In many respects, Australia was the continent of the utmost imaginative worlds and the strongest hopes even before European navigators discovered the continent. Considered inevitable from the times of Pythagoras to counterbalance the weight of the landmass of the Northern hemisphere, its existence was first imagined and later « confirmed », from 1477 onwards, by Marco Polo’s travel stories reporting the existence of a land named Locac, abounding in wealth, situated some 1000 miles to the south of Java. « Confirmed » also by the 16th century biblical interpretations of the voyages of Solomon’s ships that had travelled to the country of Ophir and that had returned laden with gold, allowing the construction of the temple. It was assumed that Ophir was situated in the Pacific. « Confirmed » by the advisors of the Spanish crown, when Juan Luis Aris of Loyola wrote to King Philip III (1578-1621) that the southern part of the landmass must be as fertile and habitable as the northern hemisphere. « Confirmed » finally by utopian writers such as Gabriel de Foigny who published in 1676 a monograph of an Australia that was completely imagined, but fantastic in all respects.
The European cartographers of the 16th and 17th century depict a gigantic terrestrial mass in the southern hemisphere, the terra incognita or terra australis. Abraham Ortelius’ map (1527-1598), around 1570.
Relentless logic, this imagined continent of the other hemisphere, with a mass identical to the good and old Europe, also had to be characteristic of similar environments, climates, civilisations and wealth – and, allowing them to be carried away by their own reveries - even superior wealth to those of the West known at the time. Australia, the not-yet discovered-Australia, became the dream, not to say the fantasy of an Europe in search of herself.
The episodes that accompanied the race for the discovery of this imaginary continent were numerous and led to the encounter with the Pacific islands. But none of those islands adequately met the expectations, neither in terms of their size nor their wealth. The fact that calling « Australia » this thing that we call still this way today is a resignation, and that hopes were replaced by deception, appears as an accident of history; an accident with significant, not to say dramatic consequences, it goes without saying, since deception became the driving force in the displacement of the convicts and in the upsurge of a deep animosity towards Indigenous peoples.
But the above is not the aim of the present paper other than to recall that the imagination that crowned the creation and naming of the Australian continent even before its discovery speaks to us as much of the history of the discovery as of the ideologies that accompanied it and which, in many respects, accompany the colonial, neo-colonial or postcolonial policies in the Pacific still today. My point here is different, even if it slips into a strange continuity with what was just brought up. It rather is about showing how Australia has continued to function as a means and a place for all the questionings the West specifies on the West itself, particularly in the domain of social and cultural anthropology, but without doubts even beyond. Let me state my point in a transparent as much as polemic way: Australia was conceived by our “ancestral thinkers”, by our predecessors, as fertile grounds for reflecting on their own ancestrallity. Australia, window of the cradle of primitive humanity, and Aborigines survivors of the social, cultural and psychological origins of modern humanity, this is, to summarise, the reasons for which Australian Indigenous societies have been granted a constitutive place in the birth of anthropology. I will be going beyond this point, however, and recall how the social sciences interested in Aboriginal Australian societies have not lost of their interest and centrality despite the difficult departure grounded on these patrimonial thoughts.
When writing that the Australian corpus, the social and cultural data reported for the Aborigines, were constitutive of the thought, or at least of its expression and formalization, of our anthropological ancestors and other thinkers, I don’t have any need to search very far. Lewis Henry Morgan, father of the post-philological anthropology and of the systematic study of kinship, based his evolutionary history of the human social forms on Australian structures. In his mind they constitute one of the primitive steps in the evolution towards the so-called modern family. The Aborigines, he wrongly thought, practised group marriage and were thus unable (and unwilling) to identify genealogical or biological relationships: the primitive horde. Let us not believe that the idea (or fantasy) of the collective marriage practised by the Aborigines has disappeared nowadays. Jacques Attali, interviewed on radio RTL on 09 November 2007 made comments that were sufficiently symptomatic for me to take some notes. Questioned at the occasion of the publication of his work Amours: Histoire des relations entre les hommes et les femmes (Love: history of relationships between men and women), he imagined he was explaining the possible reconstruction of the forms of human love relationships by the following words:
….so it gives an idea that love could exist in that [prehistoric] period, even if, in order to attempt understanding what happened a very very long time ago, one must look at the so-called primitive peoples who exist still today or who existed one century ago. And there we realize in a very general way that the first form of relationship is, as I was already saying, several men with several women. Generally speaking, in the beginning, it is several brothers with several sisters. Then several brothers with several women who are not sisters. Then again it gets divided into two stories: it is either one woman with several men, or one man with several women. And these are the evolutions before it comes to one man with one woman. [oral communication recorded by myself]
But Morgan is far from being the only one of our ancestors to have found the roots of his own ancestrallity among contemporary Aborigines. Recall Emile Durkheim who, in his Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (The elementary forms of religious life) published in 1912, explained that it is in Australia that we will find the answers to our questions on the origins of the « religious nature of man» (page 2). Even there, while he speaks of Aborigines that are his contemporaries, he justifies the detour through Australia as being essential and useful because it enables a « historical» approach; and « History» means in this case the apprehension of certain contemporaries, that is the Aborigines, as being the mirror of the entire humanity’s past. I will not detail the Durkheimian demonstration of the religious fact, instead I draw the reader to the original text while hoping on his critical vigilance.
Let me rather recall another ancestor still, Sigmund Freud, who in Totem et Tabou (1913) believes to be able to find the answers to fundamental human problems among the Australians: Oedipus’s father’s murder. Establishing a parallel between the psychic development of the child and primitive cultures (our Australians), he considers that each « primitive » appearance reflects a psychosexual stage, allowing him, he believes, to reconstruct the entire scenario. The original horde was composed of a dominant male, an all-powerful father who enjoyed of the women with exclusivity. The sons rebelled and killed the father, then devoured him. Remorse however overtook them, and the sons erected a totem in honour of the image of their father and for fear of his reprisal. They established new rules that reflect, according to Freud, the principal taboos of our Australian friends. These rules are the prohibition of incest and of killing and eating their totem.
Other « ancestors » who based their theories partly or entirely on Australian material should be mentioned. For lack of place, we will only recall Marx and Engels and the concept of “primitive communism”, Lévi-Strauss and the “elementary structures of kinship”, Malthus and the correlation between environmental wealth and social complexity, or quite the opposite, Sahlins and his definition of the first society of abundance among the Australians. As Aram Yengoyan (1979) writes, “the study of the Aboriginal population of Australia has always had a central and pivotal position. Many of our theories have been generated from the ethnography of this unique culture, and theories developed outside of the Aboriginal context have had to be tested against that corpus of ethnographic detail.”
One thus observes that Australia has first played the role of the land that kindled the hopes of the old good Europe of finding a similar and even a superior to itself elsewhere, to become later the breeding grounds in which the West believes to be able to discover its ancestral conditions. Through the distortion of the time of History, contemporary “natives” are taken as witnesses of “our” prehistoric practices.
The cannibals according to the traveller Carl Lumholtz (1888), an engraving reproduced in his article “At the Cannibals”, with the caption “the battle is waged”. According to this illustration, meat is consumed raw and each one tries to snatch a piece of it and escape: the original conditions of humanity (or pre-humanity).
The 1970s shelter a revolution in the social sciences and particularly in anthropology. A sometimes extreme relativism does not any longer allow the historical distortion, and societies are taken for what they are: contemporaries with their own ways of doing and thinking, ways of which the relationship with those of other societies, among others the West, is no longer obvious. The relativist or culturalist movement had significant consequences on australianist anthropology. It was loosing of its interest for two main reasons. First of all because of the rejection of the historical or evolutionist comparative studies that were, as I just recalled, interpreting the Aboriginal breeding ground as a « test » corpus for all anthropological theories. Secondly, and since the contemporary takes over reconstruction, interests for Australian societies diluted since they were quickly considered detribalised and decultured.
Aboriginal cultures of Australia are however, I advance, among the most interesting topics of research for both a renewed « classical» anthropology and a more modern anthropology, as long as research is appropriately contextualized. This context is made up of multiple and complex facets that, despite the need for detailed accounts, I have to limit here to the statement of certain elementary principles and facts. The main keyword is without doubt “diversity”: ecological diversity, social and cultural diversity, linguistic diversity, colonial and historic diversity. Because of these diversities it is rather difficult to offer an easy scientific justification for unifying all Indigenous inhabitants of the continent under the same collective denomination, the « Aborigines of Australia ». The inhabited ecological systems are not comparable since they are ranging from the fertile tropics where these nomadic hunters-gatherers were even more sedentary than were the horticulturists of Papua New Guinea, and where natural resources were close at hand, to the most arid deserts ever inhabited by humankind before industrialisation, where walking 30 kilometres every day in search of water was not unusual. Let us take note of the linguistic diversity and complexity as well, with 28 language families and 200 languages. Similarly, the socio-cultural diversities observed in all social domains are significant, ranging from material culture to various systems of kinship and ritual practices.
The most striking and important element of diversity relates however to the historical and colonial situation each one of these Aboriginal groups is embedded in. While some, particularly along the southern coast, have experienced western violence and domination for more than 200 years, others have encountered the first white man only in the 1950s, particularly those living in the Western Desert, with a last small family group resigning to approach settled communities in 1984. It does go without saying that close to 200 years of difference in the colonial experience does not produce identical social attitudes and organisations. Hence, more than ever may be, Australia provides a fertile ground for complex anthropological work that integrates both reflections on historical and colonial processes and the analysis of the legal systems in which Indigenous groups are embedded. For, one of the important purposes of anthropology today, in particular of applied or implied anthropology, is that of participating in the scientific formulation of the rights of existence and of recognition that our Aboriginal hosts desire.
Laurent Dousset, Directeur du CREDO
Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Océanie
http://www.pacific-credo.fr/
Bibliography
DOUSSET L. 2002. Politics and demography in a contact situation: The establishment of Giles Meteorological Station in the Rawlinson Ranges, Aboriginal History, 26: 1-22.
DOUSSET L. 1996. Production et reproduction en Australie. Pour un tableau de l'unité des tribus aborigènes, Social Anthropology, 4(3): 281-298.
DURKHEIM E. 1960. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Le système totémique en Australie (4 ème édition). Paris: PUF [1912].
FOIGNY de G. 1990. La terre australe connue. Paris: S.T.F.M. & Aux Amateurs de Livres [1676].
FREUD S. 1989. Totem und Tabu. Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag [1913].
MALTHUS T.R. 1986. An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2nd edition. The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, Volume 2. London: William Pickering [1803, 1798].
MORGAN L.H. 1971. La société archaïque. Paris: Anthropos [1877].
MORGAN L.H. 1997. Systems of consanguinity and affinity of the Human Family. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press [Smithsonian Institution volume 17 [1871].
SAHLINS M.D. 1972. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine.
YENGOYAN A. 1979. Economy, Society, and Myth in Aboriginal Australia, Annual Review of Anthropology, 8: 393-415.
News main page
30/12/14
