Decolonising Australian Anthropology - Part Ten

POST-MODERN POST SCRIPT - MISSING VOICES  

The voices of senior professional anthropologists – as cross-cultural experts -  are missing from the Australian ‘conversation’ about Constitutional recognition. 

Partly due to these missing voices the 'conversation' about Constitutional recognition of this country's First Peoples is entirely dominated by simple minded nationalist notions. There are plenty of First Peoples who are making their contra position known, - with a campaign against Constitutional recognition in a form which they consider will further rob them of their birthright as First Peoples.

See, for example,  www.nationalunitygovernment.org 

What do Australia's anthropologists - individually and as a profession - have to say on these hard and real issues? The wider public needs good information in order to make an informed choice in regard to such a vital matter. But the tired old cultural narratives of nationalism are given a free run in what is set up as a one horse race, posing as a 'conversation'.

I can think of no living professional Australian anthropologist who has championed public debate about the need for a Treaty (or treaties) and the hard issues of accommodating co-existing forms of sovereignty. 

They are completely missing in action in regard to the Australian government’s  proposals to use First Peoples living countries as repositories for radioactive waste. Yet the Federal Court case of Warlmanpa people opposed to the Commonwealth of Australia plan to locate a radioactive waste facility on land at Muckaty (NT) commences in Melbourne on Monday 2 June,

Anthropologists must be aware of the extent of the real risks posed for First Peoples by such proposals.  There is a public debate going on. 

While it was the anthropologist W E H Stanner who raised the issue of the Great Australian Silence, it appears those who followed him embraced it as a means of protecting their own positions within the Anglo-Australian system of patronage. 

The selection criteria at work for those who aspire to be successful anthropologists  has promoted people who have had their soul transformed by a process which solidly “grounds” them in modern Western metaphysics.  

They are, as a consequence, (and in my assessment) unable to transcend this limitations in order to relate with what is, in effect, another  cosmos – the living realities of First Peoples. 

As conceptual craftspeople modern anthropologists fashion forms of representation which must satisfy cultural master narratives.  

Faced with First Peoples Ways of life – in which the whole of life is subject to a process of trans-signification – modern anthropology has remain firmly grounded in what makes sense within Western life, at the expense of making a mockery of First Peoples living realities. 

As a telling – if small - recent example, I read  in a book published by an anthropologist in the last decade,  the casually description of First Peoples use of circumcision as ‘genital mutilation’.  

In the present context, with a wider debate going on regarding these practices, word ‘mutilation’ is not merely a descriptive term of social science but a loaded term which carries with it an act of judgement on the practice. 

One of the key aims of First Peoples Ways is and was to produce well-formed men – well-formed as reincarnated Beings fitting into their place in life. In some parts of Australia, this process was marked by the act of circumcision. It is an act of the highest level of cultural life.  To casually describe it as ‘genital mutilation’ demonstrates a complete lack of the degree of empathy necessary to be able to enter into First Peoples Ways of life. 

The larger picture of the work of modern anthropologists confirms the process by which First Peoples lives are depicted ‘from the outside’ as seen from a framework which is completely uncritical of such important issues as, for example, its relation to claims of Anglo-Australian sovereignty vis-à-vis First Peoples. 

As members of a social formation which requires them to comply with its own specifications many modern anthropologists simply do not have a crucial part of their own being activated if they are ever to hope to reach the high levels on which First Peoples Ways are situated. 

To be accepted as well-formed members of their chosen profession – a discipline embedded in the modern nation-state education system - modern anthropologists are required to fashion particular forms of representations of First Peoples Ways. 

There is a shared dream amongst leading – key - members of the discipline for a ‘science of society’. We can compare and contrast that dream with that of senior lawmen, living under imposed constraints in artificial communities away from their country, assert they collectively travel in their dreams to visit country to carry out the necessary cosmic maintenance ceremonies.  

And – as we have seen – what of the identities of First Peoples as reincarnated Dreaming ancestors? How do those who regard ‘naturalism’ as an adequate means of crafting representations incorporate transcendent dimensions into the core of their productions?  

Can the dream of a ‘science of society’ – with its stick-figure forms of representation of First Peoples - ever truly have space for the latter without systemic marginalisation of the respective realities? Certainly not as it has been imagined during the 20th century. 

The privileged place of modern Western masters - and modern Western master narratives – was not to be located on the level with the masters of First Peoples and their Ways, irrespective of their respective life management credentials. 

Despite the efforts of modern anthropologists to question the process at work within their own profession (Radcliffe-Brown v Stanner v Hiatt) for example) a regime of Western control has dominated the ‘means of production’ of forms of representation. 

In place of relating, modern anthropology sought to construct and impose more or less rigid frameworks upon First Peoples living realities. While there has been much debate about the degree of fit of various aspects of these frameworks, these debate has been confined to attempts to tweak it rather than to replace it with a new approach. 

This gives rise to what i regard as a ‘standard model’ – a recasting of the totality of First Peoples Ways within a very narrow focus so that, for example, it appears meaningful to privilege ‘the individual’; to regard ‘kinship’ as being based on simple nuclear family type relationships which are ‘extended’ outwards from an imaginary centre and which bestows some form of ‘ownership’ rights on a very narrowly conceived ‘local descent group’. 

Such a narrow focus excludes the totality of life from the picture – all those countless events, decisions and relationship which can be traced back to the Beginning – and all those countless events, decisions and relationships which make up the present. 

The narrow focus of modern anthropology allows no room for the bigger picture of First Peoples lives – that they are presently held captive, against their will, within a modern nation-state.  

An Anglo-Australian fantasy structure constantly seeks to forcefully impose itself on First Peoples. 

Many First Peoples – caught up in an ongoing ethnocidal psychic war directed towards them from the core of the Westminster system and its corporate clones  -  have been and still remain engaged in acts of struggle. 

Acts of struggle against the inhuman conditions of an Anglo-Australian fantasy structure which denies First Peoples recognition of the place which life itself has reserved for them in this country.  

For those whose eyes are open to this struggle, there is a mountain of historical and present day evidence. 

Modern anthropology has been part of the process which imposes entirely one-sided forms of representation on First Peoples. 

The construction of secular models of sacred lives and the associated notion of ‘local descent groups’ is one example.  

In my view these ‘local descent groups’ have no objective correlate in the lives of First Peoples. They are better understood as being part of an unconscious-in-culture which sets up the means for what appears to be a meaningful discourse for members of the modern anthropological profession, as shared with members of other Western professions (e.g. legal, political). 

But the extent of meaningfulness is mere appearance. Since all consciousness is, in a sense, false it is not sufficient to assert that modern anthropology is recycling false consciousness when it constructs such secular forms of First Peoples Ways.  

 It is more accurate to regard those modern anthropological forms of representation as being ill-fitting and – as a result – fatally flawed in so far as they can be accepted with any degree of confidence as substitutes for the authoritative voices of senior First Peoples in matters to do with First Peoples living realities. 

Life is a subtle form of energy which turns on the finest of points. 

First Peoples Ways – which are informed by transcendent sources – have been (and continue to be) refashioned by modern anthropologists to comply with a secular model deemed appropriate vis-à-vis the self-privileging places reserved in life by modern Western master narratives. 

As a result of this alliance, First Peoples will not be depicted in their own brilliant existential colours – with full sovereign rights – to ensure that no threat will be introduced on the conceptual plane to the notion of an “Australia” which complies with that of King George III and his imperial heirs. 

In other words, modern anthropologists, working as conceptual craftspeople for their European patrons, have fashioned forms of representation of First Peoples realities which comply with the fantasy structure of Anglo-Australia. 

Needless to say, this fantasy structure has reached its ‘use-by’ date. As we  proceed beyond the 20th century, new forms of representation are to be crafted. 

The Anglo-Australian spell which has been cast over our minds – Australia for the Whiteman -  is now cast aside as ill-fitting  by life itself.  

Inserting a limited form of recognition of First Peoples into the 1901 Constitution (a document in which the racism of its time is deeply inscribed) is highly unlikely to be able to preform the healing task which is required of it. 

We are, in the 21st century, already shedding that over constricting ‘skin’.   While the present attempts to gain some degree of recognition of this country’s First Peoples in the 1901 Anglo-Australian Constitution, the real task of reform involves far more than a mention in the Preamble of an obsolete imperial-measure document.