More on language. It is hard to write about traditional Aboryginal people as humans with social and political systems like everyone else in the world and avoid the colonial overtones.

Here is another 19th C description of native life: ‘the men are truly savage, and have neither law nor religion, and support a miserable existence by what they can catch’.

Aborigines? Nope, these ‘savages’ are my ancestors, the Highland Scots. There are plenty of similar descriptions dating from the 18th and 19th centuries when the English were trying to justify their dispossession of the Highlanders.

Loudmouth, I am sending a letter to the address indicated. Why the limitations; girls, universities?

Loudmouth/Cossomby

In the 17c nations as we know them today WERE unknown. That was my point. The word nation may have been used by Voltaire or Rousseau but NOT in the modern sense of the nation state. In their time the nation was embodied in the person of the king. So an insult to the king was an insult to the nation. My point was that many historians put the birth of the modern nation state down to the French Revolution. The French Revolution saw the absolutist monarchy overthrown and replaced with a democratically elected parliament. It was a philosophical change in that previously the king or queen was seen as the embodiment of the nation whereas now the nation was seen as embodied in the people. This meant real change. For the first time a 'nation' united in the face of foreign counter-revolutionary forces trying to reestablish the monarchy. They formed a national army for the first time and introduced promotion by merit (hence Napoleon). They fought with national zeal in defense of the revolution and defeated vastly superior foreign forces. Many see this as the birth of nationalism and the first modern nation state.

It is not about language, dictionaries or population (even in millions); it is about political organisation. Yes, many nations were created in the 20 C but they had a genesis. That was my point.

Loudmouth, you come across as condescending and more than a bit conceited. First you tell me to keep my feet on the ground then you tell me I have missed your point. It seems you consider yourself an expert on aboriginal issues but having studied the French Revolution, it's obvious you don't have a good grasp of European history.

cossomby,
Saying there was no such thing as aboriginal nations may have colonial overtones but that doesn’t make it wrong. Anyone who has any understanding of the intellectual history of Europe could not possible label a hunter/gather tribal society a 'nation'. If words have become so meaningless, we might as well stop using them altogether and start grunting at each other.

Cossomby

Just a post script: there are probably still English who call Scotts savages.

Hi dane,

Thanks for the serve, it spices up my day: condescending - moi ?

Your last point to Cossomby - that's precisely what I was trying to get across in my clumsy way.

And hasn't it occured to you that the concept of 'nation', as we know it today, was so weak and novel at the end of the eighteenth century, that even the post-Revolutionary French easily slipped back into an imperial frame of mind - not just in the suppression of the slaves on Hispaniola, but in the ease with which Napoleon had himself crowned Emperor - not King, notice, but Emperor. Yes, the old monarchy was to be done away with - long live the new form of monarchy (cf. Louis Bonaparte's eventual accession).

But nations as such did really not exist until after 1815 (unless you want to count Andorra, Liechtenstein, etc.: even Switzerland was less a nation than a collection of semi-independent cantons, or sort of republican principalities), and even then, endured an uneasy co-existence with neighbouring empires, a form of government that it was always tempting to fall back into (viz. France, Italy, Germany, the US, post-Revolutionary Russia and China).

Yes, Cossomby, we can all play around with words: 'clan' also meant something different in the Highlands of Scotland and along the banks of the Murray. But we have to try to get beyond the words for things and try to understand the entities (to use a much broader, more neutral word) as they actually existed. Did Aboriginal groups exist as nations or as extended families, and as alliances between family groups, in the usual sense ? Did our ancestors 15,000 years ago - including those in Scotland (even up to the present ?) - perceive 'nationhood' ? I don't think so. Sorry.

Joe

Dane
I wasn't arguing for the use of 'nation'. I placed Barwick's use of it for W Vic in inverted commas. It was used by anthropologists in the early 1900's, but is not generally used now. I wouldn't use it, exactly for the reasons you give.

But, there were political systems connecting people, who saw themselves as distinct, with other groups, often speaking related languages, and the power politics in these groups was complex even if the political structures were not what we would define as 'nations'. The problem is that language such as Loudmouth's: 'a sort of head head-man', 'no powers outside the group, and not a hell of a lot within' goes to the other extreme of implying that there was no political structure, and that is a colonial hangover (that's what I meant in the earlier post).

There are people in the world today who have political structures that are not 'nations' - Afghani tribes for example. Would we say that their leaders and/or warlords are a a sort of head head-man, with no powers outside the group and not a hell of a lot within? We might think that in these situations the actually have a lot of power!

So even though Aboriginal groups weren't 'nations' in today's sense, this doesn't mean that they had no political structures at all.