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  • 标题:Explorations towards intercultural accounts of socio-cultural reproduction and change.
  • 作者:Merlan, Francesca
  • 期刊名称:Oceania
  • 印刷版ISSN:0029-8077
  • 出版年度:2005
  • 期号:March
  • 语种:English
  • 出版社:Blackwell Publishing Limited, a company of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
  • 摘要:In the call for papers for the session 'Articulating cultures: Understanding engagements between indigenous and non-indigenous lifeworlds' at the Australian Anthropological Society conference of 2002, the convenors characterised my book, Caging the Rainbow (Merlan 1998), as an attempt to implement a notion of an 'intercultural' ethnographic description involving Australian Aborigines. I had used this word of my effort to describe the situation of Aboriginal people in a town in the upper central Northern Territory. My concern was to find ways of dealing more fully than many descriptions do with forms of engagement and influence between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people and institutions, and the implications of this for change. It was important to keep 'engagement between' in view at all times, especially with reference to a town situation. But the use of the word, I must admit, remained more indicative than examined. The kind of descriptive and ethnographic issues to which it was intended to apply are difficult ones, involving questions of difference, boundedness and transformation of indigenous life-ways in relation to the broader Australian social order. To these there is no simple 'answer', but there is a variety of potentially relevant theoretical positions, several of which I explore here. Beginning with an ethnographic fragment, I consider what potential they may have to assist in developing the issues raised.
  • 关键词:Aboriginal Australians;Australian aborigines

Explorations towards intercultural accounts of socio-cultural reproduction and change.


Merlan, Francesca


INTRODUCTION

In the call for papers for the session 'Articulating cultures: Understanding engagements between indigenous and non-indigenous lifeworlds' at the Australian Anthropological Society conference of 2002, the convenors characterised my book, Caging the Rainbow (Merlan 1998), as an attempt to implement a notion of an 'intercultural' ethnographic description involving Australian Aborigines. I had used this word of my effort to describe the situation of Aboriginal people in a town in the upper central Northern Territory. My concern was to find ways of dealing more fully than many descriptions do with forms of engagement and influence between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people and institutions, and the implications of this for change. It was important to keep 'engagement between' in view at all times, especially with reference to a town situation. But the use of the word, I must admit, remained more indicative than examined. The kind of descriptive and ethnographic issues to which it was intended to apply are difficult ones, involving questions of difference, boundedness and transformation of indigenous life-ways in relation to the broader Australian social order. To these there is no simple 'answer', but there is a variety of potentially relevant theoretical positions, several of which I explore here. Beginning with an ethnographic fragment, I consider what potential they may have to assist in developing the issues raised.

JULIE AND THE RAINBOW

In Caging the Rainbow (1998:49-50) I tell how an Aboriginal woman, Julie Williams, in sharing her experiences of the town with me, talked about a time when roadwork was going on in Katherine's central street. Her understanding, in common with many other Aboriginal people who remembered this period, was that road workers doing excavations dug up a 'rainbol', a little red rainbow serpent, in the course of their work. How are we to understand this episode?

This is a kind of creature that Aborigines of this area associate with caves, and the regional underground limestone system on which the town is partly built. They believe it reacts angrily--creating storm, wind and rain--to people whose 'sweat' or 'smell' it does not know. According to the story as Julie told it from her witnessing of the work, the road workers removed the rainbow serpent (its being red indicated it was young) and threw it in the rubbish tip outside of town.

Julie told me of having seen the road-work that exposed the little red rainbow with her closest age-mate, Margaret Katherine. Her account makes it clear (1998:58) that she did not understand what it was on first seeing it: her idea of what it was came after she and her friend Margaret went home and told their mothers of having seen something, a 'find' of the road workers, that they thought was unusual. Their mothers told them what the creature was. As this suggests, ideas were then widely shared among Aborigines about the association of 'rainbols' with the limestone sinkholes of Katherine town and the surrounding area (Rose 1992:70-71).

Julie and Margaret probably heard their relatives talk about rainbows on other occasions beside this one. But from her story, we realize that here Julie was learning about these matters in the novel and perhaps challenging context of building activity in the town.

Did the girls wonder whether there might be consequences? we might ask. But no question requiring definitiveness could be asked without, according to my experience of her, violating Julie's sense of an answerable question. 'Was the rainbol really gone'? is an hypothetical question that would require too great a departure from circumstances, and too much absoluteness, to answer. She is not inclined to think in such explicitly absolute terms as 'gone for ever'. Such an idea might occur to me and perhaps to many of my readers, but does not come naturally to Julie. The viewpoint from which one may ask about presence and absence, consequence and lack of consequence, in terms of finality is a socially conditioned one, not available to everyone.

There was something common and something different in Julie's and the roadworkers' understandings of what was being done. Like them, Julie understood the roadwork as a widening and improvement of the road. She had, or came to have, a different understanding from theirs of what was underneath the road. She has heard of and even herself seen rainbows in other places at other times.

At the same time, Julie has some of the cosmopolitanism consistent with enthusiasm for and acceptance of the idea of building the town, fixing it up. She also realizes that most whites would see the rainbol as superstition. Julie, more than some of her elders, but perhaps typically for her age group, recognizes the existence of these varying perspectives.

In the book I evaluate this incident as an aspect of the conversion of a 'place' in Aboriginal terms into just another part of the town. I suggest the overall effect may be loss of the place's distinctiveness in certain Aboriginal terms. While this 'place' had had particular physical characteristics (its location in the area of limestone sinkholes associated with rainbols), as well as the potential of interconnection with other places (via caves, the movements of the creature, etc.) which we also know to be characteristic of ways of conceiving of places in terms of relations among them, it loses this in being turned into part of a roadbed. It no longer has such features which mark it out (other than those of a major road intersection), and presumably, this way of understanding places as distinctive undergoes contraction within town space. Other places are and may become distinctively associated with Aborigines and their activities, but not in these terms. However, this change is not something that Julie undergoes; to this day she retains her sense of the ambiguity and vital potential of this place, having known it before. The change can be registered in people who did not know the town under the conditions Julie did.

INTER-

The rainbow story illustrates at least one kind of understanding of the place-world and of process in relation to it. While this might be considered to be in 'traditional' Aboriginal terms, the story also involves Julie's seeing the actions of 'whites' in dynamic relation to the place. This is thus a story of engagement, even if tangential. The world is nobody's solely; imaginatively and in other ways, the co-presence of people with different ideas and forms of action is kept in mind. And thirdly, our sense is that this very small incident points to general issues about kinds and directions of change.

The 'inter-' in my use of 'intercultural' was modelled after the 'inter-' in intersubjectivity. Influential models of subjectivity (Mead, Husserl, Schutz, Habermas) do not begin with a notion of a pre-existing 'subject' and then try to specify how that subject comes to relate to others. They begin from a notion of interrelationship and its specific moments of interaction as crucial to the on-going formation of subjectivity. Subjectivity is always fundamentally under construction, and always fundamentally relational. It is, of course, 'subject' to the patterning of historical, on-going socio-cultural organization, and so not randomly variable.

In similar fashion, I was looking for a formulation of the 'cultural' which recognizes difference but does not begin from an overspecified notion of 'culture'; as well as for a way of writing about relations 'between' people that focusses on the processual character of interrelationship.

The Katherine situation has been one of obvious, great differences in forms of life between Aborigines and other townspeople. Entrenched forms of social classification are associated with big differences in power and access to goods and services of the dominant society. Many Aboriginal people are marginal to routine institutional forms of that society--work, school, money, and so on. In this situation, Aborigines and others constantly operate with each other in mind, but often with stereotyped ideas, and at some physical distance. Town camps, which since the 1960s have become home to those Aborigines that most townspeople would consider maximally different from themselves, tend to be on the margins or indeed outside of town. Aborigines move around town in distinctive ways, their activities demarcating some spaces with which they become identified. These tend not to be occupied by white townspeople, or at least not at the same time. A long period of my field research was characterized by the growth of land rights activity. During this time, many issues (e.g. resource exploitation such as gravel-quarrying, larger-scale mining, land use issues, living space for Aborigines, 'public drunkenness' etc.) were shaped in public debate in dichotomous Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal terms.

In Katherine, people assume the solidity of social classifications, whites treating 'Aborigines' as a discrete category of persons, and vice versa. A great deal of the discussion by whites about Aborigines proceeds in terms of the presence or absence of 'culture'.

There is a widely held view of 'traditional' Aboriginal culture as esoteric, strongly determinant of behaviour (and generally, practised by only a remote few). Secondly, it is seen as having been destroyed, and the poor exemplars of Aboriginality one sees on the town street as having lost their 'culture'. Behaviour judged unacceptable is attributed to loss of culture, and lack of proper enculturation into the wider society.

Clearly, the town is a volatile space for Aborigines, in which their patterns of life become subject to a whole range of possibilities that are difficult to manage (involving e.g. money, transportation, alcohol, the pressures of many people trying to accomplish everyday tasks and relying heavily on others to help them do so). But this rather unpalatable pair of options raises the question for the ethnographer, how to represent the everyday relations of people in town space in a way that neither deprives Aborigines of any claim to living in cultural terms, nor exaggerates and falsifies what those are. I did not want to begin with a notion of what Aboriginal culture 'is', a finished product. Nor, especially in town space, did I want to assume finished social persons or subjects. An 'intercultural' description needed to emphasize processes of reproduction as well as non-reproduction of socio-cultural patterns, interaction, and the varieties of reflexivity of participating subjects.

Two different senses of 'inter-' have emerged above. The first is the commonsense understanding that prevails in Katherine that there is a significant, sharp socio-cultural difference between two (at least) kinds of people in town, Aborigines and others. Any relationships must bridge differences 'between' one group and the other. This is a kind of perspective that leaves out of account kinds of commonality (recognitions of various kinds, for example), and apparently pervasive mutual awareness.

The second sense is, in a way, opposite to the first. It is the 'inter-' of categories, understandings, modes of practical action, as reproduced and reshaped in interaction, interrelationship and event--sometimes in engagement with whites--rather than pre-given. This directs us to consider the social conditions of the production of commonsense and practice. Forms of practice and commonsense, and 'cultural products' are possible under particular conditions.

JULIE'S COMMONSENSE

What kind of social experience is compatible with the kinds of understandings and commonsense Julie displays? A town-dwelling person with relatively good English and sophisticated knowledge of the white social order of Katherine, yet thoroughly at home in (certain) local Aboriginal camps, Julie accepted (and accepts) her mother's story of the rainbow.

Julie had been born in a War-time compound (a temporary settlement in which Aboriginal people were brought together during the Second World War), where Aborigines lived under the authority of military personnel. She spent her early childhood living in Aboriginal camps on the fringes of pastoral properties and the regional towns of Pine Creek and Katherine. While Aborigines were subject to Prohibited Areas Ordinances which kept them from freely living in towns into the 1950s (and thereafter informally, given their lack of resources and allowable places to live), she, her parents and other close family were able to live on the edge of Pine Creek, a small Northern Territory (ex-mining) town, because her father had a job with the railway. She was later able to live in modest housing in Katherine (at the time of the road-work) because both her parents and Margaret Katherine's worked at Katherine's main grocery store, helping to load and unload produce and doing yardwork. In these ways their families would have been recognized by other Aborigines as having 'good job', and as having to live up to certain standards (of neatness, time deployment, responsiveness to employers, and so on).

Julie and Margaret Katherine had some schooling (Julie says she spent about four school years at Bamyili, an Aboriginal compound built shortly after the War). She developed feelings for the desirability of schooling, regular employment, and moderation in habits (especially with respect to drinking, so problematic for Aborigines communities after the liberalization of access to alcohol from 1964 in the Northern Territory). Though subjected to disciplines of schooling for a time, and living with parents in employment, she explicitly objectified these values not so much for herself and her own life as it unfolded (she never reads, and only writes to sign her name), but in expressed desires for her children (that they go to school, not drink, get training and jobs, etc.). Despite this, as things went on, neither woman was entirely successful in avoiding some of the problems for themselves and their children they saw about them. Though their parents were irremediably outside such institutions as the school, in the post-War policy climate of 'assimilation' they themselves were seen as educable youth.

Both women had kinsmen and close associates living with them, elsewhere around the town and at outlying communities like Bamyili, a constellation of campsites with whose residents there were ties of relatedness and shared background. They saw these people in their daily movements around town, and less regular movements among locations (as when people from outlying communities sometimes were brought in for the outdoor picture-show in Katherine). The older people of this loose configuration were reference points for their understandings of everyday life, and of the organization of people in relation to places.

Julie also had lasting ties with some white people. She and her parents lived a number of years at Dumigan's, a white Katherine family for whom her parents did yard-work, laundry and other tasks, and where Julie, in some sense, grew up with their children. When the family left town, they wanted to take Julie along; but she said no. Julie never saw the family again, except when one of the girls came back to a school reunion. Julie speculates about her in terms most relevant to her own sense of female futures: 'might be she got a big mob kids'. But she does not know, because the terms of closeness with the family that were constituted by the relationships of "working for' and co-residence were cut off when the working relationship ended. It was not sustained on either side, except in memory. That makes it different from the sort of relationship that obtained among Julie's 'countrymen', who kept active tabs on where their people were.

Julie's basic schooling did not relate very directly to the terms of her life then, or even later, but it did cause her to harbour some hopes and expectations for her children. The affectively and cognitively important understandings of her life were generated in the activities in camp, undertaken collectively or in small groups with those people (like Margaret); and later, also by her interaction with employers and their families for whom she worked as a domestic. More important than anything attributed to them as a result of school, both Julie and Margaret had a sense of their families' legitimacy and standing in town as a result of their employment. Margaret Katherine has told how her father, Victor, took the store-owner, Cyril Cox, to visit Katherine Gorge and told him about some of the places and waters there. That seems to imply that Victor was prepared to see in Cox someone who might attribute some value to this information, and to his own role in conveying it, rather than simply dismissing it as superstition.

Julie's experience allowed her to live with her parents and other relatives and countrymen a form of life that, while significantly organized around their relations as workers to particular white families and institutions (like the hospital, the store, the large camp of the Commonwealth Science and Industry Research Organization on the Katherine riverbank, the police station), did not compel them to experience that organization as a radical or unwarranted imposition of foreign imperatives. This is partly because some of those people related to Katherine as their home, and felt linked to it by many ties (lot Julie, on the part of both her mother and father). They were often able to interpret bosses' directives as intimately related to their own needs and arrangements (Merlan 1998:60). Their socio-spatial form of organization, dispersed over campsites organized in relation to a few pivotal white people, made it possible for Aboriginal people to have a sense of autonomy about their movements.

Families and campsites of kin remained foci of everyday life. Aboriginal people gathered in and around town, going hunting and foraging, playing cards, drinking--realizing that some of these activities might provoke police or Native Welfare, but having some space of freedom. Forms of complicity and sharing, of course, developed between white families and their Aboriginal employees under such circumstances, which ranged them on the same side as against others, like the police, who would have maintained the prescribed interracial disciplines. Mr. Dumigan, it seems, among others, was arrested on at least one occasion for supplying alcohol to Aborigines; and 'co-habitation' of particular white men with Aboriginal women remains the knowledge of many Aborigines, but is more restricted within non-Aboriginal circles?

Within the manageable socio-spatial configurations of town life, Julie absorbed and accepted many aspects of her elders' ways of understanding their place-world. She faithfully accepted her mother's explanation of the rainbol in the roadworks, along with much else. In her selective relationships with whites there was no alternative framework for the cultivation of affectively broad and deep relationships, or forms of understanding detached from the personal authority of knowers.

The life such people as Julie were able to live around town contrasts in some ways with that of her husband, Peter. He had lived as a child on a remote-area, poor cattle station, which had its own seasonal and daily rhythms, its combination of dependence on the manager and relative separateness of the Aboriginal camp. His understanding of the place-world was initially shaped by travels through the country with his father. He later worked 'rough' on a number of other pastoral properties. On coming to Katherine with his family, and briefly experiencing some schooling by missionaries near Katherine, after the Wartime hostilities he was sent to the recently-established Bamyili settlement (precisely to keep him away from town). There he was made to eat what he always satirized as 'balloon bread' in the communal dining room, cast into the comprehensive regime of a larger settlement as they were then run, and deprived of the small-scale freedoms that made life around town liveable. He absconded, going back (among other places which he could frequent by virtue of his connections) to the camp life on the Katherine river near the township, where some of his close relatives had become workers at a camp on the property of Katherine's CSIRO agricultural experimentation unit. He was seen by Aborigines in town as of bush background, a traveller of country. He reinforced Julie's beliefs in the vitality of country, and in his knowledge and practical mastery of the wider countryside, particularly to the north of Katherine. Cynical with respect to the motives and actions of whites as employers and in many other settings, he never felt the authority of his father's understandings to have been displaced. In later times, with the emergence of a 'sacred sites dispute' concerning country he was attached to (Merlan 1991), Peter relied upon what he called his 'father's law' to reject development proposals.

These different experiences left Julie and Peter with rather different orientations towards the future of what they knew. Julie found it possible to think of an explicit relationship of 'teaching' to the young: they might learn what their elders knew, by being explicitly 'taught'. The content could be somewhat independent of its mode of transmission. For Peter, 'teaching' what he knew, the important understandings he had learned while with his father, could only be passed on through the same kind of embodied experience. Explicit recording and teaching was yet another whitefella way of doing things, and in the future its products would be for whitefellas, not for anybody Peter could imagine fully identifying with. While Julie could and still does imagine having written forms of Jawoyn for her children to read, Peter thought written Jawoyn was for whitefellas. (2) There was a considerable 'cultural' difference in this sense between Peter and Julie.

By the time Julie told me of the rainbow in Katherine's main street, she and I and many others had been through several gruelling years of land claim preparations and hearings. In these, the areas under claim were outside of Katherine, to the east, north and west. Rainbow sites elsewhere were a matter of discussion, especially with respect to spectacular deep plunge-pools and parts of the river in the Katherine Gorge. The Katherine town site was never mentioned. It was not of direct relevance to the areas under claim. A huge recent flood did evoke suggestions from many Aboriginal people concerning rainbow appearances, but none (as far as I know) immediately concerned the old place in the town centre. Increasingly, it appears to me, places to which Aboriginal people attribute "new' dreaming significances are selectively distributed, in areas they frequent in travelling to and from Katherine, or in the vicinity of the Katherine camps out of town. On the main road into town, a few kilometres to the east of town, is a (rock formation) 'frog' dreaming, recognized and pointed out by travellers into town from settlements of southern Arnhem Land. (See also Merlan 1998, Chapter 7, on the discovery of 'Catfish' dreaming near a camp on the river south of town). These are places lived in by Aboriginal people, stopped at, and with respect to which they exercise the homely arts of making them 'particular' places--dreaming places and, as seems more than fortuitous, places familiar in those terms to Aborigines and not to others.

THREE THEORETICAL POSITIONS

Let us consider some aspects of three theoretical positions that deal with questions of difference, boundedness, reproduction and transformation: structural history, Bourdieuian practice theory; and the interactivist position of V.N. Voloshinov. What may each have to contribute to development of the kind of material we have looked at?

Structural history as developed by Marshall Sahlins has focussed on the question of transformation of cultural systems. That people relate to and act upon the world in terms of a 'culture', a structured set of cultural categories, is Marshall Sahlins' most fundamental assumption. He is clear that a culture or a system of cultural categories is a system of meanings. 'Culture' is for Sahlins what the a priori is for Kant: the world can only be grasped through it. But since, as Sahlins argues in Culture and Practical Reason (Sahlins 1976) and indeed in all of his work, those categories could be otherwise, one is entitled to deal with them as something sui generis. Sahlins' argument for cultural meanings as not determined by utility is most fully developed in Culture and Practical Reason; insistence that any given cultural order could have been otherwise, and is not narrowly or simply determined, is found throughout his work. Meaning values exist in relation to each other rather than directly to 'the world' (a re-framing of the Saussurean notion of valeur, whereby the value of signs is determined by their relationships to each other rather than to the objects they refer to, which is seen as an arbitrary relationship.). As Robbins (2004:11) has put it, notions of change depend on a 'more fundamental model of human behavior in which people are held to act in the world in terms of categories that are given meaning by their systematic relationship to other categories'.

The considerable power of structuralist theory arises from its concept of ordered system and regularities among elements in a system, which are seen as definable in relation to each other. Signs in structuralist theory are not prior to the relations between them, but exist in the play of differences among them. The maximum degree of such interdependence, logically, exists within systems that are seen as having definable boundaries. Structural theory by definition makes the boundedness of system a central issue.

The reproduction and transformation of cultural categories occurs when people act, putting their cultural constructions into play. This 'structure of the conjuncture' is an engagement of categories as people act in terms of them; they are 'risked' and subject to change in action. Robbins (2004:7-9) outlines three possibilities of change as envisioned in structural history: first, action in the world through categories may encounter little discrepancy and undergo no change (in Sahlins 1985, Islands of History, the Hawaiians equate Captain Cook with their god Lono); second, there may be a discrepancy between the categories they use to engage the world, and these may then be stretched or changed (as when the Hawaiians eventually decide that Captain Cook is not Lono); third, 'the cultural system' may be abandoned or rapidly transcended by another adopted alternative (as perhaps when the Hawaiians are forced to abandon their traditional modes of land tenure or religious practice and take up something new). (3)

The view of categories as external to action, capable of being 'brought into play' as if object-like, reproduces the Saussurean dissociation of language system from the flux of speech, and synchronic system from diachronic change. These are theoretical prices paid for the clarity of system.

The rainbow is a classically 'object-like' icon of Aboriginal culture. It certainly exists within a set of associated elements: notions about landscape (the rainbow lives in caves, secret places), about weather (rain, lightning, storm), and within a set of notions concerning the moral significance of rainbow appearances (it is disturbed by unfamiliar scents or intrusive presence).

We have said that Julie shares to some extent a variety of understandings about Katherine with other town-dwellers, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. What does the rainbow episode suggest about the notion of a distinct, bounded cultural system through which she grasps the world around her? Sometimes, at least, elements of an Aboriginal cultural repertoire (like the rainbow) become present to her in her engagements and experiences with 'settler' practices and projects. To an extent, the activities of whites are the catalyst of her experiences of distinctively Aboriginal perspectives on the world. But for Julie, these experiences, though perhaps 'caused' by whites, were mediated by the authority of her old people (and later, her husband). I have suggested that Julie's acceptance of her mother's version of events is possible under certain circumstances: one in which the conditions of learning and knowing had not been severed from an intimacy of social relationship. We have seen how she and Margaret went to their mothers, there confirming what they had 'seen'. At the same time, her world has become one in which a great deal of what 'happens', is attributed to the activities of whites. She also accepts the authority of the project of road-building, at least here, in town, where it seems important. There is inequality in the ways in which whites and blacks figure in each others' accounts of Katherine town life (Merlan 1998:56).

I think of an 'intercultural' account as one which attempts to deal with the relations among different forms of experience, knowing and practice that are visible from the rainbow episode. One cannot begin with a notion of any whole culture of categories in place through which people like Julie grasp the world. Despite local perceptions and the objectively great degree of segregation of Aborigines in many aspects of daily life from whites, one is not justified in assuming radical boundedness between black and white 'worlds'. There are some kinds of common experience and understanding that Julie shares with other townspeople, of which she has close experience through her family's association with such people as the Dumigans; and some kinds of difference in habit and practice, and ideas about these, including fairly strong practices of mutual black-white stereotypy, spatial separation, and all the practices of racially underpinned socio-economic subordination of Aborigines within the town. We must assume certain kinds of habit and practice as routine and normal in Julie's relations with her family and other Aborigines. Much but not all of her experience is mediated in terms of those relationships. Julie also makes room in her understandings for white actors, their different purposes and modes of action. As in the rainbow story, kinds of cultural motifs and meanings distinctive to Aborigines may be evoked by the activities of whites. The roadworkers cause the rainbow to be exposed, and throw it out; what this was as 'experience' is partly shaped by Julie's mother's explanation. An intercultural account of the situation needs to assume kinds of difference, not absolute difference or completeness of system; must attempt to understand inter-influence despite apparent separateness; and explore the reproduction and alteration of habit and practice in terms of its social conditions. The latter notion directs our attention to the work of Bourdieu.

PRACTICE THEORY

Bourdieu's practice theory, which grew out of a critique of structuralism and its associated 'objectivism', features two concepts of apparent relevance to consideration of difference, boundedness and transformation: 'habitus' and 'field', or embodied dispositions and the social positioning which conditions them.

Bourdieu (1977a) begins what remains his central work, Outline of a Theory of Practice, with a critique of objectivism. Wishing to understand but lacking practical mastery, the anthropologist is forced into the position of observer and resorts to the formalization of practice as rules, maps, or whatever, thus introducing into the 'object' of description his own relation to it. Practical experience is, in these ways, objectified and made a representation (Bourdieu 1977a:2); or, as he puts this later in Pascalian Meditations, a 'metadiscourse' is placed 'at the origin of discourse' (Bourdieu 1997:53). The first critical move is thus a problematization of the categories of social description. In relation to the intellectual heritage of structuralism, this is a deconstructionist move; for structuralist accounts tend to rely on the category 'category' as if it is unproblematic, and in their 'classical' forms tend towards assumptions of the universality of categories. Bourdieu's observation is that the 'whole social order is present in the way that we think about that order' (1997:83), and the formulation of socio-cultural organization as a system of categories cannot be exempt from this insight.

Bourdieu is clear that his own aim is not to do away with objectivist knowledge--nor does he think one can--but rather (as Marx said, alluding to his relation to Hegel) to put it 'back on its feet' (1977a:4) by posing questions of its conditions of possibility and its limitations. He wants to avoid reduction of practice to determined or mechanical reaction or enaction, and of action to the conscious and deliberate intentions of its authors (1977a:73). Cultural differences and regularities are real and need to be explained. Modes of practice differ; frames for action and modes of thought differ. (But ultimately, he assumes political economy to be the source of any cultural and symbolic system, thus bringing back a determinist assumption that Sahlins rejects).

Habitus denotes systems of durable, transposable dispositions, 'principles' of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively 'regulated' and 'regular' without in any way being the product of obedience to rules. Bourdieu accepts a notion of objective conditions of existence, defining habitus as the product of inculcation and appropriation necessary for the products of collective history, the objective structures (e.g. of language, economy, etc.), to succeed in reproducing themselves more or less completely, in the form of durable dispositions, in the organisms (which one can, if one wishes, call individuals) lastingly subjected to the same conditionings, and hence placed in the same material conditions of existence (Bourdieu 1977a:85).

Among forms of habitus, he has dealt at length with the 'scholastic disposition', arguing that it involves theoretical viewpoint and sovereign gaze. Development of these, as always, depends on certain conditions of possibility. A crucial process is the differentiation of economic and symbolic orders which allows the 'detached, gratuitous, ludic relationship with the world' (Bourdieu 1997:16). Self-reflexive and critical of homo academicus, his own sense of mission is to conserve and transcend objectivist knowledge by 'integrating the truth of practical experience and of the practical mode of knowledge which this learned knowledge had to be constructed against' (1977:4). Never does he deny the relevance and necessity of some notion of enduring regularities, or structure, to an account of social order. But these are important as the conditions for the production of dispositions and schemes of perception that frame the social actor's modus operandi.

First, then, Bourdieu shifts the emphasis from structure to structured 'disposition'. (If one accepts the emphases upon social conditioning and durable modification of the body in practice, it is not clear that a plainer term like 'habit' would not do as well). The second reworked tool in Bourdieu's kit for the description of regularities is the concept of 'field'. 'Fields' are forms of social organization involving roles, positions, structures, and historical processes in which positions are taken up (Hanks 2005). They are not inert or merely contextual. Fields are characterized by values in terms of which agents compete, and possibilities of social positioning that give rise to embodied dispositions, so that persons are shaped by the positions they occupy: 'The field thus becomes not an external feature of context, but a formative input that shapes the individual through the habitus' (Hanks 2005).

How is a field to be defined'? The emphasis on spatial metaphor--'field' as 'social location'--arises partly as an aspect of Bourdieu's perception that human beings are socially situated--they cannot be ubiquitous--and that social oppositions and differences are objectified in physical space.

Bourdieu (1997:11) suggests that the limits of field are the doxa (tacit acceptances) which distinctively define it. He also characterizes field as involving an illusio, a sense of a 'game' with its particular pursuits; and as relatively bounded by 'constraints on who can engage in which positions' (Hanks 2005).

Bourdieu tended to concern himself with institutionally defined or demarcated 'fields' (the 'academy' and its disciplines, for instance). Bourdieu would reject any mechanical notion of field, or any simple attempt to match persons with a particular field. Julie, for example, might be seen as operating within a range of them, a range which might be shared with given other Aborigines and whitefellas. For example, let us suggest a 'field' of her work as a domestic, which would include both whites and other Aborigines, in different positions in the field. There might also be a 'field' of camp life, which would include within it only a very small but potentially influential set of whites (a son-in-law)--a person with distinctively different habits, background and sense of project, but someone who also shares and takes a significant role in camp life. Conceptualization of different forms of 'field' might help overcome the commonsensical tendency to see Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ways of living as bounded off from each other.

Bourdieu's notion of habitus usefully addresses issues of conditioned subjectivity: certain ways of orienting to the world tend to be produced under particular social conditions. His emphasis on the embodiment of these orientations is also important. Recognition that we need to think in terms of a diversity of fields, suggests that persons might come to embody different forms of disposition, habit and practice. Bourdieu comments in places on 'cleft', tormented and variable habitus as dependent on the conditions of its production and exercise (Bourdieu 1997:64), and has produced an empirical volume on social suffering (Bourdieu et al. 1999). In general, however, he has relatively little to say about this, or what he designates the 'breaking of the cycle of reproduction' of dispositions (Bourdieu 1997:14). By omission, irregularity and transformation have their usual special status, rather than being simply part of a general theory of practice. Complexity of habitus is also something of an anomaly. From the perspective of the Katherine material we might complain that in Bourdieuian practice theory, the notion of the habitus remains overburdened by a weight of social normativity and regularity, and relatedly, the notion of field, characterized by underdevelopment of empirical and theoretical approaches to process and the dynamics of interaction.

VOLOSHINOV AND BAKHTIN

The Russian social and linguistic theorist V.N. Voloshinov deals with some of the same issues, and legacies of structuralism, as do Sahlins and Bourdieu. (4) Voloshinov (5) asks after the 'essence' or basic reality of language. One is put on one's guard by this metaphysical position: is there necessarily a basic reality, rather than just multiple ways of looking at language, each better for some purposes than others? He eventually concludes that its basic nature lies in verbal interaction (1973:94)--not structure. He deals with the legacy of two 'trends of thought', or ways in which the problem of the nature of language has been posed. Voloshinov labels these 'individual subjectivism' and 'objectivism'. He identifies the first as involving the propositions that the 'individual creative act of speech' (1973:48) is fundamental, and that the source of this creativity is the individual psyche. Voloshinov identifies some exponents of this position with romanticism (1973:58, and more with German rather than French national traditions of scholarship); for them, language is an 'ever-flowing stream of speech acts' in which nothing remains fixed and/or identical to itself.

The second trend, objectivism, takes precisely that which remains self-identical and normative for all utterances--in phonetics, grammar, and meaning--as prime, seeing these structured fixities as independent of individual creative acts. In this view, language stands before the individual in its basic essence as an inviolable, incontestable norm which the individual can only accept (1973:53).

Voloshinov examines the logic underlying the Saussurean view that there is an unbridgeable gulf between synchrony and diachrony, present system and history: if language as system is the incontestable norm, it follows that change is unavailable to subjective consciousness. In this case systematic relationships connecting linguistic forms as elements in the system of language have nothing in common with relations that connect a form with its altered aspect in some other historical period (1973:55). Thus synchrony and diachrony are two separate aspects of language, and history cannot be systematic but is rather in flux. This is explicated in the 'Course in General Linguistics':
 For a science concerned with values the distinction [between
 synchrony and diachrony] is a practical necessity and sometimes
 an absolute one. In these fields scholars cannot organize their
 research rigorously without considering both coordinates and making
 a distinction between the system of values per se and the same
 values as they relate to time (Saussure 1959:80).


Voloshinov (1973:57) sees these Saussurean tenets of language as conventional and arbitrary as modelled on an ideal system of mathematical signs. He argues the inadequacies of both individual subjectivist and objectivist positions. In relation to the former, he argues that there is no purely individual speech--that speech is always social: 'The organizing center of any utterance, of any experience, is not within but outside--in the social milieu surrounding the individual being' (Voloshinov 1973:93).

Voloshinov resolves the opposition between the two positions in allowing for the creativity of concrete action and utterance as authored by individual body-subjects, but by locating in both an assumed orientation towards interaction and some large degree of givenness of circumstances in a broader social environment, in interrelation with which forms of consciousness are forged. While allowing for creativity, he does suggest that what usually is called 'creative individuality' is nothing but the expression of a particular, consistent line of social orientation shaped in the reactions and responses, resistance or support, on the part of the social audience (1973:93; and indeed he adumbrates the differentiation of this 'audience', though he does not enter into detail on the point).

In exposing inadequacies of the second, objectivist view, Voloshinov argues that the subjective orientation of speakers is not to language as a system of normatively identical forms (1973:71)--here he leaves undefined what kinds of consciousness of language we may have--but opines that the notion of a language system is a theoretical abstraction arrived at through a philological orientation involving the study of defunct, preserved languages. The objectivist view of language tends to lead away from questions of its social function (6) and is thus unable to provide an adequate answer to his question, what is the basic reality of language?

Voloshinov puts his different starting point this way:
 The actual reality of language-speech is not the abstract system of
 linguistic forms, not the isolated monologic utterance, and not the
 psychophysiological act of its implementation, but the social event
 of verbal interaction implemented in an utterance or utterances.
 Thus, verbal interaction is the basic reality of language
 (1973:94).


This kind of position, I think (minus the metaphysics), can serve as a fundamentally different orientation to social reproduction and change than the structuralist one. It takes a basic orientation of subjects towards interaction as its prime starting point. It forces us to reconsider 'structures' as those elements of social meaning and ordering that perdure as the products of interaction, rather than as elements of a system stored in separation from the world and only engaged and 'risked' at particular moments. This kind of approach seems to allow wide scope for theorisation of subjectivity, or the forms of consciousness that individuals will internalise, espouse and be aware of and engage in a range of circumstances.

Asserting that the authorship of a 'word' (7) is not simply that of the 'individual' (but the implementation of it certainly involves some individual initiative in given circumstances, 1973:86), Voloshinov considers interaction. The word is a 'two-sided act', shaped both by whose it is and for whom it is meant, shared by a speaker and his interlocutor (1973:86). Enunciation is hardly ever 'what one wants to say' in some simple sense of expressiveness, but is always shaped by the interaction itself in a more than trivial way. He does not mean to reduce the word to some simple kind of strategizing, or to questions of calculation, or of plain determination by forces beyond control. His concern is a communications-theoretic one, to express the idea that there is basic orientation in the 'word' towards the other, and that in fact the 'word' is in part that of the other, or anticipates in some way the understanding and response of the other. It is, in his vocabulary, essentially 'dialogic' rather than monologic. A 'response' in an ordinary interchange is thus not simply a 'response' because in some ways it is that which is already anticipated by the fact of any exchange: the word already prefigures and shapes that to which it is a response.

There are strong resonances of M.M. Bakhtin here (see footnote 5), and his famous notion of 'dialogism' which he develops in his exploration of discourse in the novel (1981). Bakhtin, too, elaborated the idea that in the process of communication, the response or anticipated response is the activating principle; the expectation of response, and perhaps a specific kind of response, shapes every utterance. Of this idea Bakhtin says that an active understanding is
 one that assimilates the word under consideration into a new
 conceptual system, that of the one striving to understand,
 establishes a series of complex inter-relationships, consonances
 and dissonances with the word and enriches it with new elements.
 It is precisely such an understanding that the speaker counts on.
 Therefore his orientation toward the listener is an orientation
 toward a specific conceptual horizon, toward the specific world of
 the listener; it introduces totally new elements into his
 discourse; it is in this way, after all, that various different
 points of view, conceptual horizons, systems for providing
 expressive accents, various social 'languages' come to interact
 with one another. The speaker strives to get a reading on his own
 word, and on his own conceptual system that determines this word,
 within the alien conceptual system of the understanding receiver;
 he enters into dialogical relationships with certain aspects of
 this system. The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual
 horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien
 territory, against his, the listener's, apperceptive background
 (Bakhtin 1981:282).


This view of the 'word" as multiply sourced, with the party normally regarded as the speaker and author of the word in a sense seeking to 'get a reading' of what he means through the interaction, is a very rich and provocative idea. It introduces an inherent indeterminacy and dynamic potential into interaction without doing away with the relevance of notions of regularity. Given this understanding of what it means to say something, Bakhtin concludes that 'discourse lives ... on the boundary between its own context and another, alien context' (1981:284). (8) It is, in short, inherently 'inter-'.

It seems promising to explore the possible extension of these notions to action and ethnographic description more widely. Instead of imagining action or event as some kind of dimension to which categories are external, we can imagine it as a continuous medium to which a variety of resources can be relevant. Action may take place along a spectrum from 'enaction' of something already fairly clearly scripted according to the ideas of the participants, to improvisation; there may be greater or lesser commonality among those interacting concerning what may take place in any particular instance. It might help to develop a notion of a diversity of interfaces, or possibilities of different, perhaps conflicting potential engagements among parties to interaction, particularly where this becomes 'oriented around problems of bridging, accommodating, segregating or contesting social, evaluative and cognitive standpoints' (Long 1999:1). The Katherine social field, for example, certainly involves the possibilities both of extreme spatial segregation of Aborigines and others, as well as of fairly extreme difference 'interfacing' in interaction. As Bourdieu (1999:3) notes, when people come together (even or perhaps especially in contrasting or conflictual ways), it is not enough to explain each point of view separately. Interaction has an inherent polyvalence about it: no single perspective will account for what happens, because there are a variety of issues having to do with the dynamics among participants which could be described in terms of Voloshinov's notion of the word/act as double-sided, Bakhtin's parallel use of the notion of the 'dialogic' and his related notion of 'heteroglossia' or polyphony, the idea of multivocality or the multiplicity of voices that intersect within the utterance.

In just the same way that anticipation of 'response' shapes the seemingly original utterance, it may be productive to think of action as undertaken by participants according to ideas and forms of action they employ (whether consciously or not) in orienting the action towards other participants, as opposed to 'freely' acting. In some sense, most of what we do is shaped, subtly or more obviously, in terms of our understandings of the relentlessly interactive character of our lives. Voloshinov posits fundamental orientation towards interaction, and Bakhtin, the idea of people getting readings on their own meanings and stabilizing them to varying degrees in interaction. Though actors orient towards others, they may only rarely be described as having mastery of the processes of interaction. Perhaps the novelists whom Bakhtin discusses do so more than the rest of us, in their peculiar creative situation--Bakhtin certainly thought so.

In relation to our Katherine scene, that the rainbow was/is not equally recognized by both Aborigines and whites is an aspect of difference between them. The way in which the event is understood to unfold is an aspect of power differential between them. But in the episode we have considered, the rainbow is some kind of medium of interaction between people whose ideas of events and their meaning are grounded in different forms of knowing and social reason.

On this view, the story of the rainbow would not be simply a one-sided manifestation of Aboriginal 'culture', risked in the events of road-building and perhaps doomed to be eliminated (at least in the town environment) by the force majeure of white transformative activity on the one hand, and rationalist thinking on the other. In thinking of its being there, Aborigines were providing themselves with a 'reading' of events, making them meaningful in familiar terms, and orienting (at least tangentially) towards the activities of town-building. It may be seen as an orientation to an engagement in town space on the basis of partly shared and partly different ideas about what that situation may be. The rainbow is a way of Julie's and others' articulating a response to events that makes sense of them in terms of conventionalized imagery and ideas: the rainbow, the limestone sinkholes, whites engaging in landscape-altering, transformative projects. Though whitefellas are recognized as roadbuilders and as not recognizing any rainbow, this sense of things nevertheless refuses definitiveness concerning what may happen in future. Julie recognizes but does not take the position of the roadbuilders. Is the rainbow gone? is a nearly unanswerable question for those who thought it was there. The likely answer from a Julie would be: 'Might be'.

While she is unlikely to change in this respect, the conditions for the production of a contemporary Aboriginal commonsense about such things have changed. One is less likely to find her combination of savvy about whitefella ways and sense of a sentient townscape. These generational changes are likely to result in the town's becoming for Aborigines a field of interaction that does not include such possibilities. But ideas about rainbows are carried forward in other, somewhat different ways and places. As above, for some people this still is a possibility outside of town, on travelled paths.

The public exposure of rainbow has become much greater over the past two decades, in the aftermath of land claims, a regime of sites legislation, and the sign-posting of parks. In remoter areas, some Aboriginal people express views of the power of the rainbow in relation to intrusions into place (e.g. park visitation), and of themselves as having an understanding of the power and significance of the rainbow that whites do not have. For many Aboriginal people, the plausibility of rainbows in such remote locations is greater than in town. With reference to such places, it has become possible to talk or make representations to a broader public about rainbows in a way that Julie did not; new institutional forces have come into play, projecting ideas about the rainbow, and in so doing, regularizing and objectifying it in ways that deemphasize its unpredictable character. There has thus been some broadening of a possible receptive public; a spatial contraction to outlying areas of the likelihood of rainbow presence; the elaboration of a discursive mode of talking about this as about other elements of 'Aboriginal culture' which is detachable from the experiential dimension so central to people's earlier accounts of encounter with rainbows. The rainbow has become a mode of orientation and engagement in this rather different set of ways.

CONCLUSIONS: INTERCULTURAL ACCOUNTS

We have examined a tiny fragment in the relationship to Katherine of an Aboriginal woman which begins with her held ideas about a rainbow serpent, reflecting continuity in understandings she gleaned from her elders. We cannot say the rainbow is no longer relevant for Julie. What is clear is that notions of this kind have lesser experiential basis, distribution and currency among Aborigines than they did before. This kind of cultural distinctiveness is rather less likely to persist into the future than others; for example, the forms of relatedness in terms of which Julie absorbed her understandings, and the recent, discursively more elaborated versions of the rainbow serpent mentioned above. I have suggested that on the basis of this tiny fragment we raise broader questions that could be expanded in many other ways, about the nature of difference, the question of boundedness between Aborigines and non-Aborigines, and about the modes of transformation in this context of difference, but mutual awareness and influence, between people of different habits and commonsense.

I have examined some of the social conditions under which Julie absorbed understandings concerning rainbow serpents from her elders. This acceptance occurred in the terms of a wider pattern of habits, and affective-cognitive orientations to persons. The rainbow is a notion which most whites (and some others) would regard as 'unreal' and superstitious, and thus an aspect of difference between Aborigines and whites. In wider Australian society, despite its imputed unreality, the rainbow is an icon of Aboriginal 'culture'. What are we to conclude from this? The elevation of such colourful and apparently 'traditional' elements to iconic status disregards the basic sociological truth that such things only continue as unreflective and everyday elements in experience under certain conditions. When those conditions change, the objectified elements may persist, but in altered terms.

Despite many forms of social separateness and inequality between Aborigines and whites, Julie became aware of this rainbow as part of an episode involving town-building by whites. I have suggested that we cannot see the rainbow one-sidedly, as an expression of Aboriginal culture, but must consider its relevance in this engagement. We have examined some of the implications of three kinds of theoretical positions for perspectives on difference, boundedness, and transformation. The overall concern is to work towards 'intercultural' descriptions that can bring out the implications of engagement across forms of difference that nevertheless do not imply complete boundedness, and also deal with issues of change in such a context.

Structural history continues structuralism's tendency to hypostacize the notion of 'cultural category' or elements of system, treating them as if external to the dimension of 'action', 'risked' and subject to alteration in action. In looking at the 'rainbow' as an element of cultural representation, I have suggested that it is not external to action and merely 'risked' in it. Its presence in the Katherine street scene is part of what makes that situation one of a particular kind, and intelligible in a certain way, from the perspective of Julie and others.

Although an Aboriginal 'idea', the rainbow is not something that bounds Aborigines from whites, or exists only in an 'Aboriginal world'. Rather, in Julie's view of events, the rainbow is present to the roadworkers. She sees them as dealing with it in a certain way, but their manner of dealing with it is not, in her view, final or absolute. I have suggested that questions about its finality are outside the ordinary range of things she talks about.

I have proposed that we understand the rainbow here, not as an icon of Aboriginal difference, culture, protest or resistance, but as a way, in Voloshinovian terms, that Julie and others had of 'getting a reading on' what was going on, and orienting to it, in awareness of the activities of whites.

We have also considered what especially Bourdieuian practice theory has to say about the social conditioning of forms of subjectivity such as Julie's, with her faithful acceptance from her mother of something that her own children, not very different from her in some ways, do not reproduce in the same terms.

In his effort to transcend the objectivism of structuralist theorization (the particular angle from which he assails the structuring tendencies of structuralism), Bourdieu places emphasis upon the habitus as the conditioned development of 'dispositions'. 'Conditions' suggest regularity and structure, but his emphasis is on the formation of subjectivity, and the integral relation between forms of subjectivity and social positioning.

Bourdieu crams many other persistent issues of regularity and structure into the notion of 'field', offering a spatial conceptualization of social order. This disposes him towards forms of theorization of social differences, their opposition and hierarchization, and exclusiveness of positions in different, objectified social spaces, rather than ways of theorizing engagement across differences. For their contrasting orientation towards complexity in engagement, I have examined the Voloshinovian-Bakhtinian emphases on interaction, as well as the heteroglossia of articulation and action.

An 'intercultural' account should plausibly deal with socio-cultural difference, similarity, boundedness and transformation. Consideration of the varying theoretical positions leads me to suggest that such an account would include: emphasis upon questions of the constitution of modes of action; recognition of these as central to what we can mean by culture, and exploration of 'culture' in relation to them rather than in terms of categories, objects and objectifications of widespread, reified notions of Culture; exploration of the conditioned formation of habit and commonsense, and their transformation; and of the Voloshinovian emphasis upon orientation to interaction, and the polyvalence of social word/action. The rainbow 'oriented' Julie like the 'double-edged' word between self and other, towards the understandings of her mother, and also the events of town-building. Julie, shaped as she was, would draw no grand conclusions concerning the destruction of the rainbow. But the whole episode has a place in the continuous change of conditions and Julie, among others, draws upon it at some times, but largely lets it pass in silence, in shaping those to come.

REFERENCES

BAKHTIN, M.M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination (trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist). Austin: University of Texas Press.

BOURDIEU, P. 1977a. Outline of a Theory of Practice (trans. R. Nice). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1977b. The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges. Social Science Information 16:645-68.

1997. Pascalian Meditations (trans. R. Nice). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

BOURDIEU, P. et. al. 1999. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Polity Press, Stanford University Press.

CLARK, K. and M. HOLQUIST 1984. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press, Harvard University.

HANKS, W.F. 2005 [in press]. Pierre Bourdieu and the Practices of Language. Annual Reviews in Anthropology 34.

LEDER, D. 1992. The Body in Medical Thought and Practice. Dordrecht, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

LONG, N. 1999. The Multiple Optic of Interface Analysis: Development Intervention as a Socially and Culturally Contested Process. UNESCO Background Paper on Interface Analysis, Wageningen University, the Netherlands (unpublished; quoted p. 83 in Hilhorst, Dorothea 2003, The Real World of NGOs: Discourses. Diversity and Development. London: Zed Books).

MEAD, G.H. 1948. Mind, Self and Society. 7th imprsn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

MERLAN, E 1991. The Limits of Cultural Constructionism: The Case of Coronation Hill. Oceania 61:1-12.

1998. Caging the Rainbow. Places. Politics and Aborigines in a North Australian Town. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

ROBBINS, J. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

ROSE, D. 1992. Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Aboriginal Australian Culture. Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

SAHLINS, M. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1990. China Reconstructing or Vice Versa: Humiliation as a Stage of Economic 'Development', with Comments on Cultural Diversity in the Modern World System. In Toward One World Beyond All Barriers, Pp. 78-96. Seoul: Seoul Olympic Sports Foundation.

1992. The Economics of Develop-Man in the Pacific. Res 21:13-25.

SAUSSURE, F. de 1959. Course in Modern Linguistics (trans. W. Baskin). New York: The Philosophical Library, Inc.

VOLOSHINOV, V.N. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik. New York and London: Seminar Press.

Francesca Merlan

The Australian National University

NOTES

(1.) During the Katherine Land Claim proceedings, Julie Williams gave evidence of how a particular white farmer bad lived with her aunt (sometime in the 1950s) before his marriage to a white partner. At the time she said this in the context of the claim hearing in the 1980s, 1 believe she was aware of the disparity between the recognition of this situation by Aborigines (who all knew it and took it as well-established fact of restricted circulation) and whites (most of whom would not have known it, and regarded it as scandalous, whether or not they believed it. It was somewhat shocking merely for Julie to say it).

(2.) He did not think of activities of recording as worthless, but as a foreign way of doing things. I learned a great deal of Jawoyn language from him, but he was not easy to work with systematically on language 'structure'. One could learn as he did things and talked. He round explicit 'language-learning' or "recording' sessions constraining, with all the apparatus of tapes, notes, careful checking, and so on (though he did tolerate a certain amount of this from me, on the basis of long acquaintance). What he recorded most voluntarily were long sessions of story-telling, in which he allowed his rich and rather picaresque imagination to range freely over material of all sorts--mythic narratives, stories from life, trickster tales--producing a wealth of material with his own distinctive stamp on it. Julie, in other words, can partly project herself into the future of the written medium, classroom teaching of things she learned otherwise, and so on, in the belief that others can learn what she knows; while Peter could not imagine himself as involved in those futures of recorded knowledge. He refused to think that someone not now able to do so, would in the future become able to understand the stories he told.

(3.) Sahlins has not elaborated much on such radical structural change, but has suggested that part of what is involved is 'humiliation' (Sahlins 1990, 1992). People come to hate what they consider their own, with the proviso that what is experienced as humiliations can only be understood in particular cultural frames of reference.

(4.) Bourdieu may have taken a certain critical inspiration from Voloshinov's work in formulating his own, now-famous position on 'objectivism' in 'Outline of a Theory of Practice' (the reference to Voloshinov in Bourdieu 1977b, originally published in French in 1974, shows that he had some familiarity with Voloshinov by the early 1970s). But making his case for social reproduction depend heavily on a notion of 'habitus' as embodied disposition, Bourdieu paid less attention to the challenge of exploration of a dynamics of interaction and practice in action. My view is that in doing this, he remained in some ways within the recognizable limits of structuralist theory, albeit with the promising question of the intersection of habitus and field, but also a hefty dollop of individualism, strategic action, and economic determination.

(5.) See Clark and Holquist, Chapter 6, for discussion of 'disputed texts' and the question of Bakhtin's authorship of a number of works which appeared under others' names. Clark and Holquist (loc. cit., p. 166) state unequivocally that the author of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language is Bakhtin. Whether or not this is so, clearly 'Voloshinov' was involved intellectually with Bakhtin. My reference to the book as Voloshinov's follows the established citation, without my feeling able to pronounce on the identity or otherwise of Voloshinov and Bakhtin with respect to this work.

(6.) Cf. Leder's 1992 argument which arose as part of recent initiatives to re-theorize the body. Leder observes that notions of 'body' are derived from the medical study of cadavers rather than from attempts to understand the living body as process.

(7.) By 'word' I refer to the Russian slovo, for which no single gloss is adequate. In English 'word' can straddle the structuralist langue/parole opposition, whereas slovo as used by Bakhtin and Voloshinov is more clearly on the side of discourse in interaction.

(8.) Although Bakhtin's and Voloshinov's later explorations are primarily concerned with language, neither man's earlier ones were (on Bakhtin's earlier ethical explorations see Clark and Holquist 1984; Voloshinov's first book was on Freudian psychology). It is clear that the 'word' as they understand it is action in the world, not Saussurean 'langue' separate from it (see fn. 7).
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