The Saga Of Captain Cook: Remembrance And Morality

Intertwined in the complicated history of the discipline of anthropology are the concepts of primitivism and unilinearism. These concepts appeared in the analysis of many different ethnicities described as less technologically and culturally developed than that of their Western European counterparts. The trouble with this concept being applied to anthropology is that when peoples are labeled as less developed it becomes easy to consider them less than human or primitive, thereby ranking another culture as superior. With these ideas of primitivism and unilinearism arose the concept of the non-adapting native or the native who cannot be taught. Alongside this trope was the development of the nonviolent native or the docile native trope. The non-adapting Aboriginal trope and the docile native trope became the standard explanation …show more content…
Rose writes, “For Yarralin people it is inconceivable that the current state of affairs, their oppression under Captain Cook’s law, will continue indefinitely. It is not just that they do not want it to; it is that it cannot…Captain Cook’s law defies the ultimate goal of maintaining life-giving systems…such defiance cannot have a long-term future” (78). Under the laws of The Dreaming, such imbalance in power cannot exist “indefinitely”; therefore, it becomes logical to wait until there is a time when balance is returned. However, Europeans characterize this waiting as docility. Due to the role egalitarianism and non-violence has in Aboriginal Australian and Polynesian societies; the Europeans could begin to establish a claim to the land without much violent resistance. There was backlash within native communities, but the trade goods offered by the European colonists quelled much of the