Introduction: conceptual moves towards an intercultural analysis.

Hinkson, Melinda ; Smith, Benjamin

Terms such as society, habitus, and culture can all too easily obscure the lifeworlds they are supposed to cover, and we must continually remind ourselves that social life is lived at the interface of self and other

(Michael Jackson 1998:35)

BACKGROUND

Earlier versions of the papers collected here were presented at the 2002 meeting of the Australian Anthropological Society at the Australian National University in Canberra, in a session titled 'Articulating Cultures? Understanding Engagements between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Lifeworlds'. (1) The session's call for papers noted the increasing entanglement of Indigenous and non-Indigenous lifeworlds, and anthropology's apparent difficulty in making these 'intercultural' circumstances analytically tractable. Our hope was that the papers presented in this session would contribute to debates which have been unfolding in anthropology over several decades--but with renewed intensity since the late 1980s--over the applicability of the concepts of distinct domains, cultures and societies in the face of increasingly complex articulations within and across particular social groups.

The ethnographic focus of the present collection is confined to northern, north-western and central Australia. In this sense the collection attempts to bring analytic focus to bear on a particular quandary: on the one hand 'remote Australia' continues to be conceived as a context marked by cultural difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous lifeworlds. At the same time this 'remote' context, and the 'different' life-ways apparent within it, have become increasingly enmeshed both with wider Australian society and a globalised world. The question of how to conceptualise such difference-yet relatedness within an increasingly expanding social field is as crucial a challenge for accounts of 'Indigenous Australia' as it is for anthropological studies located elsewhere.

Recent debate around the continuing utility of the culture concept has been critical of earlier approaches to situations of 'difference-yet-relatedness' (see inter alia Abu-Lughod 1991; Barofsky 1994; Brumann 1999; Keesing 1974; Trouillot 2003; Yengoyan 1986). Yet such critiques often overlook the fact that conceptualisation of difference-yet-relatedness was a concern (albeit a marginal one) in early anthropological accounts (see Brightman 1995). In this sense it seems that the history of anthropology can be read as a process, a series of incremental moves towards an intercultural analysis. (2) The intention of this collection is to contribute to this ongoing development of the intercultural analysis of Indigenous Australia. The authors do not share a clearly demarcated conceptual approach. Rather, they draw upon a diversity of theoretical perspectives and speak to a range of issues. They are, however, broadly united in an attempt to shift analysis of the 'intercultural' away from an emphasis on an 'interface' between separately conceived domains, (3) and towards an approach that considers Indigenous and non-Indigenous social forms to be necessarily relational, and to occupy a single sociocultural field. In this introduction we attempt a necessarily partial treatment of the historical context for the papers that follow.

PERCEPTIONS OF CULTURE

Despite the radical promise of early twentieth century social and cultural anthropology to record the beliefs, customs, practices of the peoples of the world 'as they are in the present', a continuing orientation to an imagined original, or 'pre-contact' culture for the grounding of its descriptions left both anthropologists and our respondents with a legacy with which we continue to struggle. The salvage approach that shaped much anthropological practice into the 1960s (Barnes 1988:269) reflected the persistent view that Aboriginal people were members of a 'dying race'--if not physically then culturally; indeed, such an understanding remains lodged in contemporary imaginaries of 'culture loss', and the political and social implications which draw on this understanding.

It was not until the 1960s that such a salvage approach began to be explicitly rejected in Australianist anthropology in favour of accounts of change and the elucidation of aspects of contemporary Aboriginal society (see)or example Berndt 1962, 1977; Gale 1972; Reay 1964). (4) From the late 1960s, the discursive frame of 'continuity and change' became increasingly pervasive, and the description and analysis of colonial and state practices began to feature prominently within the growing body of ethnographic work. At this time, anthropologists generally employed an antithetical opposition between continuity and change, in which the two terms were posited as logical and ontological contraries, a paradigmatically Western conception as Sahlins (1985:144) has observed. Although Aboriginal relations with the mainstream became a topic within many ethnographic accounts, the emphasis remained primarily on the documentation of persistent aspects of Aboriginal cultural production, albeit with such persistence now understood to occur, in part, through articulation with exogenous cultural forms and artefacts.

During the 1970s and 1980s, a series of parallel developments saw major transformations in the lives of Aboriginal people in remote regions. Developments in transport and communications saw the further expansion of the sociocultural parameters of small-scale communities, meaning that remote places were increasingly intruded upon by the state and a range of other outsiders. Encountering this milieu of sociocultural transformation, and the increasing articulation of local Indigenous lifeworlds with the state, welfare and other aspects of mainstream society, many anthropologists tended to write about the resilience and efflorescence of ceremonial practice, 'traditional' Aboriginal ways of life, and the reinvigoration of customary relations to country (see for example Altman 1987; Anderson 1984; Peterson 1975, 1977; von Sturmer 1978). This continuing analytic emphasis on cultural continuity was partly influenced by the political climate in which anthropologists were working. In the Northern Territory, newly implemented land rights legislation required Aborigines to demonstrate the existence of clearly-articulated descent groups tied to the land in question by traditional 'spiritual responsibility' and rights to forage (Rumsey 1989:69). More recently, the emphasis on continuity of tradition may again be glimpsed in the 'bundle of rights' approach to native title, where particular aspects of Indigenous connection to customary lands are understood as vulnerable to extinguishment through changes in practice (Pearson 2004).

Through the 1980s, many studies of Aboriginal people's engagement with money and European goods such as vehicles showed them adapting new things to traditional ways, enacting a process of decommoditisation (Gerrard 1989; Myers 1989; Peterson 1991; but cf. Hamilton 1987). Similarly, the introduction of television and video into remote Aboriginal Australia from the early 1980s was understood in terms of Aboriginal people's capacity to reproduce traditional cultural forms in the wake of developments that had been predicted to cause massive social upheaval (Michaels 1986, 1989; cf. Hinkson 2002). These studies lay further groundwork for the analysis of Indigenous Australian lifeworlds as a (partly) intercultural milieu, although conceptually they implied that even as the imagined boundary between Aboriginal and European worlds became ever more permeable, these worlds were still separable and Aboriginal culture remained distinct, something to be maintained or lost.

During this period there was also a growing anthropological focus on the situation of Indigenous Australians in urban and rural locations. This work took two broad conceptual directions. One strand was analytically continuous with much of the work occurring in remote Australia, demonstrating the persistence of culturally distinctive forms of social organization. This work emphasised the pervasive kinship networks in which the lives of Aboriginal people remained embedded, even in situations where a high degree of social integration had been occurring over many generations (see for example Barwick 1991; Creamer 1988; Langton 1991; MacDonald 1991). The overriding message of these studies was that cultural difference and distinct modes of Aboriginal cultural production persisted in the wake of the massive upheavals of colonialism.

Another strand sought explicitly to analyse the effects of colonial and state intervention, exploring the forms of accommodation and resistance through which Indigenous Australians responded to such interventions in their lives (see in particular Beckett 1988a, 1988b; Cowlishaw 1988a, 1993; Cowlishaw and Morris 1997; Lattas 1993; Morris 1988, 1989). These studies introduced new perspectives on the workings of power, and presented both 'culture' and 'Aboriginality' as constructed and discursive (cf. Attwood 2003). One of the principal contributions of this body of work, and the heated debate it sparked (see, for example, contributions to Cowlishaw 1993; Morton 1998), was in bringing a new focus on subjectivity to anthropological inquiry demonstrating the utility of the work of Foucault, and, to a lesser extent, that of Bourdieu, in Australianist ethnography (cf. Batty, this collection). Here 'culture' and 'Aboriginality' came to be understood as outcomes of a productive interplay between Indigenous Australians and the broader social and cultural milieus in which they found themselves.

These accounts and the considerable debate they generated introduced new resources for the analysis of the (as yet unnamed) intercultural--and the cultural more generally--as a complex field constituted through a number of micro-social and macro-social processes. Comprehending social transformation was a central concern. Yet, as a number of commentators have pointed out (Merlan 1989; Morton 1989), such accounts focused on Aboriginal subjectivity produced at the interface of two cultures while their ethnographic focus remained on the Aboriginal side of the relationship. Non-Aboriginal culture/society was typically presented through broad sketches of government and the macro processes of capitalism. Whilst such approaches helped to bring the intercultural more clearly into view, there remains a tendency in much of this work to overemphasise difference and separateness in Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations, to portray the state as ultimately all-encompassing (see Anderson 1988; Merlan 1989), and to reduce and homogenise Aboriginal practice and intention (see Morton 1998). Seen from this perspective, accounts of accommodation and resistance often appear to delimit the dispositions and representations available to Aboriginal subjects. They often downplay the central role of intra-community politicking within processes of social (re)production, obscuring the ways in which the state and other aspects of non-Aboriginal culture and society are also reproduced through the actions of particular (local) subjects (see Batty, this volume). More recent work by Cowlishaw (1999), in particular her adoption of the metaphor of the palimpsest, conceptually transcends these limitations by stressing the process of merging and remoulding of symbolic material and social relations that occurs as Aborigines make sense of their post-colonial existence. Povinelli's recent (2002) book, The Cunning of Recognition, provides further impetus for rethinking post-colonial Aboriginal (and non-Indigenous) subjectivities. In particular, Povinelli demonstrates the ways in which liberal multiculturalism results in the reification of particular kinds of Aboriginal subject, not least in native title claims. Such processes lead to the construction of essentialised differences between Indigenous Australians and non-indigenes, and create situations in which those Indigenous people who do not meet criteria for recognition are judged (and find themselves to be) lacking in their Aboriginality (see also Sullivan, this collection).

TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF INTERCULTURAL PRAXIS

Merlan's (1998) study of Aborigines living in Katherine, Caging the Rainbow, is a key reference and something of a springboard for many of the papers that follow. Merlan's chapter in this volume is a theoretical elaboration of that book's notion of the intercultural. For Merlan, the intercultural suggests 'a formulation of the "cultural" which recognizes difference but does not begin from an overspecified notion of "culture"' as well as providing a way of writing about relations "between" people that focuses on the processual character of interrelationship'. Moving from a reconsideration of the story of the excavation of a 'rainbow serpent' by road workers in Katherine I here framed within a discussion of various interrelationships through which Katherine, as a town, continues to be (re)produced--Merlan considers three different theoretical positions which deal with 'questions of boundedness, reproduction and transformation'. These are Marshall Sahlins' structural history, Bourdieu's practice theory and Voloshinov's and Bakhtin's accounts of dialogism.

Merlan explores the strengths and limitations of these positions with regard to an analysis of the intercultural situation in Katherine. Sahlins' structural history presents a compelling conceptualisation of culture as an ordered system of meanings, which are risked and subject to change in action, leading to systemic reproduction, change, or collapse. But Merlan argues that such an account gains conceptual clarity through a problematic separation of category from action. The differentiable systems and the meanings abstracted from practice that inhere in Sahlins' work fail to grasp the complex, processual manifestations of difference and 'inter-influence' apparent in the day-to-day lives of Katherine's population. For Merlan, Bourdieu's theorisation of practice, habitus and field also presents a sophisticated theoretical framework that, nonetheless, fails to capture the complexities of lived interculturalism. Despite offering an account that usefully engages with the processes through which the social is (re)constituted, Merlan finds Bourdieu's theory to be overly normative, and limited in its ability to deal both with social complexity and situations of transformation (here see also Sullivan's similar critique of a 'commitment to relatively hermetic auto-reproduction' in the work of Bourdieu, as well as more readily identifiable structuralists). By contrast, Voloshinov's emphasis on interaction presents Merlan with a formulation from which the intercultural might be made analytically tractable. In his attempt to move beyond the limitations of both individual-subjectivist and objectivist theories of language, Voloshinov privileges verbal interaction as 'the basic reality of language', dismissing the idea that the essence of a language lies in its structure as an abstract system, or in the individual speech utterance. Rather, language is understood as an inherently social event; its 'basic reality' is to be found in its dialogic enactment, its mutual production and reproduction by interacting social beings. For Merlan, this critique of structural linguistics can serve as the basis for 'a fundamentally different orientation to social reproduction and change than the structuralist one', which takes 'a basic orientation of subjects towards interaction as [the] prime starting point'. Such an orientation:

 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 (Merlan, this volume).

In applying her reading of Voloshinov to Katherine's intercultural milieu, Merlan portrays interaction as the interplay of differing expectations, understandings, and forms of practice, which give every interaction the potential to be a zone of reproduction and change. A focus on interaction, and on the processes through which self and other engage, Merlan suggests, forces us to pay attention to the multiple ways in which people may reproduce or fracture relationships, stress difference or relatedness, depending on circumstances. Nor does the decentring of structure in favour of interaction leave one blind to the workings of power; the interactions constitutive of the intercultural are, rather, laden with, and reproductive of, power relations. In Merlan's account, expectations of others shape events, and events alter expectations, and even those whose ideas 'are grounded in different forms of knowing and social reason' can find themselves compelled by their interactions with one another (and with one another's actions) in ways that can both reinforce and profoundly change their understandings, reproducing a shared, but complex, life-world.

Patrick Sullivan's paper also offers a conceptual engagement with the intercultural. Sullivan traces the emergence of the culture concept back to its source in the modernist project and the birth of the nation-state. Through an examination of the later work of Malinowski, Sullivan demonstrates the thoroughly constrained notion of intercultural engagement that was born of modernist, structural conceptualisations, a 'caught between two worlds' model that depends on and reinforces the notion of distinct cultures. Whilst Merlan seeks to extend the intercultural to saturate the entire field of cultural production, Sullivan regards the notion of the intercultural as irredeemably inseparable from the modernist structural paradigm, always tending towards a view of 'a domain that occurs between structured entities'. At best, for Sullivan, the intercultural might be recognised as 'an effect that arises in social process', that is, in the artefactual production of such distinctions. Instead, Sullivan calls for a turn towards the conceptual flame sketched out by those he refers to as 'relational' theorists, starting (in anthropology) with Gluckman; more recently, such 'relational' approaches are found in the work of Strathern and Moore, as well as philosophers and critical theorists such as Deleuze.

For Sullivan, the challenge is to develop a relational anthropology which can make itself relevant to public policy, whilst avoiding ossifying forms of recognition that not only fail to account for the fluid and contestable relations so important to many Indigenous Australians, but are also likely to 'produce post-colonial conflict, dissension and ongoing intercultural dislocation'. Such an anthropology, Sullivan notes, will necessarily take public policy as an aspect of its field of inquiry, again dissolving notional intercultural spaces to reveal complex fields of interrelation, within which Indigenes and their alters are co-located, as the necessary grounds for recognition of more nuanced versions of Indigenous rights.

Subsequent papers are more explicitly ethnographic in their engagement with the notion of interculturalism. Melinda Hinkson considers aspects of W.E.H. Stanner's first fleldwork in north Australia, exploring how an anthropologist trained by and highly sympathetic to the ideas of Radcliffe-Brown attempted to make sense of a complex intercultural social field. The intent of Hinkson's paper is to remind us that concerns with intercultural engagement are by no means new. She reads in Stanner's field notes and unpublished master's thesis an attempt to transcend the structuralist-functionalist paradigm with an early formulation of a model for intercultural analysis.

A key trope in the 'Australianist' literature dealing with 'intercultural' relations is that of the 'domain', in particular a distinct 'Aboriginal domain' (see Rowse 1992; Tonkinson 1978; Trigger 1986, 1992; von Sturmer 1984). While implicitly or explicitly seeking to understand relatedness between Indigenous lifeworlds and non-Indigenous 'others', accounts of distinct domains tend to emphasise the cultural distance that Aboriginal people managed to effect from whites and European authority in mission and settlement contexts. Domains are arenas that Aboriginal people might move between with relative ease, each having its distinctive cultural content with which individuals would interact while occupying those contexts. Within an Aboriginal domain, Aboriginal people could affect closure against the transformative intents of the wider institutional processes which pervaded their lives. Batty, Holcombe and Redmond all engage with the notion of the (Indigenous) domain, responding more or less critically to its implications for the analysis of intercultural milieus.

Batty sees the notion of distinct domains as deeply problematic with regard to central Australia, where the functioning of many organisations identified as Indigenous relies on close collaboration between key Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal partners. He revisits the history of the self-determination/self-management policy era in the Northern Territory, illustrating a contradictory tendency lodged at its heart--while the rhetoric of Aboriginalisation and independence was central to the aspirations of these policies, intercultural collaboration has been a key, and perhaps an essential feature of their implementation. Batty argues that self-determination has elicited and supported the establishment of a permanent class of white advisers.

Batty uses the notion of 'leasing Aboriginality' to evoke the ambiguous and complex interpersonal relationships that drive much Aboriginal community development. Once Aboriginal organisations are understood as products and vehicles of governmental process (cf. Beckett 1988a; Rowse 1992), describing them as sites of resistance to state hegemony becomes both deeply problematic, and overlooks some of their most important features. While community-controlled organisations have provided Aboriginal people with an ability to pursue aspirations with some (often highly circumscribed) degree of autonomy, they have also 'offered the state a way of regulating and nurturing an effective Aboriginal agency', an agency capable of implementing its policies (cf. Smith 2002). Batty conjures up a picture of deeply entangled and ambiguous relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal coworkers. In the context of recent debates over the future shape of Indigenous policy, and particularly over the status and potential directions of development in remote communities, these collaborative partnerships deserve greater attention and anthropological analysis.

Also ethnographically situated in central Australia, Sarah Holcombe's paper explores 'community' as a site through which a deepening 'interleaving' of relations between Aboriginal people and the state is occurring. Holcombe draws out some of the ways in which Luritja residents of Amunturrngu/Mt Liebig and their non-Aboriginal employees experience what she calls a 'dynamic mismatch' of values and forms of practice. In her analysis of this mismatch, Holcombe rejects the model of distinct domains, arguing it 'is apparent that we now need to find new methods to express the changes that have occurred over time in the creation and evolution of the 'Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal interface'. Holcombe finds Bhabha's conceptualisation of the 'third space' and 'hybridity' helpful in making sense of the intercultural domain of Mt Liebig, a place where the 'interleaving of practices' produce new forms 'as older forms continue to exist'.

Like Batty, Holcombe is drawn to focus on a non-Aboriginal figure, the community Administrator, or Town Clerk, as a central motif in her discussion. This mediating figure reflects some of the ways in which the Mt Liebig polity is itself the result of intercultural processes. As the embodiment of the state at Mt Liebig, the Town Clerk bears an unparalleled burden. As the person most likely to bear the brunt of dissatisfaction over the allocation of resources and other significant decisions, the Town Clerk also enables the imagined preservation of the acephalous norms of Luritja sociality. In making him the object of their dissatisfaction, Luritja have found an extremely effective buffer--his presence relieves people of having to directly confront their own kin or consociates for the part they may have played in making particular decisions. In this sense separation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal action is maintained. The situational equivalent of the Town Clerk amongst Mt Liebig's Aboriginal residents is the community President, who also functions as an important cross-cultural mediator. An examination of these twin mediating roles necessarily leads not just to a simple inscribing of difference, but also an appreciation of the ways in which mutual interests are produced and fostered across cultural lines in the making of an intercultural polity. Holcombe's consideration of these twin roles reminds us that the state is often experienced in an intimate way at the margins of the polity, and that, at the local level, encounters with the state often take the form of negotiation (see Aretxega 2003:396).

Tony Redmond provides another perspective on the ambiguous intimacies of the intercultural in remote Australia. Redmond's paper traces the processes by which Ngarinyin people of the northern Kimberley have transformed relative strangers--pastoralists--into 'strange relatives', through the operation of outwardly expanding kin networks, networks which, through their flexible and adoptive functions, refuse the existence of bounded or distinct cultural domains. Redmond explores the mutual dependencies embodied in the relations between one pastoral family and the Aboriginal people associated with them and the land on which their pastoral lease is situated. He reveals the ambiguity and intimacy born of decades of mutual occupation of country and shared work practices and lives. Redmond also illustrates the ways in which a relationship of mutual dependency can be interpreted differently by self and other. Where Aboriginal people remember their 'settling in' and 'growing up' of the newcomers, pastoralists see their patronage as having secured a stable base for Aborigines. In providing a window onto the differently figured form of these relationships Redmond's intention is not to discount the structural inequalities, the brutal and bloody history, nor the 'periods of deep alienation' lodged at the heart of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations in the Kimberley, but to show that if we are to comprehend localised interpersonal relations in the ways that both Aborigines and pastoralists conceive of them, we need to dig deep into the complex particularities of intercultural production.

CONCLUSION

As we were preparing this introduction, Prime Minister John Howard announced the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), and the introduction of 'new arrangements' for the Australian state's relationships with Indigenous Australians. All Indigenous-specific programs currently delivered by ATSIC would be transferred to mainstream government departments and there would be no new body to replace the commission. This process of mainstreaming, it is argued, provides the best hope of resolving the 'problems' of Indigenous Australia that thirty years of self-determination have supposedly failed to alleviate. In such an environment it is clear that anthropological arguments which seek to place Indigenous people within a single sociocultural field along with other Australians could be interpreted as supporting this new (assimilationist?) push. But--as the papers in this collection make clear--a single field approach does not mean a downplaying of difference. Indeed, how can difference manifest itself, other than through shared social or semantic space? In this way, difference is always 'inter-', as Merlan argues.

Anthropological accounts of the intercultural necessarily move to collapse the ongoing representations of 'repressive authenticity' (Wolfe 1999) through which Indigenous people are rendered legible and governable by the Australian state. Whether authentically traditional, politically resistant and autonomous, impoverished, drunk and demoralised, or aspirational, none of these representations recognises the fullness and complexity of Aboriginal people's ways of life, nor the possibility of articulating aspirations that reflect the contradictory experience of colonialism. An anthropology of the intercultural necessarily moves to challenge contemporary imaginaries of culture loss and the political and social implications which draw on this understanding--for example, in the suggestion that 'culture' is an impediment to 'development', or that the social problems of many Indigenous communities owe their legacy to self-determination policies.

It is in such observation of the interaction between representations and the lived circumstances of Aboriginal people that the question of what is at stake in the development of an intercultural analysis comes most starkly to the fore. The notion that Aboriginal people might simply make a choice between two worlds, or simply move between them, selecting the best both have to offer, fails to comprehend the processes through which representations, cultural identities and lifeworlds are produced and reproduced. An intercultural analysis matters because it is arguably the only frame through which our conceptualisations of culture might be made to articulate with its lived expressions. The papers that follow attempt to map some of the ground upon which such analyses might be based.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to Francesca Merlan, Jon Altman, and Oceania's two anonymous referees for helpful comments on an earlier version.

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Melinda Hinkson and Benjamin Smith

The Australian National University

NOTES

(1.) This session was conceived and co-convened by ourselves, and then on request of the conference organisers was broadened to encompass a further session, 'Governance Issues for Indigenous Groups in Settler States', at which stage David Martin became our co-convenor. We were somewhat overwhelmed by the level of interest (a total of twenty-one papers was presented over three and a half days). Our original hope was to publish a larger number of papers. The contents of this volume reflect our desire to bring together those papers that most clearly share a common set of aims and reference points. We would like to express our particular gratitude to David Martin as co-convenor of the session and to all who contributed papers in the session.

(2.) In this broadest sense this collection builds on previous accounts of Aboriginal-non-Indigenous relations (see, amongst others, Anderson 1984; Austin-Broos 2003: Barwick 1991; Beckett 1987, 1988a, 1993; Chase 1980; Cowlishaw 1988b, 1999, 2004; Elkin 1951; Folds 2001; Gerritsen 1982; Keen 1988; Liberman 1985; Macdonald 2000; Martin 2003: Merlan 1998; Morris 1989: Povinelli 2002; Rowse 1992; Sansom 1980; Stanner 1977; Sullivan 1996; Trigger 1992; Wilson 19791.

(3.) Not all of the contributors to this collection want to abandon the 'interface' concept (see Holcombe, this collection).

(4.) Stanner's Presidential address to the ANZAAS conference in 1958, published as 'Continuity and Change Among the Aborigines' (Stanner 19581 provides an important marker in this shift in focus.