Image of the Prague skyline courtesy of Pavelm - licenced under Creative Commons.
I didn’t comment, but I read the thread on Kim’s post on the crimes of Joseph Fritzl and discourses in the media (Austrian and otherwise) about cultural and national responsibility. I found the thread a fascinating read, and I’m not certain that anyone could finally arbitrate the question of whether a certain Nazism or its social legacy was actually at stake here or whether to think that is to misunderstand the nature of causation and social pathologies as they manifest themselves in individual lives and choices. That’s forcing the two positions argued somewhat, and occluding a lot of nuance, but I suspect that the debate’s conditions of possibility include different levels of explanation and different methods of thought and intellectual work - I thought some of the borders of the social scientific and humanistic worldviews were both marked out and blurred in that discussion. It ought to be possible to integrate the two, but saying that is harder than doing it because there is a certain split - that’s not just manifested in disciplinary training and territory in the academy - between a more hermeneutic and a more positivist style of thought. That’s actually a dividing line that’s inscribed in our everyday culture as well as in our intellectual traditions in the West, and it’s possibly a most unfortunate divide. But then national borders, and cultures, are contingent constructions of Western modernity too.
Anyway, that’s something of a prelude to some thoughts the thread stimulated for me. I remembered I’d written a post back in December 2004 on W.G. Sebald’s work. At the time, I wrote, apropos of his A Natural History of Destruction:
Literature has often been seen as a mirror of meaning, a way of sense-making, what the literary scholar Erich Auerbach called, following Aristotle, Mimesis. To take the example of the hitherto unparalleled destruction wrought by the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, German literature produced such classics as Johann Jakob Von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (first published in 1669) and much more recently, Günter Grass ’ The Meeting at Telgte.
There is a massive, and often fine, literature of the Holocaust. But going in search of a similar literature of the suffering of German citizens during the Second World War, Sebald was surprised to find it scant, and largely unsatisfactory.
A lot more could be said about this, and I don’t plan to say it here. Rather, what I wanted to reflect on was what leads to the association of history with space as well as with time. It’s by no means an original insight, but the late French scholar Michel de Certeau memorably and exactly traced the origins of modern historiography to the project of state making that originated with the Renaissance. Machiavelli is a prime example. The Discourses on Livy pretend to reflect on Roman history, but really serve as a sort of expert advice to the Prince, a circumscription of time as pointing to action in the present on the future. History becomes a sort of political technology. Hence the longstanding privilege accorded to national political and constitutional history, and hence also philosophies of history such as Hegel’s which secularise theodicies so as to demonstrate the centrality of the modern state to progress and force history into a box of reasonableness where the real is the rational.
So history becomes, in political modernity, another country to be territorialised. Weber defined the state as an entity that monopolised the legitimate use of violence over a certain defined space. But how was such space defined?
If we go back as recently as the nineteenth century, we still find borders being fluid. The boundary between Spain and France wasn’t permanently settled by treaty until then, and Basques, Catalonians and many others live on both sides of it. Strange anachronisms like Andorra were originally parts of parcellised sovereignty that later became pseudo-states. The Kingdom of Navarre, as those who’ve seen Queen Margot may know, crossed Spain and France, and Henri of Navarre became King of France after he deemed Paris worthy of a mass. But other bits of Navarre ended up in Spain, which of course at one point was ruled by the Bourbons - the French royal dynasty. To further complicate this story, one way of looking at the Napoleonic Wars would be a desire to restore a certain Romance (or romantic) unity, and in another way, as a strange restaging of the Reconquista. One of the interesting things about the resistance to the French is that it was not only the first (European) incarnation of the guerilla, but also woke crowned heads up to the fact that national sentiment could be marshalled for military ends - a lesson the Prussians were quick to learn. A very different story (as was Napoleon’s citizen army) from the court wars of the Eighteenth century, but it was something of a revelation to the forces of slightly Enlightened reaction that they too could play a game extending beyond God and King.
This story could be even further complicated, and it would be interesting to do so (and it’s really interesting to think all this stuff with Fernand Braudel over the longue durée), but let’s cut it short. One of the key things the incipient nation state had to do was to unify disparate peoples, and teach people to think as a people. Rather than identifying primarily as Christians, or people from this valley, or as people from this family - national identification had to be secured through a process utilising a variety of techniques - including compulsory education, linguistic uniformity, compulsory military service, the formation of a national literature and a canon, and pre-eminently the harnessing of memory and forgetting to a national history. National identity, and identification, doesn’t come naturally. Far from it.
Such a history can suffer wounds and trauma - the instance of Austria is one case in point, but the instances of the Czech Republic and Poland - both cited in comments on the Fritzl thread are revelatory too. There’s a fantastic book by the Canadian sociologist Derek Sayer - The Coasts of Bohemia - which traces this unstable and contingent project of articulating a national mythos and a national culture in great detail. Sayer’s quite aware that the geographical object of his history of remembering and forgetting is itself hard to define over time - is he writing about the Kingdom of Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic? And which territory - the borders of each were different, and fluid. And which nationality? Slavic, Czech, Bohemian, German, Jewish? His title is taken from Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, and he suggests that Shakespeare was probably just intimating that he was talking about a mythical unknown country - a sort of Arcadia. But he also suggests that modern day Bohemians might remember Neville Chamberlain’s proclamation of ignorance in 1938 - “a far away country of which we know nothing”. Sayer ends up choosing to write about Prague, and he argues that history would look very different if you were in Central Europe than if you were in insular or continental isolation in the famed Anglosphere.
To return to our initial theme, Sayer also traces in detail how German and Jewish Prague (and for that matter, aspects of Habsburg Prague) were both effaced symbolically, in memory, and in material fact - a process which actually coincided with the establishment of the nation state in 1918 and which gathered enormous momentum after 1945. The symbolic effacement - and the rewriting of history - coincided with violent upheavals to lives. And there’s a motto there. And I’m not just talking about forced expulsions and political murder. What happens when you return home and there’s no home there any more? What happens to your own memories? The politics of time is intimately connected to the politics of place. And the politics of space has a tendency to destroy the memory of place, and thus to do violence to what in German is an overdetermined word - Heimat.
[The first chapter is online here, and is a fascinating read.]
Ahh Mark, you’re pretty much channeling all the modernist scholars of nationalism: - Benedict Anderson, Antony Smith, Ernst Gellner, even old Ernest Renan.
Two reflections interest me here: One is that quasi-spiritual role that nations seem to occupy in many people’s consciousness in the modern age. Anthropologically, from where does the need arise for humans to be part of ’something bigger’ - why can our lives sometimes feel so meaningless in the absence of connections - even invented or imagined connections?
And can any theologically knowledgeable LPers tell us where the veneration of nations rubs up against the Biblical prohibition against false gods?
The other point that interests me concerns my traditional bugbear - state power. It seems that, whether for nefarious or benign purpose, a people are much easier to govern if that government can promulgate and strengthen consciousness of nation. In the case of Australia and our century old debates about Federalism - we seem almost to have reached a tipping point where people identify more readily with ‘Australia’ than their own State - and thus the growing clamour for national consistency of government. This was not the case a century ago, and it has slowly developed. Keating and Howard both did a lot to highlight and strengthen the national consciousness by stoking stories and national myths. Now it’s not hard for the Federal government to propose and get popular support for pretty much any domain of power they wish to exercise. Federal health takeovers will be on the cards for the next election, for example.
The other is policy and governmental insistence on cultural ‘integration’: I think this can be explained by the expediency of making it easier to govern a lot of people. The Chinese national government for example has successfully promoted the myth of Han Chinese cultural identity as being the oldest and most pervasive, to the point that it has eclipsed many of the other ethnicities in China - and forged a behemoth nation-state. Any traditional liberal or even conservative would be concerned when governments seek to start decreeing cultural identity - but what think LPers?
After the collapse of feudal societies, it seems that ‘the nation’ has replaced the Divine Right of Kings or the Mandate of Heaven as the self-authenticating rationale for concentration of power.
I remain concerned about the ease with which governments can hold sway over entire peoples with mesmeric incantations to the nation.
I’m channelling Anderson and Gellner certainly, Mercurius, but I don’t know of Smith and haven’t read Renan.
Forgive me for a brief response to your interesting comment, but I have essays to mark before I go to sleep.
Just to pick up on one point:
Yes, and no. Because the gods of Canaan, Assyria, etc. are literally false gods for the Jewish Bible. They’re the gods of other nations, warring with or seeking to subject the Hebrew kingdoms. It gets more interesting when the Babylonian captivity happens, because a theology is articulated which suggests Yahweh directs the destinies of all nations. That’s also the period at which monotheism gets entrenched, and then we get a certain universalism within Judaism. It’s not widely realised, for instance, that around 100 AD up to 10% of the population of the Eastern Roman Empire was Jewish, and perhaps as much as 20% of the Latin empire. The Jews were great proselytisers, and their message had a lot of appeal - not least to philosophically inclined Greek types. It was really the rise of Christianity rather than the fall of the 2nd temple which stopped Judaism in its tracks.
But, yep, in a sense that’s right - and it’s one of the arguments that causes tension about the Zionist project too, which a lot of 19th and early to mid 20th century Jews rejected as an un-Jewish surrender to nationalism. Anyway, this story as well is a lot more complicated!
Uploaded essay marks to “Gradebook”, so I’ll come back to another point if I may, Mercurius. I’ll leave aside the discussion about the power of the state, because I agree (and have suggested) that nationalism is precisely a technique of governing more easily, and I’m a tad ambivalent about the very good question that you raise about cultural identity.
Easy. Death, labour and finitude. And the progressive awareness of them.
It doesn’t arise, or at least worrying about it doesn’t arise, until you take the first step towards secularisation and the state - the creation of a fixed hierarchy. Note not of a division of labour, because all social formations have those - even pre-agricultural ones. But once you start in with chiefs, kings, whatever and the extraction of a surplus to support them, and you have priests, then you’ve got politics, because you’ve sundered the original community and introduced social change into the equation, however much you might deny it. In other words once you stop living in a realm where meaning is a given, and everything is repetition governed by tradition (or rather, is lived and experienced as such) you raise the question of meaning. And once you stop living with the dead and the non-human every day, you raise the question of individual meaning. It’s a process of “disembedding” meaning from an all encompassing world that started around 7000 years ago and continues to this day. That’s the longue duree for you!
I think this is the origin of myths of the fall, original sin, the expulsion from paradise etc. The historical anthropologist Marshall Salins was very interesting on this (he did some of his work in a library in Brisbane in the 50s!). He looked at the amount of labour non-agricultural societies needed to ensure what counted as plenty, and calculated about 3 hours a day. They spent the rest of the time story telling, enacting rituals, bonking and other good things. There was violence, but there’s a lot of evidence it was fairly ritualised too. Agriculture wasn’t a choice, but a response to climate change. When agricultural societies had the opportunity to go back to transhumance, they took it, because life is a lot easier, and questions of distribution don’t arise in the same sense, because scarcity is not perceived. So “progress” is actually all about life getting worse - for a very long time. Life expectancy and health also took a big step backwards. We can tell this from the analysis of dated skeletal remains correlated with other evidence such as that going to diet.
This is also where Marx got his idea (and it wasn’t original to him) of 3 hours of work a day as optimal. Play the violin, make love, fly a kite for the rest of the time!
This process gathers pace in modernity because religious unity is sundered, and rule divorced from tradition.
But there’s a real sense in which all politics, and all history is about meaning.
“How, then, should we live?” - that’s Aristotle’s question.
God bless those Mennonites
[link]Mark, I wonder:
(a) to what extent such philosophising of the history of states with “fluid” (the metaphor) borders can be extrapolated to those entirely surrounded by fluid (literally) borders
(b) whether the “Godzone” / “Gott mit uns” / “God is an Englishman” principle negates “nationalism as a false god”.
(a) Borders of Australia and our UK “parent” (from 1788 until 1922/ Eire) were fixed, not “fluid” (metaphorically) because they are islands, and any wanabe invader must, in addition to an army, have the maritime power (and, since 1939, air-power cover) to cross the sea before it can actually invade. Although the English Channel did not stop the reverse English/ Brit invasion of The Continent, after 1066,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war …
… This precious stone set in the silver sea
Which served it in the office of a wall.
Or as a moat defensive to a house
Against the envy of less happier lands; (Shakespeare: Richard II, 2/i)
effectively confined UK wars to internal struggles within and among its component Isles. Australia’s sea borders, strengthened by very long dry treks between its northern coast and hospitable country, have (except for 1788’s English invasion) confined effective penetration to the northern coastal areas, & will continue to do so unless the invader chooses the East Coast option (I’m waiting for Bolt et al to discover this as a perfect excuse for doing nothing about Global Warming!!)
One can argue cogently that This fortress built by Nature for herself created a sense of security & nationalism (it’s hard to beat John of Gaunt’s pæan as THE expression of ecstatic nationalism) quite different from any on The Continent (or, indeed, any continent with porous borders) - a sense reinforced by an armed a citizen militia, system of invasion beacons etc which probably played a significant role in preventing England’s reversion to the autocratic rule, disenfranchisement and disarmament which characterised The Continent’s NeoFeudalism.
(b)God & nationalism are not competing Gods when nations are led by “God’s anointed” and God is either on the side of the big battallions (original statement variously attributed; but most probably Napoleon) or not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best. (Voltaire). States & their leaders have, since early Biblical times, appropriated God/s & colonised religions to reinforce their own legitimacy and excuse their own excesses of power & aggression - especially when such excesses (killing, rape, pillage, persecution, imprisonment etc) are explicitly forbidden by the same God/s & religion. Historically, genuine conscientious objectors on religious grounds have been few, whether minority groups (eg Essenes, Christian & Buddist religious, Christian sects eg Armish, Quaker)or individuals.
Another interesting example is the history of the US after 1783 to c.1812. I’m not going to go into intense detail, but basically the argument between the Federalists/Anglophile/North? (Washington?, Hamilton, Adams) v. the Anti-Federalists/Republicans/Virginians/Francophiles/South? was the argument between the idea of a federal nation state v. states-rights/individual states perceived by their inhabitants as autonomous, not really part of a wider nation. I’m being very simplistic in this outline and others familiar with the pre-Jacksonian history of the US can probably rightly argue too simplistic.
Here in Oz, after Federation the various states still saw themself very much as individual entities and the wider picture probably didn’t really come to the fore until WW2 when the Commonwealth took sole responsibility for income tax and, through the 1944 referendum took over a host of state responsibilities that the states had messed up (notably, during the Great Depression, welfare.)
One might wonder to what extent Australia’s geographical position (at the bottom of the world,) and convict heritage contribute to our well-known pugnaciousness and abhorrent willingness to send Aussies off to die for bigger more powerful countries, as is presently happening in Afghanistan.
Mark @ #3 …
a slightly different take on the same arguments - the history/ archeology / mythology buff v the anthrolology/ sociology etc one, I guess.
(BTW: I meant “disarmament of yeoman / Third Estate citizens” in the post above)
Psychologically, the answers to from where does the need arise for humans to be part of ’something bigger’, at least in settled societies, are “other-directednes” / “externally controlled”, a need for explanations of phenomena which cannot be explained by the society’s existing knowledge, unwillingness to part ‘forever’ from a loved / venerated one & a desire for immortality.
The need for explanations begins to break down when science (& the technology to propagate it) and/or exposure to more sophisticated societies provide defensible explanations. (I should state, at this juncture, that these sorts of myths seem always to contain a core of factual memory)
Only recently, a wonderful international collaboration of mythologists, students of literature, dendrochronoligists, vulcanologists, ice-core analysts etc uncovered the facts behind “The Wasteland” sections of Arthurian Legends; a c6th century explosion of Krakatoa, registered in written Chinese accounts, and the “atmospheric-ash winters” which created “The Wasteland” (BTW, and REALLY scared those who believe the earth has more to fear from atmospheric particulate build-up than CO2). For those who missed the fab TV prog, there’s a brilliant write up on [link]
About half a century earlier, a massive explosion of the Santorini volcano was identified as “the facts” behind Exodus & other religious myths (interesting account in Luce, J.V.,1969: “The End of Atlantis - New Light on an Old Legend.” Thames and Hudson, London) About the same time, fire-site, pollenology(?) etc analysis of early Neolithic settlements in the Tigris-Euphrates Delta area postulated that the “Garden of Eden & expulsion from…” myth could be explained by the sudden great drought marking the end of the hot “greenhouse” Mesolithic Era. Sciences also indicated that, within a generation, “Adam delved (ploughed) & Eve span” - though our knowledge of such societies indicates that Eve both delved & span while Adam ‘hung out’ with his domestic animals! (Account of the fire-site etc analysis in one of Leonard Cottrell’s books; can’t remember which)
Self/other-directedness theory offers one credible explanation of why some people need certainty / ’something bigger’ in their lives, and others do not - though I think the “do nots” would come from liberal societies which can accept & search for rational explanations. Once religions become organised in settled societies, they are rapidly colonised by those who want to augment their own power & control. Not infrequently are heretics “cast forth”, persecuted, even killed to stifle dissent.
Another credible explanation (almost certainly predating gods & organised religion) is based on love, reverence for the dead and unwillingness to accept that death is, indeed the end of loved-ones or their own life. These ‘human’ emotions seem also to have been rapidly colonised, until the ‘afterlife’ could only be attained by those who kept religious & civil rules - some of which created huge & expensive “death industries”.
This debate is especially acute for Austria, funnily enough. Once the German metropolis, it is now a marginalised German fragment stranded by its exclusion from Prussia’s united Germany and the defeat of Mitteleuropa in 1918. Apart from being a museum to the Habsburgs, what is Austria’s identity in an era of ethnic nationalism? At least the Czech Republic is Czech. Austria exists merely to stop Germany from being bigger than it is.
I am not claiming a connection to Fritzl but i wanted to pass on a personal observation. I went to a gay bar in Vienna years ago. Vienna has roughly the same population as Sydney. The very few gay bars there were hidden away and protected by (what seemed to an Australian) extravagent security arrangements including heavy doors, locks and spy holes. The weight of a monolithic counter-reformation Catholicism seemed to bear down heavily there, a central element in the Austrian story, and long pre-dating Nazism.
DeeCee and Paul, I think there is indeed a difference between perceptions of nationality among those countries with fluid and those with liquid borders! That’s kind of what I was alluding to when I called the Anglosphere insular - I meant literally - when you think about it, Britain, Australia and New Zealand are all islands, and America and Canada (to the extent that it is the Anglosphere) are almost one continent - the cultural border being with Mexico, and the rest of it being sea (note also the large degree of concern about the porousness of the “civilisational” border with Mexico articulated by Samuel Huntington in those terms).
There’s a fair bit of evidence that national identity was much stronger in England much earlier on than on the Continent.
Just as an aside (and a little off topic): Mark, have you read Edward Said’s piece on Auerbach? I think it’s called ‘Critic of this earthly world’ or something like that. Said is an excellent and sympathetic reader, and Auerbach is a fascinating figure indeed.
I don’t think so, Klaus. I’ve read a fair bit of Said on literary criticism and theory, and I’ve got one anthology of his essays on the shelves, but I don’t recall reading him on Auerbach. I’m off to Uni in a moment, but I’ll check later on to see if it’s in the book. I have read Auerbach, but not for a long time!
It’s a fairly recent piece, maybe published around 2003 in one of the big US journals. It should be available on the databases. I read that and ‘Freud and the Non-European’ recently, and I’ve decided Said is a better reader and critic than I’d previously thought.
Perhaps a little more on topic: Dipesh Chakrabarty and Bain Attwood have edited the latest edition of Public Culture which deals with history and memory. They set up the distinction between historical truth and historical wounds (drawing on Charles Taylor’s ‘Politics of Recognition’), wherein truth is a precondition for any such wound but they cannot be reduced to each other. Their discussion is about the ambivalence of historians who work within this tense distinction. I am a bit critical of the potential ‘cunning’ of this kind of recognition in recuperating certain historiographical positions, but it’s an interesting framework. I think some of the articles may be more explicitly about history and nation.
On the Spanish War of Independence: some of the guerrilleros may have been primarily motivated by what we’d recognise as nationalism, but certainly not all the important strands. The reconquista sentiment was much more about re-establishing a militant, absolutist, Spanish form of Catholicism with Inquisition and all, against the paganism of the enlightenment French. There *was* a liberal Constitution after 1812 but it was never particularly successful in restraining successionist war between supporters of different aristocratic branches. Those were the major political fractures in Spanish society well into the twentieth century, and in any case, there’s nothing necessarily nationalistic about guerrilla war per se.
Other than that, good article. In fact it’s interesting how supporters of pre-modern quasi-states, like the Basques and the Carlist requetés found such easy common cause with modernists, with Marxist Republicans and Fascists respectively.
Thanks, Klaus. My book is a bit older, but I’ll have a squizz around the databases.
I’ve got Chakrabarty’s Provinicialising Europe but am yet to go beyond dipping into it. One book I would recommend for a revisionist world history which attempts to rethink 19th century history from a perspective which accords agency to “the colonised” is C.A. Bayly’s Birth of the Modern World:
[link]
It’s open to a number of legitimate criticisms, but it’s a very worthy text.
[link]
There’s a lot of extremely interesting revisionist work in history at the moment which tries to capture processes and cultures beyond the nation state frame. What disappoints me is that historical sociologists haven’t really caught up - still largely stuck in Marx v. Weber and then in “what causal factor is most important - war, religion, politics, ideology, blah?”… It’s in the nature of the beast, I guess, but as the reference to Gellner might signal, a lot of the more interesting historically conscious social theory is coming from people trained originally as anthropologists. When you think about why, it’s pretty obvious!
An interesting aspect on forgetting, as it applies to Australia. I’ve just finished reading Babette Smith’s Australia’s Birthstain, which is a valuable contribution to convict history. Those of you interested in the sub-discipline of gay history will find it particularly intriguing. I’m not that interested in gay history per se myself, but realised long ago that it must’ve had some impact on the formation of Oz society, so I looked into it, and, apart from Smith’s book, which I’ll come to in a moment, about all I could find were some lurid passages in Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, some more considered work by Kay Daniels (from memory - I didn’t look in Convict Women before writing this) and Joy Damousi on lesbianism, and an article on gays in Geofrey Aplin’s (ed.) A Difficult Infant. There are imolicit intimations in Gillen’s The Founders of Australia that 2 Royal Navy seamen on the First Fleet may have been gay, and were consequently not executed, but rather dumped by Phillip in Rio. This took me into researching homosexuality in the Royal Navy - a denial it ever existed in Rodger’s The Wooden World (though he recants on this in his later The Command of the Ocean) and 2 rather old articles by another naval historian. Not exactly rich pickings.
Then along comes Babette Smith with her new book.The argument is more expansive than this but basically she puts forward a good hypothesis that the reason the Ant-Transportation Movement flourished in the mid 19C was because of an explicit homophobia about widespread homosexuality and lesbianism in convict ranks. This homophobia extended to the anti-Chinese riots on the goldfields. I think her evidence might in some places be a bit tenuous, but nevertheless, dhe makes an interesting historical case which deserves serious consideration.
And if this isn’t a revelation of historical forgetting, I don’t know what is.
The first fleet officer diaries make one thing quite clear: there was a fully fledged, rum-fuelled convict orgy on the night of of the first landing, as the sexes were permitted to mingle for the first time in 7 or 8 months.
Auspicious beginnings for a ‘new nayshun’.
It’s funny, I don’t remember reading about it in school. I would’ve been most interested.
LE - I didn’t realise the B&S Ball went back so far.
“It’s in the nature of the beast, I guess, but as the reference to Gellner might signal, a lot of the more interesting historically conscious social theory is coming from people trained originally as anthropologists. When you think about why, it’s pretty obvious!”
I’m finding anthropologists are way ahead on a lot of things at the moment. My own work is looking a bit at Australian frontier history in public discourse, novels etc and the anthropologists - especially working in what Gillian Cowlishaw calls ‘Critical Indigenous Studies’ and related areas - have provided some of the most insightful work on history and cultural politics.
Yes, White Australia certainly kicked off with a bang.
Why don’t we tell kids the best bits? That’d really get em into January 26 spirit. It could be done “facts and dates” style, or “stew of themes and narratives” wise. So everybody’s happy!
And make it part of citizenship test while you’re at it. Frankly, it annoys me that people come here, expect to fit it, and don’t know the basics, like about the Don, ANZACS, and our indiscriminately shagtastic founding moment.
You had some uptight puritans on the Mayflower - we had Lovestock 1788!
LE, the orgy on 6 February, 1788 seems to have been primarily heterosexual. Unfortunately, one of the sources, Bowes-Smyth was cowering below decks on the Lady Penrhyn in a thunderstorm, and gives a secondhand account.Tench devotes only two sentences to it, I think. The problem was the convicts, I think, got hold of more rum than they were supposed to.Portia Robinson seems to doubt it, in Botany Bay Women, from memory. But something definitely happened that got right out of hand because Phillip was mightily pissed off about it the next morning, and wanted the offending convicts to marry. And this from a Governor who had no qualms setting up a brothel staffed by convict women known to be prostitutes.
Klaus, me too. One anthropologist who’s been writing some excellent stuff on the topic of my post - viz. the politics of memory and forgetting - is Jonathan Boyarin. For whatever reason, I don’t think his work has had the attention it deserves. I might come back with some more on his take over the next week or so.
Well, this is my take on Australia’s ‘national history of memory and forgetting’:
The invented traditions and frequently inaccurate historicity upon which national identity depends can result in a national discourse that is fossilised . The ideas of 19th century Australian nationalist Bernard O’Dowd included paeans to ‘mateship’, the ‘exclusion of elements likely to make trouble’ and protecting our seas from ‘foreign neighbours’. They could be printed unedited in the op-ed column of The Australian today.
Founded as a colony, the literature that came to define Australia’s identity is colonial in outlook. Nick Mansfield demonstrates how this kind of thinking resolved ambiguous, distressing or complex historical questions into unquestioned grand narratives. Thus the plight of Australian Aborigines can be resolved into a ‘noble failure’ of European peoples to ‘elevate’ them. And wholesale environmental devastation can be portrayed as an heroic conquering of a harsh, unforgiving land. Mansfield describes this process, rather kindly, as ‘self-authentication’ — though I call it begging the question.
David Brooks (the Australian literature scholar, not the NY Times columnist) offers the starkest example of self-authentication in the historical record of the British arrival in ‘Australia’ - as the name for the continent was first suggested by explorer Matthew Flinders following his circumnavigation 15 years after the First Fleet. The notion that ‘the British arrived in Australia in 1788’ presupposes the existence of ‘Australia’ as a cultural artefact which is retrospectively written into history and literature.
Sneja Gunew suggests that Australia is autocultural, autodidactic and autonational —as it were, a hermaphrodite nation. Akin to Mansfield, Gunew posits that Australian culture was created in a culturally empty space (terra nullius, anyone?) because the colonisers took no cues from the Indigenous cultures, yet they also sought to reject their British/European ‘old world’ heritage in this new country.
Gunew argues that Australia’s status as a nation of immigrants continues to overwhelm the Indigenous cultures, while there remains the persistent trope that immigrants must largely abandon their cultural heritage in order to become a ‘real Australian’. So the logic of Australian national culture dictates that we must all cultivate an ‘Australian’ identity which is at once non-Indigenous and non-immigrant. It seems to me that such insistence impoverishes the identity, natural history and memory of all who live on this continent.
Mark:
A thoughtful and very good topic you have here.
Hey, fair crack of the whip! I haven’t even got hold of David Blackbourn’s The Conquest Of Nature and now you’ve put David Sayer’s the Coasts of Bohemia and Guenther Grass’s The Meeting at Telgte [the novel, not the opera] on my reading list.
You said
That’s just about the size of it - and one of the reasons oral history, family traditions and folk songs [genuine - as opposed to official folkloric] are so disliked and scorned and belittled by ruling authorities and their servants.
A random glimpse: Just a brisk walk down the road from Telgte is Muenster, a town founded by English missionaries, where a pub that opened in the 13th Century still serves good beer at the same tables, where the evil Anabaptists were suppressed so brutally, where the Peace of Westphalia was signed, where their great Cathedral was rebuilt after being flattened by the RAF - the locals a justly proud of their long and colourful history …. and are rather forgetful of all the hopeful and progressive things that happened in that brief period during the 16th Century when rebellious former priests and nuns ran their own republic there. So much for memory.
and
Yes the construction of national identity is an unnatural act.
It would be useful to consider just who in Australia has been and is in the position to “insist” on the nature of Australian identity.
I would suggest that the creation of this artifice has been a collaborative and a consensual activity. The broader the coalition of forces twisting and kneading this thing called identity into an agreed-upon shape, the less likely it can be that one interest was able to “insist” upon its assertions as being the onlya acceptable formulations of national identity.
Nevertheless, it is mostly true to say that both indigenous and immigrant identities were to a large degree rejected.
One of the conceits of self-identifying Australians is a form of cultural (as opposed to social) Darwinism. This conceit asserts that the whole world would be like Australia if only it had been so “lucky” (here missing the irony of the “Lucky Country”).
Thus Australia is seen to be a place where human nature has had its maximum opportunity to find its fullest and most satisfying expression, untrammelled by past, memory, precedent, dogma, or memory.
Thus, it is quite understandable why Australia is subject to bouts of paranoid xenophobia when it is suggested that foreign influences bringing in the viruses enumerated above threaten to invade our aseptic, but vulnerable, shores.
Lefty E @ #19 wrote:
Hooray to that! Can I recommend a library crawl of “pipes” & “dirty ditties” as an entree to the utter delights of OZHist “as it really happened” aka “I nearly died laughing”!! You can (or could, as late as the early 80s) waste glorious weeks in London’s documentary archives. Try: “Things have reached a pretty pass in Sydney Town when Convict women wear silk and muslin, and dine off fine china.” (Mrs Paterson or Mrs Grouse; forget which). Ships docking in Colonial NSW had to take aboard food stores for the very long voyage to the next port (or long whaling trips). NSW was a barter economy & food (fresh, dried, preserved, pickled etc) was swapped for trade goods. Rum we know about. But during the French/ Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815) Europe was closed to trade by French (Continental System) and Brit blockades etc. Indian & Far Eastern trade goods were “dumped” throughout Asian ports - the War ruined China’s porcelain trade - and bought “dirt cheap” by mariners to trade for food - hence the lady’s fury!
I couldn’t work out why Howard was pushing OzHistory - the antithesis of what he was trying to create during the Culture Wars - until I realised it would be His & his Culture Warrior’s sanitised version.
Mercurious @ #22: When analysing OzLit, I believe one needs to do some good, documentary (and non-analytical, especially “not analysed within any critical framework” - & I mean “critical” in its traditional meaning, before it was colonised by “Critical: the framework”) reading on “The Bulletin’s” Red Page, its editorial intention and policy, and the level of censorship exhibited.
What Vance Palmer called The Legend of the Nineties was, to a very great extent, a very deliberation creation of “The Bulletin”, with the deliberate intention of creating a distinctive national heroic character. At the time, WG Spence’s AMA, then AWU captured public imagination as the Depression of the late 1880s & beginnings of the Federation Drought gripped the Outback with iron hands. The failed Jondaryan Shearers Strike, its union’s telegram to Barcaldine, Gathering under the Tree of Knowledge, Bank closures & foreclosures, waterfront & ships’ crew strikes, strike-breaking property owners were all part of The Legend (& fodder for Bulletin Journos & Cartoonists, and The Red Page’s poets and story tellers). Remember also that this literary blossoming was matched by a very similar one in Painting (Roberts, Streeton, McCubbin etc). Running simultaneously were the meetings/ conventions forging a Federation of Australian states. They were all very aware of being “The Nation Builders” - there’s a George Essex Evans poem called that (this is from memory; we all learned it at primary school):
When the land that lies like a giant asleep, shall wake to the victory won.
And the hearts of the nation builders will know that their work is done.
Analysing this, one has to be aware that Oz in the 90s created an international narrative / discourse, rather than “was part of”. There is a very interesting critique (”pæan” is closer) by Lenin on Australian political & workers rights, and his hope to create something similar in Russia (despite Marx’s scepticism about R) It used to be in main UQ library.
In the early 1880s, however, “The Bulletin’s” bushmanwas as unsalubrious as he would, a few years later, become heroic.
Early (white) Australian literature is quite different from that created by the “Red Page”. Like some of the art, literature often reflected The Noble Savage concept. The heroic roles of Jacky-Jacky in Kennedy’s expedition and other Aborigines in those of (eg) Sturt, Burke & Wills etc create a different & much more appreciative impression of Indigenous Australians than those of the “White Man’s Burden” ethos of the post-Gold Rush Era (”King plates” awarded with such flair to brave / noble aborigines were as big a deal as top military awards). While I do acknowledge & deplore massacres, waterhole & flour poisoning; I’m also aware that, to consider these disgraces endemic, is to malign many very decent men & women. It can also be established that, despite dispossession, indigenous Australians fared better, and were more valued, in the first century of white settlement than in the second.
Art & lit also reflect a few other concepts/ realities: RC/CofE (non-Calvinist) attitudes tend to be quite different from and much more tolerant than those of less liberal (esp Calvinist) Sects; pre-1850 remnants of the Revolutionary/ Chartist/ Liberal period different from the less tolerant “Imperial” Victorian Era. Pioneering “old colonialist” families depended on aboriginal help (my grandmothers’ families told stories of their respect for, relationship with, reliance on aborigines when the men took the woolclip to port (away for months), leaving women and children behind; or those who looked after the children (because most pioneering women shared men’s work), and those who tirelessly tracked lost children and adults. Only when stations grew much bigger (& selector plots much smaller) and indigenous people no longer had key roles, did attitudes change for the worse - as did attitudes to women when wars were over & they were no longer needed to “do a man’s job”. Need” and “respect” are all too often interependent.
I get as annoyed by post-Marxist / post-modernist critiques, which tend to slap pejorative terms like “Grand Narratives” on what were highly complex issues, as I do with most paradigms (inc. Romantic, Marxist, structural-functionalist etc & so on). Arguing within a particular framework implies an ability to select/ twist “facts” to fit in - or alternatively to attack it in order to support a different one. In all too many cases (and all too frequently in very turgid prose) this reduction simplifies what is, when one actually studies documentation (including diaries and letters) with as paradigm-free a mind as possible, great complexity and various differing attitudes, behaviours, approaches; robbing people, actions and events of their rich & complex social, social, political etc context to fit them into specific schema.
I won’t repeat what I said on an earlier thread re studying history at UK when Thomas Kuhn’s book hit campus; but I’d like to reiterate that ALL “paradigms” are “grand narratives” - NeoMarxist / Frankfurt School, post-modernist, deconstructionist .. whatever; mere analytical frameworks / puzzle solutions, not “truth” and certainly not unbiased.
I hope that “Sorry Day” in February did “draw a line” under the past, and that Culture Wars were over - and that includes “Black-armband history: for & against.”
Speaking of “looking the other way” & a history of forgetting a Nation or twelves bad memories:
[link]
(How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power. Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today’s president)
These Busheviks are pretty good at stirring up hornet nests & making moolah out of the consequences.
Bush: “CONSTRUCTING WARS…who me?…i’m FREEDOMS LAST CHANCE”…”What me worry?”
As I understand it nationalism (in its original sense) rose in France and England as a result of the Hundred Years War where the conflict of the Houses Plantagenet and Valois over territory in France ran against the linguistic and other cultural differences between the ‘French’ and the ‘English’. People began to get a general sense of national identity seperate from vassalage allegiance. Contrawise in places like Italy, the German states, Bohemia etc where the folk culture and the political system were variant national identity was slow to develop.
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Of course it also helps that England and France were the cradle of the modern world, where the techniques of the modern state: standardization, regulation, public education helped to produce these imagined communities. Before this such phenomena as ‘the French language’ would be experienced as a spectra of dialects ranging from Italian sounding French in the south to Teutonic French in the north. As in England the range still exists but because of the aformentioned standardization and of course broadasting there is a ’standardized’ lingo.
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Australia being born in the modern era has much less linguistic diversity than European nations - three dialects essentially. Hence much easier for the soldiers on Anzac Cove to regonize each other as compatriots whether they were from Perth, Dubbo or Adelaide.
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In a globalized world where one can imagine global;ly orinetated education, entertainment and the relatively free movement of labour will national identity continue to mean that much?
Sublime Cowgirl [4]:
Thank you very much for that link to the Anabaptists and Mennonites Encyclopaedia [GAMEO] where I found a refreshingly factual and unlurid account of the “New Jerusalem” in Muenster [link] Quite a change from the usual “victors’ history” where both Catholics and Lutherans, though mortal enemies during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, told much the same story about what happened in Muenster …. and a stark lesson in the pitfalls of historiography as well.
Everyone:
That article on the GAMEO site also showed it is not only national and ethnic identity that is not necessarily set in cement - but that religious identity too may not necessarily be as rigid as is sometimes supposed, despite the fervour with which those religious beliefs are expressed.
Actually, some of the shifts in language within England are interesting - the “Thames Valley” accent, Tony Blair adopting a glottal stop, etc. Boris Johnson sounds a lot posher than “Dave” Cameron now, but even Her Maj sounds far less nasal than once upon a time.
I’m not sure about your “three dialects” reference, Adrien. It’s more accent than dialect in Australia - dialect normally implies syntactical, lexical and grammatical variation. It’s less complex than in England where accent is a marker of class as well as region, though there’s a bit of that in that the “broader” Aussie accent is also a regional or at least non-urban one.
Perhaps you could elucidate?
I’m not sure that’s quite right, Mercurius. Terra Australis had been around for a long time. In some ways, geography and map making are also political technologies in the same way as history. The act of naming/circumscribing/inscribing is the first step to the act of taking possession.
Precisely the point Brooks was making, Kim. And we don’t call it Terra Australis, we call it what Matthew Flinders first suggested was a worthy name - Australia. The act of circumnavigation gave Flinders a very particular claim to labeling/possession in the mindset of the colonialists.
I think we’re in furious agreement here.
Kim [29]Quote
Quite right Kim - and the same goes for most of the English spoken in North America [excluding the Caribbean].
Lefty E [16 & 19]:
Surely you’re not thinking of going further and suggesting that we forget all about the 26th January, 1788, are you? Leaving aside all the political opportunism, all the “black armband”, all the justification for stealing land, all the hypocritical glorification of a system more brutal than that of the Russian Tsars, all the genuine feelings of pride and patriotism and, of course, all the excuses to have another summer holiday …. it is still a day that marks the first enduring contact between two peoples of different race and of different cultures …. and, like it or not, it marks the inauspicious start of the painfully gradual coming together of those two peoples [and NO!, I don’t mean old-fashioned assimilation either - so keep your shirt on].
Sorry, Mercurius, it was late at night!
Yeah sorry Kim, you’re quite right we don’t have dialects here. There a bit stronger than accents but quite a bit less than dialects. The notion comes (I think) from The History of English which idetified three logos in Australia: Broad, General and International.
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The broad Strine is the Dave Hughes types lingo, the general is the ordinary suburbanite stuff and the international is pretty obvious. From my experience I reckon there probably are other more regional accents (Gippsland for example). And yes the authors of the aforementioned book (or wherever I actually got it from) do note that, unlike England, ‘Strine accents do not necessarilly denote socioeconomic status and in fact all three lingos may appear within the same family.
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I do believe however that this changing. There’s a sort of specifically urban and yet very ‘coarse’ lingo that is definitely associated with low levels of education etc apparent in major Australian cities. A signifier of the sadly ending days of ‘classless’ Australia.
So far as I can work out these are my impressions re the Aussie accent. North Queenslanders speak more slowly than the rest of us. Tasmanians speak very quickly. Victorians take care to be well spoken.People in New England, NSW, end their sentences with ‘eh?’ relatively frequently. Catholics of Irish ancestry living in Sydney say “Hay?” ot ‘Hay!’
All the above is entirely impressionistic. Apart from the New England ‘eh’, none of it necessarily applies to Aboriginal Australian.
You get that in Queensland too Paul! But none of that really relates to accent as such.