Great example of two-sided form of representation

Poster by Chips Mackinolty for NT Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority.

Features image and paintings of late W. Rubuntja, who employed both traditional and introduced cultural codes to depict country.

Dual forms of social organisation - some useful anthropological quotes.

While the actual lived experiences of First Peoples provide valuable examples of forms of dual organisations, something of that wisdom can be found translated into the work of some modern anthropologists.

There are a few useful quotes which i share with interested readers.

Modern anthropologists of the Dutch Leiden orientation, working within the former Dutch colonial possessions (now Indonesia and Papua) found the role of dual organisation particularly striking. They may well be the European experts in such matters. Some more from them later.

The foremost modern anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, who had spent some time in South America, also turned his mind to such matters.

He has a chapter called “Dual Organisations” in his 1949 work which was translated into English in 1967 “The Elementary Structures of Kinship”.

In that chapter he teases out a few aspects which are relevant here:

 “… the one common characteristic of moieties is that there are two of them, and the duality is called upon to play highly varying roles as the circumstances require. Sometimes it governs marriages, economic exchanges and ritual, and sometimes some of these and sometimes only sporting contests. There would appear to be as many different institutions as there are distinguishable modalities.” (page 75)

“To understand their common basis, inquiry must be directed to certain fundamental structures of the human mind, rather than to some privileged region of the world or to a certain period in the history of civilisation.” (page 75)

“These facts tally with others which might have been added in revealing dual organization less as in institution with certain precise and identifiable features than as a method for solving multiple problems.” (page 82, emphasis added.)

  

“A probably unilateral analysis of dual organisation has all too often propounded the principle of reciprocity as its main cause and result … However, we should not forget that a moiety system can express not only mechanisms 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 who wins the top spot on one plane concedes it to the opposing moiety in another.” (page ?, quoted in his later work (English trans 1995) “The Story of Lynx” at page 237. emphasis added)

These quotes provide us with some motifs for what follows. Levi-Strauss also touches, in passing, on the modern two-party system as an indication of dualism  - which i will not quote as i hope to return to it later.

For those who wish to read more from Levi-Strauss on this topic, one of his main papers is “Do Dual Organisations exist?” which is included in Structural Anthropology (Vol 1) p 132-163. He wrote this in relation to the work of Dutch anthropology.

No doubt Levi-Strauss’ trailblazing study of American mythology contains other important material. He specifically takes the topic up again in the final chapter of “The Story of Lynx” reacting, in part, to “The Attraction of Opposites. Thought and Society in the Dualistic Mode” 1989 edited by D. Maybury-Lewis and U. Almagor.

Check out:

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=x-WilndJnoEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Australia's Westminster system - transformational change

 WESTMINSTER SYSTEM – NO CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

There is a slowly growing awareness that our present political system is unable to address the increasingly urgent issues of climate change in a timely manner.

One of the reasons civilisations collapse is that the elite leaders lose touch with reality. This is compounded when everyday people maintain their faith in the elite leaders for far too long.

We may be heading into this pattern now.

The appearance of ‘success’ of the Westminster system has long been unwritten by the ability to turn a blind eye to its shortcomings and real costs.

The suffering of Australia’s First Peoples over the last two centuries is one example of its failing and of the real costs.  The well-being of people and country has been subject to a massive shock as a result of the form of colonisation by a European power.

Reforming the means by which life is presently governed in Australia is a difficult challenge. Getting Constitutional recognition of Australia’s First Peoples as First Peoples is in the “too hard” basket.

So too is the much simpler (from a cross-cultural perspective) challenge of gaining Constitutional recognition of local government, let alone reform of local government to genuinely empower and engage with people in community.

Sartre’s ‘practico-inert’ holds sway at every level  - amongst bureaucrats, mainstream politicians, suburban households, media commentators.  Resistance to intelligent and timely change is empowered by the established status-quo.

A simple change of government within the present political process – or even PM Rudd’s ideas on reforming the Australian Labor Party – will not provide us with the means we require to seriously address pressing social and ecological problems.

A CALL FOR TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE

Within the general ‘business as normal’ clamor, however, a call for transformational change can be detected.

There may be, too, a growing sense of unease at a less conscious level. Life sends its messages irrespective of what mainstream politicians and the mainstream media say.

It is not a matter of making hay while the sun shines, but of ensuring that those paddocks of drying grass do not burn up in an overheating world, nor the precious topsoil washed away with another global warming deluge.

But it does seem that it will take an increased crisis – reaching some threshold - before there is real movement towards genuinely transformational change. 

One of the roles of conceptual craftspeople during this period is to explore options for such transformation. These may help guide change as it unfolds - by seeing opportunities where others see threats.

The line i investigate is one which draws its inspiration from the Ways of Australia’s First Peoples. Such a project has been delayed for over 200 years.

Modern Western understanding is, i believe, blind to these Ways.  In the same way, modern Western understanding is blind to present and past non-agrarian Ways of life.

Just as our modern understanding prevents us from a proper evaluation of that part of our heritage wrongly categorised as “Palaeolithic” - so too our modern understanding prevents us from a proper evaluation of the Ways of contemporary First Peoples (who are a long way from our imaginary ‘Palaeolithic’).

We can no longer rely on modern European masters alone for the task of reconnecting our collective decision-making process to our true surroundings. Modern life has become ‘unearthed’.

Fashioning new eyes is a task which – while making full use of the best of a European tradition – now needs to be carried out in acts of cultural partnership with First Peoples.

A key lesson in this process is the need to prevent a concentration of power which is part of the Westminster system (as presently constituted).

The Westminster system results in one-sided forms of representation., and lurches from crisis to crisis. Is has become a straight jacket, overly constructing - with its one size fits all approach to who we are and where we fit into life. 

Well-governed life requires systems which have two-sided forms of representation, and produce stability and balance. We need to take off our European over-selves and learn more about these forms of reason. We will not learn from Europe/

Life’s masters of two-sided forms of representation are the senior law people of Australia’s First Peoples.

But their voices have been - and remain - systematically excluded from Anglo-Australian Parliaments for far too long. They are the last to be heard. We need new ears as well as new eyes.

Changing the Constitution of the Australian Parliament not only requires a critical mass for a peoples movement - it requires some real understanding of why Australian life will benefit from incorporating some of wisdom which has informed First Peoples Ways 'since the beginning'.

Therein lies our true Australian genesis.

Cooling down an overheating world.

The presumption that other Ways of Being have been superseded by modern Western civilisation is not one which is necessarily endorsed by life itself.

If the forms of society which underwrote the industrial revolution can be characterised as 'hot' societies, then it may be time to return to a cooler mode of Being.

The Ways of Australia's First Peoples can be seen as being concerned with maintaining the privileged position our form of life already enjoys, rather than seeking to improve on an eternal life design.

It may well be, as our planet begins to run a dangerous temperature, that other Ways have been slowly reclaiming back to their fold a more fundamental human inheritance.

For a very long period before the advent of neolithic transformations, my view is that we interpreted experience by means of systems of complementary opposition. Our cosmos, including ourselves, had two interrelated parts. Think yin-and-yang.

Better still, think Wurlurru and Kingili as found with Warumungu First Peoples in Central Australia, as this is a much richer source of food for thought. It is as though Australia’s First Peoples have kept faith with our original Ways.

Working backwards from what is know of extant Ways of life, we can gain not only a clearer view of what life was like in non-agrarian times, but also form a means of critiquing dominant Ways in our own times.

Myths abound of what life had to be like before the advent of farming, villages, and horticulture. Even modern professional anthropologists operate with conceptual devices which recapitulate neolithic myths.

“The Paleolithic” was – we are led to believe – characterised by small groups of hunter-gatherers living a ‘brutish’ life only a notch or so above that we ascribe to animals. Some myths depict people as eating rotten wood or even stones prior to the advent of horticulture.

This false depiction of viable alternatives serves to reinforce the choices which have been made by certain groups when they moved away from previous Ways of Being.

The picture of “non-agrarian” alternatives, based on working backwards from what is known, appears to be entirely different to that of the small bands of cave dwellers etc. Far more likely, there were forms of globalism based around some sense of a commonality of Being.

Life was connected by extensive networks along which messages of one form or another could – and did – flow.

Our cosmologies enabled us with systems of signification which took in the whole of life, including where we – as part of the larger whole - fit into life.

Any attempt to insist on a single universal characteristic of our cosmos is unbalanced. “The Universe” consists of two complementary opposite hemispheres in my way of thinking.

Underlying this means of thinking is a realisation that mental operations of an entirely abstract kind systematically exclude parts of life which are not only of value, but which part of a truly vital mix.

Rather than seeking to treat those parts as being of no significance – a waste produce to be dumped and forgotten – a better means of thinking requires us to find the counterbalancing location for that which would otherwise be excluded in order to privilege one part.

This two-sided means of relating with life is more stable – if less spectacular - than that resulting from excursions into one-sided abstraction.

Our Being was signified according to cosmologies characterised by systems of complementary opposition.

These systems were not static in the sense of everything being in perfect balance.  There was a dynamic asymmetry – such as is found in the opposition between passive and active.

The multiple dimensions of life as mapped by these cosmologies may attribute a relative superiority to one value – active, for example, vis-à-vis passive.

But these dimensions are mapped as part of a complex configuration – marked by complementary opposition (that is, as having two hemispheres). The superior pole of one dimension in one hemisphere is counterbalanced by a superior pole on another dimension which is located in the opposite hemisphere.

Ethnographic literature provides examples from the lives of First Peoples which demonstrate the degree of care which is taken to ensure that life’s relationships are kept in the proper balance.  And these life relationships extend beyond human-to-human relationships.

Any attempt to privilege one – beyond a relative superiority – would require the downgrading and demotion of the other.

For example, the masters of fire may be associated with Wurlurru and the masters of water with Kingili. Both parts are necessary for a full life. Neither alone can provide a full life.

In Warumungu wirnkara (Dreaming) narratives, fire was obtained from 'on high' by one part of humanity (Wurlurru) and  then given to the other half (Kingili). Rainmakers tend to found amongst the Kingili side of life, and they seek to ensure rain falls where required. Both Dreaming narratives envisage the two extremes - a massive conflagration and a massive flood. By attending to their respective and interrelated cosmic maintenance duties, both extremes are avoided.

If modern Western life is cast, due to the industrial revolution, in the role of the masters of fire, then what we require to heal our planet is not more of the same from that side of life, but the return of a counterbalancing part of life which has been excluded or marginalised for too long.

Life as a cosmic balancing act - moderating overvaluation

“The myths show that when the relative superiority of one value over the other gives way to an absolute superiority of one value, this means the end of society.” (Pouwer, 1992:96)

I am using the above quote as a guiding reminder of what i want to explore - the idea that well-governed life is marked by a dynamic form of balance between two complementary halves, neither of which should be allowed to dominate the other. 

And i am making use of my understanding of the Ways of Australia's original peoples as evidence of how this  works in lived practice. 

When – for whatever reason -  the relative superiority of one value threatened to move towards an absolute form of superiority, corrective mechanisms of one sort or another would operate to bring the distortion back into its proper relationship within a whole.

These mechanisms range from healing rituals; exchange transactions; to acts of low intensity violence (such as when one group engages in combat with another to make good a perceived wrong). 

The usual definitions of violence do not include attempts at self-privileging over-valuation of one aspect of life over others. But such acts may be seen as a form of violence against good order for those who take seriously - as Australia's First Peoples clearly do - the realisation that life is a cosmic balancing act.

It is interesting to read the views of an exceptional psychologist, Liam Hudson, who touches on this matter in his 1972 book “The Cult of the Fact”. Hudson considers the classification of Western forms of knowledge into 'hard' and 'soft'.

"Schemes constructed, like Brown's, in binary terms - whether explicit, as with Eros and Thanatos; or implicit, as in scientists' use of hard and soft - are bound in practice to be simple. On the other hand, they offer, historically, an impressive pedigree; and they are widely if not universally employed. They are also important, as Marcuse has argued, prophylactically. Pathological states seem to ensue whenever one value - Progress, Science, Democracy, Power, Race, Love - is pursued to the exclusion of all others. To negate one value with its antithesis is at least to cast matters back into a state of equilibrium. Even so, the elements of such binary schemes need not be treated as eternally fixed: still less the nature of the relation between them."

Liam Hudson, The Cult of the Fact. 1972:91. Hudson's reference is to Norman Brown  "Life Against Death" - concerning Freud and life and death instincts, more on that in a moment. Also referred to is Herbert Marcus “Eros and Civilisation”.

My anthropological mentor Jan Pouwer was very much concerned with configurations. “Relative position” was a phrase we heard from him in his lectures many times. For example:

“ ... it is in my opinion not the elements that matter but the relative position of the elements, a well known structuralist tenet.” (Pouwer 1992:90)

and, in relation to cross-cultural studies of space, for example, and in light of Hudson’s example above (Eros and Thanatos; Soft and Hard science):

“I would suggest that both in science and folk systems space is never a fixed entity but always a matter of relative position, though in different systems of conceptualization.” (Pouwer 1992:93)

It is easy to invoke the notion of a configuration and less easy, i find, to map one out in any meaningful sketch. Life itself has been busy on this front, as the great variety of different forms of social life demonstrate.

Freud found two aspects of experience – Life and Death - which may be found worldwide. Different attitudes to life and death are certainly important markers to different Ways and different religions.

Hudson (page 90_ mentions this in his examination of the discipline and practice of modern psychology.

  

"Brown presents Eros and Thanatos not solely as impulses or well-springs, but as a shorthand for our two modes of address to the world around us; the modes whereby we act on our surroundings, and thereby construct our sense of who we are. Eros he conceives of as the impulse to have access to someone else's mind, to share their experience; Thanatos as the urge to control, to turn our knowledge into some lifeless thing. Eros seeks 'to preserve and enrich life'; Thanatos, 'to return life to the peace of death'."

One consequence of Hudson’s exploration, if it had been taken on board, would have been to remove privileges which accrue to psychologists when they – using an ‘objective’ cover – align with a thin concept of life rather than the confoundingly rich mix which it always is.

   

I find it instructive to add to Hudson another quote from Pouwer, whose interest in configurations extended to a ‘structural history’ which would be able – using sound methods, he always insisted – to sketch differing configurations and compare and contrast them.

This notion is key to my present work as i argue that our orthodox means of relating have been systematically transformed from ‘two-hemispheres’ grounded in balanced reciprocity and into a top-down arrangement.

In his last work, 2010,  Pouwer spelled out a little more on his configurative approach:

“By ‘configuration’ I mean a process that turns elements into components arranged and imbued with meaning by a central orientation. Similar or even identical elements in different configurations may have different meanings or functions. Both configuration and orientation are conceived of as always being on the move, never closed, always open to change, ambivalence and contradiction. A configurational approach assumes a central orientation that permeates a particular society and culture.”  (Pouwer 2010:6-7)

But what are we to make of the ‘central orientation’ which has to play such an important role in Pouwer’s structural-configurational approach?

How do we come up with a meaningful sketch of a social group which is better than another self-projection on the often chaotic impressions we may form of other peoples Ways?

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Ref Jan Pouwer 2010:

Gender, ritual and social formation in West Papua; A configurational analysis comparing Kamoro and Asmat

Copy at http://www.oapen.org/search?keyword=Pouwer 

For more on Jan Pouwer see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Pouwer

Towards Restoring an Original Australian Orthodoxy

BASIC POSITION - LIFE IS PAIR-SHAPED

My basis premise in this work can be stated very simply – the orthodox well-balanced form of human life is pair-shaped.

That is, using the terminology of modern anthropology, well-governed social life – as a reflection of dualism as a total social fact – is and was made up of two moieties.

Two halves which – always kept safe from the threat of one being confused for the other – together made the only possible complete whole.

My inspiration for this comes from the early evidence of the original forms of social and cultural organisation of Australia’s First Peoples.

The Eaglehawk and Crow moieties of South- Eastern Australia where very well known at the end of the 19^th century. See reference to Mathew at end of this piece.

Similar moiety arrangements were documented over large parts of Australia. Due to the particular way modern anthropology unfolded in Australia in the 20^th century, there was little appreciation of the role of complementary opposition vis-à-vis making sense of First Peoples Ways. Now is the time to make good for that shortcoming.

Some of these original arrangements were subject to higher levels of articulation as part of a process in Australian life which reflects a particular kind of experimentation. This form of experimentation has remained under-appreciated by modern minds and largely dismissed.

Without exploring the more elabourate arrangements, the basic foundations consist of two complementary opposite parts to life. This results in very different notions of adequacy, in regard to forms of representation, than to those of modern biologists, naturalists etc.

This original Australian orthodoxy is not a result of a mindless process of following a static model. There is a dynamic balancing act in play.  Privileges are kept in balance between life’s two parts. Power is never allowed to concentrate on one side at the expense of the other.

While ‘hot’ societies (using Levi-Strauss’ distinction) seek to harness change, ‘cold’ societies seek to maintain position. Both systems involve dynamic processes.

A useful comparison in regard two complementary opposite componets is with the human brain itself. Two hemispheres are necessary for the whole brainer. By contrast, and as we will see, full-life becomes ‘half-brained’ when one hemisphere attempts to assert dominance over the other, and the other cedes more ground than is healthy.

When one moiety shifts from a counterbalancing position and proclaims itself to be ‘on top’ of the other – privileged at the cost of the other part - there is a move from well-governed life to mal-governed life. Much of known history consists of the history of mal-governed life.

Borrowing an insight from another context, and taking as our perspective that of an original Australian orthodoxy, much of what we have become accustomed to take for granted can be seen in another light.

"The myths show that when the relative superiority of one value over the other gives way to an absolute superiority of one value, this means the end of society.” (in Pouwer, 1992:96)

The expression ‘the end of society’ does not signify the end of life – but the end of a well-formed society. The attempt to universalise one side of a duality results in the beginning of a gross distortion.  The values clustered around one pole proclaim that they, and only they, are the measure of all things.

When this is combined with one-sided notions of legitimacy in the use of a monopolised force, great damage is done to life. States which insist the only duty is to that of the State represent an extreme version of this process. The position in this work is there can never be a ‘legitimate’ monopoly on the use of force.

Any attempted monopolisation of force is illegitimate as measured by life-based perspectives and not those of modern nation-states or other non-dual forms of social life.

I understand that the term ‘Gleichschtung’ (forced sameness-making?) refers to the standardisation of political etc institutions among authoritarian states.  (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung )

Gleishschtung is the antithesis of what i mean by “Becoming Otherwise” – of opening up spaces in our lives which enable First Peoples to be – as First Peoples (and not as refashioned into modern Western specifications).

(More to follow - July 2013)

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Jan Pouwer reference: "Fizzy; Fuzzy: FAS? A review article." Canberra Anthropology 15(1) 1992:87-105

For a classic study of Eaglehawk and Crow, see John Mathew 1899

“Eaglehawk and Crow: A Study of the Australian Aborigines, Including an Inquiry Into Their Origin and a Survey of Australian Languages”

one online version at

http://archive.org/stream/eaglehawkandcro00mathgoog/eaglehawkandcro00mathgoog_djvu.txt