Australian Society of Archivists
1999 Conference
Was JF to blame? Archivists, historians and risk
Don Boadle
Director, Archives & Records
Charles Sturt University
Paper delivered at the Australian Society of Archivists’
Conference
Brisbane
30 July 1999
Western society is preoccupied with the concept of risk. This has
given rise to seemingly contradictory impulses. On the one hand, there
is ‘a generous political mood’—to quote the social
anthropologist Mary Douglas (1992: 15)—‘against exposing
others to risks’, which has found its main outlets in popular
campaigns against globalised companies like chemical manufacturers
whose activities pose dangers to western consumers and their third
world hosts. On the other hand, the revival of neo-classical or
laissez faire economics has revivified an ideology which lauds the
merits of individual risk taking (Douglas, 1992: 22), and sees the
exploitation of technology as one of the mechanisms whereby society
can ‘shape the universe of future events … within limits …
regulated by risk assessment’ (Giddens, 1991: 109).
In societies where the individual is emphasised and valued and seen
as central, danger, threats or crises are interpreted as individual,
rather than social, problems. What in earlier times might have been
seen as misfortune which was out of the individual’s control,
because of the actions of the gods, or the operation of fate, is seen
by modern western societies as a matter of individual responsibility.
And a matter of individual responsibility, moreover, which can be
subjected to rational assessment and management. The assumption, then,
is that in ‘a universe of high modernity’—to use
Anthony Giddens’ (1991: 108-111) phrase—individuals will act
to prevent misfortune, and will do so as rational actors. Rational,
that is, in terms of their own social, cultural and cognitive schemes.
Risk discourse, as Tulloch and Lupton (1997: 6) point out, is
unsatisfactory when it emphasises a commonality of experience: when it
does not comprehend classed or gendered differences or the structural
location of actors, and when it slurs over the fact that ‘some
people have greater access to choice and have greater authority over
the ways that “risks” are identified and managed than do
others’. Nowhere is this more apparent than when risk assessment
and management requires recourse to the so-called ‘expert
knowledge systems’ of professionals like doctors, environmental
scientists, town planners or even archivists. Risk discourse is also
unsatisfactory when it posits a globalised universe of high modernity,
and fails to take sufficient cognisance of the delineating
characteristics of distinctively pre-modern or transitional cultures
in post-colonial settings such as Papua New Guinea, Cambodia and
Kiribati.
Risk discourse nevertheless is firmly entrenched: both as a
scholarly and a popular activity. In popular debate, as Douglas (1992:
3-21) has shown, the concept of risk, and assessments of the
effectiveness of risk management in particular cases are used to
distinguish between self and other: to project anxieties, to cast
moral judgements, and to lay blame upon marginalised individuals and
groups. In this sense, risk discourse is neither politically nor
socially generous.
Perhaps I can do no better than illustrate these issues by recourse
to a ‘hypothetical’, based on Nigel Krauth’s (1990)
anti-colonial novel, JF was here. I don’t know how many
of you are familiar with the book, but I need to point out that it’s
controversial because of the way it appropriates AIDS as a metaphor
for colonialism. As Robert Dessaix (1998: 286) has commented: ‘although
likening the invasion of the Third World to AIDS is a neat reversal of
the usual metaphor likening AIDS to invasion from the Third World, not
all readers will be politically comfortable with a novel they suspect
may be “using” AIDS to make its points’. Yet, in a
situation where AIDS ‘is the subject of surprisingly little art
of any value’, Dessaix (1998: 273, 284-86) is ready to
acknowledge Krauth’s novel not merely as one of the few sustained
responses to AIDS, but as one which has ‘managed to move beyond
the biomedical and political discourses to describe an approved “truth”
… [and] hammer home a worthy political message’.
The ‘story’, and its implications for our present
purposes, are easily summarised. What is more difficult to convey is
the novel’s metaphorical richness, and the way it intertwines the
protagonist’s experience with that of his grandmother in Port
Moresby in the 1920s. By
weaving into John’s narrative an earlier,
pre-independence story about his grandmother inadvertently causing the
death of a Papuan … , Krauth illuminates themes of colonisation
and the fragility of colonised cultures, as well as our tangled
concepts of blame (both national and personal), innocence and
responsibility. Both injustice and guilt can be “innocent”
as well as willed, the difference being often hard to define exactly,
and Western ways of thinking about justice and injustice, organised as
they are according to Judeo-Christian categories, are in many ways
inadequate to the complex reality (Dessaix: 1998, 285).
Unsurprisingly in a novel so rich in symbol and metaphor, the
eponymous protagonist is John Freeman, an idealistic young town
planner, born in Sydney in 1947 (which, I might add parenthetically,
makes him more or less contemporary with myself). JF’s marble
comes up in the ballot for Vietnam; he says he doesn’t want to
kill people, so he marries a social work student to escape the draft.
His marriage isn’t a success. He solaces himself with work—completing
a masters degree at the University of New South Wales, and making his
debut on the conference circuit. He quickly builds ‘quite a
reputation for himself, an international reputation, not so much for
the content of his addresses, but for the flair of his delivery. …
Town planners were generally dull types, he had thought. Their
conferences … a torment to anyone the least bit lively.’
(Krauth, 1990: 26)
Five years on JF comes out, leaves his wife, and gets a job in New
Guinea as the government’s deputy town planner. In Port Moresby
he’s a ‘big fish in a small pool’; it’s ‘easy’,
he finds, ‘to make a mark as a town planner in a stone-age
country hellbent on modernisation’ (107).
On annual leave one Christmas in Sydney, during a night of group sex
and substance abuse, he gets fucked by a big blond boy from
California, and contracts the HIV virus (118, 152). But, of course, he
doesn’t know this at the time. He’s dead by 1987; so, in
case any of you want to start casting blame, it isn’t just a
matter of him not heeding advice about safe sex.
On his return to New Guinea, JF fatally infects his bisexual Papuan
lover, Francis, who also happens to be his assistant. Francis is
described as ‘brilliant, shifty, handsome’, a graduate from
PNG’s own university. During working hours he is ‘gentle and
charming’, but outside working hours he is ‘a monstrous
drinker and betelnut addict’ who likes to fuck and beat white
women. He tells John that he beats ‘the whiteness in them’.
But he has no problem with John fucking him (109, 126-27, 145,
149-50). Francis’s ambivalence—sexually and temperamentally—is
the device Krauth uses to focus, as well as mirror, the tensions
between a pre-modern village based society, strongly fatalistic and
circumscribed by myth and ritual—a village society, incidentally,
to which Francis is still strongly drawn—and the alien western
values and knowledge systems of foreign experts like JF, whose mission
is founded on the assumption that individuals are able to control
their destinies, and use technology to manage their environments.
At the independence celebrations, JF’s faith in that management
is sorely tested when he falls into an open stormwater drain near the
new parliament buildings, ‘about the safety of which’, he
tells us, ‘he had given personal assurance to the Government
Architect in a memo two years before’ (134). And the realisation
slowly dawns on the once idealistic, no longer young town planning
professional, who had so forcefully attacked his elders’ ‘rigid
notions of the city as super-machine’, that his own ‘more
relaxed … more organic and human-oriented’ planning (26) is
just as foreign, just as in appropriate, just as imposed as their’s.
Standing in the middle of the new parliament buildings’ site JF
reflects that
The proposed town was all for show. It was meant to make
the statement: “Look how far Papua New Guinea has come to gain
Independence”. But, as John perceived, it said something quite
different. It showed the country’s dependence on the
twentieth century, on international politics and macroeconomics, on
aid and pressures from outside, on concrete and plastic.
… It was a mad tinsel-wreathed dance of buildings. It
was bombast in a new architectural language. It was the new elite’s
big-time squatter settlement showing off muscles of steel.
And its centre piece, predictably enough, was a brand new ‘six-lane
super highway, to be called Independence Drive, which would run for a
kilometre and stop abruptly’ (108).
John returns to Australia to die, spending his last days in the
Hydro Majestic Hotel at Meadlow Bath in the Blue Mountains west of
Sydney, where his grandmother had lived after leaving New Guinea. The
crumbling, once grand hotel, perched precariously on a sandstone
outcrop above the Grose Valley, is transformed in Krauth’s hands
into a metaphor for AIDS. But the hotel buildings, and the albums of
newspaper cuttings, photographs and memorabilia its owners have
accumulated, also serve as ‘triggers’, which John requires
to piece together and make sense of his own self, his own identity,
his own ‘story’ in relation to that of his grandmother, Ina,
who had abandoned his mother, and who, in turn was abandoned herself.
At this level, Krauth’s novel is about memory, and the different
ways it is mediated in cultures with a recordkeeping tradition on the
one hand, and an oral tradition on the other.
There are a couple of themes implicit here which I’d like to
explore in a little more detail. But because of time, and the issues
which my fellow presenters have chosen to address, I will concentrate
on only one of them, though this will not preclude us returning to
both in question time at the conclusion of Pat Jackson’s paper.
One theme has to do with what happens when professional
recordkeepers, who embody a modern world view, which emphasises
concepts like risk management and accountability, are brought into
contact with post-colonial societies undergoing the transition to
modernity, where there is no indigeneous tradition of written
recordkeeping, or where—alternatively—there may be legacies
of earlier indigeneous experiments with recordkeeping which were
posited on assumptions quite foreign to those of western recordkeeping
professionals.
The other theme has to do with perceptions of archival and
historical professionalism and their role in the preservation and
transmission of cultural memory.
Returning to the first of these themes, both Peter Arfanis and Pat
Jackson will be suggesting to you that people in post-colonial
societies in Cambodia and Kiribati may well have a very adequate level
of literacy. But this does not mean that the written word has replaced
oral tradition as the transmitter of cultural memory or cultural
values. Nor does it mean that they have either comprehended or
embraced concepts which sophisticated western recordkeeping
professionals, accustomed to operating in a world of ‘high
modernity’—and thus risk—accept as axiomatic.
Accountability for actions is one such concept, which westerners adopt
because they believe it’s possible for the individual to
manipulate his environment to secure desired outcomes, whilst at the
same time minimising or at least anticipating undesirable
consequences. For people in premodern societies, and those—like
JF’s lover, Francis—who are caught in the transition from
colonialism to modernity, this is an altogether foreign concept, as
one more illustration from Krauth’s novel will demonstrate most
tellingly.
One night in Port Moresby, driving home from a party at the
Travelodge and trying to avoid the drunken traffic on Sir Hubert
Murray Drive, John heard Francis tell a story. It was a Papua New
Guinea legend: not a legend from the village but from the town. …
A taxi roared past them where the highway turned up from Ela
Beach. The accelerating car disappeared into the darkness ahead,
leaving no trace. Its tail lights weren’t working.
“Ah, poro. Don’t ever get into Taxi Number 33,”
Francis drawled, his voice full of portent.
“Why’s that, mate?”
“Because it’s a ghost taxi, poro. It only
turns up late at night. Suppose you are walking along a dark road,
just hoping a taxi will come along. And suddenly it does. It comes
up behind you. It stops and the door opens by itself. You get into
the back seat and the rattling door closes. Before you can even say
where you want to go the taxi starts off. Its picks up speed. Then
at last the driver turns around towards you. His head turns around,
and keeps on turning, around and around and around. … You want
to jump out of the speeding car … but you can’t. There are
no handles on the door. You must keep on going. And you know where
you are going, poro?”
“No idea.”
“To hell.”
Francis broke into high-pitched laughter, and John joined in. “I’ll
remember that, mate. Taxi Number 33.”
“To hell direct, poro. No stops.” (Krauth:
1990, 5-6)
Leaving the irony aside, the essential point to notice here is the
belief in fate as a preordained determinism. According to Anthony
Giddens (1991, 110), this attitude—which he insists on
designating as ‘fatalism’—is nothing less than ‘the
refusal of modernity—a repudiation of a controlling orientation
to the future in favour of an attitude which lets events come as they
will’. The obvious point to make here is just how culture bound—and
western culture-specific—Giddens’ comment reveals him to be.
But his scornful dismissal of ‘fate’ in the popularly
understood sense does serve to highlight the difference in value
systems and world view between western experts and their colonial or
post-colonial clients. It also serves to suggest why attempts to
inculcate precepts of recordkeeping as a means to enhanced risk
management and improved accountability are met with such utter
incomprehension in post-colonial settings.
The situation, I would suggest, is even more complex for the western
professionals when indigeneous recordkeeping, posited on quite foreign
assumptions in western eyes, already has existed in a post-colonial
setting.
Recordkeeping in Kiribati was the responsibility of the British, and
the establishment of the Kiribati Archives was an ‘independence
gift’ from the departing colonial power; whereas, in Cambodia,
the French colonial administration had put archival arrangements in
place before the first world war, only to see them regularly disrupted
after their departure, in a country where changes in colonial regimes,
war, and civil disorder have been almost normative. Under the French,
a fragile Khmer literary culture existed—though Khmer society had
never placed much value on the written word or on orderly
recordkeeping. But it was not until the Khmer Rouge seized power in
1975, and installed Pol Pot as prime minister in the following year,
that Cambodia found itself developing an indigeneous recordkeeping
regime. And what is striking about this home grown urge to document,
is that it was not driven by any western concept of public
accountability. The Khmer Rouge, as Dawne Adam (1998, 18-19) has
argued,
did not have a sense of “the public” and did not,
therefore, seek to justify their methods to the Cambodian population.
… The pressure to document was internal. The Khmer Rouge were
rewriting history, abolishing the old order, and establishing the new;
doing so required not only a new language but meticulous means to
record it and the events it described. … [Hurst] Hannum believes
the Khmer Rouge killed to defend their ideology. He also believes that
they documented what they did for the same reason … to codify
their beliefs and enumerate and punish nonbelievers.
Whilst it no doubt could be argued that the meticulous records
maintained by those Khmer Rouge who staffed the torture and
extermination centres did provide some rudimentary accountability—if
only because it allowed the regime to ensure its killing rate was kept
at consistently high levels—that clearly was not their primary
purpose. Like the regime in George Owell’s novel, 1984,
the Khmer Rouge administration was concerned to use recordkeeping as a
weapon in an internal propaganda war: a battle to ensure that the
faithful kept the faith. To westerners, hardened as we are to
systematic violence and inhumanity, it remains a terrifying legacy;
and it perhaps helps to explain why Peter’s view of the prospects
for recordkeeping in Cambodia is altogether less optimistic than Pat’s
forecast for Kiribati.
Acknowledgement
The author thanks the School of Humanities and Social Sciences in
the Faculty of Arts at Charles Sturt University for so generously
supporting his attendance at this Conference.
References
Adam, Dawne (1998) ‘The Tuol Sleng Archives and the Cambodian
Genocide’, Archivaria, No. 45: 5-26.
Dessaix, Robert (1998) ‘Death to Art: Reflections on AIDS, Art
and Susan Sontag’ in (and so forth), Macmillan, Sydney:
272-93.
Douglas, Mary (1992) Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory,
Routledge, London.
Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self Identity: Self and
Society in the Late Modern Age, Stanford University Press,
Stanford.
Krauth, Nigel (1990) JF was here, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.
Tulloch, John and Deborah Lupton (1997) Television, AIDS and
Risk, Allen and Unwin, Sydney. |
