Trapped in the Gap

Doing Good in Indigenous Australia

Emma Kowal

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782386001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Australia, a 'tribe' of white, middle-class, progressive professionals is actively working to improve the lives of Indigenous people. This book explores what happens when well-meaning people, supported by the state, attempt to help without harming. 'White anti-racists' find themselves trapped by endless ambiguities, contradictions, and double binds — a microcosm of the broader dilemmas of postcolonial societies. These dilemmas are fueled by tension between the twin desires of equality and difference: to make Indigenous people statistically the same as non-Indigenous people (to 'close the gap') while simultaneously maintaining their 'cultural' distinctiveness. This tension lies at the heart of failed development efforts in Indigenous communities, ethnic minority populations and the global South. This book explains why doing good is so hard, and how it could be done differently.

Chapter 1

STUDYING ‘GOOD’

It was anthropologist Laura Nader’s famous call in 1972 for anthropologists to ‘study up’ that inspired a generation of anthropological scholarship of the ‘West’. She challenged anthropologists to shift our gaze to the ‘study of the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty’ (Nader 1972: 289).¹

Since that call, a growing body of anthropological work has emerged examining all kinds of Western institutions, cultures and cultural processes, as well as elite groups within societies around the world. While much work has examined the workings of oppressive forms of power, a small subset of that work has examined elite groups that have benevolence as their explicit mission. Some examples are the humanitarian organisation ‘Doctors Without Borders’ (Médecins Sans Frontières; see Redfield 2013), participatory development projects in India (Mosse 2001), AIDS activism in the Ivory Coast (Nguyen 2005), and self-determination in remote Indigenous communities (Cowlishaw 1999). Studying activists of various kinds raises specific methodological and ethical problems. All anthropologists who study ‘up’ or ‘across’ must contend with the unease of their research subjects who may not see themselves as the natural objects of anthropological attention. To take as an anthropological object something that most people see as inherently good is to invite a particular kind of suspicion.

The first question in people’s minds, if not on their lips, will concern the motives of the researcher: why do you want to study people that are ‘doing good’? If your reason for analysing them is not to offer good publicity, the assumption will be that you want to criticise them. Specifically, your motives will be interpreted in one of two ways. The anthropologist who analyses a benevolent project which is based on encouraging community participation might be interpreted as a right-wing conservative who thinks that participation is a waste of time and whose analysis will seek to show that participation is irrelevant, unimportant or unworkable, regardless of how well it is done. Alternatively, she might be taken to be a progressive who believes passionately in participation and whose analysis will argue it is not being done adequately. As either option spells trouble, such objects of anthropological attention are likely to be wary.²

In describing his ethnography of a development project in India, David Mosse details the political obstacles he overcame to see his work in print. While most of his development colleagues and research participants agreed wholeheartedly with his analysis of how a successful aid project was constructed, a number of those in managerial positions at the aid agency objected strongly to his work. They felt he was unfairly critical of their development project and would harm their reputation. They made their concerns widely known to the book’s publisher, his head of department, the ethics committee of his university and the chair of his professional organisation (Mosse 2005a: ix–x).

The sensitivities that produced this reaction also existed in my field site, a space where benevolence held sway. Without exception, those non-Indigenous people who participated in my research were working in Indigenous health because they wanted to help Indigenous people. Despite the widespread suspicion of one’s own and others’ motivations as befitting a ‘mercenary’ (discussed in Chapter 6), none of those I worked with could seriously be categorised that way.

My desire to study this group generated a range of responses from actual and potential research participants. First and foremost, there was great interest in my work. I benefited from the intense interest in the ethics of Indigenous research and the efforts to ‘decolonize’ it (Smith 2012). There was enough overlap between my project and the desire for White anti-racists to be ‘critically reflexive’ for there to be substantial support for my project. Fieldwork often consisted of a ‘para-ethnographic’ space, where participants and I discussed together the contradictions and ambiguities of working in Indigenous affairs (Holmes and Marcus 2005).

However, this interest and support was laced with ambivalence. Making White anti-racists visible as a ‘cultural group’ by studying them makes many people in this group uncomfortable as they experience the range of fears mentioned above. Would I portray them as racist? Would I show them up as too concerned with their own reputations (motivated by a desire to conceal their racism, or by narcissism), or as blasé and ignorant of the racial context they worked in? As I discuss in Chapter 6, White anti-racists would prefer to disappear from the scene than be placed on centre stage.

These concerns also related to the institute as a whole, expressed through concern about how I would portray the institute and its staff. I was largely able to counter this as I had previously worked in the institute, and most people knew that depicting it and its staff as ‘racist’ was not my goal. Nevertheless, after public discussions of my work some in the audience would inevitably believe I was unfairly arguing that White researchers are racist. Others had the opposite concern. Some who saw White people as furthering the colonial project thought I was being too easy on White people if I was not actively criticising them. In view of the centuries of racist acts by White people towards Indigenous people, some thought my moral stance should be to uncover the ongoing racism of White researchers. Given my failure to do this, my research has been accused of being ‘White therapy’, implying that I merely make White people feel better about their racism, or better able to deny it.³

A factor in these reactions to my work was my insider status as an employee of the institute and, related to this, my membership of the specific group under study. I identified (and still do) as a White Australian and as an anti-racist, and sought to work with other White anti-racists as a ‘native ethnographer’ to more effectively address Indigenous disadvantage. My identification with the group under study led to its own set of moral problems, distinct from yet overlapping with the quandaries of studying benevolence.⁴ My intermittent use of ‘we’ and ‘them’ to refer to White anti-racists in this book makes visible my vacillation between ‘objective’ observer and group participant, between subject and object.

Another form of response to my research was to protect Indigenous people from potential harm from my work. An academic from my university department asked me plainly whether I supported the ‘Indigenous Research Reform Agenda’, an approach to research characterised by emancipatory politics that privileges Indigenous voices (Rigney 1999). When I responded by trying to explain that my approach to anthropology meant that nothing was immune from critical analysis, he replied that if he thought that my work would ‘in any way harm the [Indigenous] community’, he would intervene to stop it.⁵ Another White academic was openly hostile to my project because ‘analysis/representation of non-Indigenous health researchers and of Indigenous co-researchers has the potential to offend and harm both groups’.

At times, I found that this academic had a point. When discussing sensitive issues such as race and the portrayal of indigeneity and whiteness, there seemed to be endless potential for misinterpretation. For example, any discussion of negative representations of Indigenous people and culture were interpreted by some as a negative portrayal of Indigenous people. When I shared a chapter I had written with a research participant that explored the ways that ‘culture’ is used in constructions of Indigenous ill health, she objected to my discussion of how Indigenous culture was constructed in some Indigenous health literature as ‘damaged’ by colonisation (Kowal 2006a). Using the word ‘damaged’ was offensive, she said. I pointed out that the sentence did not say that Indigenous culture ‘was’ damaged, but that some people wrote and talked about it ‘as if’ it were damaged – but this made little impact.⁶ The need for some progressive non-Indigenous people to remain recognisably ‘anti-racist’, what I explore in this book as the ‘performance’ of anti-racist subjectivities (see chapters 3 to 5), means that any association of a negative attribute with Indigenous people is highly problematic, even where the intent is to understand the discourses that anti-racists share and reproduce.

The preoccupation of White anti-racists with their self-presentation affected the content of this book. Senior people in my field site and some participants were highly concerned that participants may be identifiable if I described individuals in any detail. This was a difficult issue to navigate, given that the hallmark of anthropological scholarship is precisely detailed descriptions of individuals and events. Partly as a result, the essays that make up this book draw on a wide range of sources in addition to field notes and interview transcripts from my research at the institute.⁷ While the argument has been developed through participant-observation with a research team of eighteen people and long interviews with eighteen others who worked at the institute, I illustrate my arguments with a mix of material from policy, media and academic sources in addition to my direct research data. In addition, two chapters apply the main arguments of the book to contexts beyond the institute: ‘long grassers’ in Darwin, and Welcome to Country ceremonies.

Overall, the White anti-racists I have had contact with expressed more concern about possible epistemological violence to Indigenous people resulting from my work, rather than possible damage to White reputations. This is ironic from my perspective. After all, my project was inspired in part by prominent Indigenous activist Gary Foley who took a keen interest in the Indigenous solidarity student activist group I helped to found in 1997 at the University of Melbourne. As Foley used to advise, ‘don’t worry about us [Indigenous people], you work on your own mob’. I came to recognise the naivety of my assumption that directing research efforts towards White people, rather than Indigenous people, would shelter me from accusations of harming Indigenous people. I see now my focus on White people partly reflects the desire of White anti-racists to minimise our seemingly inherent capacity to damage Indigenous people – a desire I interrogate in chapters 2 and 6. Another factor that influenced how this range of criticisms was deployed, and sometimes withheld, was the indigeneity of my supervisor. Having an Indigenous professor for a supervisor – certainly one of the most influential and respected Indigenous academics in Australia – was important for the political viability of my research. Notwithstanding his intellectual contributions, my perceived ability to have captured his coveted attention was crucial in the acceptance of my work and my presence in the field, and in Indigenous health forums generally.

Concerns that my project may actively harm Indigenous people were matched by concerns that the project may not benefit them – an act of harm by omission. Echoing criticisms of ‘White therapy’, one researcher thought it was ‘indulgent’ to try and understand the position of White researchers, asking bluntly, ‘Who benefits from your research?’⁸ My pleas that Indigenous people might indirectly benefit from the improved research practices that might result from my research were far from convincing from her perspective. Another found my case for the inherent value of anthropological understanding morally unacceptable: ‘it’s not good enough anymore, just to understand … because, meanwhile, Aboriginal communities are still having inexcusable rates of violence and chronic disease’.⁹

This is a hazard of working as a cultural anthropologist in an arena where discourses of ‘urgent need’ circulate freely. Here’s a crude but effective exercise: type into a Google search the words ‘Indigenous’, ‘health’, ‘Australia’ and ‘urgent need’, and you get 1.8 million hits. The links on the first page tell us that the following are all urgently needed: housing, the alleviation of poverty and youth suicide, Indigenous health personnel, education on cultural safety, better planning and coordination of funding, better Aboriginal health promotion, and research that preserves cultural heritage. This sense of urgency and desperation is something I have shared at times, most acutely in my attempts to deliver quality medical care to Indigenous people in Darwin. In this environment of crisis, some see research of any kind as a waste of precious resources. As one audience member commented at an institute seminar on mental health research: ‘Isn’t it trite to give people a questionnaire when kids in Arnhem Land are hanging themselves every night? Shouldn’t we be trying to find out how to fix the problem instead?’¹⁰

While this discourse on urgent need casts moral uncertainty over any research effort, it is particularly difficult to carve out a foothold for critical analysis that has ‘understanding’ as its aim. This is the converse of the problem that Charles Hale has discussed. Hale is an anthropologist of Latin America and a proponent of ‘activist research’, a type of anthropology that unashamedly admits dual loyalties to the intellectual endeavour and to the emancipation of the oppressed. This method produces ‘emancipatory knowledge’ (Hale 2006). While he complains of being ostracised by anthropological colleagues for practising activist research, my problem is the risk of being ostracised at my field site for not doing activist research. It may be that all subjects of anthropological research expect anthropologists to take up the subjects’ moral positionings as their own, but when one is ‘studying up’ this expectation has particular weight, as Cris Shore has argued (Shore 2002; see also Conroy 2009).

A number of theorists have addressed the political consequences of critiquing emancipatory discourses. Stephen Muecke explains that literary criticism of Indigenous texts that transcend the automatic praise of Indigenous authors results in ‘an intensification of the scrutiny of these social fields where power relations are exercised, rather than the endorsement of romances of liberation’ (Muecke 2005: 119). This scrutiny can have uncertain political outcomes.

Anna Tsing’s ethnography of environmentalism in Indonesia takes these moral and political dilemmas seriously. She sees the kinds of issues I discuss here as an opposition between scholarly theory and activist practice. She tracks how anthropologists’ outright support for activist movements gave way to more finely grained critique in the 1990s. These analyses have made important contributions to activist discourses, for instance through questioning the concepts of ‘community’ and ‘participation’, but they have also ‘dampened the spirit of advocacy, making those who wanted to change the world seem self-aggrandizing, if effective, or silly, if not’ (Tsing 2005: 265). She argues that academic scholarship needs to re-engage with practitioners, learning to ‘tell a story that both acknowledges imperial power and leaves room for possibility… to encourage critical purchase without cutting off the strings of hope’ (ibid.: 267). Similarly, in this study of White anti-racist people, I do not aim to denigrate their quest to minimise human suffering, but to understand it better.

How are anthropologists to remain loyal to their intellectual agendas, while negotiating the politics of their field sites, respecting the viewpoints of their activist subjects and not ‘cutting off the strings of hope’? In my work, a crucial tool for this task has been the mapping out of three different modes of analysis.

David Mosse discusses the first two modes in his analysis of research on development policy. He argues that the two dominant views of policy are ‘instrumental’ and ‘critical’. The instrumental view sees development policy as shaping development in a more or less positivist way; the goal of commentary on development policy would thus be to improve development. In contrast, a critical view ‘sees policy as a rationalising technical discourse concealing hidden purposes of bureaucratic power or dominance’ (Mosse 2004: 641), a view typified by the early critiques of development two decades ago (Ferguson 1990; Escobar 1995). Within these formulations, development is a for...