Unravelling Complexity: History

Frank BongiornoSchool of History

Research School of Social SciencesAustralian National University

Puzzles in Cultural History

• ‘ ... anthropologists have found that the best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most opaque. When you realize that you are not getting something – a joke, a proverb, a ceremony – that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it.’ Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, Basic Books, New York, 1984, p. 78.

Puzzles in Cultural History

‘To unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words.’

Salman Rushdie, Shame, Picador, London, 1983, p. 104.

Examples?Clifford Geertz

‘As much of America surfaces in a ball park, on agolf links, at a race track, or around a pokertable, much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring. For itis only apparently cocks that are fighting there.Actually, it is men.’

Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, Basic Books, New York, 1973

Greg Dening

Death of Captain Cook ‘Sharks That Walk on the Land: The Death of Captain Cook’,Vol. 41, No. 4, December 1982, pp. 427-37

Mutiny on the Bounty Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty,

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992

Inga Clendinnen, ‘Spearing the Governor’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 33, No. 118, 2002, pp. 157-74

The spearing of Governor Arthur Phillip

Robert Kenny

•Why did Aboriginal people kill so many sheep?

The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper & the Ruptured World, Scribe, Melbourne, 2007.

Big History

Big bang to present E.g. David Christian and Cynthia Stokes Brown

• a story of increasing complexity • ‘the scientific creation story’ (Brown)• bringing history and natural sciences together

(interdisciplinary)• history of human beings as a species and their planet in a

much longer sweep of time• human beings decentred in an account stretching over 13

or 14 billion years

In between?

• Fernand Braudel (Annales School)

La longue duréeEvents:

‘surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on theirstrong backs’

Jared Diamond physiology, biology, geography

• Human beings comprise a single species, yet different populations have very different histories. Why?

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997)Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)

1. Damage to environment2. Climate change3. Hostile neighbours4. Less support from friendly neighbours5. Societal responses

Environment and geography, more than culture or race, as determining factors

Niall Ferguson

• Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011) • Killer Apps (What set the West apart from the rest of

the world?) • ‘The Great Divergence’• Competition• Science• Property• Modern Medicine• Consumerism• Work Ethic Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

James Belich

• Why did the number of English-speaking peoples increase so massively and spread so rapidly over so much of the globe in the nineteenth century.

Mixture of cultural, technological, social and political factors (Not Anglo-Saxonism):

• Improving reputation of settlement and migration• Improvements in use of wind, water, animals (pre-industrial)• New technologies permitted the mass transfer of people, goods, money, information,

propaganda, technology and know-how • the shifting cultural and economic relationship between old lands• Self-sustaining and self-propelling nature of colonisation once commenced (Progress as an

industry; fantasies and dreams)

• Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783-1939, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009.

Ian W. McLean• Why Australian Prospered: The Shifting Sources of Economic

Growth, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2013• 19th century: Australia probably led the world for a while

(before 1890) in terms of per capita income• 20th century: Fell behind• Why? (No single factor)• 1. Interaction of factors: ‘resource abundance’ + ‘institutional

quality’ OR ‘international economic conditions’ + ‘policy responses’ (Policy innovation)

• 2. ‘shifting bases of prosperity’• This is a fundamentally HISTORICAL account.

Wrong policy turn?• 1900-1960?• McLean:• Manufacturing development behind a tariff wall made

sense in the context of international economic change (e.g. Unstable international trading order; move to cartels). Yielded benefits in terms of war effort (WW2) and balance of payments after war.

• Increasingly redundant once new resources identified and exploited from 1960

• New policy order (winding down of ‘Australian Settlement’)

Paul Kelly, ‘Australian Settlement’, from The End of Certainty (1992)

•White Australia•Wage Arbitration• State Paternalism• Tariff Protection• Imperial Benevolence