Envy and egalitarianism in Aboriginal Australia: An integrative approach

Abstract

The word ‘envy’ directs attention to feelings and cognitions that are especially important sources of information in our complicated sociality. As it is delimited by philosophers, economists, psychologists and others, envy is conceptually nested within a family that includes evil eye beliefs, inequity aversion, strong reciprocity and social comparison. Although the accumulation of work in these areas is substantial, anthropological treatments of envy are rare. Given repeated assertions of envy's universality and its potential importance for understanding widespread aspects of the human condition, a comparative eye seems essential. I present an account of ‘jealous’ in Aboriginal Australia via a framework that casts emotions as emerging from the interaction of psychobiological and sociocultural processes. According to this perspective, ‘envy’ should not be regarded as an invariant human condition but rather as a Western version of what, in a more generic human form, may both defend the individual and the larger sociality.

The embodiment of sorcery: Supernatural aggression, belief and envy in a remote Aboriginal community

“…In the 1970s I was told that Charlie Pride, Elvis Presley and ‘Cassius Clay’ were killed because, ‘maybe someone was jealous’. In the 2000s, ‘jealous’ was said to be the ultimate cause of several deaths assumed to have been effected by sorcery (Burbank ). Following Reid (), who saw sorcery accusations at Yirrkala as statements about human relationships, I suggest that the ascription of ‘jealous’ is a projection of both early and subsequent feelings arising from competition with close ‘family’.…”

“…Elsewhere (Burbank ) I have argued that something like ‘envy’, understood as a means of responding to a negative social comparison, the perception that one has or is less than another, is a constructive emotion in an egalitarian social formation. My confidence in this interpretation is both initiated and buttressed by the observation that ‘jealous’ precipitates acts that enforce the egalitarian ethos characteristic of communities like Numbulwar.…”

“…Sorcery may also be a consequence of not acting as family should. Sharing within the family is a valued behaviour taught from early years on (Burbank ). Insufficient generosity may provoke an act of sorcery and those who ask for something are usually, and appropriately, only ‘family’, someone who is justifiably ‘jealous’ of something another has.…”

Love and the stranger: Intimate relationships between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people in a very remote Aboriginal town, northern Australia

“…Yet locating love and intimacy in interracial relationships is a difficult and incomplete task. On the one hand is the desire to recognise universal human emotions, while on the other is the need to account for the diversity of ways in which these emotions are experienced and expressed (Burbank : 2). For the Pintupi that Myers studied, such emotions were expressed using terms of reference highly mediated by local expectation, a point later reinforced by Yasmine Musharbash () in another Central Australian ethnography.…”

Dichotomous identities? Indigenous and non‐Indigenous people and the intercultural in Australia

“…Whereas anthropologists had in previous decades been intently concerned with defining and describing units of group identity relating to classical territorial organisation (hordes, clans, bands and the like), in Myers' estimation the sense of self for Pintupi was particularly borne out in the distinction between self and other, or the autonomy of the individual in concert with their relatedness to others (see also Martin ). Following Myers, the primary anthropological interest in Aboriginal personhood has been in the facets of life subjectively expressed in the person as an embedded social being; embodiment and corporeality coupled with phenomenological and emotional experiences such as stress, envy, love, boredom and grief (Burbank , ; Dalley this issue; Glaskin ; Musharbash , ; Povinelli ; papers in Glaskin et al . ).…”