Thinking with Stanner in the present

Abstract

In recent years the work of Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner has enjoyed something of a revival. To mark the centenary of his birth in 2005, Jeremy Beckett and I organised a conference and then edited An Appreciation of Difference,1 a volume of scholarly essays exploring various dimensions of Stanner's career and his legacy in the present. Just a few months after that book came out. Black Inc. published The Dreaming and Other Essays2 - essentially a reissuing of Stanner's White Man Got No Dreaming, with an introductory essay by Robert Manne celebrating Stanner as the greatest essayist Australia has ever produced.3 The attention paid to these books in the mainstream press reveals a deep and abiding interest in Stanner's work, especially the essays he wrote for a wide public, and suggests that his insights are well suited to be taken up in continuing debates about the place of Aboriginal people in Australian society. Marcia Langton writing in the Australian Literary Review,4 Christopher Pearson in the pages of The Weekend Australian,5 Inga Clendinnen in The Monthly6 and Keith Windschuttle in Quadrant7 all turned their attention variously to Stanner's work. And in their recent books, Noel Pearson8 and Peter Sutton9 have drawn on Stanner's writings to help sustain their critical attention to past policymaking and their visions for the future. In this essay, I explore Stanner's legacy as a key thinker, but not in the sense with which we tend to conventionally deploy this notion. Here, I am interested to explore how Stanner's work is being mobilised in current public political debate, to examine what kind of 'thinking with' Stanner is being undertaken in the politics of the present. Running through my essay is a reflection on the issue of 'presentism' - the use of scholarly work of an earlier era to address contemporary concerns. In an important essay on the theme, historian of anthropology George Stocking10 describes presentism as a kind of 'Whiggish history' in which the end goal is judgment not understanding. From the perspective of the presentisi, according to Stocking, history is taken to be 'the field of dramatic struggle between children of light and children of darkness'.11 In this characterisation, Stocking evokes nicely some of the tenor of Australia's history wars and the culture wars that have followed. Indeed, a concern to reveal the presentism at work in recent history making has been a strong theme of post-Mabo critical scholarship in Australia. Bain Attwood's critique of Henry Reynolds' deployment of 'juridical history' - representing the past in such a way that it might be made available to legal and quasi-legal judgments in recognition of Aboriginal rights in land - is the most well-articulated case.12 While the use of aspects of Stanner's work by contemporary writers needs to be distinguished from the kind of critique Attwood is making of Reynolds and the specificity of these issues as they concern historians, I want to suggest that at a formal level a similar process is in operation, and presentism is a useful concept with which to think about some recent readings of Stanner's works. Historically, Australians have imagined the cultural difference of remote-living Aboriginal people through two broad sets of representations: one positive, the other negative. While both positive and negative stereotypes coexist, it is by and large the case that one kind of image has dominated in any particular era and broadly influenced the public and policy attention to the Aboriginal problem. Since the mid-1990s, we have been witnessing the re-ascendency of the negative stereotype. Across this transition, two different possible readings of Stanner have been undertaken as his ideas have been appended to conflicting political projects. Before turning to consider these issues of the present, we must, however, lay the foundations for a broader understanding of the development and application of Stanner's thinking. …