Navigating cultural intimacy in Tasmanian Aboriginal public culture

Abstract

This article examines the utility of, and embarrassment around, strategic essentialism in Tasmanian Aboriginal public culture. My argument is informed by extensive participant observation in community-led education programs. Australia’s Tasmanian Aboriginal community has historically been defined by outsiders in terms of racial and cultural deficiencies. These judgments preceded and followed their supposed 1876 extinction. These education programs, catering primarily to elementary school students, idealized Tasmanian Aboriginal culture by emphasizing continuity and connection into deep antiquity. They also included moments in which private anxieties about essentialism, deficiency, and what I term their taxonomical fuzziness are made public. The delicate interplay between essentialism and private feelings about loss, appearance, and cultural inferiority is best understood in relation to Herzfeld’s “cultural intimacy.” I argue that approaching public culture through this concept forces researchers to engage with the pervasive fluency of stereotypes through which Native and Indigenous voices regularly must speak in order to be heard.

Keywords

Aboriginality Australia cultural intimacy cultural politics indigeneity performance Tasmania

This article examines the utility of, and embarrassment around, pervasive essentialism in Tasmanian Aboriginal public culture. My argument is informed by extensive participant observation in community-led education programs at Hobart’s Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 2010–2011. These programs presented an idealized version of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, stressing continuity and connection into deep history (Shryock and Smail, 2011). They also directly and indirectly addressed personal and communal concerns regarding failure to embody public stereotypes of “real” Aboriginal people in the Australian context. As a whole, programs like these represent a tool available to minority populations, one with both positive and negative potentialities in the arena of cultural politics.

Historically imagined and classified as “Paleolithic Man” by prominent figures like Charles Darwin (2004 [1879]) and Edward Burnett Tylor (1894, 1899), Australia’s Tasmanian Aboriginal people were conceptualized as the “rudest” culture ever documented (cf. Balfour, 1925; Jones, 1977). These judgments both followed and preceded their perceived 1876 extinction (Plomley, 1977; Ryan, 1996; Taylor, 2012, 2016, 2017). My research has engaged with how the Tasmanian Aboriginal people have revived many elements of their seemingly “lost” culture, including material culture production (things like baskets, canoes, and kelp water carriers) and language. Elsewhere (Berk, 2015, 2017), I have established how this demonstrable culture over which they have collective ownership (Handler, 1988, 1991) compensates for stereotypical markers of Aboriginality, like phenotypic appearance, which are very likely irretrievable. Today, practices like shell-stringing and canoe-making serve as determinative elements of communal bonds in lieu of strong, and immediate, biological ties.

In this article, I approach my research from an alternative but complementary angle. Whereas the Tasmanian Aboriginal community has labored to enact (Mol, 2002) compensatory links to the past, they are nonetheless regularly forced to engage with broader stereotypes of Aboriginality (and Indigeneity more generally) that even their tribal ancestors figuratively failed to embody. Contemporary Indigenous cultural politics engages with, and is informed by, primitivist ideologies of purity and authenticity at both global and national scales, with theorists like Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991) arguing that the very idea of the West is predicated on a juxtaposition with a seemingly external Other. Australian Aboriginal groups operate in relation to what Gillian Cowlishaw (2011: 172) calls the mythopoeia of Australian Aboriginality that exists in urban Australian contexts, what “the nation, in public discourse, assumes to be ‘Aboriginal culture’” (see also Cowlishaw, 2010).¹ Emblematic components of this mythopoeia, like didgeridoos, boomerangs, and more generally speaking Western or Central Desert cultures, were never present in the southern and more temperate Tasmanian context. Furthermore, contemporary Tasmanian Aboriginal people neither live like nor look like their tribal ancestors. This is not unusual in today’s increasingly globalized world. What is unique about the Tasmanian context is the sheer strength of the discursive rupture between the past and the present, epitomized by a century of discursive extinction in scientific, public, and popular spheres.

The Tasmanian Aboriginal people have long embodied what I call a taxonomical fuzziness within Aboriginal Australia. There is an extensive history of experts (natural historians, professionally trained and amateur anthropologists, and so forth) classifying their relationship to mainland groups in divergent ways, with noted figures historically classifying them as racially distinct. Thomas Henry Huxley (1870), for example, argued that they were of negrito “stock,” having reached Tasmania by sea vessel after bypassing mainland Australia entirely.² Even when connections to mainland groups are acknowledged, they remain a discursive subset (as Tasmanian or Tasmanian Aboriginal) of Australian Aboriginality. This is directly and/or indirectly tied to geographic separation following the end of the last Ice Age. This geographic separation played a formative role in the development of distinct material cultural practices, like kelp water carriers, within this national context.

Pride in cultural uniqueness frequently conflicts with the productive employment of broader stereotypes, stereotypes that have traction and currency in public displays of culture. During my research I frequently attended protest rallies, many of which were organized by the prominent Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC). It was relatively common during these public events for community members to play didgeridoos in front of an audience of observers. Community members often commented that playing didgeridoos in this fashion was inappropriate and even disrespectful to their own culture, as if saying that what was “theirs” was insufficient or deficient. These criticisms, however, were notably the minority.

Comments like these, commonly expressed in private, embody what Michael Herzfeld (2016 [1997]) calls cultural intimacy. Herzfeld’s innovative concept is a valuable lens through which to approach the delicate interplay between essentialism and “home truths” about loss, phenotypic appearance, and feelings of cultural inferiority in public representations of culture. Cultural intimacy, in the invaluable and oft-cited passage, is “the recognition of those aspects of an officially shared identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality. Cultural intimacy, though associated with secrecy and embarrassment, may erupt in public life and collective self-representation” (Herzfeld, 2016 [1997]: 7). Like Tasmanian Aboriginal people performing Aboriginality by playing didgeridoos at public events, these “are the self-stereotypes that insiders express ostensibly at their own collective expense” (Herzfeld, 2016 [1997]: 7). In my experience, Tasmanian Aboriginal activists and educators are very aware of the discursive work of elision enacted by common rhetoric about race, cultural knowledge, and continuity. According to Herzfeld (2016 [1997]: 11), such embarrassment and rueful self-recognition “are the key markers of what cultural intimacy is all about. They are not solely personal feelings, but describe the collective representation of intimacy.” Whereas Herzfeld originally emphasized cultural intimacy’s ties to the nation-state, further research (by both Herzfeld and others) has applied his insights to the domain of public culture.³ Shryock (2004c: 10) adeptly notes how Herzfeld’s concept of cultural intimacy “internalizes and renders essential the presence of an outside observer whose disapproval matters, whose judgments can be predicted, and (most importantly of all) whose opinion is vital in determining what value ‘common sociality’ can have.” How, for example, have Tasmanian Aboriginal “culture workers” conceptualized, represented, and essentialized themselves for new and changing outside others, whose opinions are “imagined and imagined to matter” (Shryock, 2004c: 11)? How is this part of a broader global shift in which culture is “increasingly public, yet much of it is now off limits” (Shryock, 2004c: 10)?

This article is divided into three sections. The first section addresses cultural performance as heritage. An overview of the core education program foregrounds the centrality of a counter-narrative of continuity and connection. The second section focuses on instructive moments where the programs’ underlying messages collided with common ideologies of difference and public perceptions of Aboriginality. It is during these moments that many private anxieties about strategic essentialism and fears of being evaluated as deficient or inauthentic are made public. The third section challenges anthropologists to engage with the very real stakes of public culture. This entails taking the larger political and social contexts in which essentialism is found seriously. It further involves acknowledging the simultaneously restrictive and emancipatory nature of public culture.

Culture work, master signifiers, and value-added heritage

Every Tasmanian citizen up to a certain age grew up being told the Tasmanian Aboriginal people don’t exist. In many cases, they were taught that their white ancestors were responsible. I argue that every public display of Tasmanian Aboriginality is tacitly or overtly positioned in opposition to this pervasive extinction narrative. One direct strategy to overcome such a prevalent narrative is to employ a counter-narrative espousing continuity and connection. In my estimation, this was one of the core messages of the education programs with which I assisted during 2010–2011 ethnographic fieldwork. These community-led programs catering to predominantly elementary and middle-school-aged students were held at Hobart’s Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG). I assisted with 43 total sessions as part of a larger research project into materiality, cultural politics, and revitalization. The two programs in which I participated took their names from palawa kani, the recently constructed Tasmanian Aboriginal language (see Berk, 2017). The first, ballawinne, translates into “red ochre” and was organized around its importance to Aboriginal people. The second, emita melaythenner, roughly translates to “coast country” and focused on stone tools and shell-stringing. Roughly three-quarters of the programs I worked were ballawinne (31/43) and it receives the majority of attention. The programs typically ran 1 day per week during the school year, with teachers and volunteers bringing their classes to TMAG for morning and afternoon sessions.⁴ While most programs were for Catholic schools, there were also sessions for public, home-, and long-distance education groups. 2010 was the second year this organization had run education programs like these at the museum. Alongside things like exhibitions, public workshops, and demonstrations, they were part of a relatively recent wave of public displays of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture. As I’ve argued elsewhere (Berk, 2014, 2015, 2017), this trend speaks to how various actors were taking control over how their shared culture was depicted without always receiving formal approval from semi-centralized community leadership and dominant familial factions. To put the programs in historical context, one Tasmanian Aboriginal person told me “ten years ago they would have had their wrists slapped” (personal communication).

As “hearts and minds” work, these programs represent an idealized depiction of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, albeit one acknowledging that many cultural elements remain in process (of return, revitalization, rearticulation) or are definitively lost. In sum, these programs strived to provide young children and teenagers with a counter-narrative directly challenging extinction. In the process, however, they perhaps reified certain cultural stereotypes of themselves or Aboriginality more generally. Further complicating matters was that many of the schools, the Catholic ones in particular, included many students from Tasmanian Aboriginal families.

Both programs were (eventually, and after a period of trial and error) well-regimented with respect to time management and personal responsibilities. The programs were led by a community organization and utilized the museum’s education space. The personnel varied. A rotating cast of Tasmanian Aboriginal presenters commonly included at least one highly respected female elder alongside a younger (but also highly respected) woman. They were joined by a couple male members of the younger generation. The Aboriginal Culture Liaison for Catholic Schools was present for those schools (but not the public ones). In addition to the Aboriginal presenters, the Liaison, and myself was an employee from the museum’s education department. Over time we all settled into a good interpersonal rhythm, and it was important for me (as the outside white, male, American anthropologist) to participate in (while observing) the organization and labor of these programs.

A brief overview of the ballawinne program provides insight into its internal mechanics and practicalities.⁵ After the school groups entered TMAG’s Commissariat Building the students were instructed to sit on the floor facing a projector screen. Every session of each program began with what became known as “the talk.” “The talk” consisted of a digital presentation introducing the particular cultural topics and the value they have for Tasmanian Aboriginal people and often featured the most instructive ethnographic insight. As such, it is the focus of the following section. Interactive and “hands-on” activities followed these introductory comments. Each session was typically 2 hours in duration.

The ballawinne program’s central points were relatively consistent from the beginning.⁶ In general, it focused on the importance of red ochre, or ballawinne, in Tasmanian Aboriginal culture. “The talk” emphasized its use as ground powder and more emblematically as paint. The latter was created, as the presenters frequently said, by mixing fine powder with water, animal blood or animal fat, and spit. Thomas Bock’s and Benjamin Dutterau’s 1830s/1840s portraits of Tasmanian Aboriginal people and Robert Dowling’s Group of Natives of Tasmania depict how red ochre paint was used as bodily adornment, most prominently in men’s hair.⁷ Following “the talk” the program shifted to ningina tunapri, the museum’s Tasmanian Aboriginal exhibit.⁸ The students were instructed to use their “ballawinne eyes” to point out and enumerate the number of instances of red ochre in the exhibit. Two or three small woven baskets, filled with ballawinne, were preemptively hidden for the students to find. The students raced around the space, routinely being told to move more slowly and carefully. Their reported number of ballawinne sightings ranged from believable (10–15) to incredulous (some reported 80 or higher).

After returning to the Commissariat the students were separated by gender (or, for same-gender schools, into two groups of equal size) and sat at two tables to experience grinding ochre. In front of each student was a yellow piece of paper with (top and base) grinding stones and pieces of ochre. Arranging this setup was one of my (shared) tasks prior to each session. The program staff would go around and help grind the student’s ochre into a fine powder. Next was a short DVD program about “Ballawinne (Red Ochre),” which the students watched on a movable television/DVD. The short 7-minute program, commissioned in 1999 as part of Aboriginal Nations Australia’s The Dreaming series, consists of a grandfather telling his granddaughter the region’s history through the “ballawinne dreaming.”⁹ Both characters notably have fair skin and green eyes, and the ancestral Aboriginal figures are depicted in a hyper-stylized manner. Noted community elder and writer Jim Everett both voiced the grandfather and was featured in a short explanatory video. This video had both practical and pedagogical value. Not only did the students enjoy it, it kept them occupied while the program team quickly and (increasingly) efficiently gathered all the ground ochre for two related activities. Following the video, the students were divided along gendered lines (or again, by number in the case of single-gender schools), with one group coloring their hair using ballawinne and the other using yellow ochre paint to put their hand prints or hand stencils on a makeshift cave wall comprising dark construction paper. There was always a divergence of enthusiasm for the former, with some students enjoying having their hair and/or face painted more than others.

The anthropological value of education programs with respect to cultural intimacy and public culture gains added clarity in relation to Andrew Shryock’s concept of “culture work” and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s insights into heritage and performance. Shryock’s (2004a) work in post-9/11 Arab Detroit engages with “specific kinds of representational effort[s]” in which “Arab Detroit must conform to an elaborate set of assumptions about identity that are shared among persons both external and internal to ‘the community’” in order to “materialize at all” (p. 282). Furthermore, the “target of “culture work” is almost always an established institution that solicits and participates willingly in this activity, from which it hopes to derive tangible rewards: a more flexible and sensitive workforce, improved community relations, or a better hold on ethnic niche markets” (Shryock, 2004a: 283). Anthropologists have provided insights into the operations of culture work and self-representation for viewing publics at different scales and varying locales (cf. Morphy, 2006; Myers, 1994; Shannon, 2014). The “culture work” framing device helps clarify the mechanics of public culture which, according to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, represent “value-added” heritage. This conceptual phrase recognizes that the very act of presentation

produces something new. Its instruments are a key to this process. Dance teams, heritage performers, craft cooperatives, cultural centers, art festivals, museums, exhibitions, recordings, archives, indigenous media, and cultural curricula are not only evidence of heritage, its continuity, and its vitality in the present. There are also instruments for adding value to the cultural forms they perform, teach, exhibit, circulate, and market. (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1995: 373–374)

One question that emerges is what, exactly, is being added in cultural performances and displays? I argue that certain symbols and icons are promulgated and perpetuated through the performance of self. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998: 17) notes how it is one thing

when ethnography is inscribed in books or displayed behind glass, at a remove in space, time, and language from the site described. It is quite another when people are themselves the medium of ethnographic representation, when they perform themselves, whether at home to tourists or at world’s fairs, homelands entertainments, or folklife festivals—when they becoming living signs of themselves.

Through acts of culture work like the education programs described herein, Tasmanian Aboriginal community members come to embody signifiers of a larger Aboriginal culture. As “living signs of themselves,” they engage with particular (often imagined) expectations of difference for outside observers. Visibility and being observed matters, and these acts carry potential risks and rewards.

What, specifically, are these “living signs of themselves” signifying to outside observers for validation or dismissal? Perhaps, like the Maasai performing at Mayers Ranch near Nairobi, Kenya, they will come to stand in for all Tasmanian Aboriginal people, embodying the taxonomical fuzziness relative to unmarked Australian Aboriginality.¹⁰ Further insight is provided by Gillian Cowlishaw’s (2012) reflections upon analogous school programs in Western Sydney. At a primary school in that area there is a “Koori (Aboriginal room, festooned with iconic cultural symbols, dominated by children’s paintings of animals and birds decorated with dots and lines. This is where about a dozen Aboriginal children ‘learn their culture’ during Koori Hour each day from 2 to 3 p.m.” (Cowlishaw, 2012: 400). Whereas Cowlishaw’s reflections (and reflexivity) toward such programs will be returned to shortly, her most valuable insight for now relates to Eric Michaels’ (1994) seemingly timeless question regarding “Aboriginal content,” namely “who’s got it—who needs it?” (pp. 21–48). Cowlishaw (2012: 405) suggests that “Aboriginal Culture”

in semiotic terms . . . has become a “master signifier” beneath which totems, dreaming stories, clans, Aboriginal dancing and painting now gain meaning. What were once symbols within another order of meaning are now meaningful as subordinate to the signifier “Aboriginal Culture.” This master signifier is at work structuring an array of terms, images, and ideas, helping to form a stable symbolic order within Australia’s national ideological apparatus to refer to and encompass Indigenous people and their attributes. In the nation’s eyes, the totem is no longer a symbol with its own specific meanings, but simply points to the presence of Aboriginal Culture.

Ochre, shells, stone tools, hand prints and stencils, the Dreaming. All these cultural phenomena link up to larger national demands for Aboriginal content, emplacing presenters as signifiers of (sanitized) difference. This is the crux of what Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) calls the “cunning of recognition” in an Australian nation-state in which multiculturalism is purportedly encouraged and respected. While Cowlishaw (2012: 405) accurately notes that Australian Aboriginal people are “reinserting life into these signs, disturbing their passive position as sign, and reworking them as living symbols that register and proclaim the significance of their own histories and lives,” there are concrete limitations to these processes that are not unique to Tasmania. These challenges are foregrounded in the moments where nuanced engagements with complicated collective and individual histories collide with common ideologies and public perceptions of what, precisely, Aboriginality entails. It is at these moments of conflict between what Herzfeld calls pervasive essentialism and rueful self-recognition that cultural intimacy becomes manifest. Our next task is to unpack and engage with these moments.

Cultural intimacy on display

This section concentrates on instructive moments when the programs’ underlying messages of continuity and connection collided with widespread public ideologies of difference. These “mere anecdotes” (Herzfeld, 2016 [1997]: 29) are moments in which private home truths and anxieties about strategic essentialism were made public.¹¹ It is in these events that the “master signifier” of Aboriginality comes into conflict with the broader taxonomical fuzziness of Tasmania’s Indigenous peoples within the context of the Australian nation-state.

These moments also gesture toward Herzfeld’s notion of disemia, specifically “the formal or coded tension between official self-presentation and what goes on in the privacy of collective introspection. While the official aspect is a legitimate (and indeed necessary) object of ethnographic analysis, the intimacy it masks is . . . the subject of a deep sense of cultural and political vulnerability” (Herzfeld, 2016 [1997]: 19). These moments of leakage between idealized essentialism and frank honesty often relate to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community’s taxonomical fuzziness within “Aboriginal Australia” and underscores

their problematic status in a globalized system of cultural value. This forces us to examine questions of cultural ambivalence as issues, not of definition (mixed or hybrid versus “pure” cultures), but of the power to define the good, the beautiful, and the important, and to say what constitutes the center in relation to which other things are marginal or mixed. (Herzfeld, 2004: 322)

These programs have the power to define and represent Tasmanian Aboriginality to young Tasmanians and involve both risk and reward. Whereas legitimation is clearly a possible benefit, being evaluated as deficient or as “less than” within a globalized system of cultural value is a real risk, one with serious personal and communal consequences. In this section, I approach the risks and rewards of performance of self in public culture by focusing on how cultural intimacy manifested itself in and around “the talk.”

“The talk” set the stage for both programs and is where the counter-narrative of unbroken continuity and connection was enacted. It was also the space where disemia was most pronounced. As stated earlier, a member of the Aboriginal community, usually (but not exclusively) a respected elder, presented the talk. The ballawinne “talk” utilized drawings and paintings by people like Lesueur and Petit from the Baudin Expedition of 1800–1804 (Bonnemains et al., 1988; see also Bell and Hasinoff, 2015) alongside contemporary images of Aboriginal people. The importance, and utility, of red ochre was foregrounded in instructive ways. The presenter highlighted how ground red ochre, combined with substances like grease, had historically served as body covering for Tasmanian Aboriginal people. This critical point sought to defuse the stereotype of the “primitive” Tasmanian Aboriginal. When students asked about the naked figures in the historical images, the presenter stressed cultural ingenuity in responding, matter-of-factly, “because they didn’t need” clothes, further describing the employment of animal fat, grease, and ochre as a means to contain body heat. The presenter regularly asked the students whether Tasmanian Aboriginal people had used boomerangs. Some schools were more knowledgeable than others, with many knowing the correct answer (no). The lack of boomerangs was framed as a cultural (and ecological) adaptation to the extensive trees in precolonial Tasmania. There was always a slide showing an elder woman and her daughter collecting yellow ochre, with the presenter noting how collecting locations are privileged knowledge passed down within familial networks and usually along gendered lines. The presenter shifted temporalities in an attempt to flatten the differences between the present and the past, further emphasizing continuity and strength of community. There was no direct mention of, or engagement with, extinction.

Moments when the programs’ underlying messages collided with common ideologies of difference made public many private home truths and anxieties about strategic essentialism. For example, despite efforts to present tribal Tasmanian Aboriginal people as culturally savvy, students continually imagined them as primitive Others. During my first session one elder, a key figure in the community-led revitalization of material culture production like basketry and other fiber work (Berk, 2015), displayed a mannequin-head she had “Aboriginalized” by darkening its skin, covering its hair with red ochre, and accessorizing its neck with a kangaroo skin and a shell necklace. She asked this group of fifth- or sixth-grade students what they would like to name it. Multiple students immediately yelled out “Chaka,” a clear reference to the 2009 Land of the Lost film starring Will Ferrell.¹² The film, and the television series upon which it is based, feature a father and his children traveling through a time warp to a “primitive” world inhabited by dinosaurs and other (real or imagined) ancient creatures. One character, a chimp-like creature in both appearance and behavior and whom the creators openly imagined as the mythical and ill-informed “missing link” between chimp and human, was named Chaka. The elder, to their credit, diplomatically replied, “I’m not sure I’m so happy about that.” In other instances, the presenters themselves made such comparisons. During one program the presenter couldn’t remember the word for an Aboriginal club commonly referred to as a waddy, and queried students “what do cavemen use?” These acts of desired conflation of past and present often bumped up against the realities of loss following widespread dispossession and cultural destruction. For example, drawings of people with cicatrices (scarification) covering their chests led to presenter comments about how the community simply did not know their cultural or symbolic meaning, stating how “we have lost all that.”

Race and appearance were constant points of discussion, and perhaps best exemplified the delicate interplay between cultural intimacy, self-representation, and pervasive essentialism. As previously mentioned, the majority of the contemporary Tasmanian Aboriginal community does not look like their tribal ancestors. This was (perhaps unintentionally) foregrounded in the desired flattening of time as achieved through the juxtaposition of the aforementioned historical portraits and recent photographs. Phenotypic variability and variation are accepted facts, if not embraced ones, in today’s Tasmanian Aboriginal community. There were countless moments during my fieldwork where community elders would say things like “some of us have darker skin, like myself, and some of us have blonde hair and blue eyes. But we are all Tasmanian Aboriginals.” Nevertheless, race and appearance, more specifically their “failure” to embody the public image of “real Aboriginals” with dark skin, remains something the community is regularly forced to address. Elaborating upon my previous point, these topics usually arose when the slide presentation shifted from nineteenth-century portraits and sketches to recent photographs of Tasmanian Aboriginal people with their bodies adorned with ballawinne. One group of students was especially vocal, with a student commenting how “They don’t look Aboriginal.” The community elder giving “the talk” queried what they meant. In general, students were clearly responding to the fact that the skin tone of contemporary individuals wasn’t “dark.” This frequently involved explanatory discourses of “halves” and “parts.” These discourses likewise informed students’ interpretations of historical images, with one student saying that they looked “half Aboriginal and half human.” That the majority of this particular school group identified as Aboriginal makes this moment especially instructive in relation to the intimate workings of public culture. The community elder was exceptionally skilled at exploiting the pedagogical value of such moments, on one occasion telling the students, “The color of your skin doesn’t matter.” They then pointed to their chest, adding that, “It’s what’s in here, what you were born with, what you believe in” that matters. In response to further queries from students (a number of which identified as Aboriginal), the elder said, “What matters is what you identify as, what is true to you.”

Students regularly asked the presenters about their Aboriginality during the programs. Their answers were instructive. Answers to such questions (“How Aboriginal are you,” or the more telling, “what part Aboriginal are you?”) ranged from jokey (“Which part? Do you mean my knees?”) to metaphorical, with coffee being a commonly employed discursive trope.¹³ As the explanation goes, no matter how much milk (white) is added to coffee (black), it remains coffee. This public trope is interesting because it (perhaps) co-opts essentialist racial models by referencing an internal essence that is invisible (or “off-stage”) to outside observers. Within such logic this essence is insoluble and ultimately unaffected by outward, visible dilution. In this sense, Aboriginality is a feeling (of belonging and/or connection), with community ties and shared history taking precedence over stereotypical indicators like phenotype and (certain amounts of) blood.

This coffee metaphor perhaps betrays a deeper cultural intimacy circulating around racial legitimacy and, more simply, exhaustion with having to constantly address race. For example, in response to being told about this discursive strategy, Andrew Shryock chuckled and commented that if milk is continuously added to coffee in perpetuity it is no longer coffee (personal communication). The community is aware of this sentiment. During one of the sessions, one of the younger Aboriginal educators appeared nervous about giving “the talk” for one of the first times. They jokingly said that we could change shirts (with his bearing the logo and name of the Aboriginal organization leading the program) and that I, with my fair skin and freckles, could give the talk in their place. The inference regarding phenotype is clear. Such sentiments represent broader home truths and unease around strategic essentialism and rueful self-recognition.

The risks and rewards of public culture

Social expectations of normative and/or stereotypical Aboriginality can be framed as an outcome of neocolonial formations and structures. In many ways, Tasmanian Aboriginal people, and Indigenous communities more generally, perform difference (for outside observers whose opinion matters) in exchange for tenuous recognition and validation from state agencies and publics. Acceptable forms of difference regularly include unrealistic standards and expectations. Fights for recognition in Aboriginal Tasmania are nothing new. As one prominent elder told me in 2011, “I’ve spent my entire life defending who I am.” During one of many invaluable conversations with a Tasmanian Aboriginal culture worker, I mentioned that a reviewer at a major granting agency in the United States had expressed surprise at my project, remarking that they “had always been told [the Tasmanian Aboriginals] was an extinct people.” My friend’s eyes lit up. “So you understand how we feel!” they said.

Anecdotes like these reflect important analytical and contextual nodes around which contemporary Tasmanian Aboriginality takes shape. The past is often burdensome, and this is certainly true for the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. The public performance of culture described herein has very real risks and anxieties around, which manifest themselves in cultural intimacy around race, knowledge, and continuity. With these risks in mind, why do these programs? Who, ultimately, are they for? As I argue, these types of public performances, while hegemonic and restrictive in nature, can nonetheless serve as a means for emancipation and tangible improvements for both the individual and the group.

Public culture can be fruitfully theorized at scales both larger and smaller than the nation-state. As James Clifford (2013) notes, “native cultural traditions and social movements do not exist in isolation, however much they may at times assert their sovereignty and independence. Like other identity-based social movements they are enmeshed in powerful national and transnational regimes of coercion and opportunity” (p. 27). Engaging with these processes through such lenses helps clarify the double-bind of cultural performance. Tim Ingold (2000) adds, “To observe that people face a genuine dilemma in articulating their aspirations within the hegemonic discourse of their erstwhile oppressors is not to question the worth or the integrity of their political project. They may indeed have no alternative” (p. 133). While such restrictive roles and options frequently do link up with additional aspects of contemporary Australian Aboriginal culture as part of a larger “ongoing emancipatory project” (Ginsburg and Myers, 2006: 43), the broader contexts and politics of “value-added heritage” demand sensitive analysis.¹⁴

While not without their shortcomings, these programs have been successful on a few different levels. On a basic level, any positive experience with Tasmanian Aboriginal people holds potential value, particularly in light of widespread oppositional rhetoric from vocal sections of the wider community. The TMAG employee who worked the programs commented how it was good to get some non-Aboriginal kids in and for them to have a positive experience with Aboriginal people. Many teachers with whom I spoke shared this sentiment. In addition, the Catholic Schools Liaison commented on how many Aboriginal people were learning about their culture through their kids who attended these programs. I got the sense that these concrete benefits are ultimately more important to the presenters than the potential risks attached to the presentation of culture for public consumption.

Conclusion

In this article, I have approached Tasmanian Aboriginal public culture, specifically community-led education programs, through the lens of Herzfeld’s cultural intimacy concept. My engagement with specific moments in which cultural intimacy emerged during these programs foregrounds the risks and rewards of self-representation in this particular context. Such moments embody the delicate interaction between Aboriginal Tasmania’s taxonomical fuzziness within Indigenous Australia and the master signifier of “Aboriginal Culture.”

Herzfeld (2016 [1997]) insightfully tells us that “Rethinking the tangle of multiple pasts often happens in the intimate spaces of culture” (p. 17). This is certainly true in the Tasmanian Aboriginal case, but arguably also for anthropologists in particular and social scientists more broadly. This particular point gestures toward the dialectic at the heart of Herzfeld’s (2016 [1997]) argument, namely that

social life consists of processes of reification and essentialism as well as challenges to these processes. This is the corollary to recognizing the strategic character of essentialism. Distrust of essentialism in social theory should not blur our awareness of its equally pervasive presence in social life. At this point, too, the social sciences come under their own comparative lens. (p. 32)

Herzfeld’s acknowledgment of the larger need for reflexivity within the social sciences gains added value in relation to the interrelated need to engage with, and contextualize, cultural complexity. Lila Abu-Lughod’s (2016 [1986]) sensitive analysis of oral lyric poetry amongst Awlad ‘Ali Bedouins in Egypt’s Western Desert remains an exemplar of scholarly engagement with nuance and the messiness of humanity. Such exploration, when performed effectively, is one of social analysis’ many strengths. For Abu-Lughod, the Awlad ‘Ali, the women in particular, use lyric poetry to express certain sentiments seemingly at odds with a strict honor code. A superficial reading would be that the sentiments expressed through lyric poetry are one’s true feelings, presented in a culturally sanctioned forum through which the honor code can be subverted and challenged.¹⁵ Abu-Lughod, however, directly challenges Goffman’s (1959) argument that public faces are masks to protect a private off-stage self by countering that “Rather than positing one monolithic cultural ideology that determines experience, it is probably fair to say that there are at least two ideologies in Bedouin culture, each providing models of and for different types of experiences” (Abu-Lughod, 2016 [1986]: 258).¹⁶

As Abu-Lughod’s example demonstrates, ethnographic research and analysis is contradictory, messy, and often does not “make sense.” This is because ethnography’s traditional subject matter, people (more specifically, people living in groups), is often contradictory, messy, and often does not “make sense.” This engagement with nuance and gray areas is arguably one of the core strengths of social sciences like anthropology. Ethnography, much like the education programs described herein, does not exist in isolation. Context and power matter in fieldwork, just as they do in public culture. It is critical for researchers and social scientists to strongly reflect on, and take stock of, the potential ramifications of their work, no matter how large or, more realistically, how small. This involves taking Tasmanian Aboriginal scholar Greg Lehman (2003) seriously when he asks interlocutors to “tell it true.”¹⁷ It also involves reflecting on our own “ethnographic sorcery” (West, 2007). In discussing Tasmanian Aboriginal public culture, I echo Shryock’s (2004c) sentiments that “The very mention of these things is problematic for me. In stating them so plainly, I cannot help but feel that I am revealing something I should keep secret. But why?” (p. 6). It is with these thoughts in mind that I have kept some experiences, ones of great ethnographic value, private.

Engaging with these issues in this manner forces social scientists to take account of cultural intimacy within their own disciplines. Such disciplinary self-reflection within anthropology entails talking openly about how many in the field continue to fetishize and romanticize Indigeneity, acting as self-appointed arbiters of authenticity. It also forces researchers to take seriously the aforementioned question of who, ultimately, is public culture and performance of difference for? Cowlishaw (2012) argues that, “As cultural revivalism appropriates and reformulates the notion of Aboriginal Culture, the conceptual habits that reify culture are becoming anthropologically embarrassing” (p. 412).¹⁸ Viewing such revivalism simply in terms of authenticity is overly simplistic and makes a fatal mistake regarding audience. Anthropologists need to understand that they are not the target audience (another element of our shared cultural intimacy). This entails reflection like that professed by Cowlishaw (2012), when she concludes that “it was the presence of an anthropologist in the classroom, with her baggage of classical anthropology, that rendered the totem-making absurd” (p. 407). This being said, the rewards and risks of public displays of difference are very real. Approaching such examples of public culture through the lens of cultural intimacy forces anthropologists to engage with the pervasive fluency of stereotypes through which (not just) minority groups must speak in order to be heard.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Department of Anthropology, the Rackham Graduate School, and the Museum Studies Program at the University of Michigan.

Notes

Author biography

Christopher D Berk is a Cultural Anthropologist and Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. His research focuses on Indigeneity, materiality, and cultural politics in Australia and beyond. His scholarly articles have appeared in Oceania and Museum Anthropology.

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