In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Stephen Muecke about his article “Belonging in Aboriginal Australia: A Political ‘Cosmography,'” from Telos 202 (Spring 2023). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss how cosmography rather than ethnography allows for a focus on epistemological and ontological pluralism, and what such pluralism means for the essay’s cosmographic analysis; whether ontological pluralism is fundamentally incompatible with monotheistic religion and the institutions that have derived from it; how important for the essay’s analysis is institutional belonging, and whether the centering effect of such belonging could conflict with an ontological pluralism; how Native Title in the Australian legal system is grounded in the idea of genealogy, and whether this orientation undermines or contradict the forms of title and territorial sovereignty documented in Goolarabooloo practices; and the key differences between the Goolarabooloo practices and Yawuru nationalism. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 202 are available for purchase in our online store.
Belonging in Aboriginal Australia: A Political “Cosmography”
Stephen Muecke
1. Introduction
It is an increasingly accepted protocol to situate oneself discursively in order to approach a set of problems. This protocol, consolidated by Donna Haraway’s famous “situated knowledge,” is also evident in everyday Indigenous Australian practice.[1] I begin, therefore, with my long association with the Goolarabooloo community in Broome, North-West Australia, and in particular with Paddy Roe, who started teaching me in the late 1970s. This text attempts to translate his sense of belonging to that territory, an attachment he had to struggle to maintain, both in the face of ongoing destructive colonization and also in the face of other Aboriginal territorial claims. These collective attachments are therefore inflected by history—not just settler history, but Indigenous history that has changed in relation to colonization. These changes are wrought through overwhelmingly rapid material changes, shifting institutional alliances, contested concepts, and new practices. This ethnographic history is an attempt to provide an overview of some of these changes in the North-West corner of Australia over the last forty years.
2. Defining Cosmography
To write a cosmography means to go beyond traditional ethnographies, which centralize humans in their cultures, toward those more-than-human domains. These are the strength of the territorial belongings for which Indigenous peoples are generally recognized and often identified.[2] Cosmographies are ontologically pluralist, in the tradition of William James’s “pluriverse,” Bruno Latour’s “modes of existence,” and Isabelle Stengers’s “cosmopolitics.” These philosophies contribute to the “theory” behind cosmography, except that the theory is not unified enough to be simply applied. Rather, theorizing is a pragmatic process of thinking through problems, starting in the midst of said problems, which necessarily exist suspended in heterogeneous matrices. Whatever the problem, it does not exist at one level of reality. William James “wondered why philosophers and scientists have been obsessed with the idea of one, single, unified reality. Why, he asked, should the world be just one; ‘why is “one” more excellent than “forty-three,” or than “two million and ten”?'”[3] If the object is ontologically plural, then the analysis should be epistemologically pluralist. At best, the analysis should follow the problem as it historically evolves, staying with it in critical proximity, sharpening its theoretical tools, and staying alert to the shifting agencies of objects.
This approach has its roots in the kind of “pragmatic sociology” developed in France in the 1980s with the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale founded by Luc Boltanski, Michael Pollak, and Laurent Thévenot, at the same time as Michel Callon and Bruno Latour were forging Actor-Network Theory (ANT).[4] By the time Latour came to write his Inquiry into Modes of Existence, however, he was distancing himself from ANT, while building on its methodological results in an explicitly pluralist and pragmatist manner.[5] The Inquiry could itself be called a cosmography, as it proceeds to describe in detail (through the eyes of a fictional anthropologist) sixteen modes of existence characterizing the “Western” world, something on which anthropologists felt a necessity to focus and to reflect so as not to be constantly oriented toward exotic cultures.
Elaborating on Isabelle Stengers’s conception of “cosmopolitics,” Adam Robbert and Sam Mickey define it—usefully for cosmographic purposes—as
acknowledging our participation in multiple, irreducible worlds—not just at the level of knowledge and concepts (epistemological pluralism) but at the level of being itself (ontological pluralism). Such pluralism indicates the pervasive influence of Whitehead (1978) on cosmopolitics, as it echoes his “ontological principle”—that is, the reason for anything is always one or more actual entities. Thus, instead of spatializing reality by positing two separate containers—one called nature and one called society—cosmopolitics suggests that there are as many modes of reality as there are entities. The task is to trace the multiplicity of associations between entities as they participate in a common, ecological collective—where nonhumans also have a voice in society—rather than to deliberate between the vacuous abstractions of nature and culture.[6]
So, while what I call the “new French pragmatism” has its roots in the traditional American school, it changed radically as it came to deal with contemporary problems like the environment, technology, energy, and the agency of nonhumans.[7] These issues forged new pathways in this school of thought, something that has introduced me to the possibility of writing more cosmographically.
However, experimenting with a cosmographic approach, especially when the writer is coming from outside an Indigenous community, entails being constantly on the alert not to claim any omniscient viewpoint that the term “cosmography” seems to imply—the “God trick” that Haraway famously argued against in 1988.[8] Yet if Indigenous Australians constantly stress their connections to Country,[9] these modes of belonging are situated, now unavoidably, against violent dispossession—through colonization—which has been going on since 1788. Colonization, in order to situate myself again, is the current writer’s own historical background; it is where I come from.
So, I have to switch pronouns and tell the story about how I came to know something about the struggles of the Goolarabooloo in Broome, Western Australia, by being welcomed into their community in the late 1970s. Arriving there to do work on Aboriginal storytelling techniques, I was introduced to Paddy Roe, who became my teacher over many years, and co-author of three books.[10] One protocol I learned from him is that “things must go both ways”; knowledge has to be traded, as values are translated from one “cosmos” to another, his and mine, and that the medium for this is a storytelling that starts by situating the narrator. Immersed in the space of the story, the narrator draws the listener in and they dwell together, at least for the duration of the story, and the listener emerges with a better understanding, a way of knowing and feeling that has sympathetically situated them with the narrator. It was of utmost importance to Paddy Roe to thus convey how he belonged to his ancestral lands—he was trying to protect Country—and he often wrote iconographically in the sand as he was telling a story, literally indexing his connection. After listening to many such stories, I came to feel as if I, too, belonged to Country, in a way. I kept coming back, anyway, and I continue to work with his grandsons and great-grandsons. Now, I wonder, having told this story, if there is any belonging without such storytelling?
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1. See Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99; and Sandra Harding, ed., The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies (New York: Routledge, 2004); followed by Martin Nakata, “An Indigenous Standpoint Theory,” in Disciplining the Savages: Savaging the Disciplines (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), pp. 213–16; and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Towards an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory,” Australian Feminist Studies 28, no. 78 (2014): 331–47. Knowledge that is situated in this way stands in opposition to the universalist, omniscient modes of address of some social scientific texts. See also: Hartmut Behr and Felix Rösch, “Comparing ‘Systems’ and ‘Cultures’: Between Universalities, Imperialism, and Indigenousity,” in Vergleichende Regierungslehre, ed. Hans-Joachim Lauth (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010), pp. 73–91.
2. “Indigenous peoples, also referred to as First peoples, Aboriginal peoples, Native peoples, or autochthonous peoples, are ethnic groups that are native to a particular place on earth and live or lived in an interconnected relationship with the natural environment there for many generations prior to the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples.” Wikipedia, s.v. “Indigenous peoples,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples. See also Kyle Powys Whyte, “Indigeneity,” in Keywords for Environmental Studies, ed. Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow (New York: NYU Press, 2016), pp. 143–44.
3. John Tresch, “Around the Pluriverse in Eight Objects: Cosmograms for the Critical Zone,” in Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), pp. 58–69, referring to William James, “Lecture 4: The One and the Many,” in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longman, Green, and Co., 1907), p. 51. See also Martin Savransky, “The Pluralistic Problematic: William James and the Pragmatics of the Pluriverse,” Theory, Culture and Society 38, no. 2 (2021): 141–59.
4. Antoine Hennion, “From ANT to Pragmatism: A Journey with Bruno Latour at the CSI,” in Latour and the Humanities, ed. Rita Felski and Stephen Muecke (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2020), pp. 52–75.
5. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2013).
6. Adam Robbert and Sam Mickey, “Cosmopolitics: An Ongoing Question,” paper presented at The Center for Process Studies, Claremont, CA, Political Theory and Entanglement: Politics at the Overlap of Race, Class, and Gender, October 25, 2013, https://knowledgeecology.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/claremont_cosmopolitics.pdf.
7. Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?, trans. Brett Buchanan (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2016).
8. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges.”
9. In recent years the word Country (now often capitalized) has taken on a special meaning in Indigenous Australia. Deborah Bird Rose writes about it like this: “Country in Aboriginal English is not only a common noun but also a proper noun. People talk about country in the same way that they would talk about a person: they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and long for country. People say that country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy. Country is not a generalized or undifferentiated type of place, such as one might indicate with terms like ‘spending a day in the country’ or ‘going up the country.’ Rather, country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life. Because of this richness, country is home, and peace; nourishment for body, mind and spirit; heart’s ease.” Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996), p. 7. To make this distinction, Country in this Aboriginal sense is often capitalized, as it is in this article.
10. Paddy Roe, Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley, ed. and intro. Stephen Muecke (Perth: Univ. of Western Australia Press, 2016). See also Stephen Muecke, Krim Benterrak, and Paddy Roe, Reading the Country (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2014); Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe, The Children’s Country: The Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020).
