Disentangling ‘contact’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘cultural entanglement’

Abstract

One of the most memorable articles I read as an archaeology undergraduate student was Lauriston Sharp’s (1952) ‘Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians’. In it, Sharp traced the flow of consequences – both beneficial and disruptive – that resulted from colonial encounters. To me, this illuminated human societies as multilayered, integrated systems sensitive to change; in this case, one could trace the perturbations that a seemingly innocuous substitution in technology caused, beginning in the late nineteenth century in Cape York. As it happens, this study of the consequences of contact on the Yir Yoront is not far from the Kuuku I’yu, the focus of Tutchener and Claudie’s article. How should we explore ‘contact’? What are the most appropriate terms to employ, concepts to consider, and at what scale? An approach based in cultural materialism (sensu Marvin Harris 1979) can reveal how new technologies from ‘outside’ enhance or disrupt traditional subsistence practices, gender roles, social relationships, and such, as evident with the Yir Yoront study. Or, following Silliman (2016) and Jordan (2014), unequal power dynamics might be seen as a more meaningful measure. Likewise, scale needs to be considered. Cross-cultural encounters can be viewed from a continent-wide perspective, tracking global market forces, ideological differences, etc, or focussing on a particular community/area as a microcosm of colonialism as it played out locally. These factors frame Tutchener and Claudie’s examination of ‘contact’, ‘cultural entanglement’, and ‘colonialism’ on the Kuuku I’yu cultural landscape. I focus here on two themes. The first is semantics (re: Jordan 2014; Silliman 2016) and how we think about these; the second, representations of social spaces (re: Lefebvre 1991) and cultural persistence.