The Zero Room

What follows is the result of one of those horrible "reflective" assignments; in this case, a compulsory blogging exercise that is supposed to track one's learning process through the academic term, but in reality is hastily composed in the couple of days before it's due. Even as submitted, it doesn't flow; there's no introduction or conclusion; and here I've excised any of my personal views about how the unit was delivered (shoddily, with no consideration of the stress imposed on the academic staff, as is the case with anything Southern Cross University does), so it's a disjointed series of points rather than a coherent argument. Enjoy.

Cultural awareness

I have lived my entire life in Australia, leaving only briefly for a couple of holidays in Thailand. On my first visit to Thailand, though I failed to make a serious attempt to learn the language, I did at least phonetically memorise a few phrases, and spent some time reading guidebooks in preparation. I was greatly pleased to find that Thai people generally consider going out in public shirtless to be barbaric, a sentiment I have long shared. And I was intrigued to learn that the Thai people consider feet to be the lowest, least clean, part of the body, and that therefore pointing your feet at somebody is gravely offensive. Sitting with one's feet pointing towards any representation of the Buddha is regarded the most rude behaviour possible.

Of course, in tourist villages like Patong, it is common to see groups of Australians strolling through the streets wearing nothing but bathing briefs. On a tour of Wat Chalong in Phuket, while most of the visitors dutifully sat cross-legged in the pagoda, I watched a couple of German women sitting with their legs outstretched, the soles of their bare feet directed straight at the statue before them. A security guard aproached them and gently tapped their feet with a rolled newspaper. The women were mystified by this gesture. I could not believe that somebody would spend a considerable amount of money on an overseas holiday without reading at least the first few pages of a guidebook or brochure on the country they were visiting. Of course, on boarding the plane home, it did not occur to me that I was on my way to a country for which I had never made the equivalent effort.

I am arguably among the last generation born in Australia to have a fairly direct and uncomplicated relationship to England as “home”. Through childhood, the environment of my bushland suburb on the outskirts of Sydney seemed less real that that of a small country on the other side of the world where I had never been. I knew perfectly well that proper trees have broad branches and sit among rolling green hills and hedgerows. The trees actually around me were of a far inferior sort; drab and wilting, they seemed to be perpetually near death, and about to collapse into the harsh and prickly undergrowth. My mother was, and remains, fond of what is called “Australiana”. Australiana is of course a misnomer for a collection of European archetypes garlanded by Australian bush motifs. Fairies, pixies and goblins are awkwardly transposed to Antipodean flora and fauna, while Norman Lindsay populates his canvasses and his gardens with figures from Greek antiquity. In this way anglo-Australia in the 20th century desperately sought to find the familiar in the foreign.

One does not wish to make light of very real and grievous power differentials between different ethno-ancestral groups, however I think it can be argued that as continual displacement (physical and cultural) is the essence of modernity, so modernity makes refugees of us all. Through the 19th century, as the indigenous population of Australia was forced from their land to a perilous marginal existence as - at best - livestock, and - at worst - an agricultural pest, so were the farmers of pre-industrial England forced from what had traditionally been common land into the squalid slums and workhouses of the industrial revolution.

In my own trivial example, the archetype of home in England no longer exists, if it ever did. Once, like Shaw's Henry Higgins, I could boast of the ability to name an Englishman's postcode by their accent, but now a nondescript home counties accent, with a hint of Jamaica via Brixton among many other influences, blankets almost the whole country, and London itself is increasingly home to the ultra-rich or the destitute, and very few in-between. Like many an expatriate, I suspect that if I were to actually go "home", I would not recognise it.

I came to maturity to find the Australian natural environment alien, suburbia barren, and the shopping mall whirl of incomprehensible colour, noise, and movement, positively distressing. By catching the train into the city, I could at least temporarily immerse myself in an environment rich with cultural significance. The railway station, the pub, the newsagent, doors opening directly onto paved footpaths, greenery kept in it's place, and signs both explicit and implicit which I knew how to read, all comforted me. Of course members of my own family feel quite differently about these different enviroments. A girlfriend once pointed out that while I may find an hour or two reading a book in an inner-city pub quite congenial, a woman on her own in the same place might feel considerably less comfortable.

So, to return at last to the topic, if we all differ in how comfortable we feel in different situations due to ethno-ancestral history, culture, gender, personal preference, and so on, what are our obligations to each other? Firstly, we should be aware that such differences exist. Until quite late in life I was shamefully oblivious to even this elementary fact. Secondly, we should be aware of what these differences are, at least for most of the people we are likely to meet on any given day. I know a reasonable amount about the likely background of a Palestinian living in western Sydney, but next to nothing about the culture of a Gumbaynggirr man or woman in Coffs Harbour. As I currently live in Coffs Harbour, not western Sydney, this is a problem. Thirdly, we must be aware of power disparities in society, in order to set them aside in our own dealings with people. However much I like to consider myself an iconoclast and gadfly, I am still going to look like a member of the hegemonic culture to those who don't know me. Likewise, others will be all too aware of the signifiers of their own marginalised status. Finally, we must frame our communications to fit what we know, or can at least reasonably infer, about the cultural background of the people to whom we are attempting to communicate.

To sum up in more prosaic terms: For goodness sake, at least read the first few pages of the guidebook.

Indigenous worldviews

Bird Rose characterises the indigenous worldview as a homeostatic kind of holism. a teleological worldview that produces a body of natural law from everyday experience of interaction with the environment. That is, when an individual goes against natural law, they risk not only censure from their community, but retaliation from the world as a whole as a consequence of being put out of order.

When it comes to the Western tradition, Cajete rightly bemoans the fact that "many people today have grown up with the Western culturally conditioned notion that only one science and one philosophy exist." This may be true of the popular misunderstanding of science, but is not an opinion generally held among actual scientists. "The idea," Cajete writes, "that science and art are two sides of the same coin is what Indigenous people have always tried to convey, and this is also in the margin of Western philosophical thinking". Often it's not so much in the margin. Noam Chomsky, the undisputed founder of modern linguistics, and arguably of the modern cognitive sciences as a whole, suggests that "It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology".

To actual scientists, Bird Rose's condemnation, following Said, of "monocentrism" is hardly contentious (a few loud and obnoxious exceptions notwithstanding). As McCumber observes "When we look at it, ‘the West’ seems really to be an immense collection of diverse historical phenomena, ideas, and approaches to life, many of which contradict one another." The reduction of chemistry to physics is such a commonly cited example of reconciliation of two branches of the sciences precisely because of the rarity of such an ontological unification. Moreover, attempts at the reduction of biology to chemistry remain highly contentious, and disputed by mainstream philosphers such as Mary Midgely.

During a lecture, Dr. Norm Sheehan made the following observation:

"If you read into things around the not-so-popular-sciences, you'll find that the western science that people talk about no longer exists. Science has gone a long way past determinism and materialism."

Indeed it's debatable whether we can speak of "western" science at all, since the classical foundation of this body of knowledge vanished from Europe, as the Europeans descended into barbarism and superstition in late antiquity, and was preserved and enlarged by scholars in the Islamic world, whose work in turn was informed by knowledge originating still further eastward. If I had the power to reframe contemporary discourse, I think I would much rather we made a distinction between holistic and heterogeneous world-views rather than use the terms "indigenous" and "western", which may implicitly perpetuate misleading racial associations.

The holistic/heterogeneous distinction is powerfully illustrated by the image, in for example the Gapuwiyak's women with clever hands video, of artifacts normally used in - one might say woven into - the context of day-to-day practice, hanging context-free on the stark white walls of a gallery. On the one hand one is inclined to feel that the colonising frame of "art" is not the appropriate setting for a proper appreciation of this work; on the other, one can also recognise that to people dispossed and disempowered, any route to wider public recognition and self-esteem may be legitimate. Still, having been raised in an aesthetic milieu containing faux-Papunya-style tea towels and little ceramic spear carriers keeping watch over suburban front lawns, I feel compelled to wonder about the depth of appreciation felt by the collectors of indigenous works.

It occurs to me that perhaps the relevant question isn't so much why indigenous world-views tend to be holistic, but why other cultures are not holistic. A plausible hypothesis might be that in "melting pot" geographic regions such as Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East the compartmentalisation of culture could be a necessary evil in order to occasionaly shelve those components that might cause conflict with one's neighbours. (Take for example the adage that one should never discuss politics or religion in polite company.) However I have not been able to find any work to support this hypothesis in the academic literature.

To return again to the history of my own culture, I don't think it is too much of a stretch to see parallels between the colonial crimes committed against indigenous Australians, and those committed against Celtic nations in Europe. Common to these is a programme of ethnic cleansing that emphasises eradication of the ethnicity (including languages and cultural practices) over extermination of the people (though that certainly happened as well). This impulse continues into the present day with declarations that there is only "one Australia".

Consideration of the causes of Indigenous suffering also brings to mind the "resource curse" paradox. This is the observation that countries with abundant natural resources seem often to perform much more poorly, by various economic and other measures, than countries which appear, prima facie, to be less fulsomely endowed. For a long time I thought that Australia was an exception to this rule. However, if one considers the descendants of pre-colonial Australia as the population subject to the putative curse, one can hardly sustain the claim of such an exception; indeed in this light Australia becomes a particularly extreme example of the resource curse. I was disappointed to find the American economist Joseph Stiglitz, for whom I have tremendous respect if not always complete agreement, recently citing Australia as a resource curse exception. As he did so while in the country promoting his work on economic inequality, this seems quite an egregious blind spot.