In Arena Magazine no. 107, Andrew Lattas and Barry Morris attribute to me the view that the current situation of Indigenous people, however one interprets it, is due to their ‘culture’. Nowhere have I said anything vaguely similar to this. One of my concerns has been precisely to show how totalising, bounded and fixed notions of ‘culture’ fail to help us understand the relations and outcomes of Indigenous Australians with others. Another has been to argue (for example, in my book Caging the Rainbow) that to hold Indigenous people to imagined standards of ‘authenticity’ is to impose double jeopardy upon them: to colonise them and radically alter the conditions of their existence, then also demand that they remain as they were.
Concerning the NT Intervention, my experience in remote, as well as not so remote, Aboriginal social settings is that certain unwelcome conditions are widespread. These include alcohol and substance abuse, and related violence; and their consequences for child and youth welfare. Health conditions are notorious. In many remote communities very few people survive to old age, while younger ones have multiple bypasses, complex operations, ongoing dialysis, and batteries of pills to swallow every day. There are other kinds of problems that do not lend themselves to such clear-cut description, including social involution and disoccupation in the face of what are often overwhelmingly difficult social conditions. None of these problems can be simplistically attributed to Indigenous ‘culture’. But there is a question, once one has had experience of these concentrated forms of neglect, problems and special vulnerabilities, whether one thinks that action should be taken. Many Indigenous people do. And so, in my own way, do I.
[…]
Lattas and Morris are ‘scandalised’ by what they see as the use of anthropology’s familiarity with Indigenous cultures to legitimise the ‘legal alterity’ of Indigenous people. This refers to my statement that ‘universalist understandings of rights can be problematic in their application to people whose social lives differ from the mainstream’. I should have gone further and said that the application of universal human rights is often contentious with respect to the mainstream as well—but perhaps particularly contentious with respect to people, like many Indigenous Australians, who do not themselves think in terms of universal human rights, and who may act and propose kinds of solutions to concerns in their lives that do not conform to universalist principles. This is not to say that we should not have and value human rights; and it is certainly not to advocate relegation of Aboriginal people outside their reach. However, there are often complex questions around the realisation of rights, and the reconciliation of certain rights with others. For example, how, in practice, is equality of right to life, liberty and security of person (as per Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) to be realised? There are regulations in mainstream communities to support and prioritise certain kinds of value and activity over others; so, for example, the rights of children to be tended may have to be prioritised over the rights of parents to do as they want. This is familiar territory: we all recognise obligations to protect the vulnerable. But my point is that ways in which Indigenous people may choose to identify and realise norms may differ from those in wider Australian society.
Part of Francesca Merlan’s impressive response to Andrew Lattas and Barry Morris’s astute (though, it could be said, erratically condemnatory) critique of cultural determinism, the ‘neo-liberal’ predicament, and everything else under the Aboriginal sun.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Consisting of an introduction and ten chapters, Exclusionary Empire examines the transfer of English traditions of liberty and the rule of law overseas from 1600 to 1900. Each chapter is written by a noted specialist and focuses on a particular area of the settler empire – Colonial North America, the West Indies, Ireland, the early United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa – and on one non-settler colony, India. The book examines the ways in which the polities in each of these areas incorporated these traditions, paying particular attention to the extent to which these traditions were confined to the independent white male segments of society and denied to most others. This collection will be invaluable to all those interested in the history of colonialism, European expansion, the development of empire, the role of cultural inheritance in those histories, and the confinement of access to that inheritance to people of European descent.
TOC:
Introduction: empire and liberty Jack P. Greene
1. The languages of liberty in British North America, 1607–1776 Elizabeth Mancke
2. Liberty and slavery: the transfer of British liberty to the West Indies, 1627–1865 Jack P. Greene
3. ‘Era of liberty’: the politics of civil and political rights in eighteenth-century Ireland James Kelly
4. Liberty and modernity: the American revolution and the making of Parliament’s imperial history Eliga Gould
5. Federalism, democracy, and liberty in the new American nation Peter S. Onuf
6. Liberty in Canada, ‘multiple subjects, multiple freedoms’ Philip Girard
7. Contested despotism: problems of liberty in British India Robert Travers
8. ‘… a bastard of tyranny under the guise of liberty’: liberty and representative government in Australia, 1788–1901 Richard Waterhouse
9. How much did institutions matter?: cloning Britain in New Zealand James Belich
10. The expansion of British liberty overseas: the South African case Christopher Saunders.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Empire, New Zealand, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa, United States | Closed
Matt Kaplan for the National Geographic:
As in cities today, the earliest towns helped expose their inhabitants to inordinate opportunities for infection—and today their descendants are stronger for it, a new study says.
In areas of ancient urbanization, it turned out, “we found very high frequency” for the TB-resistance gene, study co-author Thomas said. But, for example, “the Saami people from northern Scandinavia and the Malawi people from Africa, who have little history of urban living, did not have this frequency. (See our interactive Genographic atlas of ancient human migrations.)
Squint your way through it, but herein lies another explanation of ‘how the natives got smashed’ (see also Crosby, Diamond).
That link to the ‘interactive genographic atlas of ancient human migrations’ is worth a click too.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
via Native American Legal Update
The Government of Canada today formally endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. John McNee, Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations, met with the President of the United Nations General Assembly to advise him of Canada’s official endorsement of the United Nations Declaration.
Filed under: Canada, law, Political developments | Closed
In 1637, the land that is now known as the town of Mystic, Connecticut was the site of a fierce battle between the Pequot Nation and English settlers resulted in an historic massacre that shaped future relations between Tribes and colonists. Today, researchers are combing the site with metal detectors and archaeological tools to unearth the history behind one of the pivotal events of pre-American history in the region.
Filed under: United States | Closed
In 1787, the First Fleet was dispatched from the British Isles to find a penal settlement at Botany Bay, Australia. By this time, the British government had already experimented with convict transportation for over 160 years. The aim of this article is to place the history of transportation to Australia within the context of the wider flow of convict labour from the British Isles in the period 1615 to 1870. Using data from a range of sources it attempts to chart and explain fluctuations in the number of convicts transported over time. It also seeks to explore how the integration of convict labour within the transatlantic market in unfree labour-shaped British penal policy in the long-run. Such an analysis is useful in explaining the differing impacts that transportation had on the prisoners who experienced it and the intensity with which it was opposed in the 19th century by the British anti-slavery movement. Geographically the article explores these issues in relation to transportation to the New World (especially Barbados, Jamaica, Maryland and Virginia), West Africa, New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Western Australia, Bermuda and Gibraltar.
Filed under: Africa, Australia, Empire, Pacific, Scholarship and insights | Closed
As many of you will know, in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), Chief Justice John Marshall declares the sovereignty of the United States government over American Indian property. According to Marshall, the government had inherited this dominion from Great Britain, which had acquired it through the doctrine of “discovery.” The case granted American Indians a “right of occupancy,” but no more. I was familiar with the Johnson case largely through teaching it in my first-year property course. Among property professors Marshall is praised for having created at least a modicum of rights for Native Americans and for protecting native land from incursions by white settlers (since Indians could only sell to the U.S. government under his ruling, not to individual citizens). The case later served in the mid-twentieth century as a precedent for American Indian land claims. But as I prepped for the workshop, I discovered that recent work in legal history paints a different view, one that brings into question Chief Justice Marshall’s motivations and also demonstrates his own questionable use of history. [… P]roperty professors view the case as good law, in the sense of having created a leg, albeit a weak one, for Indian property rights to stand on; whereas legal historians view the case as bad law, in the sense of being based on inaccurate history (and guided by suspect motivations). So one question that comes to mind for me is this: can bad history make good cases? Does inaccurate history make a case any less legally legitimate?
Filed under: law, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
pin the racist tag on the pomo
One half of a debate in South Africa’s Mail and Guardian on white supremacy and understanding racist discourse:
We are told that Cliff is not a “conscious racist”, in other words, that nothing Cliff could possibly say would persuade Mngxitama that his analysis is false. We are informed that what might appear (to someone less tuned-in to reality than Mngxitama, perhaps) to be “humanist concerns for good governance” are in fact evidence of Cliff’s racism.
But I have, of course, already fallen into one of Mngxitama’s cunning rhetorical snares by using the word “we” in the paragraph above. This word (when used by Cliff and probably by other white men like myself), is in itself racist because it erases the “differential realities of blacks and whites”.
One cannot speak of a reality one does not live in, according to Mngxitama’s argument, and “blackness” in itself defines a reality, whether we’re talking about Tokyo Sexwale or a township dweller with no education. They are the same — and Cliff has a slave-holder’s mentality with respect to both of them.
[…]
I regret that I’ve never drunk as deeply from the well of postmodernism as Mngxitama has, because this decoding appears to fall outside of my sphere of competence, leaving me with only the suspicion that he’s talking nonsense.
It’s certainly true that there are “differential realities” and that many South Africans might be incapable of and/or unwilling to understand the reality of someone else’s life. It’s also true that many of these breakdowns of understanding are manifested in race, because race is still our best proxy for class difference, with class difference being the true cause of such mutual misunderstanding.
But these differential realities do not preclude communication or understanding across racial lines, neither do they preclude the possibility that when Cliff says “we”, he actually means “all South Africans”. He could perhaps be fully aware of the historical reasons whites are (generally) richer than blacks, and the exploitation that this inequality is premised on.
I’m amazed that ‘race’ continues to make South Africans expend so much hot air. But I’m more amazed that they do so to a degree of sophistication that would simply not be reached by writers in Australia’s media (and nor, do I suspect, by writers in New Zealand’s, Canada’s, or the USA’s).
And we might ask why.
Filed under: media, Southern Africa | Closed
peter coclanis reviews belich
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, 3 (2010)
[O]ne cannot gainsay the fact that Replenishing the Earth is a relatively comprehensive, highly original, largely convincing, and always fascinating account of Greater Britain’s will to power, with which account scholars perforce will grapple for years to come.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
Ngati Porou’s chief negotiator is going to Australia to get iwi there to vote on a unique Treaty settlement which he says would set the record straight for the iwi which has had to battle against the label of “kupapa” – or traitors – for fighting alongside the Crown in the land wars in 1865.
Ngati Porou, the second largest iwi, recently signed a Deed of Settlement with the Crown, which includes $110 million in cash for financial and cultural redress.
It also includes the largest amount of conservation land ever handed over in a settlement, and a unique recognition of Ngati Porou’s role both in the land wars and for the armed forces in wars such as World War II.
Filed under: law, New Zealand, Political developments | Closed
