Cultural Genocide, Civilization and Governance
Robert van Krieken ERS Project 1998

Project Description:
Cultural Genocide, Civilization and Governance:
the 'stolen generations' and the formation of Australian society

Aims and significance
This project seeks to identify the implications of the history of the systematic removal of indigenous Australian children from their families for our understandings of civilization, citizenship and acceptable forms of government, as well as the concrete social practices associated with such understandings. It will examine this history in order to contribute to and develop three bodies of research and scholarship: 1) the sociology of genocide, 2) theories of civilization and decivilization and 3) conceptions of liberal citizenship and governance.

The growing literature on the sociology of genocide (Bauman, Fein) has as its primary focus events and actions of clear physical brutality such as murder, massacre, torture, and so on; the Holocaust is the most frequently discussed example of 'modern barbarism'. However, the significance of the recent highlighting of the phenomenon of 'cultural genocide' by the HREOC's report, Bringing them Home, is that it draws our attention to the ways in which the 'civilizing offensives' which were central to the projects of liberal democratic states from the 19th century onwards had significant dimensions of violence only now being realised and understood. In the literature on the sociology and history of genocide (Chalk & Jonassohn), where Australia is discussed there is only mention of the destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines, but hardly any reference to mainland Australia, and certainly no discussion of the cultural genocide inherent in the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, a central element of the attempted systematic 'breeding out of colour'. My research will identify the ways in which the policies and practices relating to Aboriginal family life should be understood as 'cultural genocide', and how this history affects our conceptions of the relationship between state formation and violence.

There is also an expanding field of study which attempts to develop a social scientific conception of 'civilization' and processes of both civilization and decivilization, one which builds on the work of Norbert Elias and attempts to move beyond the progressivist and colonial understanding of 'civilization' simply as the steady worldwide triumphal march of Christian European culture. The argument is that it is possible to identify processes of civilization in which changing patterns of social relations and networks of interdependence have gradually transformed the personality structures, identities and habitus of modernizing countries, so that violence of all sorts is gradually subjected to greater and more sophisticated forms of management and control. For example, the concern over recent decades to identify and prevent various forms of child abuse, along with an increasing interest in children's rights, would, in this approach, be identified as consistent with a process of 'civilization' of the relations between adults and children. The concept 'decivilization', in contrast, is used to refer to those processes of change which result in an increase in violence, between individuals, social groups, communities, or nation-states and a breakdown in the stability and consistency of on-going social relations. Again, the Holocaust is often the key example, and one with which Elias himself was concerned, but the concept has also been used to analyse the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, events in Rwanda, and the upsurge of ethnic conflict throughout the world.

What remains unexplored in this literature is the extent to which 'civilizing offensives', the self-conscious attempts to bring about 'civilization', have revolved around essentially violent policies and practices; in this case, the removal of children from their families largely for the social engineering purpose of the gradual and systematic annihilation of Aboriginal cultural identity. At the time, however, these policies and practices were conceived by most, although not all, observers as contributing to the 'welfare' of Aboriginal Australians, and this intersection of welfare and violence raises the possibility that processes of civilization and decivilization, rather than being mutually exclusive, can run alongside each other, so that a society can be said to display both 'civilized' and 'barbaric' characteristics at one and the same time. On the other hand, it may be possible to describe the move away from the systematic removal of Aboriginal children since the 1970s as itself part of a civilizing process, an increasing recognition of the human rights of Aboriginal Australians and of the inhumanity of those policies and practices. My research will identify how these two approaches to this history can be weighed up against each other, as well as the implications for theories of civilization and decivilization more generally for our contemporary understanding of what it means to be a 'civilized' Australian citizen within society containing a variety of cultures.

A third concern of the project will be the parallels and affinities between the policies and practices relating to indigenous and non-indigenous children, which in turn cast light on the diverse logics and strategies of liberal governance (Foucault, Rose). My previous research has shown that the concept of 'rescuing the rising generation' had been central to European church and state agencies' policies in relation to the children of the poor and the working class since the sixteenth century, and was a central element of the modern State's conception of the intersection of family life and liberal citizenship. The removal of Aboriginal children was largely based on pre-existing philosophies, policies and institutional practices concerning unacceptable, 'problem' groups in all the Western European countries and their colonies, so that it is possible to chart the connections and affinities between the racism of removing Aboriginal children for their Aboriginality, and the class ideology underlying the removal of non-indigenous children for the immorality and viciousness of their impoverished surroundings. The significance of this is not a claim that there was some sort of equitable distribution of state violence between indigenous and non-indigenous families, but that it indicates a certain degree of isomorphism between 'race,''class' and 'gender' (Guillaumin, Stoler), that anxieties concerning the rapid reproduction of half-caste Aboriginals on the border between white and black cultures in many respects followed the same logic of governance underlying the fears of the equally sexually dangerous and prolific non-respectable working-class, especially women, on the fringes of the metropolis. The boundaries between individual and familial 'freedom' and a particular 'reason of state' were clearly drawn and forcefully backed up, even though they shifted over time and worked in different ways in relation to indigenous and non-indigenous populations, so that a central aim of the project will be to trace and explain both the similarities and the differences, along with identifying the central conceptual and practical significance of the regulation of reproduction, fertility and childhood in liberal governance and state-formation.

Research plan
I will first analyse a selection of primary materials relating to the history of the removal of children in order to explicate the theories of 'civilization', citizenship and governance which underlay the policies in different Australian States. This will require assembling and reading primary sources using the ideas and methods of inquiry clustered around the concepts cultural genocide, civilization and decivilization, liberal governance and governmentality, asking questions of it such as: what was actually meant by 'civilisation', how was the violence inherent in the policies and practices rendered acceptable, what were the changing conceptions of the state and its relationship to different subject populations? The sources to be consulted include the annual reports of the various state Aborigines Protection and Welfare Boards, the State Children Relief Boards and Child Welfare Departments, Parliamentary debates and special reports, conferences and commissions, contemporary newspaper reports, the writings of key commentators such as Cook, Bleakley, Neville, Baldwin Spencer, Elkin, Tindale, etc.

I will then discuss the emergence of 'the half-caste problem' in the late 19th century and the development of the policy of removal of children as a 'solution' to this problem in terms of the conceptual concerns outlined above - here my research will utilize the recent work done by McGregor and others - and identify the linkages between the racism of the removal of Aboriginal children and the basic conception of universal citizenship underlying the modern nation-state (Balibar), which in turn will illuminate the degree to which we can identify an underlying 'violence' in liberal and welfare state conceptions of citizenship and civilization. The developments and changes in the policies and practices of child removal will also be used to shed light on how those conceptions have undergone processes of transformation, and I will outline the ways in which those transformations can be understood in terms of theories of civilization and decivilization, as well as how that body of scholarship would need to be modified in order to take proper account of this particular dimension of Australian social history.

Outcomes
Both these tasks are feasible within the time available. This research will enable me to develop the theoretical work I have already done on Elias and Foucault, and the associated literature on theories of civilization and government, in working thorugh those theoretical concerns in relation to the particular empirical case of Australian state policies regarding indigenous family life. It will lay the conceptual foundations for a more detailed analysis of the primary material and the establishment of linkages with comparative developments in Europe and North America within a Large ARC grant project on the long-term relationship between state formation and social discipline, which will focus on the intersections between various formations of subjectivity, processes of civilization and decivilization, and strategies of liberal government and citizenship.

The results of the research will be presented at two different sessions at the ISA's World Congress of Sociology in August 1998, one in the Sociology of Childhood Working Group and the other in the Elias & Figurational Sociology session within the Sociological Theory Research Committee (I am involved in the organisation of both), as well as preliminary results being presented as an RIHSS work-in-progress seminar. After the ISA conference, the two papers will be finalised for publication in two international refereed sociology journals, probably the Sociological Review and International Sociology. The work done on this secondment would thus double my usual annual research output, as well as making a significant contribution to both my Department's research profile and the activities of the RIHSS.

Bibliography