Cultural Relativism. British Colonizers, Australian Aboriginals and the Case of Batman's Treaty

Ensayo , 2024 , 11 Páginas , Calificación: 1,0

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This paper examines notions and perspectives related to cultural relativism, as well as the interplay with virtual and real relativity within the context of interactions between British settlers and Australian Aboriginals, represented here with the historical episode of Batman’s Treaty. The approach of cultural relativism is a constructive method for scrutinizing the consequences of Western ethnocentric impositions that assert universal validity.

This approach exhibits the imperative to assess diverse cultures within the intricacies of their own contexts, free from normative judgments imposed by hegemonic or dominant cultures and power structures. Within this analytical framework, the examination of Batman’s Treaty, as conveyed in this paper, serves as an emblematic illustration of universalist and ethnocentric attitudes of European settlers. When explored through the lens of cultural relativity, this historical event points at the way different or conflicting conceptions and understandings contribute to distinct interpretations of the experiences and worldviews held by different cultures.

Content

1. Introduction

2. Cultural Relativism

3. Through the Lens of Cultural Relativity: Encounters Between European Settlers and Australian Aboriginals
3.1. Land, Language, and Communication: The Case of Batman’s Treaty

4. Conclusion

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Introduction

This paper examines notions and perspectives related to cultural relativism (culture relativity or cultural relativity), as well as the interplay with virtual and real relativity within the context of interactions between British settlers and Australian Aboriginals, represented here with the historical episode of Batman’s Treaty.

The approach of cultural relativism is a constructive method for scrutinizing the consequences of Western ethnocentric impositions that assert universal validity. This approach exhibits the imperative to assess diverse cultures within the intricacies of their own contexts, free from normative judgments imposed by hegemonic or dominant cultures and power structures.

Within this analytical framework, the examination of Batman’s Treaty, as conveyed in this paper, serves as an emblematic illustration of universalist and ethnocentric attitudes of European settlers. When explored through the lens of cultural relativity, this historical event points at the way different or conflicting conceptions and understandings contribute to distinct interpretations of the experiences and worldviews held by different cultures.

2. Cultural Relativism

Relativism, in this framework, serves as a comprehensive term denoting the perspective that notions, conventions, reasonings, and justifications are products of differing understandings, evaluations, and assessments and that their validity and authority rely on the individuals, societies, contexts and frameworks that generate them. Following this view, features and qualities are considered relative to their specific framework of assessment, such as local cultural norms or individual standards.¹ Thus, the truth of claims asserting these properties, is contingent upon the specification or provision of the relevant framework. “Relativists characteristically insist … that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established.”²

Following Gherdjikov, the concept of relation is to be understood as definition³: relation is “not something detached and real but is the very ‘thing’. Relating is virtual defining – projection of the real connection between moments of a life process.”⁴ In this framework, the virtual amounts to the artifacts, specifically signs, and meaning is captured as “a moment of a human life process.”⁵ Gherdjikov states that virtual and real relativity are “analogous to special and general relativity (Einstein).”⁶ Cultural relativity, which has acquired significance in the early 20th century following Einstein’s theory of special relativity, refers to the view or position that there is no universal standard to measure cultures by, and that all cultural values and beliefs must be understood relative to their intricate context and web of relations, and not judged based on exterior norms or values. Proponents of cultural relativism also tend to argue that the norms and values of one culture should not be evaluated via the norms and values of another culture. It is important to note that cultural relativism was also a response to Western ethnocentrism. The core tenet of cultural relativism lies in the claim of the “the equal standing of all cultural perspectives and values which co-vary with their cultural and social background.”⁷

The concept was established in the field of anthropology by Franz Boas who was trained in physics and geography, and influenced by Kant, Herder, and von Humboldt –he stated in 1887: “civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes”.⁸ Boas argued that in light of ethnological data, both our knowledge and emotions rely on our specific social life and of the history of our communities.⁹ Every individual sees the world through the perspective of their own culture. Thus, constructing moral judgements about a person of another culture and attempting to impose a majority view or opinion on people with different cultural perceptions is unjust. As per M. J. Herkovits’ principle of cultural relativism, which refers to the idea that “judgments are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation.”¹⁰

An important figure in linguistics who contributed to the field of cultural relativism was Benjamin Whorf, who articulated, “What needs to be clearly seen by anthropologists, who to a large extent may have gotten the idea that linguistics is merely a highly specialized and tediously technical pigeonhole in a far corner of the anthropological workshop, is that linguistics is essentially the quest of meaning.”¹¹ Whorf, inspired by his teacher Edward Sapir (who was supervised by the social anthropologist Franz Boas), used ethnographic evidence from American Indian languages, such as Hopi, to argue that languages mold our views of the world and different languages do this in a different manner. In the case of the Hopi, the claim was that their language imposes a conception of time very different from that of the speakers of the Indo-European languages. The so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the position known as “linguistic relativity”, became popular in both psychology and social anthropology in the mid-20th century. As an example, in the early 20th century, Benjamin Lee Whorf has drawn attention from his contemporaries by asserting that the Hopi language, spoken by Native American people in Arizona, lacked words and grammatical elements to represent time.¹² Whorf’s argument challenged the dominant notion that there was a universally correct way to perceive the world, contrary to the concepts embedded in Western languages.

Conceptions, understandings, and the very categories of languages vary. As Gherdjikov states, “Different language communities, depending on the distance between their languages, may not only maintain different statements about the world, but talk in different categories.”¹³ In the case of Aboriginal Australians, recent research on Australian Aboriginal languages, particularly the groundbreaking study of Murrinhpatha, spoken in Wadeye, has challenged the belief that the perception of the world remains universal, even though fundamental structures of language may differ.¹⁴ Languages are live processes that form fluid, intricate, and transient linguistic forms; they are not fixated within totalizing or universal descriptions and meanings. As Gherdjikov explains,

The greatest differences we find exactly between those concepts we assume to be universal and common to all mankind … Neutral talk is a classical illusion, analogous to the illusion about neutral results from measuring distances and time-intervals in mechanics. It is neither possible nor sensible to look for ‘truth’ somewhere ‘in between’ those diverging concepts … There is no such thing as ‘language’ employed by all people to exchange neutral information about an independent world. ‘Language’ is a form of speaking in a local life.¹⁵

Gherdjikov further explains how the “virtual” acquires reality with respect to the “real”, as there must always be an object of reference for a specific sign. As such, “virtual” and “real” form a dual form wherein “The virtual is real as a sensible form … What distinguishes the real from the virtual with sufficient clearness is that the real can live without the virtual and the virtual has no life without the real.”¹⁶ From this approach, “the network of concepts and propositions about virtual and real relativity explains the phenomena of linguistic and cultural relativity.”¹⁷ One of the most obvious instances of cultural relativity can be applied to the concepts/understandings of “East” and “West”, where one observes the obvious ethnocentrism on the side of Westerners, wherein the East is othered, seen as inferior, mystified, passivized and/or sublimated: “Taking the East as a location of great Truths is an illusion. In the perspective of the West an ‘Eastern mysticism’ is discovered – a projection-concept derived from ‘Western rationalism.’”¹⁸

As such, it should be noted that the romanticization and mystification of Aboriginals and Aboriginal culture derive from Western rationalism which reduces its other into simplistic parameters –this robs Aboriginals of their agency. Western metaphysics and more generally Western thought relies on dichotomies such as subject-object, culture-nature, spiritual-material, civilized-savage, human-animal to classify, typify, define and determine the world, its inhabitants, the worldly experience, and “worlding”¹⁹, to use Gherdjikov’s term.

3. Through the Lens of Cultural Relativity: Encounters Between European Settlers and Australian Aboriginals

Within the context of cultural relativity, the entanglements of societal dynamics rely on historical and cultural aspects of a society. In the case of Australian Aboriginals, with the arrival of European settlers in Australia in 1788, Indigenous people endured a myriad of challenges. Among these were displacement, genocidal practices, and the forcible removal of children. Australian Aboriginals endured the repercussions of living under a rule that systemically devalued their cultural heritage and people.²⁰ The profound impact of these experiences demonstrates disparities between European and Aboriginal cultures, in terms of their understandings of land, time, labor, history, language, and community. It is crucial to recognize the diversity of Aboriginal cultures and peoples, as the status and features of this culture does not demonstrate a singular or homogeneous identity –distinctions also exist among Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders, thus cultural relativity also operates within Aboriginal communities themselves.

British settlers claimed the Aboriginal lands for economic purposes. The pastoral industry was increasing expansion, as settlement moved outward from Botany Bay, with an influx of British immigrants. The image of Australian Aborigines as desert people is mostly not correct, as their population densities relied on rainfall. They were mostly living in the wet and productive parts of Australia. European settlers inhabited those areas as well: “The reason we think of Aborigines as desert people is simply that Europeans killed or drove them out of the most desirable areas, leaving the last intact Aboriginal populations only in areas that Europeans didn’t want.”²¹ Broome characterizes the rapidly moving frontier of the mid-1800s as the most “fantastic land grab which was never again to be equaled.”²² There were violent conflicts between the settlers and Aboriginal groups that escalated into full-scale war over land. As settlers were much more advanced in terms of weaponry, military and civilian responses by Europeans led to massacres, including killings of women and children.²³ Aboriginals were subjected to various heinous strategies, such as the distribution of poisoned flour and introduction of diseases like chickenpox and influenza.²⁴ As Aboriginal lands became increasingly occupied, Indigenous people moved to European settlements due to disruptions in their resources and food. They attempted to use their kinship systems for labor exchange, but the settlers did not understand this, as they viewed labor as individual exchange rather than a reciprocal gift providing food for the entire group. One of the most profound consequences of colonization was the removal of Aboriginal children from their families. This led to disruptions in traditional life, impacting high death rates and low birth rates. Many Aboriginal people became fringe dwellers in white society²⁵, struggling with homelessness and addiction rampant in their communities.

3.1. Land, Language, and Communication: The Case of Batman’s Treaty

It is in this context one should focus on Batman’s Treaty, “signed” between the Australian grazier, businessman, and colonizer John Batman and a cohort of Wurundjeri elders, as it marked a pivotal event in the history of European-Aboriginal relations. Batman arrived in Port Phillip in 1835 and approached local Indigenous leaders with a contract, to “buy” their land, and walked away with 240,000 hectares of prime farming terrain –amounting to the entirety of the Kulin nation’s ancestral land.²⁶

This treaty, centered on the acquisition of land in the vicinity of Port Phillip, holds particular significance as it represents the inaugural and singular instance wherein Europeans engaged in direct negotiations with the indigenous inhabitants to establish their presence and occupation on Aboriginal lands. Batman met with Aboriginal people several times and offered them blankets, handkerchiefs, sugar, apples as gifts, and received woven baskets and spears in exchange. On 6 June, Batman met with eight elders of the Wurundjeri. In exchange of 600,000 acres of today’s Melbourne, Batman paid the Aboriginals “40 pairs of blankets, 42 tomahawks, 130 knives, 62 pairs of scissors, 40 looking glasses, 250 handkerchiefs, 18 shirts, 4 flannel jackets, 4 suits of clothes and 150 lb. of flour.”²⁷

There were numerous issues with the treaty due to deceptiveness of Batman, as the settlers’ main goal was to exploit the Aboriginal people. Claiming the land was problematic in itself, and demonstrated the disparities in conceptualizations of these two very different communities. Batman was relying on European conceptions of land ownership and legal contracts, which were strange and incomprehensible concepts for the Aboriginals. As Batman acted according to the European constructs of legality, ownership, and contracts, the Aboriginals perceived the land in a very different manner, not as a commodity but as an inherent aspect of their identity. For them, the relationship with the land meant habitation and wandering –it was not an object of commercial transactions. This issue raised a fundamental question about the legitimacy of a treaty, as one of the parties lacked a conceptual understanding of the very notion of a treaty. It is also important to note that Batman claimed that he had negotiated with Aboriginal “chiefs” who were assigned to make decisions about the land. In reality, these Aboriginals had no superior rights over the land; they were merely heads of their families. Thus, Batman was negotiating with the tribal elders who were not able “sell” their people’s land, and his “communication” with them was rather one-sided.²⁸

Language was a problem, as the translators accompanying Batman from New South Wales did not properly speak the language of the Wurundjeri people. Also, the legalistic form and English language used in the treaty documents further complicated the communication. The document expressed that the Wurundjeri people agreed to “Give, Grant, Enfeoff and confirm unto said, John Batman, his Heirs and Assigns”²⁹ regarding their land. The term “enfeoff” symbolized the transfer of land through a ritual involving the passing of soil or leaves. Stark cultural differences became apparent because there was a similar practice in the Kulin Nation, signifying granting safe passage and temporary land use for foreigners who were friendly to the traditional owners.³⁰ Thus, the Wurundjeri people likely interpreted Batman’s offerings as gifts exchanged for safe passage (tandarrum)³¹ and temporary land use, exhibiting their sincere dealings with the Europeans to negotiate relationships and alliances whilst also ensuring security on their land.

Batman’s treaty is an example of the layered nature of the communication attempts between the colonizers and Aboriginals, in the framework of culture relativity. Due to the structure of their language, the Aboriginals did not conceive the idea of selling or owning the land. They thought that they were providing safe passage to the foreigners, whereas the colonizers as legal subjects believed they were buying the land from the Aboriginals and offered materials and goods to them in return. The conflicting realities of Indigenous communities and European colonizers, thus, become apparent, before all else, in their understandings of the concept of “land”.

The Aboriginals have a constitutive and historical relation with the land, as a spiritual and cultural bond. This bond is founded on “Dreamtime” (or “Dreaming”), which can be defined as a multi-dimensional framework that includes wisdom, narrative, knowledge, faith, and praxis that refer to the Aboriginal beliefs about the creation of the world, laws of existence, and the origins of living entities. Landscape is understood as deeply connected to the actions of their spiritual ancestors. This sacred bond with the land forms the basis of their conviction that the land has always belonged to them; this belief is often misunderstood by Westerners. Thus, the perspective on land extends beyond ownership, rather, people are considered as belonging to the land. As a spiritual and symbolic space, the land is more than physical environment. Accordingly, Moreton-Robinson defines Indigenous people’s relationship with the land as an “ontological belonging.”³²

As such, the concept of time is inherently related to the land for the Aboriginals. In Western dualistic thinking, the dichotomy of objective and subjective time introduces the specific conceptions of the temporal, non-temporal, natural and eternal, which demonstrate that “we see chronological time as something distinct from and different to the eternal. This is similar to the debate about faith and reason. Dualism says that the two are distinct, and that if you use faith to determine something, then reason must be out the window.”³³ Whereas Aboriginal understandings of time assigns priority to the aspect of eternal, due to their beliefs around Dreamtime. This view does not see the subject within a linear temporality but rather within a “continuous entity”.³⁴

Finally, as mentioned above, the issue of language was an issue in the signing of the treaty, clear in the challenges in translation. At the time of European settlement in Australia, there were hundreds of distinct Aboriginal languages. Due to this linguistic diversity, languages of different tribes were often not mutually intelligible. Batman’s translators and the Wurundjeri people, being speakers of different languages, operated within different structures, making translation process difficult. Gherdjikov defines translation as a “transition from one frame of reference to another”³⁵ emphasizing the transfer of meaning, while acknowledging the inherent locality of meaning as a “life process”. The translators’ comprehension was not adequate for effective communication, due to the “indeterminacy”³⁶ of translation, arising from the varied socio-cultural engagements of both Aboriginal groups. Similarly, but in a more pronounced way, the signing of the treaty demonstrated a lack of understanding between the Aboriginals and the settlers, in numerous aspects, language barrier being one of them.

4. Conclusion

The encounter between British settlers and Australian Aboriginals, and in this case, between Batman and the Wurundjeri people, demonstrate the multifaceted interplay of conventional Western dichotomies and the entirely different socio-cultural and linguistic parameters of the local Aboriginal people, that reveal a productive understanding of the concepts of cultural relativity, as well as notions of real and virtual relativity.

It is noteworthy that the pivotal moment of cultural relativism was significantly influenced by the prevailing dichotomies deeply ingrained in Western thought. Gherdjikov illuminates this phenomenon through the concept of “Western description” characterized by “specificity,” denoting the worldview shaped “in the wake of Western civilization in Antiquity and has developed till our days in Europe and North America.”³⁷ One of the categories specified by Gherdjikov, the category of “civilized-savage”, played a crucial role in the encounter between colonizers and Aboriginals, wherein Europeans considered Aboriginals “too primitive to be regarded as the actual owners and sovereigns”³⁸ categorizing them as existing in a “savage state”, under the Western distinction between savage hordes and civilized society.

The divergence of the colonizers’ understanding of nature can be explained by Gherdjikov’s “culture-nature” category, wherein “man is cultural being and nature is external to man.”³⁹ The Aboriginals lacked such an understanding, viewing nature not as an external entity but as an inherent part of their existence and their ontological bond to the soil. This difference was also manifested in their perspectives on time and land, exhibited in their concept of Dreamtime. The British strategically denied Aboriginal sovereignty, objectifying them, and asserting that Australia was a “vacant land.” This denial not only disregarded Aboriginals’ sovereignty but also negated its very possibility.⁴⁰ The erroneous classification of Australia as terra nullius denied humanity and agency of Aboriginal peoples.

As Gherdjikov puts it, “Relativity in awareness can be a virtual freedom from blind ego- and ethno-centrism, and a real freedom for a global perspective.”⁴¹ This approach is closely related to the potential of culture relativity to open different routes, away from egocentric and ethnocentric perspectives, paving the way for a more inclusive and globally informed understandings, both in theory and practice. Within this framework, the lens of culture relativity productively demonstrates the conflicts, social dynamics, and consequences of the interaction between the colonizers and the Aboriginal people.

***

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boas, Franz. “Museums of Ethnology and their classification.” Science Vol. IX, 1887

Boas, Franz. The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Collier Books, 1963

Buchan, Bruce. “Of ‘Social Ties’and ‘Savage Hordes’: The Denial of Indigenous Sovereignty in Australia”, https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/41043/3/brucepaper.pdf

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1999

Dudgeon, Pat, et. al. Aboriginal Social, Cultural and Historical Contexts, https://rb.gy/6fzmbe

Gherdjikov, Serghey. Philosophy of Relativity, Extremepress, Sofia 2012

Gherdjikov, Serghey. “Virtual and Real Relativity”, Sofia Philosophical Review, Vol III, No 2, 2010

Herskovits, Melville J. Cultural Relativism, Random House, 1972

Kenneally, Christine. “Grammar Changes How We See, an Australian Language Shows”, Scientific American, https://rb.gy/jfavyw

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Relativism”, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/#CulRel

Walker, Rebecca. Eternity Now: Aboriginal Concepts Of Time, https://others.org.au/features/eternity-and-aboriginal-concepts-of-time/

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought and Reality, MIT Press, 1956

“Batman’s Treaty”, State Library of Victoria, https://rb.gy/z0zk2l

“The Batman ‘treaty’is signed”, Deadly Story, https://rb.gy/dzeyio

[...]

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¹ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Relativism, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/#CulRel

² ibid.

³ Serghey Gherdjikov, Philosophy of Relativity, Extremepress, Sofia 2012, 6.

⁴ ibid.

⁵ ibid.

⁶ ibid.

⁷ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Relativism.

⁸ Franz Boas, “Museums of Ethnology and their classification.” Science Vol. IX, 1887.

⁹ Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Collier Books, 1963, 149.

¹⁰ Melville J. Herskovits, Cultural R elativism. Random House, 1972, 15.

¹¹ Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, MIT Press, 1956, 73

¹² Christine Kenneally, Grammar Changes How We See, an Australian Language Shows, Scientific American, https://rb.gy/jfavyw

¹³ Serghey Gherdjikov, “Virtual and Real Relativity”, Sofia Philosophical Review, Vol III, No 2, 2010, 83.

¹⁴ Christine Kenneally, “Grammar Changes How We See, an Australian Language Shows”, Scientific American, https://rb.gy/jfavyw

¹⁵ Serghey Gherdjikov, “Virtual and Real Relativity”, 83.

¹⁶ ibid., 84.

¹⁷ ibid., 99.

¹⁸ ibid., 100.

¹⁹ ibid., 93.

²⁰ Pat Dudgeon et. al., “Aboriginal Social, Cultural and Historical Contexts”, https://rb.gy/6fzmbe

²¹ Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1999

²² ibid.

²³ ibid., 7

²⁴ ibid.

²⁵ ibid.

²⁶ “Batman’s Treaty”, State Library of Victoria, https://rb.gy/z0zk2l

²⁷ “The Batman ‘treaty’is signed”, Deadly Story, https://rb.gy/dzeyio

²⁸ “Batman’s Treaty”, State Library of Victoria, https://rb.gy/z0zk2l

²⁹ ibid.

³⁰ The Batman ‘treaty’ is signed”, Deadly Story, https://rb.gy/dzeyio

³¹ ibid.

³² Pat Dudgeon et al., “Aboriginal Social, Cultural and Historical Contexts”, 6.

³³ Rebecca Walker, “Eternity Now: Aboriginal Concepts Of Time”, https://others.org.au/features/eternity-and-aboriginal-concepts-of-time/

³⁴ ibid.

³⁵ Serghey Gherdjikov, Philosophy of Relativity, 26

³⁶ ibid. Gherdjikov refers to Quine who uses the term “indeterminacy of translation” in Word and Object.

³⁷ ibid.

³⁸ Bruce Buchan, “Of ‘Social Ties’and ‘Savage Hordes’: The Denial of Indigenous Sovereignty in Australia”, https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/41043/3/brucepaper.pdf

³⁹ ibid.

⁴⁰ Bruce Buchan, “Of ‘Social Ties’and ‘Savage Hordes’: The Denial of Indigenous Sovereignity in Australia”, https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/41043/3/brucepaper.pdf

⁴¹ ibid., 6

• Universidad: Sofia University St. Klimment Ohridski
• Curso: Language and the World - Language and Cultural Relativity
• Calificación: 1,0
• Autor: Ilgin Yildiz (Autor)
• Año de publicación: 2024
• Páginas: 11
• No. de catálogo: V1443324
• ISBN (PDF): 9783963551956
• Idioma: Inglés
• Etiqueta: cultural relativism, colonizers, aboriginal australians, whorf, boas, Serghey Gherdjikov