BEING OF SERVICE: CROSS-CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF VALUE IN REMOTE COMMUNITY WORK

ms of cross-cultural engagement, the implications of this framework become apparent when the two ends of the continuum were compared as behavioural or motivational types. At one end of the spectrum (P1), for example, we can imagine a hardworking, vocationally committed employee who diligently spends all day in the office working for the ‘community’ while remaining steadfastly intransigent in the face of Aboriginal requests for ‘help’ or personal assistance. His/her central dilemma is that, while his skills and expertise may be acknowledged as important for the community in general, his apparent insensitivity to personal requests for help undermines his standing in the local service economy [in a transactional sense]. Put another way, his narrow preoccupation with serving the ‘community’ rather than helping individuals in ways they value leaves him vulnerable to the charge that he is doing nothing for people really, just working for and by himself.

At the other end of the analytical continuum (P2), there are staff who are lauded by Anangu as helpful and generous yet fail in their occupational endeavours because they are not impartial and diligent according to bureaucratic standards of competency and external accountability. Their position, while in some sense secure in the local economy of service exchange, is limited in a utilitarian sense by their administrative shortcomings and the threat their professional incompetence poses to the bureaucratic system that indirectly employs them in the first place. A common outcome in such cases is that pressures emerge in an organisational sense (both locally and among government agencies) for change, resulting in some unhealthy dynamics locally.

In short, we can conceptualise two forms of community relations and practice in the local service economy. One from creates a bounded administrative domain by denying the significance of staff participation in the Aboriginal service economy for professional practice, while the other euphemises power relationships and boundaries between Aboriginal and administrative domains by extending non-Aboriginal staff engagement beyond purely office and official administrative contexts.

To the extent that some employees recognise and acknowledge the importance of modifying their language, attitudes, and behaviour in accordance with community expectations, their practice is informed by competencies drawn from both domains of value. Service relations in this sense are euphemised because the value of service is not reducible to one domain or sphere of interaction. We can then conceptualise different registers of service value that are used to gain community trust and build goodwill. In highlighting the significance of these registers of value, I pursue this theme of finding significant points of cultural connection and shared value in a world of difference.

There are of course significant barriers to social inclusion, not least of which is a tenancy among some community workers to distance themselves from the community, both physically and socially. The concept of insiders and outsiders is apposite, as is the idea of social distance.

In sociology, social distance refers to the distance between individuals or groups in society. It describes the measure of nearness or intimacy that an individual or group feels towards another individual or group in a social network or the level of trust one group has for another and the extent of perceived identification with certain values and beliefs. The concept of social distance is primarily attributed to sociologist Georg Simmel but has a long and venerated history in sociology. Simmel conceptualized social distance by describing a hypothetical stranger who was simultaneously near and far from contact with his social group. Robert Park, a student of Simmel, extended these ideas to the study of relations across racial/ethnic groups.

Social distance can be categorized into three dimensions⁴ :

• • Affective social distance: It refers to how much sympathy members of a group feel for another group. Emory Bogardus based his scale on this subjective-affective conception of social distance.

• • Normative social distance: It refers to the widely accepted and often consciously expressed norms about who should be considered as an “insider” and who an “outsider/foreigner”.

• • Interactive social distance: It focuses on the frequency and intensity of interactions between two groups. The more members of two groups interact, the closer they are socially.

Clearly, social distance is not just an infectious disease control measure, it is an important concept in anthropology and sociology, as it helps understand how individuals and groups perceive and relate to one another based on various socially recognised registers of value.

If we consider how much sympathy members of the group feel for another group, we could consider registers of value in terms of personality type; a fascinating field of study in psychometrics and triangulation. If we considered normative social distance, we might examine forms of identity based on who is an insider and outsider and how cultural boundaries are manifest in social behaviour. When we consider interactive social distance on the other hand we are simply interested in the nature and extent of interaction between staff and community members; the model indicates the more interaction there is between people of different cultural backgrounds the closer they become socially, although this is naïve to say the least.

In writing chapter 6 of my PhD thesis, I was interested in Max Weber’s idea of bureaucratic modes of authority as deliberately and consciously distant from clients, in the sense of impartiality and objectivity and the denial of personalised forms of exchange. Anthropologist in Australia have had a lot to say about exchange and service value.

In the English language, the word service originated from the Old French word servise, which referred to acts of homage, servitude, service at table, and Mass or church ceremony. It also derives from the Latin word servitium, meaning slavery, condition of a slave, servitude, and slaves collectively. The Latin word servitium, for example, is related to the Latin word servus, which means slave. The term service has evolved over time and acquired various meanings. It now refers to an act of being of assistance to someone or providing help. It can also denote the state of being subordinate to or employed by an individual or group. Hence, the word service has been used in different contexts throughout history. For instance, it has been associated with religious worship, occupation as a servant, provision of food during a meal, and furniture of the table. In contemporary usage, it encompasses concepts such as community employment, military service, provision of utilities like electricity and water for domestic use, and expert care or assistance provided by service providers.

For Anangu, the closest translation to the word service in the English language, given its etymology, involved the core concept of “looking after” or kanyininypa described by Fred Myers in his book Pintupi Culture, Pintupi Self. Please take the time to read my article on service value and theories of exchange from a cross-cultural perspective.

In that post, I discussed the idea of triangulation; specifically in relation to rescuing behaviours and designated victims in identity politics. The issue, however, that most concerns me is the stereotypical alignment of people based on their racial identity. This colour-coded logic is not sufficient if we want to understand how registers of value are created, sustained, or ignored when we take an aporetic stand and failed to register that value itself is intensely subjective, until of course it becomes normative and shared. Concepts of class, gender, equality, and identity are blunt instruments from an ethnographic standpoint. Ultimately, being of service, is an attributed value attached to a person’s social status and measure of social worth. It is not just a reflection on how individuals see themselves subjectively.

Section 6.6 of my PhD developed this theme further by examining some of the ways in which staff convert long-term social investments and local knowledge into recognised forms of symbolic capital. Bourdieu’s (cf. Scott 1985:306-9) notion of euphemised power is apposite here, as is the idea that staff only have authority insofar as they defer to Aboriginal status hierarchies. As Scott explains, where power relations are euphemised, voluntary acts of service form part of the social relations of production. The ‘work’ required to maintain a coordinated community, in other words, is just as much social (and cultural) as economic. Power and work-place relations are euphemised, in this sense, where staff defer in some way to indigenous authority structures, whether those structures are of a ceremonial nature, construed in terms of ‘looking after’ or expressed in the dedicatory type of community service to significant others (e.g. elders). This suggests that to fully appreciate service relationships we need a theory of practice sensitive to the different domains or contexts in which service value is created and sustained locally.

Within the meaning of the term social capital, we may speak of cultural resources that could be accessed for personal or collective benefit. These resources can include information, support, trust, cooperation, and access to opportunities. Bourdieu, for example, introduced the term “social capital” systematically and emphasized its connection to other forms of cultural and symbolic capital. Coleman approached social capital from a rational-choice or utilitarian perspective and focused on its role in facilitating collective action and cooperation. The idea is used to analyze community development, educational achievement, economic growth, and political participation. In its most simplistic form, investing in social capital is a practice that assumes the recognition of stores of value. For anthropologists, the stores of value can only be appreciated through immersion in a culture; by being an insider as it were. It is near impossible for example to understand the meaning of a term in another language without being able to speak and understand the language itself, at least in some part. It beggars’ belief for example, that most teachers working in remote communities are not functionally literate in the local Indigenous languages, particularly where many community residents speak English as a second language. Fortunately, there are teacher aides or Aboriginal education workers employed to assist in the classroom in most schools, but I wonder how much better it might be if total immersion in Pitjantjatjara language and culture might be a better approach.

What are registers of value from a cultural standpoint? We might for example imagine a matrix with the first column identifying core concepts in the Pitjantjatjara language on each row. The second column might be the nearest English-language equivalent in translation. The third column could be a practice or behaviour or transaction that is associated with the core concept and its translation.

Here is a sampler: