Speaking Out on Aboriginal Violence

Bess Price, the Northern Territory activist and politician, has emerged over the last few years as one of the most controversial yet morally compelling voices in Aboriginal politics. Price grew up in the 1960s in Yuendumu, a settlement about 300 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs. Price’s father had been raised traditionally and saw Europeans for the first time as a young boy out hunting with his father. Yet, appreciative of the need for a Western education, he insisted Bess attend school. Bess Price consequently has both a connection to the deep Aboriginal past, while also being able to operate successfully in the mainstream Euro-Australian world.

This bi-cultural background has enabled Price to speak with authority and knowledge about current problems in remote Australia and their connection with pre-contact forms of social organisation and morality. She has been a strong advocate for the need for her people to change patterns of violent behaviour that may have been functional in the past but which in the context of sedentary living, welfare dependency and substance abuse, are proving profoundly destructive. Stephanie Jarrett has written about this issue in Liberating Aboriginal People from Violence (2013), a controversial book that claims current rates of homicide and violent crime in remote Australia are linked to the traditional tolerance of violence that was intrinsic to pre-contact Aboriginal culture. Price supports Jarrett’s thesis and has written a foreword for the book, in which she writes:

When we lived in the desert we had no armies, police force or courts. Every family had to defend itself. Everybody, male and female, knew how to fight in their own defence and to defend their families. Men had the right to beat their wives. Young women had very few rights. Men had the right to kill those who they thought had broken the law. We all know this but won’t talk about it.

Jarrett is appalled by the treatment of women and young girls in traditional Aboriginal cultures and cogently argues that such aspects of Aboriginal culture are unacceptable in a modern liberal democracy predicated on individual rights. Her research into both the anthropological literature and current debates about violence in remote Australia is robust and admirable. This is a book that needs to be taken very seriously.

It is therefore disappointing that John Van Tiggelen in his review of Liberating Aboriginal People from Violence (Monthly, March 2013) criticised the book as a politically biased and inaccurate denigration of Aboriginal culture. Disagreeing with Jarrett’s main thesis, Van Tiggelen wrote:

Most observers with first-hand experience, including many of the anthropologists Jarrett quotes, accept Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson’s analysis that today’s violence in remote communities is part and parcel of a profound social breakdown wreaked by welfare dependency and alcohol abuse.

Van Tiggelen does not mention which anthropologists accept Pearson’s analysis but merely asserts that those quoted by Jarrett do. In fact the majority of anthropologists cited in Jarrett’s book offer abundant evidence in support of her thesis that current violence has roots in the deep Aboriginal past. Jarrett relies significantly on Peter Sutton’s The Politics of Suffering (2009), which was the first major argument in favour of continuity between ancient and contemporary forms of violence, as well as Mervyn Meggitt’s much earlier Desert People (1962). She also quotes T.G.H. Strehlow in support of her thesis: “Clearly, most of the present clamour for the restoration of ‘tribal law’ comes from persons who have no idea of its major provisions.” T.G.H. Strehlow’s son, John Strehlow, has also written on the same issue in The Tale of Frieda Keysser (2010), a magisterial account of Aranda culture in the late nineteenth century that makes it quite plain that the sanctioning of interpersonal and inter-group violence was one of the most salient aspects of traditional life.

Noel Pearson’s analysis of the relationship between welfare dependency, alcohol abuse and social dysfunction in Our Right to Take Responsibility (2000) is a seminal and important contribution to Aboriginal political debate. However, contrary to Van Tiggelen’s assertion, his thesis has been questioned by the anthropological community. For example, David Martin in his paper “Is Welfare Dependency ‘Welfare Poison’?” suggests that Pearson’s program of social reform fails to take into account pre-contact values surrounding kin loyalty and protocols that sanction the use of violence to advance individual and group ends. Martin, like Sutton and Jarrett, argues that intractable cultural factors are implicated in current rates of homicide and violent crime in remote Australia and that in the absence of welfare dependency and substance abuse such protocols would still persist.

In order to look at Van Tiggelen’s claims a little more closely I want to discuss Meggitt’s Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia (1962). Meggitt’s book is one of the main sources of data on spousal and intergroup violence that Jarrett uses in Liberating Aboriginal People from Violence. Desert People was written before the current epidemic of welfare dependency and substance abuse. The book was based on Meggitt’s field work at Yuendumu in the 1950s, and many of his informants, like Price’s father, had grown up before the influence of Euro-Australian culture on Walpiri life. Consequently, the book gives us an accurate insight into traditional culture in its pre-contact forms. While I disagree with the emphasis in certain aspects of Jarrett’s discussion, I believe the main thrust of her argument concurs with what we know from major ethnographic texts such as those by Meggitt.

Desert People is a deeply informed analysis of the social organisation and ceremonial life of the Walpiri people, and since its publication in 1962 it has become one of the most frequently cited works in the canon of Australian anthropological literature. What distinguishes it from earlier work is the attentive appreciation of the interdependence of kinship, hunting economy, cosmology and religious life. Central to Meggitt’s analysis is the importance of ceremonial life in mitigating conflict between individuals and between groups. As he writes:

Such ritual occasions should not be disturbed by argument or ill-feeling … I saw only two men violate this rule during lodge ceremonies, whose participants generally manifest great good humour. Recognition of the sacred character of the activity does not prevent the men from laughing, joking and enjoying themselves. Audiences are quick to commend well-executed performances and to offer pungent advice to the few incompetent actors. Although the men would receive the criticism with hostility in secular matters, they take it in good part during the ceremonies. In short, the occasions are text-book exemplifications of the effects of social euphoria and “we feeling”.

The prohibition of hostility and conflict during ceremonies emerges throughout Meggitt’s book as one of the most salient features of Walpiri ceremonial life. The display of sacred objects and the dramatisation of the actions of the creative ancestors of a specific region, plant or animal species are undertaken in an atmosphere of reverence and respect, and evoke in the participants an enriching sense of communal feeling. Such ritual practices cultivate what the American anthropologist Victor Turner called, in Dramas, Fields and Metaphors (1975), the experience of comminitas. For Turner, the liminal nature of ritual experience evokes sentiments of humility and deference to the unity of the social whole in which the experience of transcendence becomes the dominant emotion of the participants.

For the Walpiri such ceremonies also have an important function in establishing forms of social organisation beyond that of the immediate family or kinship group. The song-lines that are sung and the dances that are performed may depict vast tracts of country—consequently people from other groups will travel long distances in order to participate in ceremonies. This has the effect of cementing ties between neighbouring groups for the reciprocal use of waterholes and hunting grounds and establishing social networks that facilitate marriages between the men and women of different groups.

The sand and body designs used in such ceremonies have become renowned across the world. When Western Desert people transposed them onto canvas using acrylic paints, they created the iconographic system of the Western Desert art movement. As Fred Myers discusses in Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (2007), the social sentiment expressed in the “revelatory regime” of Western Desert religious life has over the last forty years been embodied in concrete visual form, giving rise to one of the most vibrant art movements in the world.

However, the ban on violence and conflict during Walpiri ceremonies obviously presupposes its existence. Meggitt’s book also contains long descriptive accounts of violent conflict, most of which occur between men fighting over women, but he also discusses numerous incidents of spousal violence. Meggitt describes one incident where a Walpiri man discovered that his two wives had been secretly having affairs with two young bachelors. Meggitt describes the man’s response upon discovering what had been occurring:

He enlisted the support of several countrymen who were close brothers of his wives and then attacked the two women and their lovers. He speared Johnny through the knee and Liddy through the arm: Willy he stabbed in the back with a long knife, and only European intervention prevented him from cutting Marcie’s throat. At the same time his countrymen thrashed all four of the offenders with clubs and boomerangs.

What is significant here and what may appear strange to a white reader is that the men who help the man are the brothers of his unfaithful wives. This act of punitive violence needs to be—in fact can only be—understood in the context of the traditional Walpiri kinship system. Marcel Mauss in his classic book The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies alerted anthropologists to the social and economic function of gift giving. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship Levi-Strauss applied Mauss’s theory of gift exchange to marriage and kinship. In this context the violence described by Meggitt becomes explicable. Aboriginal cultures, like the other tribal societies that were part of Levi-Strauss’s huge body of cross-cultural data, establish forms of intergroup social organisation through wife exchange. Reciprocal use of hunting grounds and political alliances are cemented by the exchange of women. When a man receives a wife it is expected he will protect or aid her family if conflict arises with other groups and that her family will also be able to use his people’s waterholes and hunting grounds, something that would be necessary if their own lands were affected by drought for example.

In this context it becomes explicable why it is the brothers who inflict the violence upon the women and their lovers—simply because by their adulterous actions the women are jeopardising the political alliance that their marriage established between the two groups. Without the strict enforcement of such legal protocols, Walpiri social organisation would collapse.

Levi-Strauss showed that such exogamous marriage systems exist in all of the world’s pre-modern cultures and their absence in modern democracies is the actual anomaly. When European Australians try to downplay pre-contact violence in Aboriginal culture, assuming it is somehow an affront to Aboriginal people, they unwittingly expose their own ethnocentrism. Violence was one of the primary means by which such exogamous protocols, and hence the stability of society itself, were enforced and maintained. It was also the means by which individuals and groups advanced their own interests, for in the absence of a police force or an impartial judiciary, each individual or family had to defend its own interests—often through intimidation or actual violent conflict.

It is commonly acknowledged by the international anthropological community that tribal and hunter-gatherer cultures have higher rates of lethal violence than modern state-based societies. The standard reference in the field is by Bruce Knauft, Professor of Anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta. Knauft’s paper, “Reconsidering Violence in Simple Societies: Homicide among the Gebusi of New Guinea” (Current Anthropology, August/October 1987) presents cross-cultural data indicating that small-scale hunting societies have between 100 and 200 times the level of lethal violence of modern state-based urban centres.

In this context, it is worth noting not that Aboriginal culture is violent relative to other cultures, but that modern democratic systems are unusual for their intolerance of violence and consequent low levels of violence. Grievance redress and punitive measures enacted through violence are culturally and historically quite common. In this sense we should see protocols that sanction violence in Aboriginal culture as normative for a stateless hunter-gatherer culture lacking an impartial judiciary or police force—which are the conditions that obtained for most of human evolutionary history until the origins of sedentism, agriculture and state-based legal systems.

For these reasons—among many others—Peter Sutton felt compelled to write The Politics of Suffering (2009). Sutton argued that the anthropological and the general community had not come to terms with pre-contact violence and the persistence of such protocols into the present. It is imperative that such culturally sanctioned forms of violent behaviour are understood as contributing factors to the current high rates of violent crime and homicide in remote Aboriginal communities. A failure to do so blinds us to the causes of these problems and therefore prevents us from formulating adequate solutions. In a pre-contact situation such protocols were functional. However, in the circumstances Aboriginal people are now living in, such protocols can be profoundly destructive. For this reason people like Price, Jarrett and Sutton are arguing for a complete overhaul of how we think about pre-contact culture and the causes of current rates of violent crime in remote Australia. For Sutton this requires a transformation of the self—a reconceptualisation of how one relates to others. He argues that this should begin with an abandonment of traditional child socialisation practices which acculturate violent behaviour in children as the means by which they can advance their own ends. He also believes disputes should be settled through the judicial system, as opposed to using traditional means of retributive violence. Obviously these two forms of transformation are interconnected.

Another slightly different situation discussed by Meggitt is instructive. A man against the wishes of other men wanted to keep a number of women to himself—an ambiguous situation that could not be resolved adequately by appeal to traditional law. After days of fighting, resulting in much spilling of blood, the old men decided to hasten the initiation of one of the young men of the community in order to bring an end to the fighting. Because it was understood by all that it is sacrilegious to fight during ceremonial activity, the fighting dissipated and tempers were allowed to cool down.

Meggitt also deals with spousal violence in significant detail. He describes a situation where a man was being berated by his wife while playing poker. His response is telling:

Willy immediately seized a boomerang and strode across without a word and felled her with several powerful blows to the head. Without a glance, he returned and took up his game. The other men exchanged winks but kept silent. Willy drew me aside afterwards and said, “I had to hit her. A woman cannot swear at an initiated man and order him about as though he were a child.”

Jarrett quotes this passage from Meggitt’s book, then goes on to make the following comment: “A woman is severely bashed on the head, but at least an initiated man did what an initiated man had to do.” Throughout the book Jarrett quotes similar incidents from Meggitt’s book and numerous other anthropologists—and her message is loud and clear. She has deep—and justified—moral objections to the sanctioning of violence against women in traditional Aboriginal society.

One of the strengths of Jarrett’s analysis is her critique of an article by Lucy Snowball and Don Weatherburn, “Theories of Indigenous Violence: A Preliminary Empirical Assessment” (Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, Vol. 41, No. 2, 2008). This is a seminal paper that is frequently cited as evidence against cultural factors contributing to violent behaviours, asserting that more traditional remote Aboriginal people are less likely to be the victims of violent crime than Aboriginal people elsewhere in the country. Jarrett’s discussion deftly analyses the data the paper is based on, and in a gesture as obvious as pointing out the naked emperor, asks why it is in stark contradiction to hospital and police records. Jarrett quotes such records which indicate that people living in remote Aboriginal communities are more frequently victims of assault, head injury and homicide than rural and urban Aboriginal people. Jarrett offers her own explanation as to why the Snowball and Weatherburn data, which was based on self-reporting, contradicts that of hospital and police records—that Aboriginal women are reluctant to report violence due to fear of reprisals or fear of being responsible for the incarceration of kin. Whether such speculation proves to be accurate is yet to be established. However, Jarrett’s critique of the position that cultural factors are not implicated in the casual nexus underlying current rates of violence is robust and needs to be taken seriously by future researchers.

Van Tiggelen also objects to Jarrett’s critique of the policy of self-determination. Again he contrasts her views with those of Pearson:

Whereas Pearson preaches a foot-in-both-worlds philosophy, insisting people retain pride in their culture, language and community while attaining a mainstream education, Jarrett would rather everyone hop out.

However, Jarrett is not advocating Aboriginal people abandon their culture. She is merely claiming that when certain cultural practices conflict with our rights-based legal system, it is the cultural practices that need to change, not our laws or the moral principles that underpin them. The ideology and policy of self-determination contain provisions that advocate the opposite—that our legal system should accommodate itself to Aboriginal cultural practices and customary law. Jarrett for good reason rejects this position.

On April 3, 2009, the Rudd government signed up to the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, with its provision for Aboriginal people to determine their cultural and political destinies independent of state-based cultural and legal systems. By doing so, according to Jarrett, the Rudd government placed itself in an untenable position. This is because at the time it was also supporting the Northern Territory Emergency Repose Act (or NT Intervention) which explicitly forbade the use of customary law as a legal defence, or as providing mitigating circumstances, in domestic violence of homicide cases. This is an astute observation: the state cannot support the legitimacy of culturally different practices with one hand and then legislate against them with the other. If customary law sanctions the violent bashing of women in punishment for perceived or real wrongs, then Euro-Australian and Aboriginal law are inevitably on a collision course. By supporting self-determination the government is inadvertently supporting practices that are illegal in our judicial system. Jarrett argues persuasively that the right of women to be free of violence, which is enshrined in our legal system, should take precedence over the right for Aboriginal people to continue cultural practices that are in direct conflict with such legal provisions.

If I had any reservations about Jarrett’s book it would be merely her emphasis. There is nothing in the book that contradicts the major works of the Australian anthropological canon—and her moral argument is compelling. However, I would have liked to see more discussion given to the function of religious and ceremonial life in mitigating conflict, and that the moral values these rites embody have an important social and spiritual role in traditional life. It may be that the erosion of such ceremonies and the attendant morality have resulted in a loss of the positive aspects of traditional culture, while protocols that sanction violence have remained. This aspect of traditional culture in the context of sedentism, combined with substance abuse, is a deadly cocktail.

It would also be worthwhile to read Jarrett’s book alongside Diane Bell’s Daughters of the Dreaming (1983). Bell is a very brave anthropologist, and was one of the first to speak out about violence against Aboriginal women in an article co-written in the 1990s with her friend Topsy Napurrula Nelson. Jarrett quotes Bell as one of the pioneering researchers who exposed the violent abuse of Aboriginal women in remote communities, foreshadowing her own thesis.

However, Bell’s Daughters of the Dreaming was also a corrective against male bias in anthropology itself. Due to the fact that most anthropologists—Bell cites Meggitt in this context—were male, all of their data came from males, for it was and is culturally improper for women to share aspects of women’s ritual life with men. Consequently, according to Bell, anthropology has unwittingly seen Aboriginal women through the eyes of Aboriginal men. This has meant confusing Aboriginal men’s attitudes to Aboriginal women with the actual role of Aboriginal women in their own society. Bell’s more informed approach shows that Aboriginal women have their own elaborate world of religious life, little known or understood by men, and that, contrary to the impression given by Meggitt and others, women did possess legitimate power in traditional kinship, marriage and religious systems. This is something we get little sense of in Jarrett’s book.

Liberating Aboriginal People from Violence is a morally brave and important book. It breaches the entrenched silence surrounding one of the most important issues facing Aboriginal people as they mould their ancient hunter-gatherer culture to the legal and moral principles of representative democracy.