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In the realm of native title, the distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘historical’ people is one that is given official acknowledgement both by the courts of Australia and by Aboriginal people themselves. In the current guidelines for the production of native title connection reports (at least as construed by the State of Queensland) the anthropologist is required to address him/herself to the contrastive histories of such traditional and historical peoples—those who can demonstrate a connection to country that predates settlement, and those whose connection was established afterwards.
But the terminology here is anthropologically confusing. Would someone with a ‘traditional’ connection to land not also have a history of occupation of it? And would a ‘historical’ person have jettisoned any connection to a pre-colonial cultural world just because he/she is living on country other than that to which he/she was traditionally entitled? Anthropologists therefore have for the most part consistently criticised such a distinction. All anthropologists working in such places as the Pilbara, the Gulf country and adjacent Cape York and the eastern Northern Territory, insist that ‘historical’ relations to country are impossible to disentangle from … from what? What would we call such relations to country that we did not admit had a historical component?
Part of the difficulty in answering this question, or a source of the inability of history and anthropology to achieve an effective synergy, is the current rhetoric of Aboriginality itself. The requirements of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cwlth), at least since the Yorta Yorta native title hearing in the Federal and High Courts, have obliged Aboriginal claimants to prove that they have retained traditional law and custom in some form. While admitting that such law and custom can undergo change over time, it must remain functionally and structurally recognisable as such. However, Aboriginal claims to the perdurability of the Law, its alleged unchangingness (see Sansom 2006), provide a narrower channel within which the anthropologist and historian can interpret the effects of event upon the structure of Aboriginal practices and world views. (It is hoped, of course, that both would see such attestations as themselves culturally-inflected utterances, generated from within a specific landscape of cultural, social and political positions).
Another difficulty, related to the one above, is that the various State Native Title Services’ distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘historical’ reflects in some important way—though with some distortion—the conventional disciplinary separation within Australian anthropology departments between ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ Aboriginal society as distinct lecture courses—a regime in which status, approbation and the comfort of carrying out what Kuhn called ‘normal science’ accrued largely to postgraduates crafting degrees within the former and not the latter. It is hardly surprising that State and Federal legal departments, searching for what anthropologists had to say about Aboriginal society, found many examples from the former and far fewer from the latter.
But perhaps a more serious difficulty is that such a distinction has generated a corresponding professional division of labour between anthropologists and historians, a division of labour now given conventional sanction by the courts for the most part.
In the native title cases I have been involved in over the past few years, I have encountered the following:
A consultant historian is engaged to write a ‘historical’ report on the claim group for which an anthropologist is writing the connection report. The historical report is a compilation of passages gleaned from the State Aboriginal Archives, evidently generated by running a computer search on the names and surnames of the component claimant families.
Instead of an ‘anthropological’ report, an ‘oral historian’—with no university qualifications in any discipline—instead produced several hundred pages of unedited interview transcript as ‘connection material’.
An anthropologist confined him/herself to the elucidation of kinship and social organisational principles and other cultural ‘rules’, while a professional historian wrote a much longer and more detailed history of occupation of the claim area.
In the Karajarri claim, Geoff Bagshaw’s monograph (2003) deals with the cosmogonic, mythological, and ritual foundations of Karajarri connection to country, while anthropologist Sarah Yu evidently authored a separate report dealing with history of occupation and the catalogue of physical activities constitutive of native title that members of the Karajarri claimant group have engaged in and presently engage in (Bagshaw 2003: 35). What is undermined by this strategy is the ability to assess the historical dimensions of a symbolically-constituted cosmology. This bifurcation of social science analysis prevents us from considering the cosmological, ritual and mythological domain of the Karajarri as a historically generated adaptation—and hence reinforces all of the negative stereotypes that have been made of anthropologists.
Such a distinction is in social science terms insupportable and factitious. In the first De Rose FC case, consider what O’Loughlin J concluded were the principles by which an Aboriginal person asserted the status of nguraritja, ‘custodian’ of a site or area. At 922, he affirmed the anthropologist Craig Elliott’s account (at 349) that a person can become nguraritja through birth, long-time physical association, ancestral connection or knowledge of the area, and recognition by other nguraritja. The Aboriginal witnesses’ statements made it clear that the applicants individually made use of one or more of these principles in different combinations to assert their status as nguraritja. These ways of achieving the status of nguraritja are completely historically constituted—although they occur against the background of cultural principles relating people and sites in general ways, they are contingent upon the particularities of personal sojourns in space and time. Nguraritja is biographically constituted even as it embodies the primary spiritual relation between person and place. What then is the substantive difference between these historically constituted attachments to place and the ones that other Indigenous people have achieved to various sites and pastoral properties throughout Australia?
In this brief paper, I am drawing attention to two analytic separations that have been engendered by the native title process. One is the contrast between society viewed as a static bundle of structural and normative laws and principles, and society as a historically-constituted community of persons associated both temporally and spatially. This has led to the recognition of distinct anthropological and historical contributions to the demonstration of proof of native title, a distinction that has been more detrimental to anthropology than to history.
The second analytic separation is analogous, in that it has to do with the separation of anthropology and history, but has been wrought by disciplinary competition and revision rather than as an effect of the judicial interpretations of social science boundaries. Separating anthropology’s commitment to the structural and structural-functional from its historical dimension leads to an overly particularistic history. Removing the social and cultural from a consideration of the historical production of the subject has allowed history to insert its own version of subjectivity, the self as a node of memoriation, rather than as an inter-subjective, culturally constituted self.
Both of these distinctions are products of the devaluation of the structural and the cultural in Aboriginal anthropology, and both are responses, in different ways, to the dilemma of drawing attention to the phenomenon of ‘loss of culture’ in many of Australia’s Aboriginal communities in settled Australia. The judicial interpretation of native title has forced anthropologists to make judgements on the degree of retention of ‘traditional law and custom’ among contemporary Aboriginal communities. While some anthropologists may be hesitant to discuss the possibility of loss of culture, it is more difficult to countenance the loss of history or memory, which then becomes the safer academic terrain upon which to confront 20th century Aboriginal continuity.
As Geertz suggested, what has helped undermine the difference in subject matter between historians and anthropologists ‘has been a change in the ecology of learning that has driven historians and anthropologists, like so many migrant geese, on to one another’s territories’ (2000: 121). There is nowhere in the world these days (nor I suspect for most of the last 100 years) where an indigenous village or community has been left out of the flow of global events and influences, so that such history becomes at least a necessary prelude to the identification of more conventional anthropological problems.[1] And historians, again for longer than we would care to admit, have known that places like Indonesia, West Africa, and Polynesia have fully their own complement of documentary sources, sources that allow the historian to write about these places in the same way they have written about European ones. ‘Culture’ is certainly a way of speaking about the varieties of coherence of human social life, but it emerges within a historically construed horizon of time and place, not apart from it.
So, anthropology is and was already a historicised mode of social analysis—social formations unfold through time and therefore proper anthropological inquiry in the field is a process that has to be situated diachronically, that is, across an interval of time. There have been dominant modes of anthropological analysis that have stressed the importance of synchronic analysis (that is, confined to a single moment in time)—for example, structural analysis, structural-functionalism and certain forms of symbolic anthropology. These methodologies illuminate the important aspects of systemicness that are part of all cultural forms. But anthropology also acknowledges that cultures and social systems make themselves visible as temporally-constituted social phenomena.
Human cultures everywhere thus recognise the historical and biographical dimensions of human life. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1981) reminded us that social and cultural structures are reproduced through events, an approach that critiques the methods employed in allocating different historical and anthropological tasks in the connection report process. He went on to suggest that events of major culture contact had the power to more sharply illuminate the structures of society and its reproduction—for all parties to the contact.
But this alone does not make history and anthropology difficult to distinguish today. Even as Sahlins was arguing for a more historicised structural anthropology, anthropology has more recently thoroughly disengaged itself from any structuralism, disengaged itself from the notion that a culture is (or ever was) a coherent and systemic entity that was susceptible to description as formulaic or as rule-governed—a complaint also levelled at anthropology by Sutton (see for example Pannell and Vachon 2001). Whereas Lévi-Strauss once confidently spoke of the ‘death of the subject’, we have recently seen the subject and subjectivity become the centre of social analysis. Subjectivity has become largely an effect of narrativity, a reflection, perhaps, of the rise of textualism generally as a model for social and psychological life.
If the self is today largely a narrative project, it becomes more closely associated with other textual projects—such as mythopoeia. History and anthropology have become increasingly harder to draw, not because there has been any significant unification of social science theory—although others might wish to argue otherwise—but because, I think, of the increasing acceptance of the project of mythopoeia in western public life. As Faubion (1993: 44) put it: ‘If, in the last two decades, history has itself become anthropologically indefinite, that is in part because the lines between the reproduction and invention of tradition, between mnemonics and conjuration, and between myth and historia’ have grown increasingly less distinguishable. As Faubion (ibid.) suggests, our current attitude towards the Human Condition ‘is nostalgist even when at its most futurist and has virtually sacralized history, even if in sacralizing and making an essence of it, it has also done violence to it …’. In other words, anthropology jettisoned structuralism, and history jettisoned the event; the very conjunctural ground that Sahlins tried to stake out. Having abandoned this ground, the two disciplines found themselves competing over the right to authorise a version of memoriology.