Response

Abstract

We would like to thank all commentators for their excellent insights and feel honoured that so many distinguished scholars took the time to engage with our brief analysis and arguments. The responses have value not only in relation to the Forum piece but also as independent contributions to the Dark Emu debate. We hope that the comments will allow a new phase of engagement with the perception and understanding of Australia’s deep past, its relationship to present issues, and the positioning of archaeology in this respect. The responses show that Dark Emu and the debate around it can be understood in many different ways by Indigenous and other readers. They also demonstrate that issues surrounding Dark Emu have been discussed in deeply informed and conceptually sophisticated ways in previous decades. Several comments contain valuable reflections in this respect and both the archaeological community as well as the broader public can profit from these significant insights. Together with several commentators, we hope that the current discussions will initiate new archaeological research projects and the reassessment of existing collections. However, the Dark Emu debate will not be resolved with more empirical evidence alone. Almost all commentators have mentioned that Dark Emu replicates social evolutionist and progressive thinking. This understanding has been rejected by academia a long time ago. The enthusiastic reaction towards Dark Emu in the broader public sphere, however, seems to show that this thinking appears to be alive and well. We have argued that Dark Emu presents Aboriginal societies and people in overly Western modernist terms. While several commentators have stated that the key distinction of Dark Emu between hunter-gatherers and farmers is just a semantic issue, few have engaged with the question why Dark Emu’s core argument seems to necessitate a rejection of hunting and gathering as a mode of being (that is itself defined and constructed in modernist terms). Dark Emu is less about social evolutionism as a progressive vision of the whole of human history. It is more about the definition of humanity in relation to the distinction between a ‘state of nature’ and a ‘state of society’. Dark Emu is about countering the perception of Aboriginal societies on the basis of a number of dichotomies that are still largely guiding the discourse around Aboriginal people such as passive/active, wasteful/industrious, productive/unproductive, static/progressive. These dichotomies can be traced back to the establishment of modern social theory from the seventeenth century onwards (Bhambra and Holmwood 2021). Dark Emu is an attempt to modernise traditional Aboriginal societies to gain cultural recognition and political participation. But in doing so, the book replicates the ‘state of nature’/‘state of society’ division that is widely rejected in the social sciences, because it has been recognised as the basis of unrestricted exploitation of natural resources and the dispossession of Indigenous populations. Ironically and tragically, this rejection is to a large extent a consequence of an increasingly active role of Aboriginal and other Indigenous people in these discourses and more and more long-term collaborations with researchers and heritage specialists. Paradoxically, Dark Emu also mirrors arguments that have been put forward by many Indigenous leaders in the context of postWWII postcolonial movements and ‘the difficulty of being modern’ (Chakrabarty 2021:95–113). They reflect the challenges to navigate the often contradictory goals of justice and sovereignty, appropriate and respectful participation, political recognition in a world of modern nation-states, and the preservation of cultural identity. Finding sensible solutions in these contexts will require the acceptance of a diversity of views of Indigenous and nonIndigenous people, but also an honest acknowledgement of differential power relationships. The reception of Dark Emu continues to demonstrate that narratives that conform to the dominant modern discourse are most easily accepted by the broader