays in honour of P.E. de Josselin de Jong. Pouwer’s comment in “Fizzy: Fuzzy: FAS? A review of Leiden labour” Canberra Anthropology 15(1) 1992:87-105.))
Basically, I read that comment about the shift from relative to absolute superiority in relation to a transformation of life s lived which moves from having two complementary opposite parts of life (in dynamic balance) to systems which have one part ‘on top’ and the other parts ‘under’. From ‘horizontal’ arrangements to ‘vertical’ arrangements. Or, we can say, from earthed to unearthed Ways of Being.
The former are typified as ‘moieties’ by anthropologists, and the later cover a wide range of social and power formations in which there is an “upper” class or elite of some sort.
Jan Pouwer was my anthropological mentor, and it was his work on complementary opposition which has influenced my views over the years. It is hard to find anything he published on this theme, but it was constantly present in his lectures in New Zealand 1968-1976.
The late Claude Levi-Strauss thought that the emphasis of the Leiden school on dual organisation was a result of the area of study (or FAS – Field of Anthropological Study) they had access to as a result of the former Dutch empire in what is presently Indonesia.
Levi-Strauss himself, as the pre-eminent representative of modern anthropology, does not appear to place the same importance dual organisation as either indigenous peoples or those with close working relationships with them.
(See Jarich Oosten “A privileged field of study” 2006:para 18. www.erudit.org/revue/etudinuit/2006/v30/n2/017565ar.pdf See also Levi-Strass vis-à-vis Mayberry Lewis in the final chapter of Levi-Strauss 1995 “The Story of Lynx.”)
Irrespective of academic debates, the ‘field of study’ in the modern nation-state of Indonesia (which mapped its self-image onto the former Dutch colony) requires attention to be paid to the position of indigenous people in Papua.
Pouwer, working in New Guinea when it was under Dutch administration, found that the principle of reciprocity was a key feature of their ways of life. There is a consistent message from Papuan peoples that this is missing in the relationship imposed upon them from those who operate in the name of the modern nation-state of Indonesia.
For those of us who see the challenge as being one of reforming life (and not one of having an academic career) we have to look for ways of returning some of life’s wisdom back into our thinking and into our practices – rather than following European master narratives.
My position is also informed by my understanding of the situation of Australia’s First Peoples as captives of the modern Anglo-Australian nation-state.
Quite clearly, in the present Australian situation one part of life (Anglo-Australia) believes it occupies a completely superior position over that of the original First Peoples.
Instead of balanced exchange relationships within the whole of life – as is the case with Australia’s First Peoples – with the arrival of dominating Europeans, believing they are born to rule in Australia, genuine social life has “ended” for the original Australians.
Absolutely superiority is presumed to be found only with introduced British cultural forms.
The 1901 Anglo-Australian Constitution (which began life as a British Act of Parliament) does not recognise Australia’s First Peoples as First Peoples, and does not acknowledge the place of their cultural practices in “Australian” social and ecological formations.
This is not past tense. In the 2012 report of Expert Panel on the recognition of indigenous Australians in the Constitution, for example, one of the recommendations is:
Executive summary
Recommendations
Recommendations for changes to the Constitution
The Panel recommends:
...
5 That a new ‘section 127A’ be inserted, along the following lines:
Section 127A Recognition of languages
(1) The national language of the Commonwealth of Australia is English.
(2) The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages are the original Australian languages, a part of our national heritage.
http://www.youmeunity.org.au/uploads/assets/Expert%20Panel%20report%20-%20Executive%20Summary%20and%20Recommendations.pdf
A long campaign for the recognition of Australia’s First Peoples in the Anglo-Australian Constitution has produced a recommendation English be the only national language enshrined in the Constitution! The voices of those who speak the original languages of this country are missing from this debate. Rebalancing life has a long way to go in Australia.
The experts also found that the question of indigenous sovereignty was not to be included:
“The question of sovereignty
At consultations and in submissions to the Panel, there were numerous calls for a reappraisal of currently accepted perceptions of the historical relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians from the time of European settlement. Chapter 9 discusses one of the significant issues to have emerged during the consultation process: the aspiration of some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for recognition of their sovereign status.
The Panel has concluded that any proposal relating to constitutional recognition of the sovereign status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be highly contested by many Australians, and likely to jeopardise broad public support for the Panel’s recommendations. Such a proposal would not therefore satisfy at least two of the Panel’s principles for assessment of proposals, namely ‘contribute to a more unified and reconciled nation’, and ‘be capable of being supported by an overwhelming majority of Australians from across the political and social spectrums’. While questions relating to sovereignty are likely to continue to be the subject of debate in the community, including among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the Panel does not consider that these questions can be resolved or advanced at this time by inclusion in a constitutional referendum proposal.”
There is a notion of 'the thief's script' which has been applied to Middle East affairs. The Expert Panel has pre-empted Consitutional debate about indigenous sovereignty in order to comply with the Australian version of this script - in which an entire continent has been expropriated from the original peoples.
The surviving sovereignty of First Peoples is to be sacrificed in order to uphold the notion of a single and superior Anglo-speaking modern nation-state. Ethnocide is considered ‘normal’ in modern Australia.
European notions of sovereignty draw heavily on a one-sided and jealous notion in which only one sovereign is possible. All power is at a king of supreme apex – absolute and dominant. However, in the 21st century we can take stock of the planetary havoc wrought on life by this temporary fashion, and look for healing solutions – such as co-existing forms of sovereighty.
By looking at other forms of reason – those which have guided life outside of Europe to better balanced outcomes – we can begin to conceive of power sharing relationships based on ‘horizontal’ complementary oppositions rather exclusive ‘vertical’ hierarchies.
Based on relating rather than manipulation and control. Such is our healing challenge.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Theme for 2012 - regaining our balance
My theme on this blog for 2012 will be to do some work on what i regard as a key issue - rediscovering the importance of complementary oppostion in thought and in practice.
Part of this involves looking at how the dynamic balance of 'moiety' forms of social organisation (two counterbalanced hemispheres of life) have been replaced with an 'upper' class seeking to dominate a 'lower' class.
While the many associated forms of spin from this arrangement would have us accept this situation as 'normal' we can move to a position where we can see it as not only abnormal but a gross deformation of life.
Regaining our full well-being requires than we move beyond modern one-sided forms of representation.
I will allow comments initially and see if the spam becomes too much to manage.
cheers
Bruce Reyburn
Part of this involves looking at how the dynamic balance of 'moiety' forms of social organisation (two counterbalanced hemispheres of life) have been replaced with an 'upper' class seeking to dominate a 'lower' class.
While the many associated forms of spin from this arrangement would have us accept this situation as 'normal' we can move to a position where we can see it as not only abnormal but a gross deformation of life.
Regaining our full well-being requires than we move beyond modern one-sided forms of representation.
I will allow comments initially and see if the spam becomes too much to manage.
cheers
Bruce Reyburn
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