On Being Unreasonable: Breaking the Rules and Making Things Better by Kirsty Sedgman

Author:Kirsty Sedgman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Racial Etiquette

When Europe’s explorers began landing in earnest on the ancient shores of what they called ‘the new world’, along with plundered resources they also brought back plentiful stories of what they’d witnessed overseas. ‘Everywhere they went – among the hunter-gatherers of Australia, the horticulturalists of Polynesia, the village peoples of India – white men and occasionally women’ witnessed ‘electrifying rites’ of dancing, singing, chanting, waving arms and stamping feet, joyful vignettes of bodies illuminated by ‘[t]he smoke, the blazing torches, the shower of sparks falling in all directions’ – all coming together, as one pair of explorers breathlessly exclaimed, to form ‘a genuinely wild and savage scene of which it is impossible to convey any adequate idea in words’.

The colonisers were not impressed by such vibrant scenes. In fact, they were horrified. These accounts and more are collected within Barbara Ehrenreich’s history of collective joy, Dancing in the Streets,28 in which she explains how, on the whole, ‘white observers regarded the ecstatic rituals of darker-skinned peoples with horror and revulsion. Grotesque is one word that appears again and again in European accounts of such events; hideous is another.’ Charles Darwin, witnessing the corroboree rite of Western Australia, was prompted to call these rituals ‘a most rude, barbarous scene’, featuring men and especially women – this time in the words of Captain Cook on visiting Tahiti – ‘singing the most indecent songs and using most indecent actions’, permeated throughout by what nineteenth-century Swiss missionary Henri-Alexandre Junod in southern Mozambique called the ‘frightful din’ and ‘infernal racket’ of traditional drumming and chanting and song.29

To European eyes, Ehrenreich explains, there was only one possible conclusion. ‘Since these strange behaviors could be found in “primitive” cultures almost everywhere, and since they were never indulged in by the “civilised”, it follows that they must result from some fundamental defect of the “savage mind”’ – a mind that colonial elites believed to be malleable like plastic, childlike, and incapable of logic. After all, social and political theorists of the time gravely agreed, any body which allowed itself to be brought to ecstasy (or ecstasis, literally meaning ‘outside the self’) by loud, energetic, communal acts of public joy must be led by a brain that was similarly uncontrolled, ‘lacking the discipline and restraint that Europeans of the seventeenth century and beyond came to see as their own defining characteristics’.30

And that’s how the imagined ‘reasonable person’ became the stick Europe used to beat the rest of the world into submission. Their colonising ideology rested on the belief that being truly civilised meant achieving total mental and physical discipline: the rational mind subduing the animal body. That meant that all the people around the world – both abroad and those at home – who engaged in irrational and undisciplined cultural practices could be labelled ‘primitive savages’ in comparison.

Percolating throughout the white imagination, we can see how that constructed figure of the uncivilised native provided exactly the rallying cry that powerful elites needed to legitimise their imperial project. With

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