ABSTRACT
Trawling through the literature which marks cultural difference as a crucial aspect of ‘intercultural’ conflict resolution, I am, as an anthropologist, mediator and facilitator, unsettled by the recurring and sometimes uncritical binaries that are employed in discussing ‘cultures’. References to dichotomies such as ‘high context’ and ‘low context’ communication styles in cultures by authors such as Edward T. Hall (1959, 1976) for example, are truisms and treat ‘cultures’ as discrete bounded entities or ‘things’ with a number of stereotypical traits or dimensions. ‘High context’ cultures (including indigenous cultures) are described as collectivist, rarely explicit, involving minimum codification, avoiding direct confrontation, emphasizing relationships and pursuing harmony and consensus. In contrast, ‘low context’ cultures (including ‘Western’ cultures) are described as individualistic, logical, linear, action-oriented and less concerned with face-saving. Some conflict resolution theorists consider it worth the risk to employ
such generalizations. They suggest that they can raise awareness and stimulate curiosity as ‘starting points’ in avoiding ‘dichotomized, fixed-point descriptions of cultural traits’ (Pillay 2006: 33; LeBaron 2004: 13). Kahane suggests that a way around stereotypes is for practitioners to employ a ‘politics of cultural generalization’ which seeks to critically analyze and recognize their contingencies (2003, 2004). For him, this is less risky than ‘reiterating the understandings of dominant cultural groups under the guise of neutrality’ and can assist in focusing on ‘shifting authority in defining cultures and the terms of contest between them’ in ways that resist domination (Kahane 2004: 29, 38). Despite these reassurances, my disquiet remains because of the way in
which the fetishization of ‘culture’, including the imagining of Aboriginal groups as homogeneous and ‘primordial’, has provided the basis for successive Australian governments to govern Aboriginal subjects. The result has been the regimentation of Aboriginal culture and conflict amongst Aboriginal people. Employing a ‘politics of generalization’ runs the risk of reinscribing, simplifying and codifying the power relations it is attempting to expose.
Employing ‘culture’ as a lens also diverts attention from more common sources of conflict including the capacity to make and implement decisions, poverty, inequalities, claims for social justice within cultural groups and unemployment (Young 2000). In developing intercultural conflict resolution praxis, it is more useful as a
starting point to think of culture as a process of the ‘active practice of differentiation’ (Weiner 2006). In this process, meaning is available only through the space created by participating subjects. It comes into being inter-subjectively in the mutual discursive constitution of the self and ‘other’ in changing configurations of fields of power and conditions of possibility. These conditions include those co-created in the mediation space, a site of governance in which ‘culture’ is a process of negotiating shared and contested meanings and relationships. The effects of culture are located in multi-positioned ‘bodies’, seen as the sites of social relationships. Individuals (including the mediator) are powerful in determining meaning, as ‘culture’ involves ‘constant creations, recreations and negotiations of imaginary boundaries between “we” and the “other(s)”’, as ‘the “other” is also always within us’ (Benhabib 2002: 8). This chapter searches for intercultural conflict resolution praxis which is
based on an understanding of ‘how differentiation is reproduced … ’ without starting points ‘of social totalities, or distinct “cultures”, assumed as fully present repertoires in terms of which [people] act’ (Merlan 2002: 2-3) and which are considered discrete before they come into relationship. As Sullivan suggests, ‘sets of social relations in their particular places’ do not happen ‘within bounded realms of self-referral that construct and delineate “a culture”’ (2006a: 253). Starting from the fact that we all live in one world, we need to problematize cultures as having ‘an interior volume and configuration within which a collection of “traits” reside’ (Sullivan 2006a: 255). We need to posit the ‘culturally differentiating activity that emerges from it and results in categories such as “indigenous” and “non-indigenous”’ (Weiner 2006: 17-18). Following this reasoning, this chapter focuses on native title disputes and
relationships between Aboriginal Australians themselves as being ‘intercultural’.1 This is not only because of the great diversity of linguistic and cultural affiliations of Aboriginal Australians. In all dispute resolution processes, it is necessary to negotiate sets of mutual understandings emerging from multiple subjectivities. The subject and cultural difference can never be fully known. It is also the case, Weiner suggests, that we cannot distinguish between ‘“difference” that emerges within cultures as opposed to the “difference” that emerges between two “cultures”’ (2006: 17-18). In Australia, ‘culture’ as conceived in the popular imagination has provided
the rationale for various pieces of legislation, including the Native Title Act 1993 (NTA) which has resulted in unprecedented differentiations and conflicts between Aboriginal people. Because the NTA places a major emphasis on non-adversarial collaborative agreements, processes such as mediation, facilitation and negotiation have come under the microscope. These processes are
not only located in the dominant discourse of culture, they also are located at the uneasy intersection of competing discourses of individual and collective human rights, customary rights and interests as interpreted in courts, and rights and interests as they are interpreted in interest-based mediation. In this chapter I argue that mediator capacity, ethics and responsibilities
are more useful lenses than ‘culture’ in identifying intercultural dispute management praxis and in negotiating the complexities of native title rights and interests amongst Aboriginal people. I also argue that Aboriginal dispute management and decision-making processes which are solely focused on the interpersonal will ultimately be ineffective. They must also address underlying structural and systemic issues which frequently are the cause of, or significantly exacerbate, interpersonal or community conflict. Culture and conflict are located in webs of relationships and systems and mediation is only one peacebuilding approach required in Australian Indigenous communities, many of which are in crisis. Finally, I make some observations about the development of ‘intercultural’ mediator capacity which requires an approach based in a social ontology of relationships seen as ‘fields of inter-subjectivities’ rather than as ‘intercultural’.
