|
Article Excerpt
'Identity is intrinsically associated with all the joinings and departures of social life. To have an identity is to join with some and depart from others, to enter and leave social relations at once.'
(Gregory P. Stone, 1962:9)
LICENSED SOLITUDE
Stone's generative model of identity formation has the individual joining with some and departing from others 'at once'. For a lot of the time, I think that this interactionist principle holds good in regard to those situational, group-derived and group-dependant identities that people assume one after another as they progress from scene to scene in social life. Yet what I have to deal with in this essay is a culturally constructed entity that exists in space between an actor's departure from one set of people and that actor's subsequent joining up with some other set. Otherwise, the space in between can exist as a sort of limbo occupied by a withdrawn actor who subsequently rejoins his or her original grouping. Thus Aboriginal Countrymen of the Darwin hinterland will, from time to time, formally walk into liminal space to assert a newly assumed identity as: 'That very privatefella, me.' My analysis of the 'privatefella, me' is intended as a culturally specific contribution to a general category for investigation--the sociology of licensed solitude (or legitimate incumbency of non-consociate space).
SUBSUMPTION
Among Aboriginal Countrymen of the Top End (back of Darwin in Northern Australia), the supremacy of today's arrangements and dispositions is ensured by heavy reliance on a form of instituted social blindness. This is an outright refusal (rather than any mere reluctance) to concede that a member of one's own (and current) mob enjoys any significant memberships or allegiances elsewhere. The trend of denial is governed by a principle I have called subsumption (Sansom 1980). I devoted a large part of a book to the task of providing the evidence that established that subsumption was a dominant reality of Aboriginal existence among Countrymen of the Darwin hinterland in the mid 1970s. I therefore treat subsumption as an ethnographically substantiated reality. It has been documented in fine detail to be given the character of a basic condition of social existence for the Countrymen of the region that stretches from Kakadu in the east to the Daly River in the south-west.
Subsumption is to be understood as a spatio-temporal construct for it belongs to the subsumed identity that endures only for as long as a person 'joins with some' (Stone, cited above) and stays with this chosen lot (here, an Aboriginal 'mob'). I note further that instituted blindness affects research by the outsider in a consequential way. Its stubborn perpetuation means that the anthropologist's reporting and analysis of 'observed' realities must constitutionally be at variance with the models for reality-formation entertained by the people who, themselves, have been 'observed'.
Subsumption also produces a peculiar yet essential construction that exists in the space between mobs. Such space contains retreats inhabited by persons who withdraw into disassociation. When individuals arrive at this station, they are faced with an immediate follow-up question: 'Which way to go next?' And because they have been occupants of liminal space, I need to show that their re-integration into a collectivity has to be formally accomplished by the staging of a rite of return.
I end up by establishing that the 'private fella, me' is a potentiated, potentiating and future-oriented station of the self that the total system under discussion yields. Without the construct that is the 'private fella, me', the calculus of service exchange (Sansom 1988) in terms of which the give-and-take of life is measured and assigned value would be unworkable. This station of the self is not only integral to a system but is, as well, essential to the continuance of an Aboriginal way for giving and receiving and for arriving at tallies of indebtedness. It is only by declaratively going private that a person regains individual control of his or her own funds. Ordinarily, each person's holding of cash and things is subject to negotiated appropriations that are germane to what Peterson (1993) has called 'demand sharing'--a modality for reciprocities that has historically been projected into the present out of the hunter-gatherer past.
'Mob' in Aboriginal English can stand for any aggregation of persons be it small or large--Police Mob, Church Mob, Welfare Mob, Government Mob and so on and on. However, it is the 'mob' of vital personal allegiance that concerns me here and this is a person's 'roan mob'. One's 'roan mob' is the source for a basic, everyday and spatio-temporal identity. It is the mob whose members currently are plighted to back one up in one's troubles and bail one out of either strife or serious outside debt (the kind that, if unrequited, may lead to bodily harm). If one is living in coupled association with a member of the opposite sex, one's 'roan mob' is the group that attests and affirms one's relationship as 'properly marriage'; such recognition allows a couple to act as hearth-holders joined in familial association and legitimate sexual partnership on 'roan mob' stamping grounds. Within one's mob, there is general oversight of all the kids currently living with mob members. So none of a mob's kids should be found 'crying for tucker', and here the tucker index stands for more than 'feeding up' for it signals also the maintenance of a standard of caring for kids generally. If there is child neglect, the worth of each and every adult member of the 'home mob' containing one or more neglected children is depleted (this ethic of child care and collective responsibility is discussed at length in Sansom and Baines [1987] with reference both to Darwin and the environs of Perth [WA]).
As things used to be, nearly all 'roan mobs' were associated with one 'home' camp or, otherwise, with a set of 'home' camps seasonally or sporadically occupied but, nonetheless, counted as belonging to the mob. And each mob was variously identified by use of a clutch of designations -[i] announcing the name of one of the mob's main places or haunts (Wallaby Cross Mob), [ii] using the name of one of its prominent people (Roy Kelly Mob), [iii] referring to what appears from the observer's viewpoint to be the mob's dominant ethnicity (Brinken Mob) or [iv] mentioning what currently features as a dominant mob-purpose (Mob for that Land Right). Choice of label is, in fact, choice of an epithet. The chosen epithet highlights some characteristic of a mob and so the chosen label will always say something about the speaker's present stance toward the mob that is referred to.
Nowadays, mob organisation is often to be mapped network-style onto a clutch of (usually) rented properties in the suburbs together with, perhaps, some rural places nearby. (1) In this, mobs are seen as having tracks--these tracks join 'all that place this mob got altogether'. Certain dominant places serve the members of dispersed mobs as venues (a favourite is the stilt-house in the tropics with both a television and a barbeque evident in its undercroft). Residential separation of mob members is defeated by active inter-visiting which has prominent mob-venues for its foci. Furthermore, household incumbency at any moment is rarely unmitigated nucleation with father, mother and young children the only occupants of a dwelling. Young mothers without kinswomen present are said to be 'lonely'. Their loneliness is to be remedied by import of a female kinswoman old enough to help out properly. The helper is there not only as an aide but also as competent witness and, therefore, as a deliberately emplaced deterrent presence who reduces risk of domestic violence because able to attest to its infliction by providing the witness of a third-party when required. In this way, accusations of abuse can be taken out of domestic confines and given public reality whereas it is only material evidence of actual, physical damage that can attest to inflictions committed in households that contain only two adults who will be apt to witness equally and loudly one against the other. Nor, in general, do people move about singly. They prefer to travel with fellows who can serve both as 'back-ups' if there is trouble and as witnesses to anything untoward that may have happened during their expeditions. Over the years, I have seen the idea of 'catch up' broaden in meaning. I first encountered 'catch up' as a verbal form to be used for the adding of a person to one's acquaintance. 'Do you know John Fisher?' The reply: 'No, I never bin catch up with that bloke.' By the end of the 1980s the 'catch up' notion had come to stand also for doing the rounds of the residentially separated places that belong to one's 'roan mob'. People now work through life to 'catch up' with previously unknown people but 'catch up' daily with the members of 'roan mobs'.
Above all, the mob remains a moral community set up for witnessing and for the (hoped-for) resolution of problems which themselves are defined through giving witness. One of the reasons that mobs are labile is that problems are quite often resolved by acts of departure--including temporary stays of marriage. (2) Despite the fact that (in the longer term) mobs are re-composing entities, one's most significant identity day-to-day, is a function of the set of understandings negotiated to serve as the basis for running with the 'roan mob' of one's current allegiance. Here a person's basic identity is endowed, sustained, worked on and, from time to time, transformed. True to Stone's principle that one 'enters and leaves social relations at once', one generally leaves the mob of one's current allegiance only to join another. Unless one acts exceptionally and goes private.
TO GO PRIVATE
A phrase for announcing disengagement and social rupture vests in the Aboriginal English of Australia's Top End. Given in the mode of speaking that is not 'rough' but 'high' (a register that approximates the phonics of standard Australian usage), the pointed phrase uttered to accomplish estrangement is: 'Me: I'm a very private fella, me.' For this announcement to take effect, it must reiteratively be 'told round' until 'everybody bin hear what thatfella sayin presently'.
By 'telling round' a speaker broadcasts (3) the fact that he or she will have nothing (or no further thing) to do with that business to which members of a rallied mob now propose to commit themselves. The phrase thus signals withdrawal into disassociation. To those who experience the falling away of a person previously regarded as either a natural or potential comrade, the announcement signals more than non-participation. There is attribution of disaffection too: 'No more! Thatfella, he jus not carin longa we!' Further, the person of disengagement is (for the nonce): 'Notta Countryman really/any more.' In the history of social relationships, things have been brought to a pass; clearly, those who go private are given the character of defectors (4) by the persons from whom they disengage. And, from the actor who has denied himself or herself to others, one typically may hear: 'They got their business. I got roan [my own] business. I'm really very different, me!' So the stream of action that constitutes one's 'very own business' is given as the stretch of happenstance in which the 'private fella, me' finds its location.
In all this, the person is constituted agonistically. A private 'me' emerges by being distinguished from a specific, pre-formed and public lot of 'themfellas'--a set of people that speakers in our region will distinguish as a 'mob' that is distinct from other 'mobs'. In this north Australian world of mobs, a departing actor has to work to rescue, retrieve and extract individual autonomy from its previously compromised subsumption in the pursuit of group-purpose and affairs.
What I call 'subsumption' is produced by the operation of two axiomatic rules. The first rule has it that a person...
|
