The return of tribalism
A critique of cultural relativism
Keith Windschuttle
Tasmanian Historical Studies
Volume 5.2, 1997

In the preface to his 1966 book The Order of Things, Michel Foucault opens with a paragraph that has since become one of his most famous. Today, it is cited almost as frequently in radical academic circles as once were the opening lines of Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto. Foucault describes a passage from ‘a certain Chinese encyclopedia' that, he claims, breaks up all the ordered surfaces of our thoughts. By ‘our' thoughts, he means Western thought in the modern era. The encyclopedia divides animals into the following categories: ‘(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water picture, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.' Foucault writes that, thanks to ‘the wonderment of this taxonomy', we can apprehend not only ‘the exotic charm of another system of thought' but also ‘the limitation of our own'. What the taxonomy or form of classification reveals, says Foucault, is that ‘there would appear to be, then, at the other extremity of the earth we inhabit, a culture ... that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak and think'.[1] The Chinese taxonomy does not simply represent an earlier, mistaken view of how to classify animals, which Western thought has since improved upon. Rather, Foucault says, the stark impossibility of our thinking in this way demonstrates the existence of an entirely different system of rationality.

The American ethnographer Marshall Sahlins cites Foucault and the Chinese taxonomy as part of his case against his opponent Gananath Obeyesekere, in what has now developed into the most publicly contested debate in anthropology of recent times. In 1992 Obeyesekere had denied the thesis of Sahlins that the natives of Hawaii in 1779 had regarded Captain James Cook as their returned god Lono. Obeyesekere had claimed that the Hawaiians had too much ‘practical rationality' to mistake an Englishman, who wore strange clothes, spoke no Hawaiian and knew nothing of their religious beliefs or practices, for one of their gods. In his 1995 book How “Natives” Think, Sahlins replies that Obeyesekere, though a Sri Lankan, is a captive of Western concepts, a man who cannot think outside this form of rationality and who imagines that Western thought constitutes the universal mind of humanity. However, says Sahlins, the existence of radically different systems of classification like that of the Chinese encyclopedia is evidence that different cultures both perceive the world and order their perceptions in radically different ways. ‘If the classifications of the same sets of organisms by different peoples so vary', Sahlins argues, ‘it must mean that objectivity itself is a variable social value.' [2] Hence, Westerners should not impose their own perceptions and ideas of what is logical on other cultures. Obeyesekere cannot assume that the Hawaiians would have had more sense than to have mistaken Cook for Lono, Sahlins says. Rather, we have to appreciate that what might make ‘sense' to those who share a Western frame of thought can be seen in a totally different perspective by people from non-Western cultures. Obeyesekere's notion that there is some kind of ‘practical rationality', or basic psychology that all people share because of their humanity, is a mistaken attempt to universalise what Sahlins dismisses as ‘commonsense bourgeois realism'. It is, he claims, to do ‘a kind of symbolic violence' to other times and other customs. ‘I want to suggest', Sahlins says, ‘that one cannot do good history, nor even contemporary history, without regard for ideas, actions, and ontologies that are not and never were our own. Different cultures, different rationalities'. [3]

In May 1995 I gave a paper on the themes and debates in The Killing of History to a staff and graduate student seminar in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. Although most of the postmodernists in the department declined to attend, they deputised a colleague, Alastair MacLachlan, to reply to my talk and, hopefully, to tear me apart. My respondent opened his remarks by citing Foucault and the Chinese taxonomy. Didn't I realise, he chided me, that other cultures have such dramatically different conceptual schemes that the traditional assumptions of Western historiography are inadequate for the task of understanding them? Foucault and his followers, I was told, have been sources of genuine enlightenment because they have lifted the veil of Western arrogance from our eyes, allowing us to see that Western thought is but one form among many. Other cultures have their own rationality and their own legitimacy which, I was assured, we should respect in their own right.

There is, however, a problem rarely mentioned by those who cite the Chinese taxonomy as evidence for these claims. There is no Chinese encyclopedia that has ever described animals under the classifications listed by Foucault. In fact, there is no evidence that any Chinese person has ever thought about animals in this way. The taxonomy is fictitious. It is the invention of the Argentinian short story writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. This revelation, of course, would in no way disturb the assumptions of the typical postmodernist thinker who believes that the distinction between fact and fiction is arbitrary anyway. Foucault himself openly cites Borges as his source and has no problem in using the mere fictional possibility of such a radically different taxonomy as grounds for his belief that Western forms of classification are themselves nothing but the arbitrary products of our own time and space. The example, however, is now so frequently cited in academic texts and debates, such as the University of Sydney history seminar, that it is taken as a piece of credible evidence about the state of mind of non-Western cultures. It deserves to be seen, rather, as evidence of the degeneration of standards of argument in the contemporary academy. That a piece of fiction can be seriously deployed to make a case in history or anthropology indicates how low debate has sunk in the postmodern era.

It should be said that Sahlins does not rely entirely on fictional evidence to argue his case about taxonomies but also cites some findings by anthropologists. He gives the example of the Chewa people of Malawi who classify certain mushrooms in the same group with game animals, rather than with plants, on the basis of the similarities of their flesh. For the Chewa, domestic ducks are not classified with birds, nor with wild ducks. Sahlins also describes the Kalam people of the New Guinea highlands who classify animals and plants not by visual qualities such as size or colour but by their smell, based on whether they ‘smell', ‘stink' or ‘decay'. Hence, according to Sahlins, the Kalam are ‘giving the lie to the Western perceptual economy which accords affect to olfactory sensations and intellect to visual sensations'. [4]

Unfortunately for Sahlins, it is not difficult to show that this more empirical type of evidence still provides no support for his claim that different taxonomies demonstrate different rationalities. Let me give one simple example to put the issue into perspective. I have in front of me a recent document from the National Heart Foundation of Australia. It contains a table classifying plant and animal products. It puts the following items into one group: skim milk, lean red meat, skinless chicken, fresh fish, egg whites, bread, pasta, all fruit and vegetables, legumes, water, tea, coffee, fruit juices. And it links the following together into another, different group: coconut oil, butter, full cream milk, fried meat, bacon, sausages, egg yolks, croissants, toasted breakfast cereal, coconut, milkshakes, coffee whiteners. According to the Sahlins view of the power of taxonomies, this table should be a demonstration of the mentality of a radically different culture. What else should we think when the Foundation groups together such apparently unrelated items as coconuts, egg yolks and milkshakes, thereby, like the Chewa, putting plant and animal products into the one category? If we accept the logic of Sahlins's position, we should argue that only a non-Western mind would want to classify skinless chicken in the same group with bread and coffee. Should we thus assume from this taxonomy that the National Heart Foundation has become possessed of some unfathomably different rationality? Sadly, the answer is more mundane. The first category comprises foods that the Foundation recommends as being low in cholesterol and saturated fat. The second group comprises those that are high in cholesterol or saturated fat and which should be avoided by people to reduce the risk of heart disease.

Surely it is obvious that within any one culture and between any two or more cultures, human beings who share the same rationality are quite capable of adopting a variety of methods for classifying the same things and a variety of ways of looking at things depending on how they intend to use them. Different uses generate different classifications. There is nothing surprising about a Malawi tribe that puts domestic ducks and wild ducks into different categories. We make exactly the same distinction in Western culture ourselves, else we would have little use for the words ‘domestic' and ‘wild'. Under Western legal systems, the gross taxonomy of domestic and wild animals has been unchanged since Roman law. [5] Indeed, when we classify animals and plants for our own consumption we use groupings not dissimilar to those of the Chewa. The big difference between our culture and theirs is that we also have a method of classification derived from the science of biology. In this case we classify creatures not from our own interest but from the relations we find in nature. In fact, biology is the most obvious example of a science that adopts classifications that derive objectively from nature, despite the claims of postmodernists that such a thing is impossible. Our scientific taxonomies of species are in no way human-inspired or arbitrary but, rather, correspond precisely to the patterns of reproduction we find in nature. If animals or plants do not reproduce with each other they do not constitute a species. This is a taxonomy that exists in nature and did so eons before the emergence of Western science; indeed, it would still have existed even if human beings had never evolved to discover it.

Despite problems of this kind, Foucault's argument that the Western sciences have no universal validity, but are merely expressions of those in authority within Western culture, has been enormously influential. It complemented the relativist conclusions about science drawn by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend in another widely celebrated intellectual context. And it supported the aims of those anthropologists who in the 1970s and 1980s were seeking to establish the rational legitimacy of the native cultures they were studying. From three different directions thus emerged an intellectual impetus that has persuaded many people in the humanities and social sciences of the efficacy of cultural relativism.

Those who accept cultural relativism argue that Western ways of knowing do not deserve any privileged status. Western epistemologies should be judged as simply different from, not superior to, those of other cultures. The claim that Western science has found the path to objectivity is nothing but a cultural conceit. ‘Every civilisation tends to overestimate the objectivity of its thought', the French structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss has observed, ‘and this tendency is never absent.' Citing this remark, Marshall Sahlins goes on to argue that the very perceptions upon which Western scientific empiricism are based can themselves never be free of cultural conditioning. Sahlins claims that, while all human beings share the same biological mechanisms of perception, people from different cultures actually see things in different ways because their experience, including the training of their senses, is organised ‘according to social canons of relevance'. Hence, he argues, ‘people who are perceiving the same objects are not necessarily perceiving the same kinds of things… And conversely, people may agree about what certain images are, while perceiving them in entirely different ways—as happens to the red-green colour blind'. [6] According to this view, the human baby is born with an inbuilt capacity for learning but no ‘hard-wired' perception, behaviour or social dispositions of any kind. Sahlins has long been an advocate of the notion that biological or evolutionary patterning of human behaviour is mistaken. Causality does not flow outward from the individual's psychology, he has argued, but inward from the social world.[7] In short, culture determines our being and, since cultures vary, there can be no such thing as a common human perception, a common human nature or what Obeyesekere calls a common human ‘practical rationality'.

Not only do cultural relativists reject the notion that Western ideas provide greater insights than those of other cultures but the empiricist epistemology that provided the methodology for Western science from the seventeenth to the twentieth century is now said to have run its course. According to Foucault, it is being replaced by a new discursive formation drawn from hermeneutics and Nietzschean philosophy. [8] So cultural relativism regards what is usually called ‘Western knowledge' as an intellectual phenomenon with strict limitations in terms of both geographic space and historic time.

Cultural relativism's attitude both to morals and to politics is similar to its views on epistemology. There can be no universals in either. While those of us brought up with Western concepts of morality might find the practices of some non-Western people abhorrent—such as the ritual execution and cannibalisation of thousands of people a year practised by the Aztecs of Mexico—cultural relativism holds that we should recognise such feelings as the product of our own cultural confines. We have no right either to judge or to act, as the Spaniards of the sixteenth century did, against the practices of such other cultures. The political perspective of cultural relativism regards each culture as free to pursue its own ends within its own traditions and rationalities. Western concepts such as democracy, free speech and human rights are not universal principles but merely the products of specific times and places—the Enlightenment of eighteenth century Europe and its Western successors—which should not be imposed on other times and places. Hence, Foucault, though a citizen of republican, democratic France, found no inconsistency in publicly endorsing the bloody and authoritarian religious state of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.

The late Ernest Gellner pointed out the basic logical flaws in cultural relativism. In his book Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, Gellner showed that relativists are saddled with two unresolvable dilemmas. They endorse as legitimate other cultures that do not return the compliment. Some other cultures, of which one of the best known is Islam, will have no truck with relativism of any kind. The devout are totally confident of the universalism of their own beliefs which derive from the dictates of God, an absolute authority who is external to the world and its cultures. They regard a position such as postmodern cultural relativism as profoundly mistaken and, moreover, debasing. Relativism devalues their faith because it reduces it to merely one of many equally valid systems of meaning. So, entailed within cultural relativism is, first, an endorsement of absolutisms that deny it, and, second, a demeaning attitude to cultures it claims to respect. [9]

The very existence of the discipline of anthropology itself provides another kind of dilemma. If other cultures were really so alien that there was no common human perception or underlying human nature, their meanings systems would be forever beyond our grasp. We could study their external behaviour but could never pretend to what the German philosophic tradition calls verstehen, that is, the ability to think ourselves into their mentalities. Yet verstehen is exactly what anthropologists like Sahlins are claiming to offer when they explain the meaning of the religious ceremonies and symbols of other cultures. In a powerful critique of the relativism of what they call the ‘standard social science model', the evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have argued that without the existence of a universal human ‘metaculture' it would be impossible for us to understand the meanings of other cultures. The best refutation of cultural relativism, they argue, is the activity of anthropologists themselves—who could not understand or live within other human groups unless the inhabitants of those groups shared assumptions that were, in fact, similar to those of the ethnographer. [10]

Logical dilemmas like these, however, have so far remained largely unrecognised or ignored because cultural relativism has one great appeal. The acknowledged superiority of Western technical methods can no longer be taken to extend to non-technical areas such as religion, culture or politics. Other cultures are thus freed from Western intellectual hegemony and can revive their own beliefs and traditions without fear of being contradicted or ridiculed. At a time when many people in postcolonial countries and the West itself are arguing from various perspectives for a revival of cultural autonomy, this is a powerful attraction. The logical consequences, however, go much further than many Western intellectuals who have endorsed the concept might reasonably have expected. Let me give two recent examples of such extensions, one from North America, the other from Australia.

In recent years, some textbook committees of secondary school authorities in Berkeley, California, have been trying to ban history and social science textbooks that assert that native American populations arrived on the North American continent from Asia towards the end of the last Ice Age. These origins, confirmed by generations of archaeologists, anthropologists and prehistorians, run counter to the myths of the native Americans themselves. Academic supporters of the native Americans are now arguing that there is no reason why the findings of non-indigenous scientists should be privileged over the narratives that the indigenes tell about themselves. [11]

This American example has inspired imitators around the globe. One prominent Australian black activist and academic, Roberta Sykes, has recently argued in print that the claim by white scholars that Aborigines arrived in this country by way of the Indonesian archipelago is a ‘myth' that ‘is contradicted by the Australian Aborigines' own mythology'. [12] Sykes, who holds a PhD from Harvard, is thus arguing that Aboriginal myth has the same status as, and can be used to refute the claims of, Western science. The Aboriginal poet Ken Canning also disputes the claims by scientists that Aborigines migrated to Australia. These assertions are wrong according to indigenous oral history and are at variance with the intense belief of many Aborigines that they are descended from the spirit creators of this land, he says. Canning, an academic employed by the University of Technology, Sydney, argues that by thus continuing to assert the supremacy of their world view, Western scientists and social scientists clash directly with indigenous beliefs in a ‘racist' way. [13]

If we accepted this logic, only the relativist could avoid the charge of racism. However, anyone who takes the above beliefs seriously is also committed to the position that the Aborigines did not evolve in Africa along with the rest of us and must therefore belong to a different species. Here we can see not only the disastrous intellectual consequences of this position but also political perspectives that are the opposite of what they claim to be. It is the universalism of Western science that recognises all human beings as the same people with the same origins. In opposition to this, cultural relativism supports the view that each native group is different and unique and that those who think they are biologically distinct are entitled to their belief. It is Western universalism that is anti-racist, not relativism.

One of the seminal texts of the relativist movement is the literary critic Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism. Said argues that Western imperialism's racism and oppression of the Easterner was not just the result of mistaken policies or authoritarian regimes. Rather it was rooted in the Western Enlightenment's self-aggrandising delusion that it had the key to a universally valid knowledge. [14] One of these delusions in the writing of the history of colonialism has been the imposition of what the French postmodernist thinker Jean François Lyotard calls ‘metanarratives'. By this he means historical accounts that claim to see meaning in events beyond those apparent to the view of the participants. Edward Said argues that the metanarrative arises out of the perspective provided by imperialism. For instance, in his 1993 book Culture and Imperialism, Said claims that the boy hero of Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim ‘is able to see all India from the vantage point of controlled observation'. This was never a perspective adopted by the people of India themselves, Said says, but was part of the ‘microphysics' of power through which the British controlled India. [15]

In particular, both Said and Lyotard reject the attempts by Western historiography to see beyond the judgements of the indigenous peoples who became the subjects of the European imperial powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the countries of North America and the Pacific where the indigenous inhabitants were conquered by Europeans in this period, it is now common to find the views of Lyotard, Said, Foucault and other postmodernists influencing the rewriting of history from a native perspective. In his recent book on the politics and culture of indigenous Australians, Us Mob, the Aboriginal author Mudrooroo argues that a proper history of Australia would need to incorporate indigenous culture on indigenous terms. He says this means structuring history around place and family and basing the time sequence on genealogy in the way that Aboriginal oral histories do. [16] Mudrooroo is simply recommending this, rather than actually writing any history this way. However, there is an example from New Zealand of what such a history would be like.

Anne Salmond's 1991 prize-winning work of history and anthropology, Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans 1642-1772, argues that if history is to be faithful to events that involved protagonists from different societies it cannot be fairly interpreted from one point of view. In particular, she wants to give Maori opinions of the meaning of their contact with Dutch and English explorers the same status as those of the European visitors. However, in pursuit of this aim, she reduces the records of both to the level of the stories that each people told themselves about the contacts. For the Maori, the explorers' visits were ‘simply puzzling, extraordinary interludes in the life of various tribal communities'.

The ships—floating islands, mythological ‘birds' or canoes full of tupua or ‘goblins'—came into this bay or that, shot local people or presented them with strange gifts, were welcomed or pelted with rocks, and after a short time went away again and were largely forgotten.

For the Europeans, the same encounters ‘were simply episodes in the story of Europe's “discovery” of the world—more voyages to add to the great collections of “Voyages” that had already been made'.

The genre of discovery tales was an ancient one in Europe, with a well-worn narrative line—explorers ventured into unknown seas, found new lands and named their coastal features, described exotic plants, animals and inhabitants, and survived attacks by tattooed savages (or worse still, cannibals) with spears. These stories were very popular with ordinary people at the time, for they defined Europeans as ‘civilised' in contrast with the ‘savages' and ‘barbarians' to be found elsewhere ... [17]

The book thus treats both sides of this story as equally interpretable texts. Neither account is shown to be more truthful or penetrating than the other. Salmond tells her readers that she adopted this approach partly through her desire to rescue the Maori side of the story and partly through her reading of European philosophers—‘Heidegger, Foucault, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Habermas, Hesse, Derrida, Eco and others who I thought might help me to understand some of the essential questions involved'. [18] At the time of contact with the European explorers, the Maori were engaged in continual tribal warfare. One of the prizes of victory was the killing and eating of opposing warriors. Cannibalism was rife throughout Maori communities and, since they had exterminated all large land animals and birds, human flesh constituted a major source of protein in the Maori diet. To ensure her account is balanced, Salmond also provides an ethnographic sketch of Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that focuses largely on the bloody warfare between states, the violent uprisings and revolutions of the period and the cruelty practised towards criminals. To match the distasteful aspects of Maori culture she looks for comparable behaviour in Europe and publishes a number of woodcut illustrations of criminals being subject to ‘birching, beheading, hanging, drowning, burning, quartering, eye-gouging and other forms of maiming'. [19] She even reproduces a contemporary artist's drawing of the death of Robert François Damiens whose drawn-out execution for his unsuccessful attempt on the life of Louis XV in 1757 was described in graphic detail in the introduction to Foucault's book Discipline and Punish.

What is missing from all this concern with ‘balance' is an appropriate sense of the portentous nature of the explorers' contacts. At one stage when discussing her use of the records of Maori oral historians, Salmond writes that ‘the European visits were of marginal interest to tribal historians, since the European protagonists were external to the local genealogical networks which provide the key principle for ordering tribal historical accounts'. [20] Another New Zealand historian, Peter Munz, has made a penetrating critique of Salmond's methodology, pointing out that the Maori lack of interest in the strangers and their focus on the bonding effect of the recital of genealogies deprived them of either an historical or sociological perspective that would have served their long-term interests better.

Thus they were not able to take an interest in the Europeans who were coming to threaten and eventually destroy the indigenous style of life. This is a serious matter, for a society in which people are unable to discern and diagnose life-threatening events is lacking in something that is essential. [21]

Similarly, Munz points out, what is omitted from Salmond's account is an historical perspective that transcends parochial Maori culture. Her approach lacks a ‘metanarrative' that could put the events into their historical perspective and show that the Maori view of the apparent triviality of the European visits was profoundly mistaken. What her account also does is to considerably reduce the stature of the European side of the story which, rather than simply being one more example of the genre of discovery tales, contained within itself the very metanarrative that the Maori perspective lacked. The Europeans recognised full well the significance of their visit for the Maori. They knew that, once discovered by Europe, the Maori way of life was suddenly vulnerable in a way that no Maori had ever imagined. This was the historical reality whether the Maori historians saw it or not. Munz observes that the European explorers also knew that their visits confirmed many other things they knew but the Maori did not—that the earth was round, that its islands or continents were not yet all known but soon would be, and that they had the expertise in seamanship, astronomy and geography to return to Europe and tell others of their discoveries.

What is really peculiar about the type of history Salmond is trying to write is that her readers know all these things too. With their own hindsight, they cannot help but read into Salmond's account their knowledge that the European discoveries eventually led to white settlement, military conflict and the displacement of the Maori from much of their land. In other words, the attempt to eliminate metanarrative by telling things exclusively from the point of view of the participant is impossible. No matter how pristine the account, readers will always impose their own mental overview onto the story drawn from what they know of the outcome. In short, Salmond's attempt to portray the Maori perspective by replacing one European methodology—empirical historiography—with another—relativist hermeneutics—turns out to be nothing but a futile exercise in political correctness, an attempt to write a euphemistic version of history that offends nobody's racial sensitivity…at the expense of telling what really happened.

Cultural relativism began as an intellectual critique of Western thought but has now become an influential justification for one of the contemporary era's most potent political forces. This is the revival of tribalism in thinking and politics. The demand by representatives of tribal cultures to have the sole governance of their affairs is probably the biggest single cause of bloodshed in the world today. It has produced the charnel house politics of Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Central Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans. Postmodernism and cultural relativism are complicit in this—both in their insistence on the integrity of all tribal cultures, no matter what practices or values they perpetuate, and in their denunciation of all imperial cultures. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said even takes to task the Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams for the ‘massive absence' in his work of any condemnation of the English imperialism imposed upon Williams's Welsh ancestors. [22] Rather than being regarded as any advance in political conceptualisation, however, the politics of relativism should be recognised as simply a mirror image of the racist ideologies that accompanied and justified Western imperialism in the colonial era: once it was the West that imagined it brought civilisation to the heathen; today it is tribal cultures that are revered as humane, and imperial cultures that are condemned as brutish.

This vision, however, is of little assistance for anyone seeking to come to terms with particular political conflicts. How does one differentiate, for instance, between demands for self-determination that appear morally legitimate, such as those made by the people of East Timor against their military annexation by Indonesia, and the barbaric kind of tribalism that committed some of the worst atrocities of recent history in the name of creating a Greater Serbia? How can one define some tribal demands, such as those made by Armenians against Turks or Kurds against Iraqis, as proper attempts to restore land expropriated only two generations ago, while recognising other ancestral disputes—such as that between Greek and Macedonian based on who occupied territory more than two thousand years ago or on the ethnic identity of Alexander the Great—as political absurdities? We need to be able to make the same kinds of discriminations between imperialisms. As the history of the past millennium clearly demonstrates, imperialism has taken many forms. It has imposed horrors and it has eliminated horrors. Different imperial powers have had different records in these matters and the behaviour of any one imperial power—whether it be English, French, American, Russian, Chinese, Ottoman, Khmer or Mogul—has varied dramatically at different periods of time. How does one judge the difference between the relatively benign imperialism of the Portuguese in Timor and the ruthless oppression imposed by their Indonesian successors, or indeed the great disparity in the treatment by the Portuguese dictator Salazar of his colonial subjects in Timor on the one hand, and war-torn Mozambique on the other?

Relativism is no help in any of these issues. All the relativist can do is either take sides according to ethnic preference or assert that each side has its own legitimate point of view—a position guaranteed to earn contempt from all concerned. The only values that can assist one to sort out these questions are the universal kind, and the only internationally accepted universal values are those based on human rights, that is, those values born and nurtured within the Western tradition. Though they originated in the European Enlightenment and became politically established through their overthrow of the anciens regimes of Europe, they have more claim than any others to global acceptance. They form the legal code of virtually all democratic nations and have been sanctioned by international law. One does not have to be a Francis Fukuyama type of historical determinist to agree that the concepts of human rights and liberal democratic government have swept nearly all before them in the last fifty years and look like continuing the process for the next fifty at least.

In contrast, the values of tribalism, despite their enthusiastic endorsement by the academic left, have much more difficult prospects in the real world. The followers of Michel de Certeau argue that cultural diversity has everywhere proved irrepressible. Wherever an indigenous culture appears to have been wiped out by imperialism, we eventually see ‘the return of the repressed'. Today, if proof of the thesis is required, the high profile of indigenous cultural expression in many countries in the form of state-funded artefacts, music and performances can readily be cited. Hence relativists draw the conclusion that, given half a chance, cultural diversity will return to regain its place as the natural condition of humanity. It is this hope that nurtures the multicultural political movement of today.

Unfortunately, the historical record does not support the thesis. For the past ten thousand years at least, indigenous cultures on every continent have been subject to a process of change that has varied from merger and absorption into other cultures to complete obliteration by a conquering power. Every culture that exists today has been subject to either violent or peaceful amalgamation and absorption of earlier smaller communities. The process has occurred just as certainly, if not to the same extent, in the relatively isolated indigenous cultures of the New Guinea highlands as it has in the multiracial societies of North America. If this were not true, human beings would still be living in the small family-based clans that constituted hunter-gatherer society. Whether we like it or not, Peter Munz has argued in a striking analysis of the historical logic of multiculturalism, we are all the inheritors of cultures that have been forged out of a long process of suppression and absorption of the cultures that arose before them. [23] Just as inexorably, this has meant that cultures that once were in conflict have ceased their struggle and cultural diversity has diminished. Over time, most of those societies that once housed two or more disparate cultures ceased to be multicultural and became monocultural. This has occurred either by minority cultures succumbing to a dominant culture or through merger and accommodation on terms acceptable to both sides.

Accompanying the long-term tendency to monoculturalism has been a similar change in the degree of openness of communities. The earliest hunter-gatherers formed largely exclusive societies that refused to accept as members, and indeed regarded as enemies, those who did not belong to their descent group. They then developed into societies that admitted outsiders through marriage. With the emergence of large-scale settlement and nation states came societies that would potentially include anybody who wanted to be included. The difference in these degrees of exclusiveness can be seen plainly today where native communities still exist. In countries like Australia and New Zealand, indigenous people define themselves through ancestry and bloodlines. By contrast, immigrants to these countries, no matter what their ancestry, are accepted by nothing more than declarations of citizenship. As Munz has put it: ‘while one cannot “become” a Maori, one can “become” a New Zealander.' [24] Clearly, any attempt at cultural merger and accommodation is made very difficult if one side identifies itself by ancestry and genealogy, thereby defining itself in terms so exclusive that it forever rules out the inclusion of the other side.

Those who are arguing for the revival of tribalism, then, are not only trying to push the barrow of history back up a pretty steep slope but are involved in some expensive political and cultural trade-offs. The return of tribalism would mean a revival of cultural diversity, which might have some value from an aesthetic point of view but would also have its down side. A revival of cultural exclusiveness would mean a return to differentiating between human beings on the basis of genealogical blood lines, in other words, on racial grounds. If the history of the twentieth century has taught anything it is that the attempt to establish societies based on the latter is a sure road to catastrophe. Cultures based on religion, political principles or historical tradition always have the potential for accommodation with others. Cultures based exclusively on race cannot, by their very nature, do this. It is a great irony that the cultural relativist and multicultural movements gain most of their support from those people of European descent who want to avoid derogatory attitudes towards the people and cultures of other races. This is a very decent sentiment and one that derives from the basic principle of Western liberalism that all human beings are equal. These people should be reminded that the first thing to be rejected by cultural exclusiveness, wherever it becomes entrenched, is the very liberal principle that led them to support it in the first place.

Nonetheless, in the postcolonial era it has seemed natural to many brought up on liberal principles to go one step further than simple individual egalitarianism and to argue that it is not just all people that are equal but all cultures or meanings systems as well. This not only puts Western culture in its place but also relativises the whole corpus of Western knowledge. However, this extension of the argument should be recognised as illegitimate. The liberal democratic notion that all people are equal means equal in a legal and political sense. All people should be treated equally before the law and all should have an equal voice in the governance of their society. It has never meant that all people have equality of knowledge, ability or understanding. Similarly, all cultures or meanings systems are demonstrably not equal in terms of knowledge and ability. The inference drawn by ideologues like Edward Said, that the political liberation of colonial peoples should be accompanied by their epistemological liberation, does not follow. Indeed, those former colonies who want to expel Western thought in the way that they expelled Western imperialism should recognise that they would be throwing away the most valuable intellectual tools available to them.

Despite the claims of the relativists, there is one particular style of knowledge that has proven, historically, so overwhelmingly powerful—technologically, economically, militarily and administratively—that all societies have had to make their peace with it and adopt it. Ernest Gellner has argued that, no matter how unfashionable it might be to say it today, there is but one genuinely valid style of knowledge and that the mainstream of the Western scientific tradition has captured it. The epistemological grounds for the empirical methods of science contain some contentious assertions, he acknowledges, and agreement is lacking even among those philosophers who completely endorse the procedures themselves. But this does not constitute a good reason to doubt the efficacy of the methodology. Western science has trumped all other cognitive styles when judged by the pragmatic criterion of technological efficacy, but also when assessed by criteria such as precision, elaboration, elegance and sustained and consensual growth. In other words, Western knowledge works, and none of the others do with remotely the same effectiveness. [25]

In asserting the absolutism and non-relativism of Western scientific method, Gellner says this status is quite separate from any question about the ranking of the inhabitants of Western societies. It has nothing whatever to do with a racist, or any other, glorification of one segment of humanity over another. It is a style of knowledge and its implementation, not any category of personnel, that is being singled out. That style of knowledge did, of course, have to emerge somewhere and at some time, and to this extent it certainly has links with a particular tradition or culture. It emerged in one social context, but it is clearly accessible to all humanity. It endorses no single nation, culture or race. It is not clear which of the conditions surrounding its birth were crucial, and which were merely accidental and irrelevant, and the crucial conditions might well have come together in other places and at other times. Its greatest affinity need not be, and probably no longer is, with its place of origin. Indeed, Gellner notes with irony, the first nation to be both scientific and industrial, Great Britain, is not at present at the top of the ‘first industrial division' and in recent years has been struggling in the relegation zone. [26] This powerful form of cognition is not the prerogative of any one human group. So it does not, in this sense, give rise to any ranking of human groups. Far from being bound by Western culture, Western science belongs to the whole of humanity.

The same is true of history. The attempt by cultural relativism and postmodernism to eliminate the metanarrative from history—that is, to eliminate the narrative of what really happened irrespective of whether the participants were aware of it or not—would deprive us all, no matter what culture we inhabit, of genuine knowledge of our past. This attempt is not only a theoretical delusion but is politically inept. Though used most often these days to assert the esteem of indigenous cultures, cultural relativism will never serve the real interests of indigenous peoples if it denies them access to the truth about the past. This essay has been designed to demonstrate and to reassert that the best method for gaining this access is through the tools refined by the discipline of history. Just as Western science is open to everyone, Western historical method is available to the people of any culture to understand their past and their relations with other peoples. It is by facing the truth of both our separate and our common histories that we can best learn to live with one another.

Notes:

1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (French edn 1966), Vintage Books, New York, 1994, p xix

2. Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995, pp 158, 163

3. Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think, p 14

4. Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think, pp 157-8

5. James Franklin has drawn my attention to Stroud's Judicial Dictionary, 5th edn, London, 1986, and the vagaries of legal definitions of animals (pp 127, 762, 968). Camels, for instance, are domestic animals but performing elephants are wild; a domestic fowl is an animal but a cock kept for cock-fighting is not an animal at all, according to Scottish law. On Sahlins's logic, ethnographers should be flocking to Scotland to study a culture as exotic as anything out of Africa.

6. Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think, p 155

7. Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An anthropological critique of sociobiology, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1976

8. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things; see also his The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York, 1982

9. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, Routledge, London, 1992, p 74

10. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, ‘The Psychological Foundations of Culture', in Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992, p 92

11. Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994, pp 247-8

12. Roberta Sykes, ‘History without morality', Sydney Morning Herald, 10 December 1994, Spectrum, p 10A.

13. Debra Jopson, ‘Racism or just arrogance?', Sydney Morning Herald, 14 April 1995, p 11

14. Edward Said, Orientalism, (1st edn 1978), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985

15. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, London, 1993, pp 162-96

16. Mudrooroo, Us Mob, History, culture, struggle: An introduction to indigenous Australia, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1995, pp 185-6

17. Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans 1642-1772, Viking, Auckland, 1991, pp 11-12

18. Anne Salmond, Two Worlds, p 15

19. Anne Salmond, Two Worlds, p 50

20. Anne Salmond, Two Worlds, p 436

21. Peter Munz, ‘The Two Worlds of Anne Salmond in Postmodern Fancy Dress', New Zealand Journal of History, University of Auckland, 28, 1, April 1994, p 62

22. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, p 77. Let me play a relativist card here and note that I have the appropriate ethnic credentials to take a position in any debate on Welsh history, unlike Said who should heed his own ethnocentric advice and keep out of our affairs. Rather than being oppressed, my own Welsh ancestors were liberated by English imperialism. My great grandfather, Eleazar Owens, was emancipated from the peasant agriculture of his parents and elevated first to the occupation of teacher at one of Her Majesty's Government schools in Aberystwyth and then, happily for his descendants, to the British colony of New South Wales where he became a publican and, in his own words, a gentleman.

23. Peter Munz, ‘The Two Worlds of Anne Salmond', pp 71-5

24. Peter Munz, ‘The Two Worlds of Anne Salmond', p 75

25. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, pp 61-2

26. Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, p 61