by Michael Edwards
When I was growing up in Australia in the early 1990s, my parents were a little strict about not letting me watch too many cartoons and ads on commercial TV. Instead, I watched a lot of SBS. One of Australia’s two public broadcasters, SBS (the Special Broadcasting Service) aims, according to its 1991 charter, to “inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society.” Its programming was distinctive: news in English and the languages of diaspora communities combined with current affairs shows, often racy foreign art-house films, and European football matches. The joke was that the initials really stood for “Sex Before Soccer.”
There are no specific images or scenes from these films that I remember now, though some are probably lodged deep in the recesses of my psyche. What I do remember is something of the mood of watching SBS as a kid on our living room floor in Sydney in the 1990s, a mood shaped as much by my own family histories—my mum the child of European Jewish refugees, my dad the descendant of Irish settlers—as by the political shifts then underway in Australia. This was a time when the Labor government of Prime Minister Paul Keating was pursuing its agenda of reconciliation with First Nations people, deepening the country’s connections with Asia, and promoting its vision for a multicultural society. Keating opened SBS’s new headquarters in Sydney in 1993. My parents and their friends were big fans of both Keating and SBS.
There is a more complex story about Australian multiculturalism in the 90s which anthropologists had already begun to tell close to the time. In White Nation (1998), Ghassan Hage delineates how official multiculturalism left structures of white supremacy and racial hierarchy intact, allowing space for certain, permissible forms of cultural difference while denying it to others. Elizabeth Povinelli, in The Cunning of Recognition (2002), shows how multiculturalism’s insistence on authentic expressions of traditional culture fell heavily on Indigenous peoples. If my parents thought about of these contradictions inherent in liberal multiculturalism, it’s not a topic I recall from what I remember as optimistic and enthusiastic conversations around our dinner table.
A couple of years ago a friend sent me a link to a video that brought that childhood mood, that feeling rushing back. It was the music video for Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby” from 1992, which SBS used in the early and mid 90s as its promo, broadcasting it regularly in the breaks between shows. Recent comments below the video on YouTube suggest it has had the same effect on others. It’s the combination of the music and images that is achingly familiar. At the heart of the song is a Baegu-language lullaby from the Solomon Islands titled “Rorogwela,” sung by a woman named Afunakwa, about an older brother comforting his younger brother after they are orphaned. Recorded by the ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp in the late 1960s, it was included on a UNESCO collection, from which it was sampled by Deep Forest’s French producers, and then, accompanied by a drum track and synthesizers, went on to become a 90s “world music” hit.
As the anthropologist Steven Feld put it in an article in the year 2000, the story of this song’s creation reveals how “companies, performers, recordists, organizations, and media can now find their identities embroiled in complex multilocal song histories … signs of anxious and celebratory contradictions in world music” (p. 165). For Feld, the increasing pop cultural prominence and commercial success of “world music” in the 90s threw into relief broader issues and anxieties then coming to surround globalisation: the “tensions that characterize global processes of separation and mixing … [and the] increasingly complicated pluralities, uneven experiences, and consolidated powers” (p. 146).
The music video for “Sweet Lullaby”, by the Indian director Tarsem Singh, reinforces the picture. Nominated for the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards, it’s a montage of scenes from around the world, from a muddy shipyard in India to a rainy street in post-Soviet Russia, from the Empire State Building in New York to the Great Wall of China to Gaudi’s Park Güell in Barcelona. Our guide is a young girl, travelling by tricycle through each of the spaces, before returning to an older girl—an older sister?—who cradles her in the opening and closing scenes. Gestures and objects repeat: an arm outstretched to give directions, a mirror, a small wooden frame which the girl and the people she encounters hold up to the world, to each other, and sometimes to us.
When SBS ran the music video in the 90s it added a line, “The world is an amazing place,” at the end.
It’s not just nostalgia that’s had me recently watching the video on repeat. I’ve also been wondering if it can also tell us something more about that 90s moment, one whose legacies continue to shape anthropology today.
In the histories of anthropology that we tend to tell, certain decades loom large: the 1920s, for instance, the time of Argonauts, or the 1980s, the time of Writing Culture. The 1990s, if considered at all, tend to be treated with nostalgia, derision, or some combination of the two—though there are important exceptions. For Joel Robbins, the 90s is the moment anthropology left the “savage slot,” taking on the “suffering subject” as its principal ethnographic and theoretical domain, with a host of ethical and political implications. For Robbins, anthropology in the 90s changes “its relation to those it studies from one of analytic distance and critical comparison focused on difference to one of empathic connection and moral witnessing based on human unity” (p. 453).
In the wake of the Cold War, with the end of the millennium fast approaching, and with the implications of the World Wide Web rushing into view, the 90s were the setting for an anthropology that placed increasing emphasis on connection and movement, on what Feld referred to as the “transnational flows of technology, media, and popular culture” and related “global processes of separation and mixing, … genericization, hybridization, and revitalization” (p. 146). Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, in their defining volume from the mid-1990s, described the period as “a time of great uncertainty for anthropology, … [and] also one of enormous possibilities,” one in which anthropologists needed to “try to find our feet in a strange new world” (p. 26).
What does that time look like from today’s vantage? Did anthropologists ever find their feet? Or did the world grow stranger still?
Thirty years ago, around the time that the video clip for “Sweet Lullaby” was getting nominated for the MTV Awards, Anna Tsing was publishing In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. A reflection on the ironic construction of marginality in an “out-of-the-way place” in Indonesia, it is also a study of how her Meratus interlocutors engage with a wider world in Indonesia and beyond, of how certain types of esoteric Meratus knowledge rely, like anthropology, on practices of travel both physical and imaginative. In the 90s, it became impossible for anthropologists to ignore that it was not just they who travelled; the “cultures” they studied did too.
Nowhere was the point more clearly made than in the then expanding anthropological literature on diaspora. It was also in 1994 that James Clifford published his much-cited essay on the topic, locating diaspora in an “unruly crowd of descriptive/interpretive terms [that] now jostle and converse in an effort to characterize the contact zones of nations, cultures, and regions: terms such as border, travel, creolization, transculturation, hybridity” (p. 303). Diaspora, for Clifford and the growing number of scholars whose work he cites, was a term with significant, though complex, potential. Diasporic histories and identities, their complex and contradictory attachments to place, their alternate networks and models of cosmopolitan life, might be able, it was hoped, to push not just against the boundaries of exclusivist nationalism, but also to “reach beyond mere ethnic status within the composite, liberal state” (p. 310), beyond those limited visions of pluralism and tolerance enshrined in official policies and practices of multiculturalism.
Clifford drew on two then recent works: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) and an essay by Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin titled “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity” (1993). The latter offers a reading of Jewish diasporism, arguing that it “involves a principled renunciation of both universalism and sovereignty, and an embrace of the arts of exile and coexistence” (Clifford 1994: 322). For the Boyarins, the formation of the modern State of Israel represents “the subversion of Jewish culture and not its culmination … capturing Judaism in a state” (quoted in Clifford, ibid.). In his conclusion, Clifford notes the recent signing of the Oslo Accords, suggesting that “diasporist skills for maintaining difference in contact and accommodation” may be needed to reach a sustainable political solution for Israelis and Palestinians.
Thirty years on, and as Israel’s assault on Gaza has unfolded over the past year, politicians and journalists in Australia have lamented the fraying of “social cohesion,” a fraying felt to threaten the country’s proud multicultural self-mythologizing. Often in their sights are the large number of Australians protesting and rightly angry that the current Labor government hasn’t taken a stronger stand against Israel’s violence. This discourse has been, in large part, about the role and proper behaviour of diaspora communities—Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Muslim—in Australia’s multicultural fabric. All this was thrown into sharp relief last July when Fatima Payman, a senator who had come to Australia as a refugee from Afghanistan in the early 2000s, quit the Labor Party after defying it to cast her vote with the Greens to support a motion that would recognise a Palestinian State. Payman said she’d been intimated by Labor colleagues after the vote. Journalists relayed party insider concerns that Payman, a Muslim woman, had been somehow inappropriately guided by God in ways that were, again, apparently a threat to social cohesion.
The lessons of Hage’s White Nation stay relevant. As the Payman affair unfolded, Hage himself wrote on Facebook,
Leaving Sydney as the White establishment is laying into Payman. The ‘Eureka Stew’ syndrome strikes again as the White multiculturalist cooks (politicians and journalists) unite in telling Payman that while she is welcome as a multicultural ingredient, her desire to have even a minimal say in how the stew is cooked cannot be tolerated. Here’s white multicultural tolerance on full display for you.
In 2023, White Nation was reissued alongside some of Hage’s other writings in a new volume titled The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism. Some upcoming proceeds from the sale of the book are to be donated to Olive Kids, an Australian charity supporting children in Palestine, where Israel’s war on children has been so catastrophic that it has coined a new acronym, WCNSF: Wounded Child No Surviving Family. Gestures and objects repeat. In a video from Al Jazeera, a small boy in Gaza returns to where his family’s house stood before it was destroyed by an Israeli bomb, retrieving his tricycle from the rubble.
References
Boyarin, Daniel, and Jonathan Boyarin. 1993. “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity.” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4: 693–725.
Clifford, James. 1994. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3: 302–338.
Feld, Steven. 2000. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture 12, no. 1: 145–171.
Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1997. “Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era.” In Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, edited by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, 1–30. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hage, Ghassan. 1998. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 3: 447–462.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 1993. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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