On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, "Voice" and Colonial Citizenship

On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, "Voice" and Colonial Citizenship

ANTHROPOLOGICAL NEED

To speak of Indigeneity is to speak of colonialism and anthropology, as these are means through which Indigenous people have been known and sometimes are still known. In different moments, anthropology has imagined itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised. This modern interlocutory role was not self-ascribed by anthropologists, nor was it without a serious material and ideational context; it accorded with the imperatives of Empire and in this, specific technologies of rule that sought to obtain space and resources, to define and know the difference that it constructed in those spaces and to then govern those within. Knowing and representing the "voices" within those places required more than military might, it required the methods and modalities of knowing, in particular: categorisation, ethnological comparison, linguistic translation and ethnography.

These techniques of knowing were predicated upon a profound need, as the distributions in power and possibility that made Empire also made for the heuristic and documentary requirements of a metropolitan and administrative readership, hence the required accounts of the difference that "culture" stood in for in these "new" places. These accounts were required for governance, but also so that those in the metropole might know themselves in a manner that accorded to the global processes underway. Like "race" in other contexts, "culture" was (and still is in some quarters) the conceptual and necessarily essentialised space that stood in for complicated bodily and exchange-based relationships that enabled and marked colonial situations in Empire: warfare, commerce, sex, trade, missionisation. "Culture" described the difference that was found in these places and marked the ontological end-game of each exchange: a difference that had been contained into neat, ethnically-defined territorial spaces that now needed to be made sense of, to be ordered, ranked, to be governed, to be possessed. This is a form of politics that is more than representational, as this was a governmental and disciplinary possession of bodies and territories, and in this were included existent forms of philosophy, history and social life that Empire sought to speak of and speak for.

In this article I will argue that the techniques of representation and analysis that avail themselves to us when the processes sketched out above have been accounted for make for a form of representation that may move away from "difference" and attendant containment as a unit of analysis. I am interested in the way that cultural analysis may look when difference is not the unit of analysis, when culture is disaggregated into narratives rather than wholes, when proximity to the territory that one is engaging in is as immediate as the self, and what this then does to questions of "voice." I will argue that in such a context of anthropological accounting - an accounting I started to do above but will do more robustly below - "voice" is coupled with sovereignty that is evident at the level of interlocution, at the level of method and at the level of textualisation. Within Indigenous contexts, contexts that are never properly "post-colonial," the sovereignty of the people we speak of, when speaking for themselves, interrupt anthropological portraits of timelessness, procedure and function that dominate representations of their past and, sometimes, their present.

As an anthropologist I always found such portraits of Indigenous peoples to be strange in light of the deeply resistant, self-governing and relentlessly critical people that I belong to and work with. When I started to do my work on a topic that simply matters to the Mohawks of Kahnawake - the question of who we are, and who we shall be for the future - I found that anthropological histories on the Iroquois and analytics used for cultural analysis were exceedingly ritualistic and procedural, and so much so that they privileged particular communities and peoples in ways that stressed harmony and timelessness even where there was utter opposition to and struggle against the state. Again, this is more than a representational problem, or a superficially representational problem. The people that I work with and belong to do care deeply about ceremony and tradition, but hinged those concerns to nationhood, citizenship, rights, justice, proper ways of being in the world, the best way to be in relation to one another, political recognition, invigorating the Mohawk language - they did not talk about the usual anthropological fare that dominated the prodigious amount of research upon them. They clearly had and have critiques of state power, hegemony, history and even one another that made them appear anomalous against the literature written upon them.

And so it was that I asked questions about the questions that mattered to us and had to write in certain ways, as these matterings sometimes were more our business than others, but clearly had import for much larger questions, questions concerning just forms of dominion, or sovereignty or citizenship. I want to reflect upon the dissonance between the representations that were produced by writing away from and to dominant forms of knowing and commitment to what people say (imperfectly glossed here as "voice"). I do so in order to ask what the form of knowledge might look like when such histories as the one sketched out above are accounted for in disciplinary form and analysis. And further to that, I consider what analysis will look like, or sound like, when the goals and aspirations of those we talk to inform the methods and the shape of our theorising and analysis.

PARTICULAR WAYS OF KNOWING

Unlike anthropologies of the past, accounting for Empire and colonialism and doing so in the context of "settler societies" (code for proximal-to, or once "Indigenous") is now becoming more acceptable. This is owing to political currents, critiques and philosophical trends outside of and within anthropology that have embedded the discipline within the history of colonialism, have highlighted ethics and form, and pluralised the places and peoples that are now considered viable for ethnographic analysis. Although more acceptable than in the past, anthropological analyses of indigeneity may still occupy the "salvage" and "documentary" slot for analysis, an elaboration of object that results from the endurance of categories that emerged in moments of colonial contact, many of which still reign supreme. In those moments, people left their own spaces of self-definition and became "Indigenous." And "Indigenous" is a category that did not explicitly state or theorise the shared experience of having their lands alienated from them or that they would be understood in particular ways. This shared condition might be an innocent tale of differential access to power, of differing translations of events, were there a level field of interpretation within which to assert those different translations, as well as an agreed-upon vocabulary for comparison. No situation such as the one we all inherit and live within is "innocent" of a violence of form, if not content, in narrating a history or a present for ourselves. But like the law and its political formations that took things from them, there are disciplinary forms that must be contended with by Indigenous peoples. Anthropology and the "law" (both, necessarily, reified in this iteration) mark two such spaces of knowing and contention with serious implications for Indigenous peoples in the present.

Aileen Moreton-Robinson links this form of differential access to power and historical knowing to an a priori privilege, one that is gendered and racialised by the relationships mentioned above (warfare, commerce, sex, trade, missionisation) in the exchange-based histories that became reified and thus possessive, relationships that dialectically shaped those engagements as well as colonial possibilities in the present. As an example Moreton-Robinson cites Captain Cook's account of the people he first encountered in what is now Australia. It was "stated that the Indigenous people of Australia had no form of land tenure because they were uncivilised, which meant the land belonged to no-one and was available for possession under the doctrine of terra nullius." The legal doctrine of terra nullius, an "empty land," held sway in Australia until the High Court overturned it in nineteen ninety-two with the Mabo decision and offers stark testimony to the differential power of one account over another in defining not only difference but establishing presence, by establishing the terms of even being seen: an historical perceptibility that empowered possibilities of self- and territorial possession in the present. We see in this example how historical perceptibility is used, and is still used, to claim, to define capacities for self-rule, to apportion social and political possibilities, to, in effect, empower and disempower Indigenous peoples in the present. Such categorical forms of recognition and mis-recognition are indebted to deep philosophical histories of seeing and knowing; tied to legal fiat, they may enable disproportionately empowered political forms (such as "Empire," or particular nation-states such as the United States, Canada and Australia) to come into being in a very short time, as without that category of knowing and its concomitant force land could not be wrested from those that belong to it, and those to whom it rightfully belongs.

And so it is that concepts have teeth and teeth that bite through time. By legally acknowledging the presence of Indigenous peoples in Australia, Mabo enabled Indigenous peoples there to finally claim legal title to their ancestral territories. But they could only do so after two hundred fifteen years of settler occupation that coincided with two hundred fifteen years of their continued presence in their own lands. These historical and legal effacements of Indigeneity are predicated upon accounts such as Cook's: accounts that became histories which dialectically informed theories, which then emboldened the laws of nation-states. The traffic between theory and event moved colonies into nation-states. This trafficking disabled future claims of Indigenous occupation and ownership of territory because, in part, their own voices were imperceptible, or unknowable, or unimportant, or were sieved through analytics that interpreted their aspirations in ways that were not their own.

These effective effacements rested upon ways of knowing that imbricated the ethnological, ethnographic and cartographic with social and political theory and enabled the justification of dispossession.

Cook's thinking was very much of a piece with that of political theorists such as John Locke, who argued most persuasively, it seems, that the origins of property rest only in that which has been mixed with labour, and thus, that which does not appear to have been mixed with labour is alienable. A panoptic view of labour here is essential as only certain forms of labour, those which are perceptible to certain viewers, will matter. But of equal import for Indigenous peoples is the conflation of property with a larger economy of social and political rank and value - "and amongst those who are counted the civilized part of mankind, who have made and multiplied positive laws to determine property ... is by the labour that removes it out of that common state nature left it in made his property who takes pains about it." This fragment from Locke's text Of Property enunciates the hierarchies of social value and accordant rights that were tied to the understanding of people and a social ranking within humanity. Thus property could be defined only as that which was mixed with labour and belonged to those who perceived it, in contradistinction to the living histories of Indigenous peoples in those places.

Cultural form is critical here, recognising and apportioning out rights, and is broken down and sieved into different hierarchies of value and accordant analytics - in their contemporary forms, those of "structure," "practice" and "meaning." We must be mindful however, that in its theoretical and analytic guises "culture" is defined in anthropological terms most consistently by its proximal relationship to difference. And that difference was to be defined against the sameness and omniscience of a stable ontological core, an unquestioned "self" that defined that difference and thence "culture" for a readership, one that corresponded to a metropole and to a colony, a self and an other to define oneself proximally against.