Symposium: Anthropology and the Ends of Worlds, Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney 25-26 March 2010

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF EXEMPTION: REMARKS AFTER THE FACT

Anthropology has placed itself under confinement, as a science of the attested. This means that it constitutes itself as history – as a history of the encounter. It is dominated, whether it likes it or not, by the event – thus by the compulsion to report. To record and to report. It places itself on the side of consumption, it ignores the possibility of production. Reproduction but not production, that is its secret terrain – to such a degree that it is secretly complicit in strategies of self-administration and self-normalising.

I never met him. He left Aurukun 2 years before I arrived. It was still Mackenzie time. The spectre persisted. Maybe Aurukun has now entered some other time yet no one has asserted their presence the way he asserted his presence. It is now a time of erasure, not at the hand of the locals, not at the hands of the blackfellas but at the hands of the whitefellas. For it is the whitefellas who are the jealous people, fly by night but ruthless in their demand to create the world in their image. I don’t imagine that Mackenzie was exempt in this respect. I think of him as murderous.

The missionary as murderer is a tantalising thought. Not to put oneself on the side of angels but to align with the forces, not of evil but the primordial. A propriety not of niceness but something hard, implacable, good-humoured, wilful, playful

He did not appear among the dancers but he danced. There are images of him dancing to old ladies, not mocking them but a strange identification, maybe. He smiles – but thaadyam is a dance of complaint, announcement, arousal. As if tearing your hair out and dancing on the spot, hopping up and down in extreme rage.

It goes with mourning.

Mackenzie danced with a smile. He laughed.

It is rare to see missionaries laugh.

I rely on verbal testimony – from ‘the natives’. Not things solicited or enquired after (I was in fact not all that interested) but volunteered, let slip. I was in fact not all that interested in the inquiry. It was not a topic.

At Pormpuraaw, one old man: ‘When you came we thought you were Mackenzie’. In the photos I could not see any resemblance. ‘Proper big man’, they said. I saw a rather roly-poly affable figure.

They remembered him from when he was young. Solid, solid body. He grew up with them; he grew old with them.

The casual remark is not all that casual. The technique is to let it reverberate, for the song and the chant of it finally to be heard, heard as we hear it, no doubt, but heard nonetheless. Literalism is the death of art and the death of meaning. The face value of things is a treacherous terrain. It is not models we seek, it’s a frame of sorts. There is always an armature, a strange intention to make admissions, an oblique (or not so oblique) confession of self. We all engage in it. Sometimes we call it interest.

John von Sturmer