Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. 357 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$28.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-1081-4.
In the face of colonialism and modernity, Indigenous people often experienced unprecedented dislocation, disenfranchisement, and loss of social identity. As Ballantyne, Paterson, and Wanhalla (editors) observe, “Histories of connection were often fraught and violent and produced deeply unequal outcomes” (1). Also, the effects of colonialism on people in different historical and social contexts were not equal (1). However, modernity’s massive disruption on communities through its “deepening and accelerating connectedness” was “neither total, nor uncontested” (1). This volume highlights one of the intriguing narratives emerging from indigenous studies, namely, the ways in which those ruled by colonial structures resisted, altered, or appropriated ideas, products, and values, reworking them to fulfill their own purposes.
This volume focuses on how local communities used their unique textual traditions to pursue “community formation and…struggle against colonial rule” even as they were geographically embedded within a global empire (3, 75–76). The twelve geographically diverse chapters are grouped into four main topics: archives and debates, orality and texts, readers, and writers.
Three primary threads appear throughout the collection. First, each chapter offers well-written, engaging, and thoughtful illustrations and analyses of the ways in which communities developed and used textual traditions that supported their desired goals and strengthened their social identities. Aside from pragmatic reasons to communicate, people used words and signs to indicate identity and belonging, appropriate and use power, and persuade others (subtly or not). Powerful forces from outside, such as colonial administrators, missionaries, and business owners, often asserted their influence over those with whom they interacted by discounting, misunderstanding, or actively opposing Indigenous ways of communicating. They commonly saw literacy, often in English, as the foundation of “proper” governance, referring to those without a textual tradition “uncivilized” and thus in need of guidance. However, local people subverted communication to resist these influences. For instance, as Evelyn Ellerman demonstrates, in Papua New Guinea, the colonial government and mission agencies believed that literacy in a common language was the key to “national development and the development of an informed electorate” (220); but instead of a widespread acceptance of written literacy, people generally did not see the need for it (217, 219, 226, 228). Likewise, Laura Rademaker shows how missionaries in Groot Eylandt, Australia, saw literacy as a way to “create rational order and to pin down knowledge” (199), but the Anindilyakwa people used literacy to subvert order and clarity (195–196, 199, 211, 219). In the Australian case, “in failing to follow the missionary script, Anindilyakwa people themselves could no longer be read by the missionaries” (212).
Second, literacy has been unhelpfully cast as opposed to orality, as seen in Levi-Strauss’ work, among others (11). Walter Ong, for example, argued that people who became literate were cognitively transformed—“writing restructures consciousness” (12; Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1982, 78). Jack Goody’s work tended to differentiate knowledge transmission through speech and writing, pointing out that the written word made its referent “abstract and universal” (12). However, research in this volume indicates that written and oral communication can have a symbiotic relationship (111, 149). The way people used language, in whatever form, was varied—a hybrid of oral, written, and other forms of signification, blurring the outdated binary framework of oral and written texts (13, 32, 81, 94, 149, 297). Instead, Ivy Schweitzer describes “alternative literacies” (296). Noelani Arista argues for a research praxis in which the scholar analyzes texts that were transcribed from oral modes of delivery that allow one to “following the oral into the written” and are a type of “ear witnessing” (32). Alban Bensa and Adrian Muckle, quoting Kasarhérou, insist that “Kanak culture is not purely oral” (61, 76 fn1) and that the belief to the contrary occludes the possibility that people have a textual tradition (60). Schweitzer highlights the social and behavioural factors that are a part of knowledge transmission in Matt Cohen’s definition of “multimedia literacy” (304; Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2009, 2, 8).
Third, the chapters show the social dynamics and relational dimensions that were often inherent in communication in and between Indigenous communities. Instead of literacy having a “corrosive” effect, it was a tool people harnessed (1–4, 80, 147–148). Local populations developed rich, relational ways to interact and maintain strong relationships, as seen, for example, in the large, but woefully neglected, archive of Hawaiian language texts, North American wampum, and Polynesian family genealogical manuscripts. When colonial forces asserted control over local people, such as by deciding how and what to communicate, often these communities resisted, ignored, or altered the communication media to meet their own needs. As Lachy Paterson notes concerning literacy among the Maori in the nineteenth century, “literacy practices, the ‘cultural ways of utilizing written language which people draw upon in their lives,’ have more relevance than the rate of individual literacy in the context of historical tribal societies…” (81). Literacy practices were not simply something that individuals did, but something that the Maori societies did—together. Their social interactions maintained and strengthened their social identities (81, 94). For example, different chapters mention communication styles—like the Hawaiian grief chants called mele kanikau (42) and the Kanak epic poems called ténô (70–75)—the colonizers’ expectation that local people would mimic them (106–107) and societies’ preferences for predominantly “time-based” or “space-based” communication (105, 198, 201; Harold Innis, Empire and Communications, Oxford: Clarendon, 1950, 7).
This volume will be of interest to researchers in indigenous studies, communication studies, museum studies, and linguistic and social anthropology. It is an important contribution to the role of communication in the vicious and devastating struggles between colonial structures and Indigenous communities.
David Troolin
The University of Adelaide, Adelaide