The name is absent

128

Writings in the sociology of knowledge (Stark, 1958:3) show
how not only knowledge but all cultural forms are socially contexted.
The frameworks for the writing of history and anthropology are
socially contexted; the particular paradigm used to organize
knowledge is contexted into the sedimented knowledge of the world
of the historian, or the anthropologist.

The early accounts of Australian settlement were thus written
from the point of view of the dominant group imposing its reality
on history.

Hence the accounts of Australian colonization were either
silent about Aboriginal resistance or, in order to preserve the
symbolic universe of the dominant group, they identified resistance
< ɪ
by conceptualising it as treachery, savagery »

Reynolds makes the assessment that the resistance offered
would, inevitably, have been crushed:

.     ... good intentions and benevolent policies

notwithstanding, the very act of settlement implied
that whenever the Aborigines confronted the encroaching
newcomer they would be crushed; and that such action
would generate a covert cultural resistance destined
to last long after the frontier era remained (Reynolds,
1972:1).

Thus there were, until the seventies, two forms of black

resistance - the early militant resistance in which Aborigines,

Reconceptualisation in this manner can be found in contemporary
history. In 1982 a major diplomatic row erupted between Japan
and China. The former rewrote the history of the Japanese invasion
ofChina as benign 'advances' rather than 'aggression'. Massacres
were attributed to the hostile (presumably unjustified) resistance         _f

of the Chinese.

Similarly, in visiting Peking in 1976 it was found that the museum of

History was closed; the reason given was that scholars were rewriting the History
of Chinese Revolution. A subsequent visit in 1979 showed that Chou, en
Lai had been raised to a new status, overshadowing Mao, consonant with
the fall of the gang of four and the loss of Mao's stature.

History was being written from a different perspective with a
kaleidascopic effect; a change in situation rotated the 'facts’ to
form a totally different picture.

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