Ancient and Modern: Time, culture and indigenous philosophy

By Stephen Muecke, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004, 198 pages, paperback, $39.95. Reviewed by Eve Vincent in the December 2004 issue.

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Stephen Muecke tells of his first meeting decades ago with Nyigina elder Paddy Roe, who was to become friend, Indigenous 'informant' and colleague/collaborator. Muecke, a first year PhD student recording oral narratives, met Paddy Roe in Broome at the 'old Anna Street reserve where he was dismantling old sheds to take the materials out to Coconut Wells to build a new place'. Muecke relates: 'When I asked if he could tell me a few stories, he responded by saying, Things must go both ways. When I asked what he meant he laughed and asked if I could start by loading that corrugated iron on the truck'.

Muecke then is no stranger to 'visiting Aboriginal Australia'. He is familiar with the protocols -- patient waiting and listening, responsiveness to invitation, and the expectations surrounding reciprocity and responsibility: 'Things must go both ways'. He must also be acutely aware of the possibility of trespass. In the case of Ancient & Modern, a work that explores Aboriginal ways of being, it is Murri historian Jackie Huggins who articulates the danger specific to this project: '...any definition of Aboriginality by non-Aborigines ... insults my intelligence, spirit and soul, and negates my heritage'. Huggins goes on to say, 'I would never presume to know what it is to be white (except when I dine at the Hilton)'. Accordingly, Muecke's is an always uncertain inquiry into contemporary forms of Aboriginality, unsettled by Huggins' dig, and Dipesh Chakabarty's question: 'Can the designation of something or some group as non- or premodern ever be anything but a gesture of the powerful?'

The experience of visiting, of being a stranger in another's country -- so especially potent for a non-Aboriginal Australian who finds themselves hosted as visitor in country, which is part of a country/nation that is 'home' -- is, ideally, transformative. And this is a book about transformative processes: like the transformative potential of living country in creation stories -- stories which are still vitally generative; or, like the dismantling of the sheds up at the old reserve, in order to build some new ones, at a new place. Ancient & Modern cites a range of Aboriginal 'cultural' practices that help us conceive of Aboriginal Australia -- so transformed by colonial processes -- as modern.

Modernity, just to jog your memory, is of course characterised by 'rational' rather than mystical explanations for the world, by innovation and a rapid pace of change. Muecke insists that 'Indigenous Capitalism', 'Indigenous Technologies', 'Indigenous Philosophies', and 'Indigenous Modernities' are not anachronisms. This may seem an all too obvious and potentially patronising endeavour and it's easy enough to doubt its usefulness (better off loading corrugated iron on to a truck eh?). However, Muecke does his best to persuade his reader that he journeys, and writes, against pervasive assumptions with very real political effects. (His analysis of the re-emergence of cultural assimilationism discourse within the New Right makes this point explicit, but Ancient & Modern has a more complex political impetus than just rebutting the depressingly predictable and basic racism of Ruddock et al.) For Muecke 'the emphasis on modernities means treating everyone right now as if they live in the same time and place -- coexisting contemporaries -- rather than as vestiges of the past or future hopefuls'.

Aboriginal Australia has long been seen as a 'primitive counter-point to European modernity', which brought 'history' to this continent, and designated the Indigenous past the greatly unvariegated 'pre-historic'. Since the 1970s, however, attention has been paid to the active role Aboriginal people played within the colonial dynamic: many revisionist histories emphasise resistance, inventiveness, adaptation and survival. Muecke goes further still in his interpretation, posing the question: 'Maybe [Aboriginal people] were already modern in ways whitefellas still don't have words for?' That is, the capacity for change evidenced in Aboriginal Australia's response to invading peoples and ways should not be read as the impressive ability of the primitive to 'become' modern. Such a schema risks re-engaging the idea of 'progress' realised along a racialised hierarchy of civilisation (in the singular). Instead, Muecke looks at the moments and places in which Aboriginal culture is distinctly, and differently, modern. He understands Aboriginal society to have captured new technologies, ideas and possibilities 'for their own purposes' -- as opposed to assimilative, or even subversive means, with cultural survival as an end. Muecke talks about 'civilisations' in the plural, and also spends time contemplating non-Indigenous 'ways of being', emphasising in this case primitive aspects (such as rituals) that are part of the non-Indigenous experience of modernity. Importantly these are not vestiges of a preceding formation, but evidence that modernities are never pure, they are contradictory, at once 'ancient and modern'.

Muecke's work may seem strange to scholars of the south-east Aboriginal experience, who will be familiar with a damaging divide between more traditional Aboriginal communities and urban ones. In popularly held, continuously represented and reproduced conceptions, authentic Aboriginal culture is seen as 'traditional' (non-modern) and located up north, and in the centre. Down south mob are 'modern', yet as the Yorta Yorta found out in 2001, lack authenticity as Aboriginal. Muecke spends much more time 'up north' insisting that Aboriginal can mean modern rather than thinking through the ways in which modern can mean Aboriginal.

In his theory of nomadic writing Muecke called for a mode of thinking that, like any sensible traveller, constantly deferred to local authority. Again, in Ancient & Modern his work on place is perceptive and evocative. But this book has such a restless feel to it, constantly turning on its own questions, that I kept thinking of a phrase in Aboriginal English that runs 'How long you stop here?' As in, 'how long are you staying?' I kept wishing Muecke could only just stop here, and there, for a moment longer.

Citation

• Eve Vincent. 'Review: Ancient and Modern: Time, culture and indigenous philosophy by Stephen Muecke' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), December 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 25 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• How might we think and talk about indigenous philosophy? Why has Aboriginal knowledge not been given the status of philosophical knowledge, but treated by whites as culture or history? There is a quarrel about whose antiquity is at the foundation of Australian culture, and why contemporary forms of Aboriginality are marginal to Australia's modernity. These are the starting points for the essays contained in Stephen Muecke's original and challenging book.
  
  Blending anecdote, thoery and personal reflection, Muecke moves from film to travel to politics to religion, gathering knowledge, revisiting theory and recasting key assumptions.
  
  With passion and conviction, and a sense of experiment and discovery, Ancient and Modern calls for a new kind of modernity. This will be a modernity that is contradictory, yet inclusive at the same time, and which allows for a range of inventive responses to the contemporary world.

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