The dangers of memoriology lead me to my final observation on the methodological problems generated by native title for the social sciences. For one of the ways in which contemporary social science has repaired the lack of indigenous voices in conventional history is to embark on a wholesale project of oral history. Oral history has become the methodological substitute for the almost complete absence of reliable records of the words, theories and analyses of Aboriginal social action at the threshold of colonisation: ‘Ethnohistory might address the native reception of events. It made plain that peoples purportedly without history had histories after all. It occasionally found in their oral tradition the glimmer of some crude art of memory’ (Faubion 1993: 42).

But Faubion never confused this with the art of historia. The contrast that has emerged within native title research in recent years is not so much between the disciplines of history and anthropology—for as I have suggested such was always a factitious opposition within anthropology in the first place—as between the objective validity of the documentary record and claimants’ counterposed ‘oral history’. ‘Oral history’ is not an exclusively anthropological methodology, and never was, even though methodologically it was not differentiated from some anthropological modes of questioning. But to call claimants’ self-narratives ‘oral history’ is to conceal the fact that it is not history as such—it is a congealed form of memoriation. Much of the ‘oral history’ I read has been obtained by people who evidently see memory as a form of text and who ‘treat memory as a set of documents that happen to be in people’s heads rather than in the Public Records Office’ (Fentress and Wickham 1992: 2).

From this perspective, memoriation brings a view of history into an already-defined and accepted history of the subject. It commonly becomes a story about how the subject has achieved an identity and subject-position, rather than constitutes a ‘history of the person’ per se. The sociologist Stuart Hall writes, however, that identities are themselves ‘the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past’ (quoted without citation in Huyssen 1995: 1). In other words, identities emerge as an effect of a self located in and acting within a social field, a field which is temporal, spatial and human simultaneously. Aboriginal people’s construction of memory and oral history is an identity-building practice, fully culturally constituted. It is not disengaged from other cultural practices, such as that of being a native title claimant, but it is insufficiently accounted for in the current repertoire of ‘laws and customs’.

As social processes themselves, the human acts of recalling and remembering are selective and interpretational processes and in important methodological respects distinct from the historian’s task of constructing an objective account of the past. Historians Christine Choo and Margaret O’Connell thus say: ‘Historical narrative goes beyond chronology because it imposes a discursive form on the events; transforming the events into a story, it gives meaning to the events by presenting the events, agents and agencies as elements of identifiable story types’ (2000: 2; emphasis added). If these stories are subjective in their origin and meaning, then they are contiguous with other social phenomena that constitute the community and are therefore within the domain of anthropological analysis. By the same token, such stories that a community authors for itself are not a preferred alternative to other historical accounts, or to the record of documented events. They themselves are another culturally-constructed gloss on such events and documents, and it is, as both Sahlins and Sutton concur (e.g. Sutton 2003: 19) in the mutually constitutive relation between event and its human apperception that cultural accounts are forged.

But the contrast between ‘objective history’ and ‘oral or ethno-history’ is itself a highly political one, and is used to deliberately polarise the Aboriginal and non-Indigenous positions in the national debate on Indigeneity and Indigenous rights. So I return to a consideration of the way the rhetoric of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal self-makings, and the attempts on both sides to maintain their epistemological divide via appeals to ‘tradition’ and ‘history’, have contoured disciplinarity in native title. I make two observations, one about history and the other about culture.

First, the effective contrast is between a previous ‘official’ colonial history, in which a strong mythographic component is apparent, and a history which seeks, through an appreciation of the course of a total social world, to re-insert previously invisible persons, classes, races and occupants of that colonial world, an approach made famous by E. P. Thompson in his landmark history of the English working class. Anthropologist Jonathan Hill has used the term ethnogenesis to describe ‘peoples’ simultaneously cultural and political struggles to create enduring identities in general contexts of radical change and discontinuity’ (1996: 1).^[2] Its investigation is founded in ‘historical approaches to culture as an ongoing process of conflict and struggle over a people’s existence and their positioning within and against a general history of domination’ (ibid.).

But a historical anthropology of the conjuncture between indigenous and non-indigenous histories is where a suitably defensible anthropological account of connection should start (see for example Merlan 1998). The anthropological sensibility in this approach is admirably expressed by Sutton’s forthright assessment of pastoralism as ‘the form of colonisation most compatible with the maintenance of traditional Aboriginal connections to land’ (2003: 35). Not only did the pastoral industry itself develop a requirement for permanent seasonal Aboriginal labour, Aboriginal forms of subsistence ensured that they remained on properties during the wet season of work lay-off—Sutton thus remarks, ‘the viability of the granted leases was in some measure enhanced by, if not dependent on, the maintenance of Aboriginal foraging’ (2003: 33). The methodological implications of this observation are also clearly understood by Sutton: ‘it is the lawyers’ chronologies of official tenure changes, and the anthropologists’ diachronic accounts of indigenous laws and customs giving rise to customary rights and interests in land and waters, that form the crucial historical evidence’ (2004: 4).

The second point I want to make concerns the restricted field in which we are more or less obliged to locate the evidence for ‘the history of connection’, and the manner in which we fail to distinguish between discursive and praxical connections to a life world. In settled Australia, ‘connection to country’ lies chiefly in knowledge of past activities, and it is this knowledge that is transmitted, rather than the repertoire of subsistence skills per se. Further, in settled Australia, much evidence on behalf of native title claims is elicited from informants in their houses, not on country. Anthropologically this produces an attenuated and weakened account of social process, since the interviewer is not observing the social practice of story-telling and narration among group members, but is merely subjecting the informant to a series of questions that itself does not derive dialectically from the observation of social action at all, or does so in an extremely artificial and factitious context. Many native title anthropologists consequently become oriented towards what their interlocutors were able to tell them and insufficiently attuned to the way they behave in a culturally-patterned way. I am not disparaging ‘oral history’ as such. We can characterise Aboriginal society as an ‘orally’ rather than ‘literarily’ based culture—but this should orient us towards a description of the social practices and behaviours by which they transmit and construct knowledge among themselves by way of speech,^[3] rather than indiscriminately to any utterance an Aboriginal person produces, especially in highly-polarised intercultural encounters among anthropologists, lawyers, NTRB personnel and claimants. It is therefore not simply a question about how much or how little people know, but of obtaining an anthropologically respectable account of how such accounts are transmitted and the role of such transmission in current Aboriginal cultural practice.

Unfortunately, anthropologists and other native title researchers have neither the time nor the resources for the kind of participant-observation—a cornerstone of anthropological methodology—that would lead to a description of the social practice of narrative and oral communication. Paradoxically, although the architects of current native title interpretation insist on the historical verifiability of accounts of connection to country, they have been unable to infer from such a demand the anthropological requirement of observation across and within a temporal interval. Without this temporal dimension, however, we can achieve no real anthropological understanding of how society is constituted normatively, for we are unable to construe the social work of interpretation through which people reconcile human behaviour with its idealised rule-governed portrait. Such integral features of anthropological theory and methodology are so far considerably beyond the capacity of legal practitioners to turn into guidelines for practice. In the meantime, anthropology on behalf of native title will be able to bring only a denatured version of its own analysis to bear on the topic.