Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. xvi, 301 pp. (Maps.) US$59.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8122-5000-8.
This is an extraordinary book that deserves a wide readership. Dynamics of Difference in Australia examines the question how Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians have engaged with one another across major differences in cultural orientation, practices, and power since the first arrival of Europeans in Australia. The ambitious goal is to understand, not culture per se, as separated from social practices, but to scrutinize the cultural by focusing on difference as it persists in circumstances of radical change. Francesca Merlan demonstrates that incommensurability not necessarily appears as classically cultural, but at a more mundane level, embedded in unequal and racialized structures and practices that have characterized intercultural relations in Australia from time immemorial. In so doing, Merlan simultaneously offers deep insight into the transformation of enduring differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians over history.
The book covers enormous ground. It is not only concerned with the historicity of changing differences—beginning with an analysis of the first meeting with Captain James Cook in 1770 and finishing with reflections on the contemporary debate about the so-called recognition of Aborigines—but it is also ethnographic. Since the 1970s, the author has been involved in long-term field research in several parts of Australia, but especially in the region around the town of Katherine in the Northern Territory. She builds on her extensive experience in the field by offering numerous vignettes of situations she encountered over the years and by introducing several life histories of some of her interlocutors. These are alternated with sketches of explorers or early settlers who interacted intensively with Aborigines in the outback, including some who behaved incredibly rude and racist, and some who showed a more empathetic attitude although still steeped in colonial hierarchy. Not infrequently, Merlan also incorporates reflections on anthropological, linguistic, phenomenological, and psychological concepts and discussions. Finally, she engages with the full range of political debates about the place of Indigenous people in wider Australian society that have taken place in recent decades as well as the various positions that anthropologists have adopted in them. The exceptional variety of narratives that are carefully and competently interwoven into a coherent discourse about difference makes this an attractive book.
After an introduction into the main themes, Merlan examines phenomenological questions of seeing, knowing, and recognizing in the first chapter. She commences with a detailed analysis of the first encounter with James Cook and his crew, which was characterized by a complete refusal of Aborigines to engage with the Europeans. The systematic non-recognition of non-Indigenous visitors is interpreted as a form of communication that may be considered a denial of the Other as encounterable. A second modality of engagement in early contact is the identification of Europeans as spirits of the dead. Both types of responses are analyzed in line with Aboriginal kinship practices. Subsequently, she reflects on imitative behavior in the second chapter that aims at reinterpreting the social significance of mimetic practices. Different attitudes towards material objects are investigated in the third chapter, which highlights Aboriginal reluctance to receive “things” that in other colonial settings had been embraced. Ample attention is paid to emotions involved in the intercultural exchanges and mediations of value, in which context Merlan distinguishes three different types of relationality: interaffectivity, interattentionality, and interintentionality. These are richly illustrated in extensive analyses of sexual relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in relation to violence as well as in relation to different notions of property, or rather the lack of it, in Aboriginal societies. In chapters four and five, Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of stereotyping actions of the other are compared and contrasted: European interpretations of Aborigines as “treacherous” versus Indigenous views of non-Indigenous actions as “cruel.” Here Merlan zooms in on Aboriginal modes of recognizing others and associated avenues for including strangers in their societies, which made them inherently vulnerable. Chapter 6 extends the analysis of practices of inclusion and exclusion to the level of the Australian nation and state, with special attention to the emergence of the concept of race in discourses of difference. It includes a review of various policies of defining Aborigines and the implications for population statistics and demographic policies. In the final two chapters, the emphasis shifts to recent and contemporary initiatives to recognize Indigenous Australians. The consequences of legal battles are discussed, such as the controversy around Coronation Hill and the Mabo case, which at long last recognized Native title as a bundle of rights under common law, but which simultaneously upheld the sovereignty of the state of Australia.
The scope of this book is simply stunning: it is historical, covering developments from the beginning of contact until the present; it is ethnographic, including vignettes exemplifying changes over the past four or five decades, supplemented with oral historical accounts dating back to the late nineteenth century; while it is theoretically also rather ambitious, containing intermezzos and reflections on a wide range of concepts and debates in cultural anthropology and the cognitive sciences, both fundamental and more policy oriented. Against that background, it is noticeable that Merlan only marginally engages in comparative references to other settler colonies. At the same time, she refrains from referring to some contemporary debates in anthropology that might be considered as highly relevant to her analysis, e.g. the ontological turn. Given her focus on the intercultural, it is unlikely that she subscribes to a view of multiple, coexisting ontologies, which just leaves the reader curious. It would, however, be unfair to criticize her for what she has not done, as the book is already rather voluminous. The book will therefore appeal to scholars of various disciplines who seek to understand the endurance of difference in colonial and postcolonial circumstances. I have rarely read such a compelling explanation of the complexities in dealing with difference in intercultural relations. Not only is it a challenge to abandon holistic cultural dichotomies that fail to take into account change and innovations, but to recognize Indigenous forms of difference, both old and new, beyond a racialized hierarchy is even more difficult.
Toon van Meijl
Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands