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Peter Sutton (1)

Autor de Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia

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Peter Sutton is an anthropologist and linguist who has worked with Aboriginal people since 1969. He speaks three Cape York languages and as an expert on Aboriginal land ownership has assisted with over-fifty land rights cases. He has authored or edited twelve books, including Native Title in mostrar más Australia: an Ethnographic Perspective, regarded as the most authoritative work in its field. He is an Affiliate Professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide, and the Division of Anthropology, South Australian Museum. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. mostrar menos

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Farmers or Hunter-gatherers?: The Dark Emu Debate por Peter Sutton
I'm very grateful to Peter Sutton and Karyn Walshe for putting this book together. I'd read Dark Emu and had been rather astonished at the message ...basically that the Australian Aborigines were far more "advanced" than we had been giving them credit for. According to Bruce Pascoe, they were active agriculturalists, built stone houses, which they lived in more or less permanently, dug wells, engaged in aquaculture etc. etc. Though, I've just gone back and had a look at my review of Pascoe's book and realise that I was a bit sceptical even then and felt that Bruce was using one instance to generalise to the whole of Australia. And that's what the current Authors say too.
I must say that I was impressed with the scholarly nature of the current book; the careful cross referencing, the way they dealt with all the issues. For example there is some supposed evidence of very old stone implements (120,000 years old) being found on Rottnest Island off Perth in WA. But, as the authors point out....this is a real outlier with no supporting evidence whatsoever and big claims demand big evidence. What's the evidence?....well a snail shell found nearby. But that, or the implements themselves might have been placed together much more recently.
Time and time again they catch Bruce Pascoe out with selective quoting....leaving out the qualifiers in the narrative or simply just making stuff up. I've come away pretty convinced that what Sutton and Walshe say is much more likely to be the correct picture: that the aborigines, pre 1788, were hunter gatherers with minor variations, they were generally not sedentary but moved around following food and water resources. their belief system was that the earth would provide and they did not harvest and plant seed, in general they did nothing like practice agriculture or aquaculture, they did not build stone houses and live in them (with, perhaps the single exception of some stone foundations where it was on a rock foundation in Western Victoria), Yes they built fish traps but these should not be overstated as marvels of engineering, etc etc. I'm now concerned that Pascoe's book has been received with great enthusiasm ...even a version being developed for schools...which is really worrying and it plays right into the hands of those who, for political reasons are claiming that the aborigines have 70,000 years of the world's oldest "civilisation". Well they certainly had a long culture which had enabled them to live and survive quite well in Australia and to live very lightly on the land. But whatever they had it does not fit the normal archeological definitions of a civilisation: Buildings, large stratified societies, Complex tools, and creations, etc etc. I get the impression from Sutton that he has enormous respect for the Aboriginal culture as it stands and sees that Pascoe actually diminishes it by suggesting tht the closer it comes to the Western view of development (agriculture, sophisticated dwellings, and engineering works) then the more advanced they were. It seems that there is a lot of evidence for the Aborigines being in Australia for 45,000 - 50,000 years but beyond this the evidence gets a bit thin. Oh, one other thing struck me and that was the use of Melanesian influences from Torres Strait (Conical Hats) being generalised for the whole of Australia. In a way, I'm a bit disappointed. It would have been nice to think of the aborigines harvesting grain for sowing into prepared seed beds ....but the reality seems to be that if they had such seed they would eat it. Here's some highlights that I noted in the book:
2. Spiritual propagation
Aboriginal traditional maintenance of the fertility of the biota in many different regions by spiritual means is ignored in Dark Emu.
Instead, Dark Emu’s focus is completely on material methods of species cultivation. Yet Aboriginal spiritual management of species fertility was clearly the dominant mode by comparison with physical species management practices. It was dominant, but the two were often complementary.
3. The language question
The basic pattern with regard to the possession of specifically ‘horticultural’ vocabulary in traditional Australia is that it is found only in the Torres Strait, where horticulture (gardening) was in fact traditionally practised to a degree, on the western islands, and to a greater degree in the east and north.
4. Ecological agents and ‘firestick farming’
In 1959 Tindale had published a paper, which Jones cited, containing these passages: Man, setting fire to large area of his territory at all times of the year convenient for his hunting, often causes destruction far beyond that done by nature [that is, lightning].
If people want to metaphorically call that ‘firestick farming’, as Jones did in his 1969 paper, they well may, but producing young grass was never their main motivation in engaging in grass firing in the extensive Wik grasslands and thickets. I never heard of people intending fire to maintain grasslands free from trees, although this may well have been an effect of their actions.
‘Proto-agriculture’ is not agriculture. It may well have been, instead, a long-term stable skill beyond which it was unnecessary to venture, and therefore was not proto-anything. We should not assume that it was ‘on the way’ to something other than its own continued effectiveness.

‘some San communities have oscillated between foraging and cattle herding over several centuries—perhaps for millennia’. 37 As Layton, Foley and Williams say, ‘These examples underline the danger of perceiving the transition between hunting and gathering and specialized husbandry as a one-way process that in some absolute sense constitutes progress.’

The writings of David Harris are particularly relevant here; he constructs a continuum from dependency on wild plants and animals to dependency on domesticated ones. Even where production of wild plant-foods and animals dominates, it may be combined with cultivation involving small-scale clearing of vegetation and minimal tillage, and/ or the taming, protective herding, or free-range management of animals.
Pascoe’s presentation of his findings as new, and his frequent assertion of the ignorance of the Australian public, appear at least partly based on an unwillingness to acknowledge this kind of highly relevant published discussion and the direct teachings of Aboriginal people.
On the basis of what I have learned from senior Aboriginal mentors over a period of fifty years, it is clear to me that the non-adoption of horticulture and agriculture by the Old People was not a failure of the imagination but an active championing and protection of their own way of life and, when in contact with outsiders, resistance to an alien economic pattern.
‘When it came time for planting it seemed ridiculous to the nomad to bury good sweet-potatoes instead of eating them
5. Social evolutionism rebirthed
There are moments in Dark Emu where a medieval European peasant economy seems to be held up as the progressive target for Australians before conquest, or even claimed as its ‘achievement’.
Pascoe regards the possession of pottery, sewn clothing, agriculture, permanent settlements, and houses that employ stone rather than tree limbs, grass and bark as hallmarks of a more ‘advanced’ or more sophisticated society.
If Australian societies were, as Pascoe argues, on a ‘movement towards agricultural reliance’, was this same movement going on for over 50,000 years? If people devised these adaptations 50,000 years ago, have they been stuck in a time warp of ‘lack of advancement’ ever since?
Pascoe’s book is an essay in admiration of creativity and invention. Readers are encouraged to feel rushes of wonder for ingenious devices, for ‘achievements’. This is dangerously close to a Western notion of culture focused on constant innovation, competition, progress and, in its lighter moments, gadgetry, gimmickry, smartness, novelty.
The fish traps of Brewarrina and eastern Cape York were not claimed as the ingenious works of human beings, but were regarded as having been put there in the Dreaming, by Dreamings.
One of Pascoe’s focal subjects, the milling of seeds into flour for the making of seedcakes, is a relevant case. Use of millstones for grinding seeds was adopted through much of arid-zone Australia and nearby beginning somewhere around 4000 years ago.
Dark Emu bypasses the widely based evidence for the introduction of seed grinding around 4000 years ago and instead uses the isolated Cuddie Springs site case as evidence that Australians had begun grinding seeds, and were the world’s ‘first bakers’, around 30,000 years ago (in the Pleistocene period), 15,000 years before the Egyptians
Professor Mike Smith, senior archaeologist at the National Museum of Australia (NMA), after a detailed discussion of the evidence, concluded instead: ‘In this context, claims for late
Pleistocene seed-grinding implements at Cuddie Springs … are tenuous.’
6. The agriculture debate
On that basis I can say that, out of the many dozens of fruits, root vegetables and swamp plants we investigated, this ‘replanting’ practice was confined to only one class: the yams. Of these, five species were identified, but probably only two species of yam were replanted or conserved in situ: the long yam and the hairy yam. 17 This alleged link to ‘farming’ does not make classical Wik society an agricultural one or even a horticultural one. It was hunter-gatherer-plus.
recent fine-grained and authoritative study of plant use traditions of the same people and their neighbours, by Jeff Hardwick, 28 has produced a great deal of detail but nothing that even suggests that they practised horticulture or agriculture prior to conquest.
He suggests the fruit was brought to the ranges by people travelling from elsewhere, and possibly established by people defecating near camp sites.
It is notable that detailed studies of Aboriginal seed use in the seed-grinding region characteristically make no suggestion of the physical cultivation of crops through sowing of seeds stored from previous seasons. Had this practice been widespread it would have been observed and recorded ubiquitously.
One can legitimately interpret these stretched definitions and uses of qualifiers such as semi-( cultivation) and proto-( agriculture) as Eurocentric wishful thinking.
Why were these practices not read as evidence of a long-term stable relationship with the biota, as an achievement of relative equilibrium, rather than unfulfilled steps up some supposed ladder of progress?
They provoke questions such as: ‘What held
people up, for around 55,000 years, from making progress?’ The question is false. It glamorises agriculture, and fails to respect the spiritual propagation philosophy of the Old People.
If ‘agriculture’ was the way of life of the Old People, why did they not segue smoothly into the domestic gardening—and the broad-field ploughing, sowing and cropping—of the British settlers?
The view we express in this book—that is, that at conquest Aboriginal people were practical and spiritual managers and modifiers of their environment, skilled hunters, adept fishers and trappers, and very botanically knowledgeable foragers who had long come to grips with the problems of making a living in a wide range of ecologies. A minority harvested grass seeds and ground them into a paste that could be cooked or eaten raw. They had not, however, become farmers who created and tended fields, sowed crops and lived in permanent villages.
Nor had they become horticulturists (gardeners). They had their own way. This way should be cherished.
8. ‘Aquaculture’ or fishing and trapping?
Dark Emu refers to several kinds of traditional fish trap (pages 53–71). Those given the most prominence, generally, are the ones that constitute exceptional creations. ......There is abundant evidence that Aboriginal people in different regions of Australia harvested wild fish by spearing, angling, netting, grabbing them by the gills, and creating weirs and stone traps, but no evidence that they physically bred, fed, protected and reared them as captive fingerlings and then introduced them into the environment.
Moving offshore, Pascoe here asserts that ‘large, organised fishing expeditions by watercraft were observed all around the coast’ ....Watercraft were absent from the greater part of the south-western coasts. There were also no watercraft in most of the interior.
9. Dwellings
Pascoe provides only fragmentary evidence from a single part of Victoria, namely the Western District, that dwellings were ‘permanent’
Instead, it states that families had their ‘permanent’ dwellings but did not dwell in them all of the time: ......About once in three months the whole tribe unite, 2 generally at new or full moon, when they have a few dances, and again separate into three or more bodies, as they cannot get food if they move en masse; the chief, with the aged, makes arrangements for the route each party is to take. In their movements they seldom encamp more than three nights in one place, and oftener but one. Thus they move from one place to another, regardless of sickness, deaths, births, &c. … … They seldom travel more than six miles [10 km] a day.
The recurring pattern, all over Australia, was one of seasonal and other variation in lengths of stays in one place. No group is ever described, at the moment of colonisation, as living year in, year out, in one single place.
It is just possible, by the stretch of a very fertile imagination to assign the name of village to an assemblage of aboriginal huts, but such a liberty with the English language could only be permitted to one possessing a highly poetical organisation,
The use of stone footings for boughs seems to have been partly prompted by scarcity of organic materials rather than simply chosen. O’Connor suggested that the local islands were used on a ‘sedentary or semi-sedentary basis’
The relative permanency of the dwellings did not mean they were permanently inhabited. ...... ‘In some parts of the country where it is easier to get stones than wood and bark for dwellings, the walls are built of flat stones and roofed with limbs and thatch.’
But when we go to that page in Memmott’s book to check, there is no such statement,
There is no scientific evidence that Aboriginal Australians, before conquest, made stone houses with stone walls rising all the way from ground level to roof level at, say, a height of 2 metres—
As the radius of collected suitable wood expanded over time, wood became harder to find and had to be sought further out. The fuel-based incentive to move to another location thus increased with length of stay.
But this was not one of the domed structures photographed by Thomson and was actually not even from Aboriginal Australia but from the Melanesian region of the eastern Torres Strait, .......Most aboriginal huts were.....assembled with an economy of effort appropriate to their needs and their minimal-impact economic philosophy—the latter being what Stanner called their use of ‘least-cost’ solutions.
Camps numbering in the hundreds were not the norm. In the children’s version, Young Dark Emu......There are no images of the most frequently recorded range of dwellings in the old Australia: modestly sized, low huts.
The text indicates that the authors mistakenly believe Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to have had the same traditional economic system:
The message serves only to seriously mislead secondary students exposed to this material.
10. Mobility
in what is now the Townsville region of Queensland: They never stay long in a locality; as one place becomes a little exhausted of food, they travel to another. In the wet and cold season they put up small gunyahs to live in, but in no particular order … They get their living by fishing, hunting, digging in the earth for roots, gathering fruits.
Aboriginal educator Colin Bourke wrote: In most cases the people moved around their ancestral lands as hunters and gatherers, so many possessions would have been a hindrance. Their movements around their country were not haphazard, but had a purpose. They were part of Aboriginal mastery over the resources of the land.
11. The explorers’ records
All Mitchell says is that his party ‘noticed some of their huts’; there is no mention of anyone counting anything. Pascoe’s ‘over one thousand’ is pure fiction.
Unburned country was also a form of storage. The resources of the grasslands and savannahs were sequentially released, usually in a mosaic burning pattern, during cooperative game drives for which people assembled.
12. ‘Agricultural’ implements and antiquity
Pascoe misquotes Etheridge and implies that the Torres Strait implement is of Australian Aboriginal origin.
The oldest reliably dated shell middens in Australia are about 30,000 years old but most are less than 10,000 years old, coinciding with stabilisation of the current shoreline.
When Dark Emu presents evidence from archaeological sites and objects, it is the caveats that go missing.
When caveats are excluded from the discussion, the reader is grossly misled.
13. Stone circles and ‘smoking’ trees
The study area was principally Lake Condah and the archaeologist was Anne Clarke. She found that terms such as ‘stone house’, ‘hut’ and ‘village’ had been loosely applied without a clear and consistent definition. 29 The vision of ‘hundreds of people living in villages’ had gone unquestioned and become all-pervasive,
If the cultural stone circles had revealed cultural artefacts, such as stone tools, shell, animal bone, ash or charcoal, and the natural stone circles were sterile, then it would have simplified matters. Instead, and interestingly, of the 318 cultural and natural stone features recorded in the region, only one circle was recorded with artefacts. It was excavated, and its charcoal samples returned a date of less than 200 years old, which was fitting with the glass identified on the same site.
There is no reliable or convincing archaeological or ethnographic evidence for thousands of eels being smoke-dried and stored in the Lake Condah district before or at colonisation.
Stone circles have been well recorded around Lake Condah but remain in an unknown ratio of cultural to natural formations. In view of the nineteenth-century ethnographies and illustrations and the excavation of two circles, 90 there is no doubt that some circles represent the base for constructing a dwelling. Other circles close to the fish-trap complex may have been used for caching live eels or to serve some other purpose related to the ponding and channelling of fish within the system.
Still others may be due to a range of natural phenomena, such as geological processes and tree falls.
Conclusion
Native title is a pre-existing title, continuous since before effective British sovereignty in each region—not a grant of title........ It is founded on a perpetual spiritual belonging to country that is based, usually, on descent from preceding landowners, plus some other factors, depending on the legal jurisdiction. The classifying of Aboriginal people as wandering hunting-and-gathering people who did not use the land the way Europeans did, and were therefore not owners of it, is a colonial-era fiction long expunged from Australian law.
Really enjoyed the book and impressed with the scholarship, Five stars from me.… (más)
 
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booktsunami | 2 reseñas más. | Mar 23, 2024 |
Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers?: The Dark Emu Debate por Peter Sutton
Anyone in Australia with access to books, TV, radio or other media would be aware of Pascoe's 2014's Dark Emu and it various subsequent manifestations.

I believe I first read it in 2017 after reading Bill Grammage's The Greatest Estate.

At the time I was impressed by it, and by the general acclamation it received.

Not being initially deterred by the lack of formal training of the author in relevant skills as to the scope of enquiry, I went along with it.

But more and more doubts came through the media.

Which calumniated in this book. Perversely (please update/correct em if this is wrong) it is written by people out out of the establishment academia, as others are wary of expressing alternative views.

On the whole the authors demonstrate (I think conclusively..note my earlier caveats) Pascoe is wrong on so many levels.

I am not an anthropologist, etc etc so you can dismiss my view completely, but the Sutton/Walshe view won me over.

But in many cases that is not saying Pascoe is wrong, but rather that Pascoe (and others) have not shown it yet. And I think Sutton/Walshe would accept that. But I dont hold a lot of hope re that.

I don't mind which way it turns out so long as it is through genuine science recognised by both First Australians and others

Big Ship

29 November 2022… (más)
 
Denunciada
bigship | 2 reseñas más. | Nov 29, 2022 |
Farmers or hunter-gatherers? : the dark emu debate por Peter Sutton
I am out of my depth when it comes to reviewing Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe. When back in 2014 (as you can see in my review), I read Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? I was convinced by author Bruce Pascoe's use of historical sources to show that, before 1788, there was systematic agriculture and aquaculture; permanent dwellings; storage and preservation methods and the use of fire to manage the difficult Australian environment. On my LisaHillSchoolStuff blog I recommended the text as one that should be widely read and also taught in schools.

So it was chastening to read Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers, the Dark Emu Debate by Professor Peter Sutton FASSA and Dr Keryn Walshe. I only had to read the Introduction to realise that I was one of the many who read Dark Emu as a revelatory experience when in fact there were for many decades texts in which a 'simply nomadic' description of the Old People was rejected. There's more to reviewing books in this debate than just reading them.

The author profiles on the publisher's website are impressive:
Sutton is a social anthropologist and linguist who has, over more than 50 years, contributed to learning and recording Aboriginal languages, promoting Aboriginal art, mapping Aboriginal cultural landscapes, increasing understanding of contemporary Aboriginal societies and land tenure systems, and the successes of native title claimants.

Walshe is an archaeologist with more than 35 years of experience in recording, analysing and interpreting Australian Indigenous heritage sites and objects. She has lectured in archaeology, managed Indigenous heritage museum collections and undertaken site assessments for corporate and government agencies. Walshe continues to write for academic journals, advise heritage managers and give public presentations.

But impressive as these credentials are, it is the authors' cogent argument which makes their work a corrective to my naïve enthusiasm. I'm not qualified to judge whether what they say about Pascoe's selective use of sources is a problem, but I do know that evidence-based truth telling necessitates research across the available knowledge bases. I knew that Pascoe was not a trained historian but I assumed that his research was extensive and even-handed.

In contemporary Aboriginal studies, including history, archaeology and anthropology, academic expertise includes respecting the knowledge of The Old People, i.e. Aboriginal collaborators in the research who share facts and insights from their expertise. Here it is pertinent to note that one of the blurbers praising this book is Dr Kellie Pollard, a Wiradjuri archaeologist, lecturer and researcher at Charles Darwin University:
Sutton and Walshe show that Pascoe tried, and failed, to overturn over a century of anthropological and archaeological study, analysis and documentation, in addition to Aboriginal oral testimony, of the ways of life, governance, socioeconomic behaviour, material, technological and spiritual accomplishments and preferences of Aboriginal people in classical society and on the cusp of colonisation.

My own common sense and experience as a language learner tells me that Chapter 3 'The Language Question' is persuasive. All languages have vocabulary that match the cultural practices and needs of their users. But missing from the research into the 260 distinct languages of Australia in 1788 are words for 'hoed'; 'tilled'; 'ploughed'; 'sowed'; 'planted'; 'irrigated' or 'reaped'. If what Pascoe claims is true, then there would be multiple words for agricultural activities in Aboriginal languages. The only language that has a word for 'garden' or 'to sow, to plant' is Meryam Mir, a Torres Strait language. (It's not an Australian language, apparently; it's a Papuan language within Australia's borders.) These people have considerable gardening vocabulary, and mainlanders did adopt some of their technologies such as outrigger canoes and detachable-head harpoons, but they did not adopt horticulture. Sutton makes a convincing argument that this was a choice: obviously Aborigines had expert knowledge of the plants on which they depended but they did not need to farm them and chose not to.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/07/26/combined-reviews-farmers-or-hunter-gatherers...… (más)
 
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anzlitlovers | 2 reseñas más. | Jul 26, 2021 |
The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and… por Peter Sutton
Will be reading this book slowly, very slowly.

Sutton finds himself in the opening pages beyond being guarded. He writes from a perspective of having seen enough, having had (adopted) family members die, suffer and struggle - and for what?

In this balanced book he boldly discusses a range of issues that impact on Australian society, it just happens be more narrowly defined as Indigenous society, or as Nicolas Rothwell would say, that 'other country'.

Sutton is worth reading for anyone who claims to be an Australian, especially one that doesn't draw a national boarder that mysteriously stops at the edge of their comfortable suburbs. (We don't need passports to go to the Australian outback, or do we?)

Sutton lends his powerful and respected voice to a series of sensitive debates that were formerly discouraged from being discussed outside of a circle of Indigenous Leaders and Policy Wonks. But as Sutton acknowledges, Dodson's infamous address in the early 2000s ended all that. Dodson effectively called for all Australians to wake up and to take a stand, to understand what was going on in Indigenous communities.

There's much for me to take in from these pages, especially after having traveled (on my own accord) across northern Australia in 2009.

To anyone who has done the same, I would encourage you to pick up this book; and here I am especially going to single out those socially conservative Grey Nomads, young bleeding hearted lefties, and young wannabe Cultural Anthropologists types who I saw straying across the remoter regions of Australia.

After reading Sutton, don't be surprised if, like myself, there is much you wish to articulate about Australia's so called "indigenous affairs". Yet I feel undecided about how much I would encourage anyone to be first tempered with their views by reading the likes of Sutton, Pearson, Langton, Yunupingu, Rothwell and a host of others?

Sutton's unguarded well written book tells me there's much more we ought to be hearing in the way of raw experience and observations about Indigenous Australia, not the least from the people who are impacted directly themselves.

And with this thinking, it may well be too early for any policy gurus to start packaging stories and briefing departments about Indigenous Australia until we (the wider public) have heard more of these voices in our media.… (más)
 
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CraigHodges | Feb 9, 2010 |
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