So, on the rare occasions where an Australian journal conducts a conceptual discussion, it is conducted wholly within European or US parameters, and often by invited European and US writers, at that. To extraverted thought, what is imported from the metropole simply is theory or method – no other meaning for those terms is recognized. Its results, packaged as theory or methodology, are simply imported. What might be called the productive arc of methodology – the movement of thought in which concepts and methods are generated from actual social experience – is missing, in settler society’s truncated public realm of social science. When these studies are published, there is normally no discussion of whether such ideas really apply in a settler-colonial context.
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Thus, Australian psychology is full of experiments using scales developed in the United States, Australian economics is full of models developed in the United States, Australian sociology is full of concepts developed in France. Research is done as if the researcher were standing in the metropole, or as if the society being studied were part of the metropole. The gesture was repeated as recently as 2003, when the Prime Minister of the day sent Australian troops into Iraq.įor social sciences in a settler-colonial society, this produces an “as-if” form of knowledge. In 1939 the Prime Minister famously announced on radio that “Great Britain has declared war on, and that, as a result, Australia is also at war”.
The leading institutions and technologies were developed in the metropole most of the capital that underpinned colonial development came from the metropole and key political decisions were also made there. Settler colonialism thus produced a truncated public realm. When the colonists felt they were up to universities (the 1850s, in Sydney and Melbourne) they imported both the academics and the curricula direct from what was, without irony, called the mother country.
Settler schools and newspapers were modelled from the start on those of the home country. The colonial state achieved local order, so far as it could – the colonies were violent places – through imperial law and bureaucracy. Imperial force enabled settlement, up to the point of demographic dominance over indigenous people, and demographic dominance was mainly achieved by immigration. Whatever happens, we have got/ The Maxim gun, and they have not. The colonizers claimed to have the true religion or a superior civilization, but what they crucially had was warships, muskets, cavalry, cannon, steam power and the ruthlessness to use them for conquest. Ultimately it has to do with the way the public realm is created in colonial societies. What Phillips called a disease is better analyzed by Hountondji as part of a global economy of culture.
It is found both in settler and colonized societies. Hountondji calls this attitude “extraversion”, being oriented to external sources of authority. Scientists from the global South travel to the USA and Europe for training and recognition, learn Northern intellectual frameworks, try to get published in Northern journals. There is a global division of labour: data are gathered in the colony, but theory is made in the metropole. The Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji described the situation in his important 1997 book Endogenous Knowledge. Phillips was talking about literature and art, but the same issues arise in science. Phillips shrewdly observed that this resulted in “the estrangement of the Australian Intellectual” from Australian society, a disdainful attitude that equated the rough, the uncultured and the local. Phillips diagnosed “a disease of the Australian mind”, an assumption of inferiority vis-a-vis England, a deep dependence on imported judgments and tastes. The problem was named “The Cultural Cringe” by the Australian critic Arthur Phillips, in a pungent article published in 1950 by the new literary magazine Meanjin. There is a problem about intellectual work in settler-colonial societies that deeply affects social science.