Les actes de colloques du musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac
4 | 2014 Australian Aboriginal Anthropology Today: Critical Perspectives from Europe International Symposium on Australian Aboriginal Anthropology – January 22-24th, 2013
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/actesbranly/515 DOI: 10.4000/actesbranly.515 ISSN: 2105-2735
Publisher Musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac
Electronic reference Les actes de colloques du musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac, 4 | 2014, « Australian Aboriginal Anthropology Today: Critical Perspectives from Europe » [Online], Online since 13 June 2014, connection on 12 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/actesbranly/515 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/actesbranly.515
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© Tous droits réservés 1
The wide circulation of Australian Aboriginal ethnographies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be said to have significantly shaped the anthropological study of myth, ritual, kinship, art, or hunting and gathering economies. Despite important political changes brought about since the 1960s by indigenous campaigns for the recognition of their land and other related rights, their increasing visibility on national and international stages, and their creative adjustments to State and other outside interventions, this intellectual legacy continues to inform much of the scholarship produced by non-Australianist anthropologists in Europe. By contrast in Australia, the practice of anthropology has been profoundly challenged by this highly charged context. Researchers are required to negotiate their positioning according to diverging and ever-shifting political, economic and social agendas while conforming at the same time to ethical standards set by their institutions that evaluate research in terms of its “benefits” for the studied groups. For many anthropologists working in Aboriginal Australia, whose data can be utilized by various corporate interests or potentially subpoenaed in court, the tension between applied and implicated anthropology ultimately raises the question of scientific responsibility. Many European anthropologists have contributed to those debates in and out of Australia, through long fieldwork involvement with different Aboriginal peoples. This symposium, which is the first event of its kind in France, brought together thirty scholars from Australia, Europe and northern America, to critically explore the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of Aboriginal anthropology today. The tensions linking Aboriginal cultural activism to anthropological reflexivity, past scientific knowledge to current research, Australian academic traditions to European scholarship, as well as the implications of research politics in the production of anthropological knowledge, were addressed through five thematic panels which reflect the diversity of current anthropological work in Aboriginal Australia.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Scientific committee: Laurent Berger, Barbara Glowczewski, Laurent Dousset, Marika Moisseeff, Jessica De Largy Healy
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Tuesday, January 22nd 2013
Research politics and the production of anthropological knowledge
Session introduction Laurent Dousset
The present and the ethnographic present: change in the production of anthropological knowledge about Aboriginal Australia Nicolas Peterson
“Sitting around the fire ashes”. An epistemology of personal acquaintance Franca Tamisari
Paintings, Publics, and Protocols: the early paintings from Papunya Fred Myers
From academic heritage to Aboriginal priorities : anthropological responsibilities Barbara Glowczewski
Wednesday, January 23rd 2013
The State and recognition of Aboriginal rights, land, and history
Places, performative kinship and networking in the Western Desert. A contemporary perspective Sylvie Poirier
Recognising the significance of the ‘mainland’ presence on Palm Island, past and present Lise Garond
Intrumentalizations of history and the Single Noongar claim Virginie Bernard
We are not a Christian mob, we want that UAM land back Bernard Moizo
Introduction to the discussion Barbara Glowczewski
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Sustainable environments and new economies in Aboriginal Australia
Introduction Laurent Berger
The language of ‘rights’ in the analysis of Aboriginal property relations Ian Keen
Australian Indigenous ‘artists’ critical agency and the values of the art market Géraldine Le Roux
Conservation as development in Northern Australia: from policies to ethnography Élodie Fache
Speaking for the land. Looking at Aboriginal tourism today through the Bardi-Jawi example (Kimberleys, Western Australia) Céline Travesi
Foundation and continuity: Kimberley Aboriginal geopolitics Martin Préaud
Thursday, January 24th 2013
Kinship, gender, and social relatedness
Introduction Michael Houseman
A quality of being: embodied kinship among the Tiwi of Northern Australia Andrée Grau
From structure to substance and back: materialities in Australian Aboriginal kinship Laurent Dousset
The Body in Linguistic Representations of Emotions in Dalabon (Northern Australia) Maïa Ponsonnet
Payback and Forward: Relatives as a Source of Weakness or Strength Marika Moisseeff
Ritual, art, and performance in Aboriginal Australia
Introduction Marika Moisseeff
Fora of Identity: From Public Ceremonies through Acrylic Painting to Evangelical Preaching Françoise Dussart
Remediating sacred imagery on screens: Yolngu experiments with new media technology Jessica De Largy Healy
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The East Kimberley painting movement: performing colonial history Arnaud Morvan
‘Under Western Eyes’: a short analysis of the reception of Aboriginal art in France through the press Philippe Peltier
A history of art from the Tiwi Islands: the source community in an evolving museumscape Eric Venbrux
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Tuesday, January 22nd 2013
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Tuesday, January 22nd 2013
Laurent Dousset (dir.) Research politics and the production of anthropological knowledge
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Session introduction
Laurent Dousset
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1 Well good afternoon and thank you very much. I am very honored to be chairing this first session, in particular with the prestigious floor and speakers that will present and discuss one of the most important issues I think, at the moment, in Australian anthropology. Well, my role is limited to that of BBC’s Doctor Who, as the time lord kind of thing. But I will nevertheless say one or two words. Just two sentences, about a minute, not more, about what I think is the most important issue in this session and Sylvie Poirier will have the very difficult task to discuss the various papers at the end of the session. A few words because as most of you would know, or would have followed, there have been heavy discussions on the AAS Net, the Australian Anthropological Society discussion list in the last few months and years about the issues we are tackling this afternoon. Some of these discussions haven’t always followed the academic politeness one would expect from some of our colleagues, but they nonetheless tackle very important questions, very important issues which are relevant for and in the framework of the involvement of anthropology in public policies and public opinions. Of course, anthropology has always been involved in public policy directly or indirectly, but I think these questions have crystalised further and to a culminating point in the last couple of years. Also, I think with the abandonment of meta-discourses and meta-theories, I think this move to a culturalist and more local approach of ethnographic issues has further culminated into the anthropologists’ responsibilities in his own field. The question is maybe not that much whether we should or should not get involved in applied anthropology, but the question is probably, what is it to do “implied anthropology” with opposition to “applied anthropology”, and I think implications and indigenisations of our scientific questions have become an important issue. How much can we or should we take into account when we define so-called scientific questions and problems? How much is it a salvation to take into account this embodied interconnection and interrelation we have with our hosts?
2 So, after what is in my opinion of this general framework, I would immediately invite the first speaker, Nick Peterson from the Australian National University who will obviously tackle one of the important questions that is behind what I just said, which is that of the ethnographic present.
AUTHOR
LAURENT DOUSSET Chair - (EHESS)
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The present and the ethnographic present: change in the production of anthropological knowledge about Aboriginal Australia
Nicolas Peterson
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I would like to thank Chris Gregory for a stimulating exchange on the topic of this paper.
1 Well first, I’d just like to thank the organizing committee and the museum invitation. It’s a wonderful chance to be here, I haven’t been here before. And also Phillippe Peltier and Anne-Christine Taylor and Jessica De Largy Healy for taking us around the museum yesterday, it was such a privilege and it was a wonderful experience, completely devoid of anybody else and with full access to the collections.
2 My paper “The present and the ethnographic present: reflections on the production of anthropological knowledge about Aboriginal societies and cultures”. The period between the 23rd of September 2000 and the 25th of October 2001 is as good as any to take for the public transition in the production of anthropological knowledge in Australia. On the first of these dates, Peter Sutton, a linguistically oriented anthropologist working mainly in Cape York, gave the inaugural Berndt Foundation memorial lecture. And on the second date, Noel Pearson, a leading public intellectual from Cape York gave the inaugural Charles Perkins Memorial Oration. Broadly speaking they were saying the same things: there was a policy failure in remote Aboriginal Australia where 30 years of solicitous welfare State policies had led to wide spread but not universal demoralization and unacceptable levels of social problems. These two speeches enabled those both inside and outside Aboriginal affairs to speak out aloud about what had previously been only whispered, and be heard. Ultimately this led, on
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the 23rd of June 2007, to the Northern Territory Emergency Response known as the Intervention, when drastic measures aimed at a radical change of direction in Aboriginal policy were introduced, directed at similar social problems to those that had been found in Cape York.1
3 This transition has given a dramatic emphasis to changes in the production of anthropological knowledge, marked by the change from an emphasis on the ethnographic present to the present. Broadly coincident with these changes are other changes that are going on in the social sciences in the Anglophone world. Two of the more significant are the marked feminization of anthropology, at both graduate and undergraduate levels and the huge growth in development studies courses and graduate research projects at much the same time.
4 This table, compiled from the Australian Institute of Torres Strait Islander studies Library catalogue, which holds most, but not all PhD’s in Aboriginal anthropology, clearly shows the change at graduate level in terms of the production of knowledge by female anthropologists. In respect of the emphasis on development, lecture courses, essay topics, doctoral research projects, conference sessions and book publications are now dominated both directly and indirectly with issues of change in one way or another. The impact on the kind of anthropological knowledge produced is much more strongly marked at a national level, and is less visible as yet in the international literature. Another feature of this transitional period that I will not touch on here, but which relates to the focus on the present is the huge growth in research and publication on Aboriginal issues from people across the whole spectrum of disciplines outside of anthropology that until recently had largely ignored this field.
5 In an attempt to see if I could in any way substantiate these observations and to see what else I might learn, I decided to turn to Google Scholar citations. I chose Google scholar mainly because it is very easy to use as compared to Scopus and The Web of Knowledge, even though there are well known criticisms of it and the other two as well. There is not time to go into all the criticisms of each of these databases except to note their Anglophone focus and that not all of the criticisms apply to the very simple way in which I have used it to generate the tables I will show you. I simply typed in the name of 87 Australianist anthropologists active today, and the principle ones from the past, and took the top two cited works for each, for single authored works (i.e. no edited volumes, one or two of which come out quite well, or theses), and treating Spencer and Gillen, and Ronald and Catherine Berndt as single authors. Only those people with more than 50 citations for one of their publications in mid-December 2012 have been included, making 65 people (only one entry for Godelier) in the database. I will not qualify all of my Statements with, ‘according to this database’ but that of course has to be borne in mind.
6 Table 1 lists the items published since 2000 that appear in my research of the full 87 names and reflects both the importance of publishing by female anthropologists, 10 of 18 authors, and the emphasis on the issues of the present. Only 5 of 17 authors have a classical focus: Poirier on dreams, Dousset on kinship, Dussart on ritual and Morphy on art-land, and Layton on land respectively, with one author writing a historical article.This emphasizes that recent Francophone anthropologists who have worked in Australia have a classical focus, which if one adds Barbara Glowczewski’s work with Warlpiri, and Michael Houseman’s work on marriage networks both is even more marked. Bernard Moizo’s ethnography of Junjuwa bridges the classical and the
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contemporary, while only Marika Moisseeff’sfascinating survey of an Aboriginal village fits firmly into the contemporary grouping.
Table 1: Citations of new works between 2000-2009 reflecting some of the changes referred to
NAME M YEAR ARTICLE PUB B CITE F C J
Musharbash, Y. F 2009 Yuendumu everyday A B 26
Austin-Broos, F 2009 Arrernte present, Arrernte past US B 38 D.
Musharbash, Y. F 2007 Boredom US J 24
Cowlishaw, G. F 2004 Blackfellas, whitefellas and the hidden injuries of A B 105 race
Kowal, E. F 2008 The politics of the gap US J 32
Lea, T F 2008 Bureaucrats and bleeding hearts A B 48
Kowal, E. F 2005 Ambivalent helpers N J 38
Poirier, S. F 2005 A world of relationships C B 38
Dousset, L. M 2005 Assimilating identities A B 10
Lea, T. F 2005 The work of forgetting N J 6
Morphy, H. M 2004 Landscape and the reproduction of the ancestral past C 143
Austin-Broos, F 2003 Places, practices ,and things US J 58 D.
Povinelli, E. F 2002 The cunning of recognition US B 485
Myers, F. M 2002 Painting culture US B 170
McKnight, D. M 2002 From hunting to drinking UK B 64
Strang, V. F 2001 Negotiating the river UK J 14
Sutton, P. M 2001 The politics of suffering A B 145
Altman, J. M 2001 Sustainable development options on Aboriginal land A J 124
Layton, R. M 2001 Uluru: an Aboriginal history A B 80
Layton, R. M 2001 Relating to country UK C 45
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Wolfe, P. M 2001 Land. Labor and difference US J 108
Dussart, F. F 2000 The politics of ritual US B 68
Macdonald, G. F 2000 Economies of personhood J C 45
7 It is interesting to re-rank these publications by number of citations.This emphasizes a point that will be come clearer: books are more likely to be cited than journals, and journals than book chapters. This itself is interesting because on the basis of work done for the quality assessment of university disciplines, in Australia, the ERA (Excellence in Research Australia) for the period 2007-2011 by the ANU, where there are c40 anthropologists, journal articles in all years were the favoured place of publication making up in 2011, 60% of the total, book chapters c.28% and books c.5%. While there is a clear correlation between citation rates and how long a publication has been available, time alone does not account for the citation rates. It seems evident that publication in the US is also helpful. I think it would go unchallenged that as far as the nation as a whole was concerned the most high profile publication nationally about Aboriginal issues by an anthropologist would have been Sutton’s book, ‘The politics of suffering’ (2009).
Table 2: New works published between 2000 and 2009 ranked in descending order by citation.
NAME M YEAR ARTICLE PUB B CITE F C J
Povinelli, E. F 2002 The cunning of recognition US B 485
Myers, F. M 2002 Painting culture US B 170
Sutton, P. M 2001 The politics of suffering A B 145
Morphy, H. M 2004 Landscape and the reproduction of the ancestral past C 143
Altman, J. M 2001 Sustainable development options on Aboriginal land A J 124
Wolfe, P. M 2001 Land. Labor and difference US J 108
Cowlishaw, G. F 2004 Blackfellas, whitefellas and the hidden injuries of A B 105 race
Layton, R. M 2001 Uluru: an Aboriginal history A B 80
Dussart, F. F 2000 The politics of ritual US B 68
McKnight, D. M 2002 From hunting to drinking UK B 64
Austin-Broos, F 2003 Places, practices ,and things US J 58 D.
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Lea, T F 2008 Bureaucrats and bleeding hearts A B 48
Layton, R. M 2001 Relating to country UK C 45
Macdonald, G. F 2000 Economies of personhood J C 45
Austin-Broos, F 2009 Arrernte present, Arrernte past US B 38 D.
Kowal, E. F 2005 Ambivalent helpers N J 38
Poirier, S. F 2005 A world of relationships C B 38
Kowal, E. F 2008 The politics of the gap US J 32
Musharbash, Y. F 2009 Yuendumu everyday A B 26
Musharbash, Y. F 2007 Boredom US J 24
Strang, V. F 2001 Negotiating the river UK J 14
Dousset, L. M 2005 Assimilating identities A B 10
Lea, T. F 2005 The work of forgetting N J 6
8 Production of anthropological knowledge about the present might well be welcomed but it has had at least two unintended negative consequences, which is of itself of interest. Faced with public concerns around health, youth, law enforcement, employment, education and housing, the temperature of anthropological debate as reflected in some conference sessions, journal articles, book chapters, and aasnet, (the bulletin board of the Australian Anthropological Society, which is the national professional association) has risen hugely. The reasons for this are complex but one is certainly because much of this work would fall under the rubric of applied anthropology or at least with implied policy implications. In this context cultural relativism may suffer, and righteousness emerges, leading to accusation against those involved in applied work of being complicit in the subjugation of Aboriginal people, because of anthropology’s allegedly foundational role as a critic of the State (see Trigger 2012 et al). Thus some seek to create a sharp divide between ‘pure’ and applied anthropology, vilifying the latter. The second negative consequence is that far too much anthropological writing, often unintentionally, mistakes advocacy for analysis: indeed, sadly, this is now almost a trade mark of writing about Indigenous related issues adding to the confusion in public debate, among other things.
9 So these changes leave the ethnographic present very much in the past. Nevertheless it is the knowledge produced in the hey day of the ethnographic present that still captures the imagination of the international world of scholarship, to the extent that it has an interest in Aboriginal Australia, and it would be wrong to suggest that there is no interest at all in classical topics such as kinship, land tenure, material culture or some limited kinds of ceremonial activity among active Anglophone researchers today, although the firm impression is that these subjects are dominated by older male
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anthropologists. That may not be surprising since male graduate students were the more numerous in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when it was still not only easier to work on such topics but the expected focus of research.
10 Up to the beginning of the First World War, anthropological knowledge about Aboriginal societies and cultures played a crucial role in the production of anthropological theory. They were seen to be the sociological, ecological and evolutionary prototype of the hunting and gathering existence, a paradigm of the relations with the natural environment and to represent humans in the chrysalis phase. In the first 14 years of the twentieth century twelve major theoretical books drawing either entirely or extensively on Australian ethnography, and written by people who had not done research in Australia, appeared addressing what were understood to be universal issues relating to the history of human kind (Crawley 1902; Lang and Atkinson 1903; Van Gennep 1905; Lang 1905; Thomas 1906; Hartland 1909; Marett 1909; Frazer 1910; Wheeler 1910; Durkheim 1912; Malinowski 1913; Freud 1913). The ethnographic base was quite slim relying principally on seven or eight authors (Spencer and Gillen, Roth, Mathews, Howitt, Bates, Radcliffe-Brown, Parker). With the demise of the social evolutionary paradigm, interest and research in Australia declined dramatically. It was not until the establishment of the chair of anthropology at the University of Sydney in 1925 that a new round of research began. However, the new spate of publication by A. P Elkin, Lauriston Sharp, CW Hart, Ralph Piddington, WEH Stanner and Geza Roheim, much of it initially in the pages of the journal Oceania, and then later as monographs by Lloyd Warner, Phyllis Kaberry, and Radcliffe Brown, did not attract much more than local interest. Perhaps it was, as somebody has suggested, that Aboriginal people had too much social structure, making it a field for regional specialists with only the occasional international scholar venturing into this area of publication to tackle issues such as the Murngin problem.
11 In the post WW2 a new group of scholars greatly expanded the ethnographic record, among them were the outstanding contribution of Ronald and Catherine Berndt, T.G H. Strehlow, Mervyn Meggitt, Les Hiatt, Fred Rose, Norman Tindale, and Nancy Munn. There was also the occasional striking engagement with Australian ethnography not based on field research that projected it back into the international world of scholarship, most notably Claude Levi-Strauss’s work on kinship and totemism.
12 At the ‘Man the hunter’ conference in 1966, that revived the interest in hunter- gatherer studies, Australian ethnography was further distanced from the international world of scholarship by G.P Murdoch’s comment that: I suggest that we recognize the near uniqueness of Australian social organization and pay more attention than before to attempts to explain their sharp divergence from similar societies elsewhere in the world (1968:336).
13 He had in mind what he believed were the rigid residence rules, the common polygyny and the prevalence of unilineal descent.
14 In the 1970s two contributions caused a flurry of interest: Marshall Sahlins’s (1972) essay on the original affluent society based on the time studies of McCarthy and McArthur and Maurice Godelier’s (1975) essay on the kinship mode of production, drawing substantially on the work of Aram Yengoyan.
15 Aboriginal anthropology received a great stimulus from the formal establishment of the AIAS in 1964 and the huge boost to its funding, including for research grants in the early 1970s, which joined with the expansion of Australian universities at the same
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time lead to a huge increase in doctoral research. It also brought with it an influx of anthropologists who had trained in the United States moving Australian anthropology away from its roots in British social anthropology into the mid-Atlantic. The work with the most dramatic impact from this new orientation has been Fred Myers’s Pintupi country Pintupi self (1986) that was the first detailed and comprehensive cultural anthropological ethnography, although Bob Tonkinson had published a short case study in the Holt Rinehart and Winston series from a similar orientation in 1978. Myers’ volume has had an enormous impact on the research agenda of most subsequent work carried out in remote Australia.
16 Since the 1980s, anthropology in Australia as elsewhere in the Anglophone world has become increasingly diverse and eclectic and broadly speaking, trends in Australia reflect movements in the discipline internationally. Thus there is evidence that phenomenological approaches are more common now partly brought about by a greater number of students and staff with a European background, and increasingly there is an overlap between anthropological and cultural studies projects.
17 From 1979 to the present, the demand for Australian anthropologists to work on land and native title claims has been substantial and given anthropologists easy access to communities across Australia. While this has as yet had relative limited impact on publishing outside of technical writing about issues to do with this kind of work, the end of such applied work is in sight and it is possible that the support that anthropology has had from Aboriginal people may decline. But this work has generated a huge archive of material, much as yet legally restricted but which will eventually become available providing rich documentation on land related aspects of life since the 1980s.
Table 3: Top 30 most cited works
NAME YEAR ARTICLE
Myers, F. 1991 Pintupi country Pintupi self
Spencer & 1898 The native tribes of central Australia Gillen
Elkin, A. P 1970 The Australian Aborigines
Howitt, A. 1904 The native tribes of southeast Australia
Berndt R & C 1988 The world of the first Australians
Povinelli, E. 2002 The cunning of recognition
Meggitt, M. 1965 Desert people
Tindale, N. B. 1974 Aboriginal tribes of Australia
Bell, D. 2002 Daughters of the dreaming
Radcliffe-Brown 1930 The social organisation of Australian tribes 2
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Warner, L. 1969 A black civilisation
Sharp, L. 1952 Steel axes for stone-age Australians
Kaberry, P. 2003 Aboriginal woman: sacred and profane
Rose, D. 1996 Nourishing terrains
Hart, CWM 1966 The Tiwi of north Australia
Morphy, H. 1992 Ancestral connections
Strehlow, TGH 1968 Aranda traditions
Tonkinson, R. 1991 The Mardu Aborigines
Maddock, K. 1973 The Australian Aborigines
Altman, J. 1987 Hunter-gatherers today
Goodale, J. 1971 Tiwi wives
Spencer & 1904 The northern tribes of central Australia Gillen
Peterson, N. 1993 Demand sharing
Munn, N. 1973 Walbiri iconography
Elkin, A. P. 1978 Aboriginal men of high degree
Langton, M. 1993 We, I heard it on the radio
Strehlow, TGH. 1971 Songs of central Australia
Wolfe, P. 1998 Settler colonialism
Sansom, B. 1980 The camp at Wallaby Cross
Roth, WE 1897 Ethnological studies among the north-west-central Queensland Aborigines
18 Table 3 shows the top thirty works by citation. It confirms that books are still by far and away the most likely to be picked up as the most highly cited with only two journal articles in the top 30. Given the time span covered by this table it is not surprising that 22 of the 29 items (the joint R and C Berndt not counted) have been published by males, and that almost half of the items were published before 1970. What this table does not show is the impression I get from reading and conference sessions that it is probably archaeologists, and people interested in optimal foraging and the like, who are among the biggest consumers of the classic ethnographic literature even though ethno- archaeological analogy is out of fashion.
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19 Regionally nine of the works are book length ethnographies of desert cultures and the six ethnographies from Arnhem Land, in its widest sense, are again all books. Six can be classified as textbooks if, Elkin and Tindale’s nationwide surveys are included in that category. While the four early volumes are clearly inspired by a social evolutionary perspective, ameliorated to some degree by the empirical orientation of the scholars involved, at least twelve are broadly speaking inspired by an ethnographic empiricism with a functionalist flavor and three by a cultural anthropological approach.
Conclusion
20 While there are many reservations that could be expressed about these tables and the methodology, intuitively they make reasonable sense in relation to anthropological interest in Aboriginal classical life. Table 3 focuses on the enduring ethnographic corpus that people turn to when concerned with classical Australian culture. What is completely invisible is the huge range of highly influential papers that have taken collective understanding at any point in time a step further. And because only two items have been taken for each person the impact of some few people whose fourth, fifth and sixth ranked publications would appear in this list if it were compiled simply on citations. Another category of contribution, which probably makes up the majority of writing on Aboriginal societies and cultures, are books, articles and book chapters on focused or limited topics, many of which are enormously important and influential in their field but mainly of interest to regional specialists. These tables raise interesting questions about our disciplinary citation practices, questions that are not investigated here but which deserve a much more sophisticated methodology than the one I have used for this paper.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Crawley, E. 1902. The mystic rose: a study of primitive marriage. London: Macmillian.
Durkheim, E. 1912 see 1915. The elementary forms of the religious life. London: Allen and Unwin.
Frazer, J. 1910. Totemism and exogamy: a treatise on certain early forms of superstition and society. London: Macmillian.
Freud, S. 1913 see 1946. Totem and taboo. New York: Random House.
Godlier, M. 1975. Modes of production, kinship and demographic structures. In Marxist analyses and social anthropology (ed) M. Bloch. London: Malaby Press. Pp. 3-27.
Hartland, E. S. 1909. Primitive paternity: the myth of supernatural birth in relation to the history of the family. London: Nutt.
Jacso, P. 2009. Google Scholar’s ghost authors. Library Journal 11/01/2009. Accessed at http:// www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6703850.html 12th December 2012.
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Myers, F. 1986. Pintupi country Pintupi self. Washington: Smithsonian Press.
Lang, A. 1905. The secret of the totem. London: Longmans, Green and co.
Lang, A. and Atkinson, J.J. 1903. Social origins and primal law. London.
Malinowski, B. 1913 the family among the Australian Aborigines. London: University of London Press.
Marett, R. R. 1909. The threshold of religion. London.
Murdoch, G. P. 1968. Comment under ‘Are the hunter-gatherers a cultural type?’. In Man the hunter (eds) R. B. Lee and I. DeVore. Chicago: Aldine. Pp. 335-339.
Sahlins, M. 1972. Stone-age economics. Chicago: Aldine.
Tonkinson, R. 1978. The Mardudjara Aborigines: living the dream in Australia’s desert. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Sutton, P. 2009. The politics of suffering. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Thomas, N. W. 1906. Kinship organisations and group marriage in Australia.. Cambridge: CUP.
Trigger, D. Comment on. 2012. Anthropological Forum 22(1).
Van Gennep, A. 1905. Mythes et legends d’Australie: etudes d’ethnographie et de sociologie. Paris: Guilmoto.
Wheeler, G. C. 1910. The tribe, and intertribal relations in Australia. London: Murray.
NOTES
1. The Territory was the focus of the Intervention for several reasons. While the Territory Aboriginal population of 56,779 is only 10.4% of the national Aboriginal population it forms 26.8% of that jurisdictions population whereas the highest elsewhere is only 4%, and for this reason looms large in national discourse about remote Aboriginal people. Equally important, however, is the legal status of the Northern Territory which is not yet a State and an area where the Federal Government has greater powers than in the States.
AUTHOR
NICOLAS PETERSON Australian National University
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“Sitting around the fire ashes”. An epistemology of personal acquaintance
Franca Tamisari
I would like to dedicate this paper to my sister, Rraying who adopted me and was the first to welcome me to sit around the fire ashes of her camp.
Something forever exceeds, escapes from Statement, withdraws from definition, must be glimpsed & felt, not told. … there is something in life …entirely unparalleled by anything in verbal thought. William James 1985:480
1 What is a person and what does it mean to know a person? (De Monticelli 1998:28). What is the personal reality of an encounter? What is the nature and possibility of encountering a person in the field and how encounters affect the knowledge we produce? (cf. Tamisari 2006). As other enthusiastic but completely naive and rather arrogant anthropologists at the beginning of their research, I took for granted the face- to-face, direct encounters with people in the field.
2 As the English terms meeting and encountering seem to distinguish, we usually meet or deal withlots of people in the field however, we encounter, or engage with a few with whom we embark, albeit not always willingly, in a relationship with all its risks, promises and responsibilities. I am interested in exploring those aspects of an encounter with another person that are readily, immediately and often intensively experienced yet escape analysis. These relationships that the ethnographer establishes and deepens in the field are recognised as fundamental in most anthropological projects, however, with some notable past and more recent exceptions in Australia they continue to remain marginal, especially in relation to epistemological questions (see
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for instance, Casagrande 1960 entitled “In the Company of Men”; recording and editing of oral histories, i.e. Shaw 1986; Mathews 1988; Beckett 2000, Camfoo et al.2000).
3 In his monograph “A Black Civilization”, Lloyd Warner (1969:466ff), entitles the volume’s last part “Personal History” and dedicates chapter XV to his friend “Mahkarolla” (Makarrwala), with whom he established and “strong and enduring friendship” (ibid.:1969:467). “Throughout the book I have striven for objective reporting and detached scientific analysis; although Mahkarolla’s autobiographical sections in this chapter do conform with these criteria and the evidence was collected accordingly, I hope the last section about him, will express what I felt him to be a splendid human being, as well as express my love, respect, and admiration for him. Perhaps in any true account of a lasting friendship this is the ultimate objectivity” (my emphasis).
4 By personal reality of encounters I intend considering the singular and unpredictable character, personality, or essential individuality of the Other, as well of the self, that is crucial in knowing another person. Encounters are thus characterised by a process of personal acquaintance that demands to be lived-in through ever deepening layers of affect. It is through “the non conceptual aspects involved in any kind of communication” (Shultz 1951:79) that are experienced, continuously negotiated, and understood before being explained that the anthropologist is invited to enter the sphere of values, practices and concepts that are at the basis of the knowledge we produce in our writings. To use Shultz’ expression (Ibid.:79), the personal reality of an encounter can also be called “a mutual tuning-in relationship by which the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’ are experienced by both participants as a ‘We’ in vivid presence”. In other words, I propose a phenomenology of the encounter in order to explore the ways in which personal knowledge interweaves ontological and epistemological questions (De Monticelli 1998:131).
5 If, as Fabian argues (1990: 3ff), cultural knowledge is always expressed, mediated, and observed, through action in a performance, and thus the anthropologist’s task is not limited to a dialogical approach – information exchanged at the level of communication – I would like to add that ethnographic work goes also beyond embodied practices. No doubt, the embodiment paradigm (Csordas 1990; Comaroff & Comaroff 1992; Jackson 1983; Lock 1993; Scheper-Hughes e Lock 1987; Scheper-Hughes 2000) has certainly been one of the most productive critiques of the politics of representation – for instance in the attempts of not separating objectivity from subjectivity and experience (Jackson 1989, 1995; Herzfeld 1997), cognition from perception (Stoller 1986, Howes 1991) and cultural models from affect (Wikan 1992). However, this approach has, in the main, privileged the body as an interpretative category or analytical model rather than considering it as a part of the person in her totality, the ways in which, for instance, a person gives herself to be known through a process of personal acquaintance that is inevitably grounded in a mutual openness towards the Other. It is a “being alongside with”, an “intersubjective mutuality of being” (Stasch 2009:132), an intimacy which strengthens as well as makes one vulnerable (cf. von Sturmer 2001:104; de Monticelli 1998:181-182; Jackson 1998:10)1.
6 While subjectivity can be considered as the most visible and most obvious aspect of a person, each person is a subject in his or her own individual way. And thus, while one’s subjectivity is immediately given, the essential individuality of a person, her unpredictable and unique way of being, acting and becoming, ‘announces itself as hidden, secret, “internal”, “deep”’:
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“an individual, a person is not ‘all there’ wholly and right away virtually ‘given’. On the contrary, if I want to make her acquaintance as an individual I must engage in a new type of exploration, embarking on an adventure that I might in fact have no desire to undertake... However, it is only by embarking on this adventure of personal acquaintance that I will discover what there is to discover about the essential nature of the individual in question, that is her individuality...” (De Monticelli 1998:130, original emphasis).
7 As we do not encounter a culture as a system of values and ideas in the field, but persons in their “essential individuality”, similarly we neither encounter any body, nor do we chance upon a habitus, but we are exposed to the presence, personality and character of an individual: we encounter a “life that is the history of a person, her experiences her training, her choices, her adventures and misadventures” (De Monticelli 1998:121). The anthropologist’s body tunes-in through a process of personal acquaintance and its logic of feeling that by means of the body, yet beyond the body, allows her to enter and participate in the Other’s value sphere.
Sitting and standing around the fire ashes
8 During my first fieldwork period in Milingimbi in 1990, in Northeast Armhem Land, I encountered several people with whom I maintain a relationship despite my distance from the community and my move to Italy almost seven years ago. These relationships have not only been fashioned through my participation in ceremonial dancing, gambling, and travelling together, but also deepened by sitting around my adoptive relatives’ hearth, or rather “fire ashes” and “charcoal embers” (ganu’ or lirrwi’) as Yolngu people refer to the campfire2. Located in the immediate vicinity of most houses in the community, the campfire is the fulcrum around which a residential group’s everyday life revolves. It is near the hearth that the camp members sit every day for most of the day talking or being silent, arguing, resting, playing or sulking. This is the place where daily events are discussed, food is cooked and eaten, announcements are made, family meetings are held, and visitors are received. Mortuary ritual and circumcisions are also held near the campfire. It was around my adoptive family’s campfire that I was adopted and around this and other relatives’ campfires that, over time, I was invited to commence a long mutual process of personal acquaintance. It is around the campfire that the personal reality of encounters “incarnates itself in the lived actualisation of its feeling and in the decisions and actions that follow’ (De Monticelli 2003:168).
9 Before understanding the significance of being invited to sit around the “fire ashes” I felt ill at ease and embarrassed. Although I was always welcome there, the effort my presence demanded for entertaining me and my awkwardness in trying to understand what was happening around me was palpable. Often I would wonder what I was doing there apart from intruding and imposing myself into the lives of my hosts. Soon, however, I was also impatient and rather irritated, because, at the time I felt I was “wasting my time” just “sitting around”, “doing nothing”, rather than collecting data, mapping the town, learning the language, and participating in rituals as I was trained to do. Time went by very slowly sitting down next to my adoptive sister, Rrayin, drinking tea, listening, trying to communicate, playing with the children and re- orienting myself in the new play of affects made up of small gestures ranging from expressions of love and acceptance to plain indifference and overt hostility. The
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symbolic significance of the hearth, however, is not limited to the sharing of everyday experience through co-residence, cooperation and commensality, but extends to incorporate the deceased members of the residential group. Given that the hearth is not usually moved over time, and the members of an extended family have occupied the same camp over several generations, the hearth is also considered as connecting the present and the past, the dead and the living. When, in more or less formal speeches, one affirms that “one stands in” or “sits around the fire ashes” (respectively dhaara or nhinnanganu’gnur)”, the speaker wants to stress the strength of her relationships with all members of a residential group that have been established by the intimate and gradual process of personal acquaintance. The fire ashes stand for shared mundane time, the time necessary to become a relative who is the same as but different from any other, or as Yolngu people say: someone who is “together but alone” (rrambangi ga ga:na), or “close but far away” (galki ga barrkuwatj). The fire ashes represent all the occasions in which one announces oneself and is accepted for what one becomes with and for others.
10 As I was told, Yolngu Law must be felt in order to be respected and acted out correctly. One must “hold the Law” (rom ngayatham), that can be glossed as to touch, to have, to reach, and to endure the correct way of behaving. However, as the Italian and the French verbs underline, “tenere” and “tenir”, the Yolngu verb ngayatham must also be understood in terns of “having close to one’s heart” (the Yolngu would say close to one’s stomach, ngayangur), to worry about, to participate, to be close to others through a logic of feelings (maarr) founded on the singularity and depth of each encounter (cf Tamisari 2000). A Yolngu person is socialised through a gradual acquisition of her patrilineal essence expressed in terms of sweat and bones. At birth an individual is automatically placed in the kinship network, but remains a stranger (mulkur) until the patrilineal essence shared with one’s “bone country” or country of origin (ngarraka, lit. bones) and patrilineal relatives is absorbed by one’s body in daily life and transformed by and with others relatives3. With a very moving gesture, I once witnessed a maternal grandmother put her sweat onto the coffin of her deceased newborn grandson thus assuring that he could be recognised by his ‘bone country’ (ngaraka, lit. bones) he was returning to after his death. Socialisation, then, is not only a matter of group membership or genealogical links but is accomplished through a process of personal acquaintance in which one’s everyday experiences, choices and actions involve a life- long affective engagement with kin and country.
11 I can now better understand what my son Lapulung once told me by saying: “you have become a real relative by sitting around the fire ashes for a long time” (nhe yuwalk gurrutumirr dhuwal, bili nhe wiyiin ganu’ngur nhinan, lit. you are really having kinship/ relatedness as you spent a long time near the fire ashes). Everything I know and keep on learning about Yolnu Law, comes from the relationships I deepened sitting around this and other campfires every time I am in Milingimbi. Affect as a modality of knowing others, human and non-human beings, is also central in the consubstantial connection between person and place, and in the urges that motivate ancestral cosmogonic actions as they are re-actualised in paintings, songs and dances. Songs cycles, for instance, do not simply connect places and people by retracing ancestral journeys, but describe beings who know and interact in their world through a wide range of sense perceptions, moral qualities and feelings such as homesickness, compassion, aggression, care, physical exhaustion or strength, love, avidity, happiness, the malice of
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seduction, generosity, determination, resourcefulness, deceit, the lust of sexual desire and many others. SLIDE: summary of song transcription
12 As I illustrate in relation to a song transcription discussed in a recent paper (Tamisari submitted 2012):
13 In these songs, for instance, the joy of Diamond Fish who is light-heartedly darting in and out of the waves is counterposed to Long Tom’s aggressive nature. The violence and roar of the waves in the storm is placed against the firmness, fearlessness and obstinacy of Stone who resists them. The disorientation and listlessness of Driftwood adrift in the sea is opposed to the energy and determination of Seagull’s flight, who challenges the storm in order to take some grass to his/her nest. The stillness of the calm sea water is shattered by the Oyster Catcher’s loud call who, deeply moved, cries for Driftwood’s endless and aimless wandering. The mourning sadness of Turtle and the homesickness of Porpoise are played out against the thinking clouds-turned-into-words on their way to the territory of each subgroup where they belong. Reproducing similar contrasts, other songs of both moieties, describe, for instance, the rage, the courage but also the impotence and pain of the Shark Ancestor who, fatally wounded to death and drained of blood, wants revenge; cunning Mouse who tells lies and brings Barramundi and Dog to fight each other in a deadly struggle. Many songs also elaborate the malice of seduction, the eagerness and lust of sexual desire (Berndt 1952). In addition, the song texts describe in full detail how the environment is perceived through all the senses: the rain that makes one cold, the sound of the rain on Turtle’s carapace, the sea water lapping Purpoise’s shiny black skin, the first monsoon rain that obscures the sky and changes the colour of the sea, the shimmering of Diamond Fish through the transparent water, the changing colours of Stone being covered by molluscs, Seagull’s nourishing beak, the sound of the waves, and their bright white foam. Other recurrent senses through which the world is perceived in other songs include: the whistling of the wind through the casuarina trees, the taste of turtle blood, the enfolding reddish light of the sunset, the lightness of a butterfly’s wings, the flash of lightning, the roaring of thunder, but also the smell of decomposition, and the appearance of festering boils. Songs describe a world that is known through sensory experience and feelings, a way of knowing that changes the observer and the observed, the subject and the object, the sentient and the sensible, the dancers and the spectator.As in everyday life, the Law set down by ancestral beings that is reproduced in ritual implies an epistemology that does not separate cognition and affect, language and body, content and performance, representation and expression (cf.Tamisari 1998; 2005:177; 2006). SLIDE (Gattjirrk Festival logo 2003)
14 The image of the fire ashes was also used for the logo of the 2003 Gattjirrk Festival organised in Milingimbi by Keith Lapulung, leader of the Djambarrpuyngu group and songwriter of the local music group called Wirrinyga Band. In one of our conversations on that year edition, entitled after one of his albums “Dreamtime Wisdom, Modern- time Vision”, Lapulung explained to me that the footprints in the logo represent the different people who participate in the Festival: the young and the old, the different clan groups from the region, the Yolngu and the balanda; while the “charcoal embers” is the Festival itself, the point of arrival, the moment of encounter, “the connection between present circumstances and the living wisdom from the past”, the space and
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time for “sharing culture” accepting and confronting the Other’s diversity, including the balanda, white, or non indigenous people. In Lapulung’s words:
15 “Dreamtime Wisdom, Modern-Time Vision” is like a story. It is like that ashes (ganu’) that burn at an old site where you and your old people had once let a campfire burn ... Well, our knowledge is encountered in the form of the ashes [ganu’] that had been burnt and buried in a fireplace. When you pick up ... that charcoal (lirrwi’) had been left there from the old people, there is a bit of knowledge that is hidden in those charcoals and buried, and this is like opening a filing cabinet through our knowledge. It’s Yolngu knowledge that is buried in the ashes so the interpretation of “Dreamtime Wisdom, Modern-Time Vision” [is that] it’s like a scope ... looking into ... the big picture that brings our reality—the formation of ... reality in our lives suiting today’s modern society and the knowledge that had been told in [elders’] stories. We still have to hold onto that ... because [of its] very important [and] vital role in Yolngu knowledge (Keith Lapulung, Milingimbi 2 July 2003 in Djambarrpuyngu and English).
16 However, the ‘fire ashes’ is not only a symbol of relatedness characterising the intimacy of the domestic sphere (cf. Carsten 2000) nor a metaphor for cultural exchange. In the same way that an emphasis on the social structures takes the individual for granted (Cohen 1994:6), it would be equally reductive to give priority to ‘culture intended as a system of values’, shared symbols and meanings. It is not only the socialisation of a person into the values shared by a group that shapes her personality. It is rather the individual sensitivity — the manner in which one opens oneself to another person — that is called on to verify, define and redefine the fundamental socio-cultural values of the group one inhabits. We encounter and continually discover another person moving through layers of feeling at a different level of intensity and depth, and it is through this process of mutual personal acquaintance that, each time, a personality is formed and acquires a temporary profile, face and gait to the extent that one con/sents or dis/ sents with another any aspects of the social and moral value order of the group (De Monticelli 2003:166 ff.). The feeling of embarrassment I experienced and shared with my adoptive sister Rraying and others signalled that my sensitivity was ready to open up to a new sphere and order of values. We can speak of an ‘awakening’ of the self which opens a passage onto the depths of the other person through which one accepts or refuses to enter. And ‘[t]he awakening to the value sphere is always mediated by an existing essential identity, by a person, and linked to this [personal] knowledge…’ (De Monticelli 2003:168). The fire ashes are not only a generalised image of Yolngu cultural identity, subjectivity, sociality and relatedness. Each encounter around the fire ashes goes beyond a shared ethos, in general terms as ‘standing’ or ‘sitting’ around the fire ashes’, but points toward how each person ‘stands’ or ‘sits’ with another: consenting and dissenting tois always a con/senting and dis/senting withanother person in specific encounters through a gradual and never-ending process of personal acquaintance (De Monticelli 2003:168). Examples of these encounters, in everyday life and in ritual contexts are endless and include all forms of positive and negative affective engagements — generosity and resentment, respect and insolence, modesty and boastfulness, love and hatred and the many shadows of grey in between accompanying all events and interactions: from the simplest gestures to the more complex occasions.
17 It is this priority of ‘sensing in’ (Stein 1989:58) or ‘tuning in’ (Shcultz 1951:79) with others, taking on its endless positive and negative possibilities actualised in each
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encounter, that demonstrates that individuality is ontologically deeper than the generalised categories of subjectivity and agency4.
18 Beyond the ‘frivolous show of fashionable cultural models proposed on the catwalk of “science” by a frigid…anthropologist’ (De Martino 1980:103, my translation), or the fragmentation of theoretical paradigms, beyond the sustained self-critique on the reproduction of power relationships in the politics of representation, there is a personal reality which is irreducible to any other category or notion and can only be approached not in the terms ofbut withanother person, in encounters where one is open to be literally sub/jected, in the sense of being touched and changed, committed to and accountable for the people we become embroiled with.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Camfoo T., Camfoo N. and Cowlishaw G. 2000, Love Against the Law: The Autobiographies of Tex and Nelly Camfoo, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.
Carsten J. 2000, ‘Introduction. Cultures of relatedness’, in Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Casagrande B. J. 1960, In the Company of Man: Twenty Portraits of Anthropological Informants, Harper Torchbooks, New York.
Cohen P.A. 1994, Self Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity, Routledge, London and New York.
Comaroff, J. e J. Comaroff, 1992, Bodily Reform and Historical Practice, in “Ethnography and the Historical Imagination”, Boulder, Westview Press, pp. 69-91.
De Martino E. 1980, ‘Promesse e minacce dell’antropologia (Promises and menaces of anthropology)’, in Furore simbolo valore, ed Ernesto De Martino, Feltrinelli, Milano.
De Monticelli R. 1998, La Conoscenza personale. Introduzione alla fenomenologia, Guerrini Studio, Milano.
De Monticelli R. 2003, L’ordine del cuore. Etica e teoria del sentire (The Order of the Heart. Ethics and Theory of Feeling), Garzanti, Milano.
Dufrenne M., 1973, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, (trad.) E.L. Casey, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Fabian J. 1990, Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations Through Proverbial Wisdom and Theatre in Shaba, Zaire, The University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin.
Herzfeld M. 1997, Portrait of A Greek Imagination: An Ethnographic Biography of Andreas Nenedakis, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
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Howes D., 1991, The variety of sensory experience. A sourcebook in the anthropology of the senses. Toronto, University of Toronto Press.
Jackson M. 1989, ‘Introduction’, in Paths Towards a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, pp. 1-18.
Jackson M. 1995, At Home in the World, Harper Perennial, Sydney.
Jackson M. 1997, Mimima Etnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Ethnographic Project,The University of Chicago Press,
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Lock, M., 1993, “Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and Knowledge”, in Annual Review of Anthropology 22:133-155.
Marcus G.E. and Fischer M.M.J. 1987, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, Chicago University Press, Chicago.
Mathews J. 1988, The Two Worlds of Jimmie Barker: The Life of an Australian Aboriginal 1900-1972, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.
Mauss M. 1979 [1950], ‘A category of the human mind: the notion of the person, the notion of the “self”’, in Sociology and Psychology Essays, trans. B. Brewster, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Myers F. 1986, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Myers, F. 1979 Emotions and the Self: A Theory of Personhood and Political Order among the Pintupi Aborigines, Ethos 7,4:343-370.
Rapport N. 2001,‘Random mind: towards and appreciation of openness in individual, society, and anthropology’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 12(2):190-208.
Rapport N. 2005, ‘Nietzsche’s pendulum: oscillations of humankind’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 16(2):212-28.
Schutz, A. 1951 Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship, in Social Research 18,1:76-97
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Tamisari, F. submitted 2012 Feeling, Motion and Attention in the Display of Emotions in Yolngu Law, Song and Dance Performance, Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement (JASHM).
Tamisari, F., 2006, “Personal Acquaintance: Essential Individuality and the Possibilities of Encounters ”, in Moving anthropology critical indigenous studies, T. Lea, E. Kowal and G. Cowlishaw eds. Darwin, Darwin University Press, pp.18-36.
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Tamisari, F. 2005 Writing Close to Dance. Reflexions on an Experiment. In Aesthetics and Experience in Music Performance, E. Mackinlay, D. Collins and S. Owens, eds, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, pp 174–203.
Tamisari F. 2000, The meaning of the steps is in between: dancing and the curse of compliments, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 11(3):36-48.
Tamisari F. 1998, ‘Body, vision and movement: in the footprints of the ancestors’, Oceania, 68(4): 249-70. von Sturmer J., 2001, “hot diggidy dog or stomaching the truth or one way passage ”, in UTS Review, 7(1):96-105. von Sturmer J., 1999, “Aborigines in Australia ”, manoscritto delle lezioni tenutesi a Sydney, The University of Sydney.
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NOTES
1. In asking the question: “What kind of things are we, persons?”, De Monticelli (2000:XV) challenges the most popular answers: “the one that reduces us to invisible identities that are mysteriously embodied in – or emerging from – our organisms, and the one that reduces us to complex physiological systems, mere supports of cognitive and operating functions akin to computer programs” (original text: “quella che ci riduce a delle identità invisibili misteriosamente incorporate nei – o emergenti dai – nostri organismi e quella che ci riduce a sistemi fisici complessi, supporti di funzionicognitive e operative paragonabili a programmi informatici”. On the approaches and debates on the person and individuality starting with Mauss’ paper to the work by Cohen (1994), Amit and Rapport (2002), Rapport (2001 and 2005), see Tamisari 2006:23-27. 2. As I noted elsewhere, (Tamisari 2006:29) several anthropologists have noted and explained the basis and logic of relatedness in Australian Indigenous communities as stemming from co- residence, everyday cooperation and ritual association. Sansom (1980:12) describes how mobs constitute themselves in grounding their ‘union in histories of shared experience between people “who have ‘run together’ for years n years”’. Myers (1986:91) reports that ‘one countrymen… “used to travel together”, even though their homelands were separate’; and one’s walytja (‘one family’ and ‘all related’) are not all consanguines but ‘include those with whom one grows up, those with whom one is familiar, those who have fed and cared for one, and those with whom one camps frequently’ (Myers 1986:110; see also Myers 1979). 3. Here it would be necessary to explain how many kinship relationships are lived in and continuously negotiated in everyday life in the community. 4. Empathy does not, however, mean a form of affective communion with the other, one’s participation in the other’s feelings. Empathy is a modality of co-presence and co-presencing, an initial contact which, by changing the dimensions of perception, opens a way to get acquainted with the unexplored depths of another person (Dufrenne 1973:398-407; De Monticelli 1998:134ff).
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AUTHOR
FRANCA TAMISARI CA' Foscari University of Venice
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Paintings, Publics, and Protocols: the early paintings from Papunya
Fred Myers
1 I am taking the occasion of the musée du quai Branly’s very recent exhibition of early Papunya paintings to talk today about the complex epistemological and political issues instantiated in the history of Papunya painting, raised by the contact between distinctive regimes of knowledge and value. It is partly a personal history and partly a story that appropriately enough, cannot be extricated from the web of relationships that define the representation and contemporary production of Aboriginal culture.
2 Western Desert acrylic paintings are objects made to move between cultures, created by Indigenous artists with introduced materials on permanent western surfaces, such as canvas, in order to express themselves and their culture to a non-Indigenous audience. The Papunya artists wanted people to know and understand that the paintings were Tjukurrtjanu (‘from The Dreaming’) – that their contents were not ‘made up’ – and they wanted the paintings to be valued because of their relationship to this sacred tradition.1 The paintings, we now understand, were political assertions of cultural value and particularly of their relationship to land in the face of the assimilating forces of government policy in that era. While the paintings have had an extraordinary trajectory, it has not been a simple one – because the protocols of viewing and knowing that are essential to their producers differ radically from those of the people who come to view them. It is widely understood that the paintings of Papunya Tula artists are contemporary expressions of ritual, mythological, musical and geographical knowledge – knowledge of what is frequently called Tjukurrpa in Pintupi and ‘The Dreaming’ in English – that was part of a complex gender-segregated initiatory cosmological system. The translation of such a system that distributes knowledge differentially into one that imagines freedom of access is always unstable. In the Indigenous system as it has existed in Central Australia, rights to know and perform different portions of stories distinguish those with a right to see or learn about these designs (for example, initiated men and sometimes, more particularly, those from a particular local group) from those who are still learning, and all of them from females (who have their own exclusive ritual traditions) anduninitiated males. In this ‘revelatory’
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regime of value, control over the visual – over what can be seen and by whom – is central; the fundamental concern is to limit dispersal, to control the potential or manifestations of Tjukurrpa, objectifications of ancestral power identified with persons and groups. Aboriginal men of the Central and Western Deserts acquire knowledge of and rights to express these traditions through sequences of initiation and exchange. These rights were – and are – part of the significant identities that linked people throughout the region, as shareholders, if you will, in highly valued religious traditions.
3 It was (and is) this knowledge, and its design forms, that constituted the foundation of Western Desert acrylic painting and the imaginative inspiration for the painters. By 1971, Aboriginal people had been explaining their religious life to outsiders for decades, allowing photography and making crayon drawings of their country that look remarkably like the early paintings. Yet this generosity of exchange, or the enthusiasm of displaying one’s own culture’s value, has not been an easy fit with the protocols from which it emerged. And it has come to pass that many Aboriginal people came to regret their openness about their religious life, as representations of it came back in unanticipated ways to their communities – in books, films, photographs and paintings that had been meant to circulate ‘outside’ (at times with what appears to be consent if not successfully “informed”) and not to expose local secrets within the Indigenous community. A variety of ceremonial objects, designs and performances are considered ‘dear’, and are sometimes ‘dangerous’ to show to uninitiated persons. Yet representations of precisely such forms were often present in the initial few years of the Papunya Tula painting movement, as the painters in this remote settlement did not imagine that their work would remain within the immediate sensory world of their own communities. They expected, initially, that its circulation into the whitefella domain would be exempt from local contestation. The painters were enthusiastic about their stories, and excited by the opportunities for expression offered by the new medium and by its apparent positive reception by a non-Indigenous audience. It is not surprising that they crossed some lines of Indigenous protocol in the new intercultural activity. Unlike the expressions and performances of prescribed ritual practice, individual artists typically executed paintings on their own – an activity (unlike ritual performance) that did not require the attendance and agreement of the many possible shareholders of the stories expressed.
4 By August of 1972, rumblings of dissonance began to appear in the form of criticism of the public display of stories in some of the Papunya Tula paintings exhibited at the neighboring community of Yuendumu during its well-attended “Sports weekend.” As a result of the criticism of such exposure by men who shared in the ritual tradition, the Papunya artists began to drop the restricted initiatory stories of the major related Dreaming from their painting repertoire. Inappropriate disclosure of knowledge of these stories, their music or designs has customarily been punishable by death, and tales abound of women and children executed for transgression. For similar reasons, overt representation of ritual objects, too, began to be reduced or disguised – allowing for the expression of their knowledge of country, story and ritual within allowable limits.
5 In 1974, a previously established collection of early Papunya paintings was exhibited at the Residency in Alice Springs. A visiting Indigenous man was angered by what he saw, which was a violation of what should be shown publicly. As a result, the exhibition was
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taken down, and the paintings sent into storage at the Northern Territory Museum.2 In 1975, an exhibition of later paintings in Perth – 1000 km away – was criticized by visiting Pitjantjatjarra men who shared rights in the Tingarri Dreaming stories represented in them. While these paintings may not have transgressed the revelatory practices of initiatory restriction for Papunya Tula painters, their production and display had not recognized the rights of those from other communities who shared in the tradition. For this, a different scale of transgression, compensation nevertheless had to be made.3 In response to these continuing problems, the style of painting changed – hiding, disguising or omitting the religious objects from obvious view and focusing visually on the less dangerous ritual traditions and dimensions of the stories. Eventually, the ‘problematic’ early paintings were more or less secluded in a few museum collections, and their exhibition halted. In other places, where some of the early paintings might have been shown, the works may not have come to the attention of Indigenous visitors or they withheld comment rather than draw attention to what ought not to have been shown. Viewing, hearing, telling – these are serious matters in a cultural tradition where the right to know and tell are carefully guarded. Indeed, these rights are not just a matter of some kind of property; they comprise the very foundation of being, of who one is. Sharing in rights to the stories of a place means sharing a foundational identity.
6 Although the practices of painting changed to remove transgressive references, the early paintings were being exhibited in museums, circulating in the marketplace and selling at high prices at auction. By the late 1990s, photographic reproductions of the paintings were common in auction catalogues, postcards and books. [Vivien Johnson (2010)4 provides some insight and detail into the decisions about such reproductions in catalogs, at Sotheby’s for example, in an interview with Tim Klingender.]
7 It became widely known that some of the early paintings were not appropriate for exhibition, but not always which ones. For the 2000 retrospective of Papunya Tula painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, the indigenous curator Hetti Perkins consulted with the artists of the company about the paintings she proposed to show. They cleared the paintings in the exhibition and reportedly established a principle that it was allowable to show the paintings as long as no information was provided that would identify the images. If non-Indigenous viewers saw the paintings, they wouldn’t understand what they were seeing, so it would be okay to display the works: transgressive images would be hiding in plain sight. It seemed, from all this, that it might be acceptable now to show paintings containing overt religious material.
8 Recently, however, in the course of planning for the 2009 exhibition of early Papunya Tula paintings in the US for the show Icons of the Desert, and in a flurry of discussion about the collection at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, it became clear that this was not the case. The Northern Territory Museum is in possession of over 200 early Papunya paintings, including many of those that had been removed from the exhibition in Alice Springs in 1974. Some painters in the arts cooperative began to say that paintings with overt religious material should not be seen by the uninitiated.
9 In 2006, for example, at least a few of the men from Papunya Tula expressed opinions ranging from reservations about the exhibition of such images to declarative Statements that they ought not be shown to uninitiated people.5 Vivien Johnson initially fell upon
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these views accidentally in the course of another consultation, about cultural heritage, when her laptop popped open to a small image of a painting planned to be exhibited in “Icons.” But the men would not discuss the issue further with her, as her status as a woman prevented that. It is clear, however, that Dick Kimber had made a number of reports over the years that indicated continued uncertainty about exhibiting certain images, although this went largely unheeded (personal communication). Nonetheless, Vivien’s conversations, occurring at the same time as plans for an upcoming exhibition in the US, “Icons of the Desert,” occasioned an intervention which I will discuss below. The point here is that opinions on how to treat these kinds of early paintings with restricted imagery are not consolidated; they are unstable. For example, Bobby West Tjupurrula who expressed concern to Vivien Johnson about the potential exhibition of certain images had previously spoken to me precisely of his pride at seeing a painting of his father’s in the show at the AGNSW! Local Alice Springs historian Dick Kimber’s consultation with relatives of deceased painters for the Icons show, instigated by me with the collectors in light of these renewed concerns,6 revealed that the principal reason for restricting access to some of the paintings with overt religious imagery was to prevent inappropriate and thus vulnerable people from the relevant Indigenous communities viewing the images.7 It was okay, almost everyone said, to show all the paintings in the US. Meanwhile, the collection of early Papunya paintings at the Northern Territory Museum has instigated a crisis of more public form. Possibly, the story here begins with the attempted theft of 6 early paintings from the Museum on April 1, 2008, brought to light the dire security and conservation condition of these works so prized elsewhere. I remember Apolline Kohen, temporarily acting director of the Museum discussing a combination of fundraising for conservation to support an international exhibition – which would have drawn attention to the value of the Museum’s collection. Not too long after, in 2009, Alison Anderson – an Indigenous politician, Arts Minister of the Northern Territory, and herself from Papunya – “intervened to halt plans to take the collection known as the Papunya Tula Boards on international tour in 2012, describing people who exploit sacred Aboriginal artworks as ‘culture vultures’” (Lindsay Murdoch Melbourne Age 5-16-2009). As a journalist for one of the major Australian papers, Lindsay Murdoch reported, “Controversy surrounds the collection because some of the 220 paintings show secret, sacred men’s cultural ceremonies. But Ms Anderson, whose two grandfathers [e.g., Long Jack Phillipus and Ronnie Tjampitjinpa] are the only still living artists with works in the collection, has ordered a review to ensure that paintings deemed too sensitive are not exhibited” (ibid.).
10 So, how would this be done? Again, as reported by Murdoch (2009), Anderson said that “because she is a cultural woman, she cannot talk about the stories of the paintings, not even why they are sensitive. ‘The men have to do that,’ she said.” The decision to halt the plans for an international tour disturbed those in Darwin – described by Murdoch as “art lovers” – who had already begun to raise funds to support it. First hand knowledge is often hard to come by, but an echo of this disturbance, resonating with the frictions between these regimes of value, can be found in Jeremy Eccles online review of the catalog of the “Icons” exhibition, which had negotiated a restriction arrangement for problematic paintings.8 It is “a complex and still muddled story,” he writes. the fate of more than a thousand Papunya boards - the genesis from which contemporary Aboriginal art sprang in 1971 - and our right to view significant public collections at the National Gallery of Victoria and Museum and Gallery of the
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Northern Territory hangs on the outcome. [Eccles 06 Sept 2009, Australian Art Review. Emphasis mine]
11 Eccles, characteristically, places the blame at the feet of the “white interpreters” who are the authors and curators of the “Icons” material, assuming a familiar position of casting them/us as “cultural gatekeepers” (implying we might be insisting on protocols that the people themselves have left behind) or more simply as “anthropologists.” Eccles “wondered whether the anthropologists were back in charge after twenty-five years of mainly aesthetic appreciation of Aboriginal art.” Eccles ends his review of the catalog with a solution which, ironically, was that of the curators in the catalog: But Northern Territory Arts Minister, former ATSIC Commissioner for the Desert and an artist herself, Alison Anderson has loudly pointed out that all those interpretations are by white people; the next step has to be to define who are the Aboriginal 'contemporary cultural custodians' of these extraordinary works. For it may well be they who decide what 'we' both see and learn in the future. [Eccles 2009]
12 Again, in the context of the Darwin tangle, Nicolas Rothwell, well-known art writer and Northern Territory correspondent for The Australian, also discussed the difficulties that threatened the “Icons” exhibition, and suggested that such exhibitions might be impossible in the future because of restrictions: The wheel has turned: the images inscribed on the early boards, which emerged from concealment at a crucial point in the history of the Australian frontier, are moving back into the shadows. It is most unlikely, despite the present urgent efforts of at least two big public galleries to mount Papunya board exhibitions, that anything like informed consent from the senior custodians of the desert for their display will be forthcoming in future years. The gems of the Wilkerson collection, on view in distant gallery spaces, half a world away from the place of their creation, are not just the tokens of an artistic renaissance: they are like the pale, precious light, revealed only for a moment, that floods from the sun in eclipse. [Rothwell 2009]9
13 Who, then, might determine what the fate should be regarding the future exhibition of the paintings, if Alison Anderson herself could not speak? More complexly, one should imagine that broader politics had an influence as well, since Indigenous politician Marion Scrymgeour had promised the funding for conservation but now found herself in competition with Anderson.10 In the midst of this social drama, Apolline Kohen was forced out of the Northern Territory Museum. Rumor – and that is all that is available – suggests that Kohen, previously a successful arts coordinator at Maningrida, had nominated herself to undertake the consultation on the Museum’s collection, a role unsuitable to a woman according to Central Australian protocols and that this deeply disturbed Anderson whose cultural affiliations are at Papunya.
14 Since 2006, then, I have been involved in consultations about early Papunya paintings, using photographic images to discuss them. The planning of the massive National Gallery of Victoria exhibition of early Papunya paintings, in 2011, accelerated concerns for those who might lend paintings – and subsequentlly this exhibition, Tjukurrtjanu, has been shown at the Musee du Quai Branly. Now, and further, as a witness to some of the early discussions in the 1970s, along with Dick Kimber, I was one of the two people who worked on the consultation on the NT Museum collection for the review assigned to the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority. One of the elderly Pintupi painters to whom I spoke in 2010, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, at first told me it was okay for everybody to see the paintings: ‘They are free,’ he said. Then I asked him whether it would be
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acceptable to have these paintings exhibited in Alice Springs, where women and children from that particular Indigenous community could see them. ‘No,’ he said, realizing what would be involved. Then he went through a pile of photographs of his own paintings and those of his close relatives, sorting them into those that could be shown to everybody and those that women and children should not see. Indeed, at the Icons exhibition in New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, we placed the nine paintings for restricted viewing in a separate area, much to the relief of two visiting Pintupi women painters. The two women had been quite apprehensive about entering the gallery, even though they wanted to see the work of their relatives, because they feared they might stumble on something inappropriate for them to see. The caution exercised with the separation of these nine paintings allowed the women a freedom of movement and the chance to follow their own protocols.11 In the case of the Icons exhibition, we felt we had been able to establish an ethical principle for private collectors, in which they might agree to respect the wishes of the Indigenous custodians of the traditions objectified in the paintings yet still exhibit work. In terms of the discussions today about “cosmology,” this principle reflects the local understandings of these objects as something more than mere “commodities,” as themselves extensions – iconic and indexical – of the persons and relationships they instantiate. Indeed, they continue to be understood thusly by the descendants of the painters and it is in such terms that they identify their value. Their making and exchange has always been understood, at least partly, in terms of exchanges in which people present – show and give – their identity and sacred knowledge to others and thereby enter into a relationship of recognition. To respect these terms in exhibition is not simply to engage in an abstract political correctness. Rather, it is to present these objects in their genuine complexity, to allow viewers to engage with these cultural objects as profoundly relational and to learn from them in deeper ways.
15 Negotiations are never settled when it comes to these paintings. Shortly, after the Icons exhibition, a far more extensive exhibition was planned at the National Gallery of Victoria, of over 200 paintings, entitled Tjukurrtjanu (“from The Dreaming”). For this, initially the curators engaged in consultation with the communities from which the paintings – produced some 40 years earlier – came. They recorded assent to their exhibition. And yet, as the time approached for the exhibition, and the results of consultations taking place for the Northern Territory Museum collection became clear, it seemed that the first consultation did not reflect the more considered opinions of custodians. This was the context of my interview with the elderly Pintupi painter I have recounted. Could it be that a consultation might be found wanting as time passed? Here remains a significant question in moving objects between what I have elsewhere called “regimes of value.”12 What are the conditions of decision-making and assent? It is assumed in museums that individuals can enter into binding contracts of agreement about conditions of exhibition, but – frequently – opinion in an Aboriginal community shifts over time, as new information comes in, as new participants speak… It is difficult to establish a final decision that is not subject to reconsideration. Indeed, these are not abstract questions. Painters and their descendants can be harshly sanctioned for decisions to exhibit or display knowledge with which others disagree, and it is quite possible that even a very thoughtful man might reconsider when he realizes more fully what a museum exhibition might entail in terms of visitors who might be offended. Recognizing this and under some pressure from me and others, on account of the
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possible harm to the Aboriginal consultants for the exhibition, the NGV agreed to follow the principle of putting the problematic paintings in a separate room.
16 I would like to offer you some of the terms of the spirited discussion I had with various people involved in the NGV Tjukurrtjanu exhibition. What was the problem, you wonder? For their part, the curators were committed to a “fine art” or “art historical” display, attending to the formal qualities of the works by showing them in seriation and grouped by artist. To remove “key” works, or even to place them elsewhere, challenged this principle – the art equals aesthetics principle echoed in the citations I have offered from the critics Eccles and Rothwell. Despite their long and respectful association with Indigenous people in Central Australia, some of the curatorial group felt that the time of this gender-based segregation was or should be over, that things had changed and perhaps observing of this principle was more a form of political correctness on the part of white gatekeepers than it was initiated by the Indigenous community itself. Here, we might read again the concerns articulated by Jeremy Eccles, but now emanating from people who have had closer relationships with producing communities. Do we see here a reduction of accountability with temporal and spatial distance from the community? Second, the question was raised as to whether a public museum or art gallery could restrict any citizens from access to viewing. Finally, members of the community had agreed to the exhibition and had signed releases. But, as I learned later, the request for permission was accompanied by the lure of checks at hand and undertaken with video recording. Well-intentioned it might be to offer compensation and to provide a sincere record, but one can see another side as well. Let me underscore how hard it is to ascertain what “informed consent is in such complex situations where people may not have thought through the consequences or contexts of exhibition. Additionally, Indigenous participants, at least in Central Australia, are reluctant to refuse those they know, something that curators eager to show work may unwittingly exploit. The curators’ desire to show paintings -- using the comprehensive collection to display an art historical series as a formal aesthetic exploration would be a coup for them -- is experienced as pressure on the part of cultural custodians. To this, one has to answer with a concern for possible harm or retaliation to the custodians. But not only, I think. There is also the question of what is the purpose of an exhibition. If it is to engage viewers with the complexity of these objects, their wonder and mystery, why try to erase it? Why not build these questions into the exhibition itself? This would be a more conceptual dimension and one that acknowledges the actual history of these paintings.
17 What have we learned, then? I think we have realized that some of the early Papunya paintings remain dangerous or problematic for open exhibition, particularly for those who are their custodians. Consultation is necessary in order to determine how the relevant local custodians of the traditions evaluate the suitability of exhibition. These consultations need to be careful and extensive, allowing for discussions and for views to change as those consulted consider other relevant shareholders. In 1975, for example, the Pintupi painters of the Tingarri stories had rights to those stories, but their Pitjantjatjarra neighbors also had rights, and the two groups disagreed about the suitability of showing these stories. Thus, we need to acknowledge that while the painters and their descendants are custodians and authorities for the stories that were depicted, there may be others who share the rights to these stories – and they may have different views. Perhaps the adult child of a deceased artist thinks it is all right to show a certain work painted by his father, but what if he hasn’t imagined what will happen when a visitor from a related Indigenous community visits the gallery? Having
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written of this myself, and following also the work of Ken Liberman of years ago, what is the status of a “decision” in Western Desert protocol? How do the determinations of a present group hold authority in the technologically and socially transformed current condition? It is an old rabbinic tradition, and a more general moral one, that if there is any uncertainty or ambiguity, one should err on the side of caution. This is an inescapably difficult issue. When seeking agreements for an exhibition, curators need to acknowledge the internal politics of custodianship and find ways to present the paintings that respect the complexities of Indigenous protocols. This also means respecting the temporalities and openness of the negotiations in which the custodians and other stakeholders engage.
18 Having made my somewhat truncated argument for the necessity of ongoing negotiation, rather than a punctuated consultation and agreement – a position I regard as crucial to the real goals of cultural property claim (contra Michael Brown), I would like to suggest very briefly why there might also be value in finding a way to include some restricted paintings in the inventory of exhibition. I need to return to Alison Anderson, as she has returned to this question very recently with the handing over of the consultation report, on which I worked, to the NT Museum. In this report, 66 paintings were regarded as inappropriate for exhibition, and the consultants have further asked that the reasons for their restriction not be available publicly. They did agree that senior men could give permission to appropriate outside men to view the paintings.
19 In a moving speech at the exhibition of locally held works from Papunya Tula at the Alice Springs Araluen Gallery, Anderson took the opportunity to re-State her view, calling “on those who love the art to be happy with its ‘beautiful surface’, to not try ‘to see behind the veil’, to not delve into its ‘inner secrets’” (Alice Springs News Online 11/17/12).13 For Anderson, This is an exhibition about my home, Papunya, and my law and culture, and about my youthful years, when I sat with all my dear fathers and uncles and grandfathers, and watched them as they painted the first boards and early canvases in Papunya and its camps. There are works here from recent years, by artists who are still among us, artists from Kintore and Kiwirrkurra. But it is also an exhibition about Alice Springs, the town that first saw and appreciated and loved western desert art. These paintings you see all around you are the collections of the town, its councils and its men and women. This exhibition is a bridge between these two worlds: a precious bridge. It is also a window into the past – a past I see very clearly, with the eyes of childhood. I see once more the painters from the early days, and you can walk around and see their works here on the walls, and feel something of their character, their wisdom and their grace. These are the people who taught me how to live, they taught me my culture. The heart and core of every western desert man and woman is on view in these galleries. I see the first painters in my mind’s eye so clearly: Old Mick Wallangkari Tjakamarra, and Johnny Warrangkula Tjupurrula, and old Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi.14
20 For those of us without Anderson’s depth of experiential knowledge, how are we to understand the dynamic of this art form, even to comprehend its surface, which became what it was and what it is through engagement with boundaries, challenges, threats as the inspiration of a secreted religious life found expression in new form. Perhaps these are reasons simply to keep the collection, keep its knowledge, in storage for now, or to figure out a way to allow some of this dynamic to be seen. Moreover, as I
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have argued elsewhere, the dynamics of revelation and concealment are intrinsic to the tradition from which these paintings emerge. Painters played at the edge of these boundaries, as they no doubt did in deciding when and what to reveal in ceremonies – sometimes with unfortunate consequences. But curators must be mindful, indeed accountable, of and to those who will bear the responsibilities of revealing the work. For it to be “art,” in the way that Eccles desired, something has had to be stripped away in translation.
21 At the same time, for us to recognize them for as Anderson does – as objects with a special cultural history – one needs some sort of exhibitionary strategy that respects the problem of translation or more importantly one that incorporates the genuine challenge these objects offer to the very limited frameworks of Western contemporary art that, ironically, are espoused by critics like Eccles and, at times, Rothwell. I know, and would be happy to discuss, the history of the interventions on Western knowledge and viewing practice that have surfaced in cultural and intellectual property cases – Gould at Warburton, Mountford and the Pitjantjatjarra, Wandjuk Marika and cultural copyright – but the unsettling continues and nowhere with more force than in the Pitjantjatjarra homelands. Rothwell has recently written of the Pitjantjarra painters like Hector Burton who (rather recently) “formed a plan” for new paintings that be a “gateway into traditions and stories, but they were a barrier as well’ (Rothwell 1 March 2012a, “Trees hide secrets endangered by success”).15 They would protect their stories from curious outsiders, by using something other than the so-called traditional icons -- not sacred rockholes and patterns in the landscape but trees. Rothwell traces this concern (not a new one) to meetings and discussions in 2011 among senior men – “synoptic thinkers” and “political leaders, as he describes them, -- who made a decision to shift away from “old icons” of religious life. In their place, the painters of Amata have produced canvasses “that initiate and embody an art of concealment: that seek to turn the recent tide of revelations about desert beliefs” (Rothwell March 1, 2012b: “Mysteries of Desert Kings stay concealed among the trees”).16 While the practice of concealment, I have argued repeatedly (Myers 2002, 2012, nd), lies at the core of Western Desert art, what is the occasion for this announcement of it as a novelty by Rothwell? It is contemporaneous, by the way, with a series of local denunciations and blockings of research projects already apparently negotiated by well-established researchers – such as Diana James’s Songlines Project with the National Museum of Australia, and (or so I have heard) Ute Eickelkamp’s research at Ernabella. I have to leave that question now, wondering about the current conflicts between art centres/art advisers or possibly journalists and art critics and anthropological research, a conflict that has some resonance with Rothwell’s long program of claiming to rescue “art” from “anthropology.” I know that many on the scene regard these articles and the events in these communities to reflect some emerging politics surrounding knowledge, following on criticisms of independent art centres and support of private dealers, but we cannot imagine that the practice of consultation and negotiation will be – or can be – separated from the currents that roil contemporary life in Indigenous Australia.
22 In undertaking to display this extraordinary early history of Papunya Tula Artists, its outburst of creativity and intensity of attachment to place and tradition in paint, the curators of Tjukurrtjanu at the NGV – and now at the musée du quai Branly -- have recognised how the perspectives of western curatorial and Indigenous authority can clash. I believe these institutions and Papunya Tula Artists, have taken the respectful
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path in consultation and exhibition – true to the complexities of the work – by placing the paintings that might concern Indigenous viewers in a separate area, together with a caution for those who identify themselves as subject to the protocols of the Indigenous communities of Central Australia. Certainly, the most “dangerous” of the paintings are not being shown at all. Perhaps this determination will prove unsatisfactory over time, but it is true to the epistemology and politics of knowledge that continue to define the intersection of Indigenous and Euro-Australian regimes of value.
NOTES
1. See Fred Myers, ‘Truth, beauty, and Pintupi painting’, Visual Anthropology, vol. 2, no. 2, 1989, pp. 163–95. 2. See Vivien Johnson, Once Upon a Time in Papunya, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2010. 3. See R. G. Kimber, ‘Politics of the secret in the contemporary Western Desert’, in C. Anderson (ed.), Politics of the Secret, Oceania Monograph 15, University of Sydney, Sydney, 1995, pp. 123–42; and F. Myers, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, Duke University Press, Durham, 2002. 4. Vivien Johnson, ibid. 5. Vivien Johnson has reported on these 2006 conversations in Once Upon a Time in Papunya (2010). 6. These events are discussed in more detail in two articles I have written, “Censorship from Below: Aboriginal Art in Australian Museums,” In T. Berman, ed., No Deal! Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2012, pp. 174-187; “Showing too much, showing too little: predicaments of painting Indigenous presence in Central Australia,” In G. Penny and L. Graham, eds., The Performance of Indigeneity Lincoln: Univ of Nebraska Press. Forthcoming. 7. R. G. Kimber, ‘Relatives of the artists respond to the paintings’, in R. Benjamin (ed.), Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, Cornell University Press, New York, 2009, pp. 71–6. 8. Jeremy Eccles, “Icons of the Desert,” Australian Art Review (online). 6 September 2009. 9. Nicolas Rothwell, “From the Desert, Artists Came.” The Australian (online), 13 February 2009. 10. In her role as Arts Minister of the Northern Territory, Alison Anderson cancelled an exhibition of these paintings, contravening an election promise by Scrimgeour who had proposed $300,000 to restore and show the paintings (Calacouras, “Secret Art Business Stirs Pot on Public Exhibition,” 05-20-09 Northern Territory News). Calacouras notes that Apolline Kohen, then acting director of MAGNT, had been supervising the exhibition, but “was removed from her job shortly after Ms Anderson intervened.” He reports that she might have been “removed after a series of ‘ideological differences’, in particular relating to the Papunya show.” 11. I have presented a fuller discussion of these issues and the significance of new protocols in an essay that is not yet published. See Fred Myers, ‘Showing too much, showing too little: predicaments of painting Indigenous presence in Central Australia’, in G. Penny & L. Graham (eds), The Performance of Indigeneity, forthcoming. 12. By a regime of value, I speak of a hierarchical structure of values of the sort discussed by Louis Dumont. Such a structure can incorporate apparently contradictory values within a framework of encompassment rather than one of simple logical resolution. 13. Alice Springs News Online 11/17/12
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14. Alison Anderson quoted ibid. 11/17/12. 15. Nicolas Rothwell, “Trees hide secrets endangered by success.” The Australian (online) 1 March 2012a, 16. Nicolas Rothwell, “Mysteries of Desert Kings stay concealed among the trees.” The Australian (online) March 1, 2012b:
AUTHOR
FRED MYERS New York University
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From academic heritage to Aboriginal priorities : anthropological responsibilities
Barbara Glowczewski
1 Throughout my 34 years of involvement with Aboriginal people across Australia, I have regularly chosen to respond to Aboriginal priorities against a certain academic heritage, illustrated by the refusal of some colleagues – in France or Australia – to recognise the importance of women’s agency in the society, the impact of history on Aboriginal ritual life and cosmology, the continuity of their culture in new forms of creativity, the respect of ethical protocols, the discrimination and social injustice suffered by Indigenous people and the legitimacy of their political struggles.
2 In the mid 1970’s, no French scholar was doing fieldwork with Aboriginal people : students were introduced to Australia through classic studies on religion, totemism and kinship by Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss. The museum of African and Oceanian Arts was displaying sound documentation of the beautiful collection of bark paintings collected by Kupka in Arnhem Land, and research libraries offered monographies in English. In 1978, Lalai Dreamtime, a film shot with traditional rock art owners of the Kimberley, was awarded by the festival of Cinéma du Réel in Paris. The film maker, Michael Edols, and his team told me that an Aboriginal federation of Land Councils had been established with an Aboriginal ambassador in London : Shorty O’Neil. I went to London where I was briefed on the history of Aboriginal strikes and resistance, and given the advice to write to a Land Council to ask for a permit to do a field study in an Aboriginal settlement. I wrote to the Central Land Council in Alice Spring and was invited to do research in the old Hooker Creek reserve (where Mervyn Meggitt had worked in the 1950’s). The settlement was renamed Lajamanu since the Warlpiri people– with the assistance of some anthropologists (including Nic Peterson) – had just won a land claim on a huge territory of some 600 by 300 kms of desert and some grazier land.
3 After my first fieldwork in 1979, I wrote an article in Le Monde (1980) which was titled “Aboriginal people come out of the reserve”, describing the Warlpiri people’s reuse of reclaimed land, their determination to maintain some aspects of their hunter-gatherer
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life style (like sleeping outside and investing time in rituals), their economic independence as royalty beneficiaries from mining companies who undertook exploration on their land in search of gold. I also mentioned their criticism of the Welfare system and of some Church representatives and administrators who still treated them “like dogs”. Translated in The Guardian (1980), this article pleased neither the missionaries nor some administrators, preventing me from getting a new permit to stay in Lajamanu. Even though permits were given by an Aboriginal organisation and an Aboriginal elected Council, I realized that the so-called “self-management” of Aboriginal communities was in fact overshadowed by a heavy interventionist bureaucracy that was not ready to allow any real Aboriginal self-determination. After defending my PhD thesis (1982), I was sent by a French publisher (Autrement) to do a survey of Aboriginal politics across Australia, and was then invited to come back to Lajamanu : Warlpiri people were full of questions about France, as 12 men were about to fly to Paris to make a huge sand painting at the Museum of Modern Art and dance at the Peter Brook Theatre in October 1983. Despite failure on the part of some of the media to reconcile what they called “stone age” performance with the humour and subtlety of the Warlpiri Statements in the catalogue and on radio, a fascination for Aboriginal people spread across France : many Aboriginal performers, artists, activists and film makers were going to be invited by various festivals, for shows, tours and workshops with all kinds of audiences (Glowczewski & Henry 2011).
4 1984 in Lajamanu was a time of hope with intensive ritual activities and exchange between the Central and Western Deserts. Warlpiri did not call ritual activities “culture” yet but “business”. The Lajamanu school had a pioneer bilingual program and acquired a first video camera that was used by the Warlpiri for a film they made for a mining company to save the sacred site of the Granites from destruction. With the instalment of the satellite, the Warlpiri from three communities established the Tanami Network to broadcast their own videos and do teleconferencing with their relatives in jail or hospital. In those days there was no ban on packing trucks with people to travel as I did in a ritual convoy covering thousands of kilometres from Lajamanu to Docker River to witness the ceremonial transfer of the Kajirri initiation cycle. We stopped along the way in Yuendumu, for a women’s ritual (5 women joined our convoy in a Toyota driven by Françoise Dussart, then preparing her PhD). I had witnessed Kajirri 5 years before, in 1979, and with a 16mm camera filmed women’s rituals related to this male initiation cycle. Contrary to Mervyn Meggitt’s monograph Gadjeri (1966) which Stated that in the 1950s this ceremony was restricted to men, I discovered the importance of women during the 5 months of its performance. Both sexes performed their ritual activities in separate spaces but – since I slept in the women’s camp – I could see the women ritual “bosses” (Napanangka and Napangardi) daily discussing with one or two men what Dreaming tracks to celebrate. The women were celebrating Two Women (of Nampijinpa skin) who travelled from place to place with powers extending beyond current female social roles ; men were celebrating two heroes who travelled the same route and had not yet acquired the male social role. The initiation ceremony – with 22 young men in seclusion – was a form of Statement about an ideal sexual androgyny where each gender performs its cosmological autonomy separately, thereby creating a sort of polarity to assure the efficiency of the parallel celebrations. Indeed the women’s ritual role proved to be essential for the reproduction of the society, including the circulation of hairstrings, which struck me as being an
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example of female inalienable possessions described by Annette Weiner for Melanesia.1 On gender issues and women’s agency, debates were hot with French colleagues.
5 My writings in the 1980s demonstrated the Warlpiri ingenuity of resistance through rituals and the dynamics of the Dreaming conceived as a space-time in feedback with the present : I rejected the notion of cyclical time and Aboriginal people as being outside of history, or that of reducing relations between people and their Dreamings to symbolism, that is to define totemism as simple nominalism (Lévi-Strauss, 1962). To me Dreamings were “in becoming” in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari, “devenirs”, through ritual performance and alliances between people, that is they constituted a process of assemblage (agencements) of subjectivisation between people, their totems and places rather than essentialised features of identification : Warlpiri practice exemplified tensions between affect and expression, individual and collective, a network of relations intertwining humans, non-humans and places, in a transformative way, where women and men had a complementary role. But in the 1980s such ideas were not popular in anthropology.
6 French psychoanalyst and philosopher Felix Guattari was struck by my interpretation of Warlpiri data : our discussions and further writings informed the work he elaborated after the publication of Anti-Oedipus with Deleuze (Guattari & Glowczewski 1987, Glowczewski 2011). I had translated two Warlpiri cosmological concepts in the following way : kankarlu, which means “above” and public, as “the actual” and kanunju, which means underneath and secret, as the virtual : men and women have different roles in the constant transformation of virtual into actual and vice versa.2 This analysis allowed me to step away from the exclusive oppositions between real and imaginary, nature and culture, which too often reduces Indigenous people to nature and the notion of the Dreaming to a mythical time. The Dreaming is a space-time matrix with past, present and future potentials : its expressions (the Dreamings as totems) are embodied in places, people and other things but they need to be reactivated through emotions during some rituals, nostalgia in exile and the happiness experienced in return to place, sleeping in special places, and dream revelations of new images and sounds to nourish the rituals. Painting on canvas also participated in this Dreaming enaction (in Varela’s sense).
7 A group of women and men from the Warnayaka art centre in Lajamanu recently expressed their view in a forthcoming catalogue : « Without the connection between the land and the person the individual is lost, empty inside, not connected to anyone or anything or the land. If the connection is lost they won’t survive and their identity no longer exists. Jukurrpa is our life first. Jukurrpa connects us to our country. It is Law that makes it our right to our country. We can’t be sent away. »3
8 Desert people’s “existential territories”4 – a concept from Guattari’s 1992 fourfold cartography – have multiple layers of universes of references and values : not only totemic songs, designs and dances, but also Dreamings redefined through art and negotiations for rights and protection of land, Christianity or digital images. Aboriginal existential territories are in interaction with abstract ideas - kinship and its reconfiguration to satisfy their new needs5 – but also with other abstract machines like the State, various institutions and technologies. Existential territories, universes of value and abstract machines are in a constant transformative relations with the “actually real” the material and energetic social flows which involve land, traditional circulations of food, hair, blood at initiations and death, but also money, mining
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royalties, the art market, that is the world integrated capital, and multiple effects on the body and the mind of the violent impact of colonisation.
9 In 1979, I was lucky to witness a new intertribal secret ceremony (Juluru) that I described in a French article as « a symbolic manifestation of an economic transition », a form of « cargo cult » or « historical cult » (Glowczewski 1983b). The Warlpiri said the ceremony had been dreamt in Western Australia. I found out when going to Broome on the West Coast in 1980 that it was dreamt in 1912, in Port Hedland, just after the sinking of the Koombanah steamer. The ceremony was a re-enactment of violent aspects of historical contact to promote a double Law where the changes imposed by colonisation could be intertwined with the Aboriginal cosmology : it was an attempt to redefine the status of women, young people and “middle men”, defined as people who, through their life experience, were acting as mediators between the traditional society and the State system.
10 Years later, when I lived and worked with coastal people in Broome, the notion of “middle men” was also referred to people of mixed descent who suffered the Stolen Generation : the secret cult Juluru was in a way trying to deal with the spirits of all the dead who were transported by the boat before its wreckage : that is children taken away from their parents to be sent to missions, Aboriginal men chained by the neck to be sent to Rottnest Island prison and lepers deported to leprosariums ; the secret cult was also related to a 3 years Aboriginal strike – from 1946 to 1949 – where 800 Aboriginal pastoral workers walked off from 27 stations in Western Australia (Glowczewski 2002, 2004, Swain 1998, Muecke 2010), twenty years before the Wave Hill strike of the Gurindji. The transfer of the Juluru secret ceremony from the West coast to Central Australia used traditional trade routes, through the Kimberley and Balgo in the Western desert.6
11 After the passing of the Mabo Native Title Act in 1992, many conflicts opposed Aboriginal people who had to demonstrate continuity of their culture and land occupation to claim a Native Title in the Tribunal created for that purpose. Hundreds of claims were prepared. A Ngarrinyin man, David Mowaljarlai, had already fought in court for 17 years to challenge the Australian government to recognise not just his clan land but the model of an interconnected society which connected several language groups of the Kimberley plateau with other groups on the coast and in the desert ; he used to draw the sharing system that connected communities through trade routes and “history stories” as the “body of Australia” made up of a grid looking like a knotted fishing net spread across the continent. A version of his map of trade and spiritual connections was published in his book Yorro Yorro in 1993 and he was invited by Unesco in 1996 to call for protection of the rock art of the Kimberley from diamond mining (Glowczewski 2004).7 It is only in 2000, that Alan Rumsey (2000) commented Mowaljarlai’s rhizomatic map of Australia in a discussion about Deleuzo- Guattarian concept of rhizome. I have written elsewhere that rhizomatic or network thinking corresponds to a paradigm shift in the Western world. The perception of a network as an open, dynamic, both discursive and non discursive system only became widely understood once the internet became part of our everyday life with its virtual sites on the web, hyperlinks connecting such sites and cartographies of social networks (Glowczewski 2004, 2013). But, as noticed by Bruno Latour in 1999, many people then still did not understand the transformative power of networks.8
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12 The totemic cartography bringing together geographical, social and spiritual elements resonates with Felix Guattari’s ecosophy that proposes enmeshing three ecologies : of the environment, of the social and of the mind. Such a resonance between a hunter- gatherer mental and physical mapping and our current technological environment challenges the constant resurgence of evolutionist prejudice. Epistemological delays have had an impact on Aboriginal land claims temporality. For instance, the Ngarrinyin’s arguments were too pioneering, too different from the classic model of the hunter-gatherer stereotype and conventional “land rights” scheme to fit in the legal discussions of the court. It is the Ngarrinyin strong testimony filmed in rock art spiritual places (see Gwion Gwion film by Jeff Doring and his book with Mowaljarlai & al, 2000) that helped them to get their Native Title. But the granting of a Native Title (contrary to the NT Land Rights Act) is not enough to empower Aboriginal people. It often creates new problems that continue to feed anthropologists and lawyers. The strategy of many land claims is to oppose and divide families in court proceedings, instead of trying to defend a general vision which could demonstrate that across clan and language boundaries an interlinked society was reproduced before and after colonisation through exchange routes and new links forged in reaction to forced displacements (Toussaint 2006). To use such an argument would imply a change of paradigm not only in Australia, but in the social sciences generally to understand our world of displacements and new networks (Glowczewski 2005b, 2007, Glowczewski & Henry eds 2011 ; Abeles 2006).
13 Before going to Australia, I had read Nancy Munn's Walbiri iconography (1973) and asked her for advice : she wrote back that it was difficult to do research with Aboriginal people in traditional remote communities as they did not want anthropologists to talk publicly about their secret ritual life. She recommended that I work instead in Alice Springs where a new art movement was emerging (Papunya). I was fortunate to be welcomed into Lajamanu and to witness incredible ritual creativity, dream revelations and social experimentation before Lajamanu people started to paint on canvas in 1985, and also to travel to other communities across Australia for intertribal meetings (Dussart 2000, Peterson 2000, Poirier 2005). Right through the 1980’s and 1990’s I was asked not to show my films of women’s rituals to men, even overseas.
14 This ethical requirement to respect secrecy involved an anthropological responsibility of constant negotiations as Aboriginal values changed over time. Secrecy is a cosmological priority with political implications : in gender relations, for men and women to assert their own space and rights : as land rights became a public process, sometimes carried through art, some female rituals became public. Similarly ritual secrecy asserts Aboriginal power in relation to other Aboriginal groups and to the representatives of the colonial order and the State that overpowered their traditional life. Today the control of their images, especially through the web is a way to assert a new autonomy as a transformative agency.
15 In the mid 1990’s, I developed a multimedia project to return my recordings to the community and test hyperlinks as a tool to map the network organisation of the desert people’s system of knowledge : digital media was ideal to show on an interactive map how totemic stories and songlines were connecting sacred places and how ritual designs painted on the bodies, relevant songs and dances were connected to the Dreaming stories and pathways Warlpiri men and women chose to paint on canvas. After two years of discussions on the selection of what could or could not be shown, the
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CD-ROM was installed on the new computers of the Lajamanu school and 3 years later, in 2000, a public version called DreamTrackers (Glowczewski 2000) was published by UNESCO, with a licence recognising the intellectual copyright of 50 artists who had contributed to the CD-ROM with their art but also with Dreaming stories and oneiric revelations of new designs to paint on the body, and new ritual songs and dances. The Warlpiri artist and then Warnayaka arts manager, Jimmy Robertson Jampijinpa was invited to launch the CD-ROM by UNESCO in Paris.
16 The return of my data to the community and recognition of Indigenous intellectual copyright has been another anthropological responsibility derived from Aboriginal priorities (Glowczewski 2005). The CD-ROM Dream Trackers was used in the school for 10 years until all Macintosh computers were replaced by PCs. Every time I come back to Lajamanu I am asked to reinstall it on public and private computers. After Warlpiri started to use YouTube to post their own short films, they asked me why their data was not on the web. Now most of my Warlpiri audiovisual archives are online – thanks to the online digital source and annotation system developed by Laurent Dousset (www.odsas.fr, Glowczewski 2013). For two years I have been documenting the data with Australian linguist Mary Laughren and also with some Warlpiri people. Most young people are extremely keen to access old photos and recognize themselves and friends as children, or members of the older generation who are still alive or who are now dead. In fact the last two years saw young Warlpiri organise funerals with framed pictures of the dead brought to the grave and circulated among the mourners. This new ritual has shocked the older people who refuse to go to such funerals as they still respect the taboo on the images of the dead. Inherited funeral practices also continue, which involve the whole community : widows and other bereaved women camp aside with a ban of speech, gifts of goods (including blankets) and circulation of the deceased hair between the relatives. Times are changing, but old and new values are intertwinned in a productive tension : conflicts express what is at stake, and in many Statements, the power of image as embodied in reality is the reason for the various responses to the images of the past and the creative process of making those images live again like in art, be it on canvas or digital. Some Warlpiri families who live now in cities (the diaspora is massive) put photos on play stations that display them randomly day and night : the screen is used as a light in the house, a sort of digital chimney, (as if the succession of past and present faces was recreating the fire of the camp). On the other hand, facebook can be used to enflame fights.
17 New technologies are reactivating old and new relations of power. The enthusiasm and collaboration between generations during the annotation workshop I organised in July 2011 can be seen on the ODSAS website (www.odsas.fr). But Warlpiri people in Lajamanu cannot access the internet as easily as they used to : many sites are blocked, the connexion slow and expensive. Various recent government policies have disempowered them from having control of some of their own resources. For instance the building the Warlpiri funded partly themselves – through their mining royalties – for their library and e-learning was mostly closed during 2011-2012, the new shire refusing to employ several Warlpiri on a part-time basis to run it.9 The interruption of bilingual programs also saw 25 Warlpiri men and women dismissed from the Lajamanu school when the teaching of Warlpiri – which is the children’s first language – was reduced to half an hour a week. Warlpiri communities have created and continue to fund with their own resources from mining the Warlpiri Triangle (linking Lajamanu with Yuendumu and Willowra) to promote bilingual education – including through the
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internet – as a stimulus for better school achievements. Internet is also used by young and old artists of the Warnayaka art centre to document their art on canvas and create new digital art. Youtube is invested for cultural and political Statements10.
18 For many years I have called Aboriginal people “refugees of the interior”. In 2012, Amnesty International released a report denouncing both the Australian treatment of asylum seekers and the Stronger Futures Bill designed to extend for another ten years the very controversial Northern Territory Emergency Intervention which was imposed in 2007 on 73 Indigenous communities for a 5-year period. In these communities, many Indigenous people and leaders elsewhere, as well as the UN special Rapporteur, have accused this policy not only of being racially discriminatory and therefore racist but also of failing to achieve improvements in the living conditions of Aboriginal people – in terms of their economic situation, health and general wellbeing11. But the legislation was passed and the Bill became law in July 2012 despite the “Stand up for Freedom” campaign launched by some Yolngu people from Arnhem Land. A declaration was then posted on YouTube by Djiniyini Gondarra appealing to “all people to join the fight against this paternalistic, disempowering and deceptive policy that is now spreading to other parts of Australia”12. He Stated that “the government has established a war against democracy” and that other Northern Territory communities such as the Warlpiri have joined the fight. Gondarra and his positions are not shared by all but 2011 saw the creation in the Northern Territory of an Aboriginal party, First Nations by Japarta Ryan, a former member ot the Australian Labor Party and the grandson of Indigenous activist Vincent Lingiari. It was supported by many Warlpiri in Lajamanu (and gained up to 17 % of the vote in some Northern communities). On the other hand, a Warlpiri woman, Bess Price, ex Labor, won the election for the Country Liberal Party in the region and supported the NT Intervention13. Political anthropology is desperately needed in Australia to grasp the new responses to decades of Aboriginal disenchantment and injustice (Langton 2008, 2011).
19 In 2004, when I was a guest researcher at James Cook University in Queensland, the violent death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee occurred on Palm Island, and sparked a riot with some 20 Aboriginal men and women committed to a hearing in the Townsville Court House. For months in 2005 I followed their committal hearing in court and the long campaign for an inquest that led to the policeman held responsible, Chris Hurley, being brought to trial14. Hurley was found not guilty because of a lack of witnesses but there was no lack of evidence about the cause of Doomadgee’s death (his liver was split in two) which took place less than an hour after he was taken to the police station for singing drunkenly in the streets. The sentences of the rioters ranged from prison terms of several months to 6 years. Lex Wotton – with whom I wrote the book, Warriors for peace (2008), about the events on Palm Island following Doomadgee’s death – received the maximum sentence. Wotton was released after two years’ imprisonment in 2010, but a ban of four years was imposed on him preventing him from speaking to the media and in public. His parole board made an exception to this ban in allowing him to speak publicly at a press conference he gave at Palm Island in July 2011 and again a few months later at a human rights convention organised by James Cook University.
20 A newspaper reported that Aboriginal Dr Chris Sarra “drew cheers from a crowd of 130 as he labeled Mr Wotton 'his inspiration” during an opening speech at the First Nations Pathways Conference at JCU : "It's easy for people like me to challenge injustice from
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the safe confines of higher education or a newspaper column," Dr Sarra said. "You and the people on Palm Island put your lives on the line to stand up for what was right”15. In 2012 the High Court refused to lift the ban on Lex Wotton’s speaking in public or in the media. Lawyers have labelled the ban as racist : is the State afraid of an Aboriginal man who says : “we don’twant two laws, one White, one Black, we want one law for all, we want to live in peace” ? (Statement I filmed in 2005 and put online on the French website of Audiovisual archives in Social Sciences : AAR). Lex Wotton triggers “moral panic” for finding strong words and arguments to express the painful history of his stigmatised island and to criticise the difference in justice applied to Black and White in Australia, the criminalisation of Indigenous peoples (Cunneen 2007) and the deafness of institutions which do not listen to Indigenous propositions.
21 One challenge for academics is to find ways to change widely held biased perceptions, especially the global revival of eugenics and biological racism. One recent example of this is a French novel which last year was awarded a prestigious literary prize even though it conveys a series of racist prejudices about Aboriginal people. The author claims to have invented a tribe “with no law” while his novel is based on the actual Indigenous group who, in 1858, saved the life of a 14-year old French sailor, Narcisse Pelletier, who went on to live with them for 17 years before being taken back to France against his will. An Australian researcher, Stephanie Anderson (2009), who wrote an excellent essay on this story, sent a critique of the racist novel to some French newspapers who did not publish it while French academic websites did16. Critique of stereotypes of invented “wilderness” is not in fashion with the main media, but Indigenous words have power and it is our responsibility to convey such messages17.
22 The Aboriginal critique of so-called reconciliation policies and their constant claim for maintaining their culture as a life style, engaging both individual and collective assemblage, old and recreated practices, insist on their recognition as humans with a singularity to respect, instead of being rejected as “Others” failing to assimilate. Such a position questions the consensus of assimilation. Anthropological responsibility in terms of theory – for me – is to advocate « dissensus » as defined by Guattari (1991, 1995) : that is dissensus as the propeller [or driver] to stimulate the creation of new societal forms, forms that can respond to the poverty and injustice generated by exclusion, but this means that recognition of existential heterogeneity needs to be conceptualised at the structural level of contemporary societies and nations. It is a task for any science to construct new models to think the heterogeneity and connections of all forms of existence in our global world. For anthropology, it means to step away from the sterile oppositions between universal versus relative or assimilation versus exclusion.
23 One way to approach transformations of heterogeneous complexities is to use Guattari’s propositions in Schizoanalytic cartographies : « What the book tries to show – says Brian Holmes - is not how behavior is structured in adaptation to its context – because every discourse of power does that – but instead, how people are able to leave their initial territories and articulate original expressions in problematic interaction with others on a multiplicity of grounds, so as to resist, create, propose alternatives and also escape into their evolving singularities, despite the normalizing forces that are continually brought to bear on them by capitalist society. » 18
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NOTES
1. Weiner’s theory, which she presented in 1981 at the seminar of Maurice Godelier, inspired a chapter on hairstring in my PhD. I translated this chapter for the US journal Ethnography: (Glowczewski 1983a). Weiner (1994) in turn commented the Australian data (Glowczewski 2002). 2. The virtual secret realm needs to be actualised in ritual or through the birth of new children and the reproduction of any totemic species (Dreamings), while some aspects of the actual public realm return to the virtual at death, spirits waiting to be embodied again in people and things (Glowczewski 1991, 1998, see conference: Glowczewski B. 2012 « Tracking the spirit of the
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Dreamings. Ritual dreamers and Warlpiri artists from Lajamanu » Dreams of Insomnia workshop, Fondation Ratti, Come Italie. http://www.fondazioneratti.org/seminars/239/dream_of_insomnia_workshop.) 3. Biddy Nungarrayi Long/Jurrah, Elizabeth Nungarrayi Ross, Judy Napangardi Martin, Lily Nungarrayi Hargraves/Jurrah, Molly Napurrurla Tasman, Jerry Jangala Patrick and Joe Japanangka James, in G. Louw (ed), Warnayaka - Art in the digital desert, Lajamanu : Warnayaka Art and Aboriginal Corporation: http://www.warnayaka.com/index.php/about-us. On Lajamanu art comparedwith Balgo art, see Glowczewski ed. 1991 ; compared with Galiwin'ku art, see Glowczewski & De Largy Healy (2005). 4. Guattari’s Schizoanalytical cartographies (published in 1992, not translated in English; but see Chaosmosis) proposes a model of temporal permutations between 4 polarities to grasp the existential economy of the world we live in: 1) existential territories as “virtually real”; 2) incorporeal universes of reference and value defined as “virtually possible”, 3) the economy of social flows as “actually real” and 4) rhizomatic abstract machines or ideas as “actually possible”. This model is rediscovered today as a political tool (see Brian Holmes, 2009, Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies or, the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics, Online on Continental Drift, the other side of neoliberal globalization http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/ guattaris-schizoanalytic-cartographies/ ( see also filmed lecture2011: http://www.egs.edu/ faculty/brian-holmes/videos/, and Guattari & Rolnik 2008). 5. The Warlpiri found my hypercube a “good game” (Glowczewski 1989, 1991): Aboriginal kinship systems – which fascinated generations of anthropologists and mathematicians – are not fixed systems of classification but dynamic in their interaction with existential territories and social flows. 6. Traditional routes of exchange of rituals and goods were documented for the Kimberley by German anthropologists Petri & Petri-Odermann, Lommel, Worms and others in the 1950’s, Kim Akerman in the 1970’s (and in a film by Aboriginal researcher and novelist, Eric Wilmot, who showed the extension of these trade routes to the East of the continent). See also Gwion Gwion book (Mowaljarlai (Banggal) & al 2000). 7. Extended discussions with Mowaljarlai in Glowczewski 2004. His drawing was also reproduced by Woodward & Lewis (eds) 1998. 8. Before the web came into being, says Latour (1999:15): “the word network, like Deleuze and Guattari’s term rhizome, clearly meant a series of transformations — translations, transductions — which could not be captured by any of the traditional terms of social theory. With the new popularisation of the word ‘network’, it now means transport without deformation, an instantaneous, unmediated access to every piece of information. That is exactly the opposite of what we mean”. 9. Various policies have divested Warlpiri people of many jobs that they had gained thanks to selfdetermination policies of the 70’s-90’s, at the same time the government is flying in and out at high cost many non-Aboriginal people who are supposed to create new jobs for the population. Ironically, in 2011, some backpackers were replacing the 40 Warlpiri men and women who used to work on part-time shifts at the Lajamanu shop – which they successfully managed with profit, having bought their own plane and hired a pilot. The plane was sold by the new management introduced after the new shire system, resulting in exorbitant private company fares, the population can hardly afford. 10. Wanta Jampijinpa, Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu (Steven Jampijinpa Patrick) 2006 Ngurra-kurlu, YouTube,
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new bill, which is soon to be debated in the Senate, is being widely condemned by Indigenous groups as a continuation of the Northern Territory Intervention. Ms Mallinson says the legislation echoes the policies of the assimilation era”: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-24/ australia-criticised-in-latest-amnesty-report/4029984/?site=indigenous&topic=latest. 12. http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/50391; http://indymedia.org.au/2012/03/18/wgar-news- responses-to-senate-committee-report-on-stronger-futures-new-nt-intervention-la 13. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/indigenous/amnesty-a-racist- organisation-says-bessprice/story-fn9hm1pm-1226446316271 14. From 2006 till 2008, further fieldwork was conducted by Lise Garond who wrote a PHD in joint cosupervision EHESS in Paris and JCU : “Il y a beaucoup d’histoire ici” : histoire, mémoire et subjectivité chez les habitants aborigènes de Palm Island (Australie, 2011) shows the many ambiguities in which theinhabitants – descendants of 40 Indigenous languages, talk about their past and traumatic experiences of displacement. 15. http://www.townsvillebulletin.com.au/article/2011/11/29/287031_news.html 16. Anderson's book includes a chapter by the anthropologist Athol Chase ( “Pama Malngkana: The ‘Sandbeach People’ of Cape York” in Anderson, pp. 91-127), specialist of this Indigenous group (Pama Malngkana or Sand Beach people) whose descendants now live in Lockhart River (Qld). See http://www.asso-afea.fr/Questions-concernant-Ce-qu-il.html et http:// www.sogip.ehess.fr/ 17. see Andrew Johnson Japanangka declaration “They should learn how to respect us as human beings. We all Australians, we should learn how to work together, and share this together, support ourselves together, learn from each other”: (on Glowczewski's Warlpiri audiovisual digital archive: http://www.odsas.net/scan_sets.php?set_id=902). 18. Brian Holmes, 2009, Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies - or, the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics, Online on Continental Drift, the other side of neoliberal globalization (no pages): http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/guattaris-schizoanalytic-cartographies/
AUTHOR
BARBARA GLOWCZEWSKI CNRS-LAS
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Wednesday, January 23rd 2013
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Wednesday, January 23rd 2013
Barbara Glowczewski (dir.) The State and recognition of Aboriginal rights, land, and history
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Places, performative kinship and networking in the Western Desert. A contemporary perspective
Sylvie Poirier
1 The title suggested for this morning’s session is: The State and recognition of Aboriginal rights, land, and history. I will retain here one aspect of this title that I consider more encompassing and that is: the State and the recognition of Aboriginal differences?
2 I must say first that my understanding and reading of Aboriginal contemporary realities and lifeworlds, my understanding and reading of the nature of Aboriginal relations with the State are based predominantly on my experiences and observations at Balgo, a place I have known since 1980; my last visit was in 2006. Balgo is an Aboriginal community of about 500 people, situated at the northern fringe of the Gibson Desert, in Western Australia. Its geographical position places it at the cross- roads between the Tanami, the Western Desert and the Kimberley regions. In this paper, I will focus on the extent and the vitality of the manifold social networks in which Balgo people have been engaged in since the 1970s – as expressions of their recent history, on the one hand, but also of their mobility and nomadic ethos and of their relational way of being-in-the-world. Considering the extent and the vitality of such networking, the expression used by the State to designate Aboriginal settlements like Balgo as being a “remote” community becomes quite irrelevant. The so-called remoteness of it makes sense only from the bureaucratic perspective of Canberra. Anyhow and like any other place, a place like Balgo, is necessarily plurilocal and plurivocal.
3 I’ll start with some overall observations. A community like Balgo offers a most potent example of what some observers have qualified as the «failure » of the policies of self- determination (or self-management). Indeed, the Aborigines in Balgo do not meet any of the criteria and expectations of the Australian State in terms of good governance, of health, housing, schooling and employment. For example, and as far as governance is concerned, Balgo has been without a proper local council since the early nineties. One
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can still sense a clear hesitation and uneasiness on the part of the Aborigines to adopt and adapt a political structure imposed by the State (Poirier 2010). We should not downplay the fact that chairmanship and council as representative and elective modes and processes are antinomic to Aboriginal own political mode and decision making process which ones are based on reciprocity. (Unfortunately, this “parody” of governance leaves ample room to unethical Kartiya (Whites) who seem to take advantage of this situation).
4 Furthermore, a community like Balgo is most representative of the public discourses and the figures of “statistical inequality” which keep stressing the so-called cultural deficit, mal-adaptation and incapacity of Aboriginal people to deal with modernity and to behave “properly”, presenting them as a class of citizens in the waiting room of modernity. In other words, the Balgo people never respond to State policies and programmes the way the State and its representatives would have expected. But where the State chooses to see “deficit”, “incapacity” and “irresponsibility”, and in times when public and institutional discourses chose to focus on the “distress” of Aboriginal so-called remote communities, I choose rather to see the resistance of a people who refuse to adopt the forms of subjectivity, sociality and responsibility expected and sanctioned by the State. People who fight hard, in spite of increasing constraints, hardships and sufferings, to remain true to their own regime of values, to their own forms of subjectivity, sociality and responsibility (isn’t indeed their most basic rights?), while adapting these to their new conditions of living. Such perspective allows in turn a clearer view into the transformative and adaptive potential of these former nomadic hunters and gatherers, into their creativity and their agency. I am not saying that there are not any distresses and sufferings in a place like Balgo. Over the decades, I have seen too many Aboriginal people, mostly young adults (men and women), died of a violent death or of ill-health to remain insensitive or indifferent. But on the other hand, I remain convinced that their reality cannot be reduced to that – unless, as anthropologists, we want to be the spokespersons of the neocolonial discourses and strategies of the State which aims and duties are to “domesticate” and “normalise” Aboriginal people. Basically, I am just trying to understand how the Balgo people are working hard to reproduce and create a lifeworld in which they can recognise themselves – even though their lifeworld is far from the one expected by the State and is, in many ways, antinomic/anathema to the regime of values of modernity and to being “modern subjects”.
5 I wish to address now some of the Aboriginal differences I have mentioned already - these very differences which are antinomic to the State’s programs and expectations - namely their relational way-of-being in the world and their nomadic ethos. The anthropological literature on Aboriginal kin-based forms of subjectivity and sociality, of solidarity and responsibility is abundant and very explicit. Starting with Fred Myers’ work on the paramount values of autonomy and relatedness (and reciprocity) (Myers 1991); then Basil Sansom’s concept of “performative kinship”, as extended kin networks and relations which are constantly tested, negotiated, reaffirm through actions and a “grammar of exchange” (Sansom 1991); and then Peterson’s concept of demand sharing. Other authors, like Austin-Broos (2003), have demonstrated the articulation of Aboriginal kinship with welfare and work and how kin-based forms of sociality and solidarity continue to be reproduced and performed in relation with the circulation of money and objects. Even though the literature has put great emphasis on the ongoing and central importance of kinship and kin networks and relations, and
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their performative dimension, I am not sure we have sufficiently addressed the notion of the person in Aboriginal Australia, as well as the relational dimension of the self at the ontological level, and the embodied character of relationality. Considering seriously such Aboriginal differences would mean placing at an equal level and in dialogue the relational way of being in the world of the Aborigines with the sovereign self of the modern subject. These different ways of being-in-the-world should be addressed each from their own ontological principles. It is in that sense that I have contrasted elsewhere what has come to be called “relational ontologies” with the naturalist and dualist ontology of Western modern thought (Poirier 2008; Poirier, in press). While all forms of being are indisputably relational, various ontological traditions conceive, value and experience the reality of relationaliy differently. In relational ontologies, relations take on a reality on their own; they are not only a construct of the mind or mere representations within a symbolic system. As we know, for the Aborigines, relatedness and relationality refer not only to kin and kin networks, but also to places, to country, to the ancestral realm and the non-humans in general.
6 Some of the questions I would ask at this point are the following: At the experiential, ontological, phenomenological levels, who is this I, this self who embodies relatedness, who acts and interacts in a conscious and knowledgeable relational way? What does it imply to, not only conceive, but live and experience the world in such a relational way? What is the nature of such embodied relationality? I will mention two ethnographic examples from the literature which I consider give the beginning of an answer to these questions. The first one is drawn from Françoise Dussart’s work among Warlpiri suffering from diabetes, in which she underlies the ontological obstacles between Aboriginal forms of subjectivity and sociality and those that are expected from the biomedical system. She writes: “The biomedical establishment systematically presses for those affected with diabetes to stay close to the clinic and limit travel. But this kind of restriction is anathema to contemporary Warlpiri people, erstwhile hunters and gatherers whose identity is still very much rooted in nomadism” (2010, 80). She explains how they need to remain mobile to attend to kin (living in other communities) and country, and to partake in distant rituals or sport events; in other words, in order to maintain and nourish their social and cosmological networks of relationships and remain full social beings. The second example is drawn from Austin-Broos’ analysis of the articulation of Arrernte (Central Desert) kinship with a welfare economy and the State. Among the many examples given by the author, I have selected the following one. The author accompanies an Arrernte friend on a visit to an old people’s home in Alice Springs. She explains how a cousin of her friend, rendered paraplegic in an accident, “was fighting hard not to be socially dead” and deprived of relatedness (2003, 127). In order to engage in relatedness and “nourish” her relational self, the paraplegic woman gave to her cousin the very few objects she had (among these, a deodorant, a few sweets, and a dress that the staff had just given to her) – to the great dismay of the staff. These examples portray the phenomenological and performative dimensions of relatoniality, as an embodied value and as an integral part of one’s relational self, and show how the activation, validation and maintenance of such relatedness may guide and orient one’s agency, one’s choices and actions. Not being in a position, for various reasons, to act in such a relational way, is a form of ontological violence for the Aboriginal person (Macdonald 2010).
7 This takes me to the other difference I wish to address here and that is how the relational self and extended kin networks of sociality and solidarity continue to inform
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a high level of mobility among the people of Balgo, an Aboriginal nomadic ethos. This aspect of high mobility to attend to kin, to country, ritual, but also to Church and sport events (but not so much to attend to work or school – which belong to the White man’s domain) has also been addressed in the anthropological literature. One of the points I wish to stress here is the way the people of Balgo are constantly engaged in reproducing, strengthening and expanding their social networks through a high degree of mobility and through performative kinship. As a whole, the people of Balgo are thus connecting with places and settlements over a wide area: to settlements further south into the desert, starting with Kiwirrkura (and beyond); to the south-east along the Tanami, all the way to Yuendumu; north to Lajamanu (but also as far as Kununarra), and to the north-west, all across the Kimberley, even now as far as Broome.
8 While the networks themselves do vary for each local group (and for each member of a local group), they also intersect and intermingle. So, if we want to understand the reality and the dynamic of a place like Balgo, I suggest that we adopt the perspective of the Aborigines who view the settlement not as being enclosed on itself but as one within a complex entanglement of social, ritual and cosmological networks of places and settlements that expand far beyond the community of Balgo. I will now try to portray the patterns and the forms of such mobility and networking.
9 Bits and parcels of recent history, from an Aboriginal perspective, are necessary here. In the seventies, the implementation of the policies of self-determination has meant, for the desert people, the possibility of a greater mobility and the opportunity to reconnect with country and to reconnect with kin living in other settlements. In the region, both, the outstation and the acrylic movements, as Aboriginal initiatives, were creative expressions of such “reconnection”. It has meant also an increase in ritual activities. In the 1970s and 1980s, most people in Balgo were deeply engaged and involved in ritual exchanges. As I said already, being at the cross-roads of desert and Kimberley routes, Balgo became a strong center for ritual activities, a kind of turning point. I’ll mention just a few here to give an overall idea. The Tjulurru, the travelling cult (also known as the Balgo Business), that they received form West coast and Kimberley groups and then gave to the Pintupi further south and to the Warlpiri of Lajamanu and Yuendumu. In exchange of the Tjulurru, the Balgo mob received from the Lajamanu and Yuendumu people, the rights to perform the Jardiwampa ceremony linked to Puluwanti Dreaming (a ceremony analysed in great details by Peterson at Yuendumu). The Balgo women also engaged in some ritual exchanges with Kiwurrkura women, among others, and participated actively in various Law women meeting organised in Balgo and across the Kimberley. I understand these travelling rituals and practices of exchange as expressions of Aboriginal cosmopolitics, a way to establish long lasting alliances with various groups and settlements from Broome all the way to Yuendumu. These ritual activities decrease through the nineties and I would be unable to say if the knowledge, rights to perform and custody pertaining to these particular rituals are still being claimed, enacted and transmitted. The younger generations, though they are not as versed and interested in ritual matters as were their elders, continue nevertheless to build on the relations and the networks established by the elders through these ritual exchanges.
10 In Balgo, initiation ceremonies and mourning rites are still very important and they are one of the means to maintain connection and networking with various groups over a wide area, but also, obviously, to maintain, affirm and enact knowledge and rights
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pertaining to country. Held every year between November and March, initiation ceremonies are performed at different places, either Balgo, Kiwirrkura or elsewhere, and continue to mobilise and gather together a whole range of people from different places over a wide area. As for mourning rites, people don’t hesitate to travel long distances to participate in them. The Aborigines in Balgo continue to talk of initiatory and mourning rites as “very hard work”, in the sense first that these practices mobilise tremendous organisational, human and material resources; and second, in the sense that looking after and sustaining these manifold relations is indeed “very hard work”. However, the kind of “work” (or labour) involved in perpetuating initiatory and funerary rituals (the reproduction of their socio-cosmic order) has no value and legitimacy from the point of view of neoliberal economic rationality and within the regime of values of modernity.
11 Aside these rituals activities and networks, and the mobility they necessitate, there are also other forms of mobility as people travel to and fro the settlements for varying periods of time, mostly to visit relatives. In a place like Balgo, the high degree of mobility and the unpredictability of it are a major source of puzzlement and misunderstanding on the part of the Kartiya. You never know when someone will decide to leave, and even less when they will be back. This, in turn, raises the whole question of Aboriginal relations to Kartiya time and temporality, and thus to work and school (Tonkinson & Tonkinson 2010). Such mobility, unpredictability and spontaneity are, more often than not, interpreted as “irresponsibility” by the Kartiya; while they are, in Aboriginal perspective, a fulfilment of their forms of subjectivity, sociality and responsibility, an expression of their relational self, of their nomadic ethos, but also of their “spatial ontology”. Such mobility is a way of life. Furthermore, and as we know, the travelling itself is as important as the destination; as people move across the land, they meet with significant Dreaming places, they recall stories, events and anecdotes linked with such and such places; according to the season, they might decide to stop to hunt a goanna or gather some bush tomatoes, and then to establish camp, and so on. Through these travelling practices, they constantly reaffirm the Aboriginal identity of the land.
12 One of the main reasons for moving about is to visit relatives in other settlements. For example, a young mother from Kiwirrkura married to a Balgo man might decide to visit her close relatives in Kiwirrkura for a few months (her husband might or might not join her) and from there the young woman may decide to join a group of relatives visiting another settlement further south; an older couple will visit their son in Lajamanu, who is married to a Lajamanu woman, for a few weeks and on their way back they might stop another few weeks at an outstation where live some of their kin; an unmarried woman will go to live with her married sister in Fitzroy Crossing or Broome for a few months and see what happens from there; a young man from Balgo might travel to another community with his football team and decide to stay there “for a while” with his relatives; and so on. Such mobility happens in both ways. People from different communities do come also to live in Balgo for more or less extended periods of time. For example, a woman from Yuendumu whose daughter is married to a Balgo man may come to look after her grand-children for a while; she may take one of her grand- children back with her to Yuendumu for a few weeks or months.
13 Children are also quite mobile – not only the parents take them with them to their prolonged visits to other settlements, but it is quite common that paternal or maternal
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grand-mothers living in other communities ask to “look after” their grand-children for a while. Over their childhood, it is not uncommon for children to live in different settlements. As the children grow up, they are already familiar with other settlements and have a good knowledge of their extended social and kin networks.
14 Obviously, such mobility tells us also a lot about contemporary marriage and residential patterns. Today’s marriage and residential patterns in the area would certainly be a relevant topic for future researches and could be revealing on the ways families and local groups strengthen, transform, and extend existing networks. Quite a few of the young couples I know in Balgo are composed of one partner coming from another community; it is hard to evaluate the steadiness of married couples (Musharbash 2010). On the other hand, more and more young women decide to go without a steady partner, but still have children. One woman in her mid-twenties (in 2006), though her case is maybe unusual, had four children from four different fathers. She explained to me how she would every now and then leave one or more of her children, for indeterminate periods of time, in the care of their respective paternal grand-mother living in other settlements.
15 All what I have said up to here on mobility and on the way each person is engaged in reproducing his or her social and kin networks would be incomplete without a mention of the relations with one’s country. Mobility and networking do not erode one’s sense of belonging to country. Relationships to one’s country remain very strong. Beside the ritual domain, one of the contemporary ways through which such relationships are affirmed, reinforced and transmitted is through acrylic paintings. As a medium introduced and appropriated quite recently, which is in the eighties, acrylic painting has been readily articulated within the regime of values and the sociality of these Western Desert people (Myers 2002). John Carty’s recent and in depth analysis of the acrylic movement in Balgo is most revealing at that level. He has analysed a tremendous amount of acrylic paintings produced in Balgo since the eighties by members of different families and local groups, and demonstrated that painting, as praxis and object, is not the sole representation of country, it is “country”. The “spatial ontology” of these Western Desert people appears clearly in the way the act of painting, as a social, cosmopolitical and economic practice, not only allows to confirm and to affirm one’s relationships to country, but it allows the very reproduction of country, as well as the inter-generational transmission of knowledge pertaining to country. Acrylic painting, as action, as object, and as a source of income, has thus become an integral part of the networks of social relations of exchange.
16 To conclude, I’ll say a few words about the State’s recognition of land rights and Native Title in the Balgo area. As Balgo is situated in Western Australia, its people did not benefit from the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory, 1976); only a couple of families living in Balgo, who are recognised as “traditional owners” of some land across the Northern Territory border, benefit from mining royalties. In most cases, the traditional lands of the local groups and extended families living in Balgo since its establishment in the 1940s lie further south. In 2007, they had their Native Title recognised (the Ngururrpa Determination Area) for a stretch of land that covers 30,000 square kilometers, in the Great Sandy Desert, and part of it (to the south-east) touches the Northern Territory border and Lake MacKay. It could certainly be relevant to inquire eventually into the social, political and economic impacts of such Native Title recognition.
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17 Paradoxically, in the early 2000s, the Federal Government closed and dismantled the outstation of Yagga Yagga, situated hundred kilometers south of Balgo. The founding families of Yagga Yagga were the same families who lodged the Ngururrpa Native Title claim. Yagga Yagga had been established in 1984; in the nineties, it had become a community of about 200 people; it had a store, a school and an office. Following the deaths of a few elders and the suicide of a young man, the people deserted the place, planning to come back after a year or so. The government took advantage of the situation to dismantle the place (in 2003).
18 The Ngururrpa Determination Area is surrounded by other areas for which Native Title has also been determined and recognised: Kiwirrkura to the south; Tjurabalan to the north (Mulan and Lake Gregory area) and Martu to the West. Considering the extent of Western Desert lands covered by these Native Titles and the “bundles of rights” that come with it, it is going to be most interesting to see, in the years to come, the outcomes of this new reality. A few questions come to mind: Are the novel forms of borders and rights implemented through the Native Tiles going to contribute to divide the groups concerned and create frictions and conflicts between the Aboriginal corporations responsible to “manage” these Native Titles? To which extent and in which forms are the implementation of the Native Titles going to contribute to the reformulation and the transformation of kin and social networks across these portions of the Western Desert?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Austin-Broos, Diane, 2003, Places, Practices and Things: The articulation of Arrernte kinship with welfare and work. American Ethnologist, 30 (1): 118-135.
Carty, John, 2011, Creating Country: Abstraction, Economics and the Social Life of Style in Balgo Art. Unpublished PhD thesis. Australian National University.
Dussart, Françoise, 2010, “It is hard to be sick now”: Diabetes and the reconstruction of indigenous sociality. Anthropologica 52 (1): 77-87.
Macdonald, Gaynor, 2010, Colonizing processes, the reach of the State and ontological violence: historicizing Australian aboriginal experience. Anthropologica 52 (1): 49-66.
Musharbash, Yasmine, 2010. Marriage, Love Magic, and Adultery: Warlpiri Relationships as seen by Three Generations of Anthropologists. Oceania 80: 272- 288.
Myers, F., 1991, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self. Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Myers, Fred, 2002, Painting Culture. The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham: Duke University Press.
Poirier, Sylvie, 2008, Reflections on Indigenous Cosmopolitics-Poetics. Anthropologica, 50 (1): 75-85.
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Poirier, Sylvie, 2010, Change, Resistance, Accommodation and Engagement in Indigenous Contexts: A Comparative (Canada-Australia) Perspective. Anthropological Forum 20(1): 41-60.
Poirier, Sylvie (in press), The dynamic reproduction of hunter-gatherers’ ontologies and values. In M. Lambek & J. Boddy, Companion to the Anthropology of Religion. Wiley/Blackwell.
Sansom, Basil, 1991. A Grammar of Exchange. In Ian Keen (ed.), Being Black. Aboriginal Cultures in “Settled” Australia. Canberra: Australian Aboriginal Studies Press.
Tonkinson M. & R. Tonkinson, 2010, The cultural Dynamics of Adaptation in Remote Aborignal Communities: Policy, values and he State’s Unmet Expectations. Anthropologica, 52 (1): 67-75.
AUTHOR
SYLVIE POIRIER Université Laval
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Recognising the significance of the ‘mainland’ presence on Palm Island, past and present
Lise Garond
Summary
1 In this paper, I look at the question of the relationships between Aboriginal and non- Aboriginal people in the “remote” community of Palm Island. The island, located in North-east Queensland, is host to an Aboriginal population of about 3000 people, with a small non-Aboriginal population of approximately 200. Until the late 1970s, Palm Island operated as an Aboriginal reserve, under the supervision of non-Aboriginal administrators. Lately, Palm Island has come under intense mediatic attention, in the tragic context of the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee and the subsequent uprising or “riot” of 2004; these events called into question, among other issues, the State of the relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people (notably the police) on Palm Island. Aboriginal Palm Islanders commonly refer to “the mainland” as the place where non-Aboriginal, or rather white people, live. The “mainland” is commonly represented as rather prejudiced and often hostile towards “the island”. On the island, where non-Aboriginal people constitute an ambiguous “minority”, interactions between “islanders” and “mainlanders” reproduce, but also often complexify and destabilise the representations which members of both subjective groups may have of each others from further afar.
2 Since the 1980s, anthropologists have emphasized the relational way in which Aboriginality, “past and present”, is constructed at the crossroads between the experiences and imagination of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, and as a product of “State effects” (examples include Beckett 1988a, 1988b, Cowlishaw & Morris 1997, Morris 1989, Langton 1993, Lattas 1993, Kapferer 1995, and Povinelli 2002, Cowlishaw 2004, Babidge 2010). Given this acceptance, however, a comparatively limited number of scholars have specifically undertaken descriptions of actual interactions between
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Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in various contexts (for instance Cowlishaw 2004, Morris 2001, 2005, Trigger 1992, Henry 2012, Collman 1988). In relation to this, even fewer studies have paid detailed attention to non-Aboriginal subjectivities (Lea 2008, Kowal 2011). Moreover, whereas in recent years, “Aboriginal communities” have become the focus of much public debate, including among anthropologists, and especially in relation to the “Intervention”, still very little anthropological attention is being paid to the presence of those non-Aboriginal people who come to, or reside in, these communities, and who daily interact with Aboriginal people and constitute an important aspect of Aboriginal people’s lives.
3 In this paper I thus argue for the need to further study the relationships, in terms of representations, and actual interactions, between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in more or less “remote” Aboriginal communities, using “the island” and “the mainland” as starting points to look at Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal subjectivities and their interrelations.
AUTHOR
LISE GAROND LAS-Université de Bordeaux II
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Intrumentalizations of history and the Single Noongar claim
Virginie Bernard
1 In 2003, 80 Aboriginal Noongar, represented by the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council (SWALSC), lodged the ‘Single Noongar Claim’ (WAG 6006 of 2003), an application for native title, on behalf of all Noongar people, over the South West of Western Australia, including the Perth metropolitan area.
2 At the request of the State of Western Australia and the Commonwealth, the hearing over the Perth area commenced first in 2005 before Justice Wilcox, who handed down his judgement in 2006. He recognised the existence of a single Noongar community, governed by a normative system of laws and customs at the date of settlement in 1829, and confirmed the continuity of that community and normative system to the present day. He identified eight surviving native title rights that should be recognised, subject to extinguishment.
3 The State and Commonwealth governments appealed this decision. In 2008, the full Federal Court confirmed the existence of a single Noongar society at sovereignty. However, the full Court overturned the positive determination and sent the case back to another court for reconsideration. In consultation with the Noongar, SWALSC decided to pursue the Single Noongar Claim through negotiations with the State government. These negotiations should soon be concluded.
4 The concept of history and its interpretations, rather than culture, tradition or practice, played a central role in the prosecution of the separate proceeding and its subsequent appeal, and is still central to the negotiations with the State government. I will illustrate how history as such as has been instrumentalized by the various parties involved in the Single Noongar Claim. The applicants used historical evidence to prove the continuity of the Noongar community, a view adopted by Justice Wilcox. On the contrary, the State and Commonwealth argued that, due to the history of dispossession in the South West, the maintenance of ‘traditional’ laws and customs to the present day was impossible. The judges of the full Court accepted their claim that continuity had not been proved for each generation and were dissatisfied with Justice Wilcox’s
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consideration of the historical context as an explanation for change. Eventually, to prepare themselves for the negotiations with the State of Western Australia, SWALSC used history again as an empowering tool proving the continuity and strength of the Noongar community.
Recognising history
5 As Smith and Morphy (2007: 14) have noted “[the] Yorta Yorta case made it clear that Aboriginal claimants – in particular those in the ‘settled south’ of Australia – would be subject to extremely conservative and limited grounds for recognition of their law and custom, although the recent finding in the Noongar case makes it clear that, in some cases at least, native title is able to be recognised in the ‘south’, albeit in extremely limited forms.”
6 SWALSC were perfectly aware of the difficulties of native title and envisaged it as a struggle. They considered the ‘Single Noongar Claim’ as a strategy that would empower the Noongar and manoeuvred accordingly to aggregate the 78 individual family claims, that had been lodged over the South West since 1994. Glen Kelly, SWALSC CEO, explained to me that the Single Noongar claim was “a good legal strategy, it [was] a very good case concept and it’[d] got a far better chance of succeeding in court [than individuals claims].” (Glen Kelly, interview 08/05/2012) It would have been impossible to run all of the 78 claims so, withdrawing them to lodge a single application, placed the Noongar in a more advantageous position and presented them as a unified community.
7 SWALSC hired the services of an anthropologist, a historian and a linguist, whose complementary reports were grounded in the history of the South West. They stressed the existence of a single Noongar community and its survival, continuity, and resilience, thanks to its capacity to adapt. Historical evidence was used as a tool, a key element to argue for the inevitable changes undergone by the Noongar community.
8 One of the preliminary questions listed by Justice Wilcox in the separate proceeding was to determine whether the 1829 society continues to exist today. The point was to establish if there was a discontinuity with a recent revival, or a continuing practice. Discontinuity would have entailed the failure of the native title claim.
9 The Applicants’ evidence on the continuity of the 1829 Noongar laws and customs was based on the conclusions by Kingsley Palmer, their expert anthropologist: “the rights and duties of the Noongar people in respect of their country have not changed in their fundamentals and the normative system upon which an owner is understood to relate to his or her country, remains founded upon the same principles as it did at sovereignty.” (Bennell: §704, my emphasis) The applicants stressed that it was a question of degree as to whether native title was satisfied. They said that “the question is likely to be whether the community or group, as a whole, has sufficiently acknowledged and observed the relevant traditional laws and customs.” (Original emphasis) (Bennell: §776)
10 Justice Wilcox embraced that definition of continuity. He interpreted Yorta Yorta as conceding that, as long as traditions had been substantially maintained by the community, a certain degree of change was unavoidable and not fatal to native title, since European settlement had a profound impact on Aboriginal societies. What had to
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be determined was whether the changes, brought by that specific historical context, were adaptations to the new conditions it had created or a departure from ‘tradition’.
11 Historical conditions hence played an important role in Justice Wilcox’s judgement. He acknowledged the Noongar’s history of dispossession and oppression and was ready to accept a high degree of change. He argued that: “[...] one should look for evidence of the continuity of the society, rather than require unchanged laws and customs” and that “significant change [was] readily understandable [if] [it] was forced upon the Aboriginal people by white settlement”. (Bennell: §776; §785)
12 Justice Wilcox was convinced that external causes for change had to be taken into account; he was impressed by the Noongar’s survival in the face of the drastic conditions imposed on them by colonisation and maintenance of some of their customs. He decided to focus on the adaptability of the Noongar community rather than its unchanging character. Hence, he accepted that the Noongar were part of the history of the South West and were not a fixed social entity, frozen in time. Social and cultural change could thus be perceived as a normal response to their changing historical contexts and was inevitable.
13 Moreover, Justice Wilcox did not endeavour to establish evidence for continuity, generation by generation since sovereignty. Despite many factors of fragmentation, he found that family members had remained connected through a ‘noongar network’. Continuity at all times could not be proved, but could be inferred. Requiring the applicants to prove continuity for each and every generation would have added another hurdle to the already extensive burden of proof they have to confront with.
14 To establish continuity, Justice Wilcox relied on writings from the time of sovereignty and Statements provided by Noongar witnesses, especially older people. They could give evidence about customs and traditions and assert they had been observed without interruption. Justice Wilcox also noted that caution had to be taken as the witnesses knew it had to be proved that they constituted, in the past and the present, a single society. He nevertheless inferred that being a Noongar was learnt from childhood and this identity had not been conditioned for the court appearance.
15 In the Statement preceding his judgement, Justice Wilcox made the following remark:
16 Undoubtedly, there have been changes in the land rules. It would have been impossible for it to be otherwise, given the devastating effect on the Noongars of dispossession from their land and other social changes. However, I have concluded that the contemporary Noongar community acknowledges and observes laws and customs relating to land which are a recognisable adaptation to their situation of the laws and customs existing at the date of settlement. (Bennell: 7; my emphasis)
17 The particular history of the South West was fundamental to Justice Wilcox’s conclusions, external causes had to be considered otherwise a native title claim in the South West, or any heavily settled area could not even be envisaged. The Noongar had been dispossessed but had survived because of their capacity to adapt to changing historical conditions.
Denying history
18 On the other hand, the State of Western Australia and the Commonwealth had a different approach to history, since they were eager to see the claim for Native Title
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fail. Ironically, while usually reluctant to acknowledge the Aboriginals’ dispossession and oppression that colonisation had caused, they argued that devastation was so great that the Noongar could no longer be ‘traditional’ and had departed from traditional laws and customs.
19 Instead of focusing on ‘substantial continuity’, the State and Commonwealth grounded their argumentation on the report by their expert anthropologist Ron Brunton, and argued for ‘fundamental transformation’. According to Brunton, one example of the breakdown of the normative system was that, at sovereignty, rights in land were patrilineal, whereas at present, they also combine matrilineality, birth and marriage. Counsel for the Commonwealth submitted that: “[a] shift from patrilineal descent to cognatic descent is a radical shift in which the norms governing group composition and the acquisition of rights and interests in land have changed in a fundamental way.” (Bodney: §736, my emphasis)
20 The State and the Commonwealth rejected the argument by the applicants’ anthropologist that the exercise of rights was a long-life social process of assertion and negotiation, submitted to a normative system, at least since sovereignty. Brunton affirmed that at sovereignty the acquisition of rights in land was patrilineal and that other means of acquisition had developed in the absence of a normative system.
21 In their appeal, they advanced that Justice Wilcox had failed to prove continuity and had asked the wrong questions: he incorrectly concentrated on the continuity of the Noongar ‘society’. He should have endeavoured to prove, for each generation, the continuity of the laws and customs forming a normative system, giving rise to rights in land. The full Court accepted the submission of the State and the Commonwealth. The judges admitted the notion of change as long as the rights in land remained ‘traditional’, otherwise, change would be ‘unacceptable’. (Bodney: §74) The full Court found that Justice Wilcox had not established whether the elements he had identified, related to the current land tenure system, were ‘acceptable adaptations’ or ‘unacceptable changes’. The full Court concluded that some evidence even suggested discontinuity.
22 Lisa Strelein, director of the Native Title Research Unit (NTRU) at AIATSIS has argued that: The language of the full Court [...] is problematic, but it is illustrative. Instead of focusing the inquiry around the seemingly objective test of ‘traditionality’, the Court introduced overtly judgemental language as to what is ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ change and adaptation in Indigenous society and determined that it is the Court’s role to judge this. (Strelein, 2009: 102)
23 By accepting the State and Commonwealth arguments and focusing on the normative system of the society to prove continuity, the full Court once again deprived the Noongar of their capacity to adapt to changing historical conditions. They were no longer considered as a social entity but were reduced to a system of rights and interests, which degree of change the Court could accept or reject as it pleased.
24 Justice Wilcox was also criticised for ‘disregarding’ works by late 20th century writers. Indeed, he had judged they did not provide factual evidence of the 1829 situation. The full Court argued this evidence could have established continuity for each generation, which was essential for a positive native title determination. As Strelein has demonstrated, this is a question of interpretation of the Yorta Yorta requirement of ‘substantial uninterruption’ and in the Noongar case, “the Federal Court has
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transformed a ‘definition’ into a strict requirement of proof.” (Strelein, 2009: 105) This test increases the amount of proof that the applicants to native title have to provide and confront them to an even more arduous procedure.
25 Moreover, once again in a questionable language, the full Court said: [...] in reaching his conclusion that Noongar laws and customs of today are traditional, his Honour’s reasoning was infected by an erroneous belief that the effects of European settlement were to be taken in account – in the claimants’ favour – by way of mitigating the effect of change. (Bodney: §97, my emphasis)
26 They rejected external causes for change in considering whether change was an ‘acceptable adaptation’ or a departure from tradition.
27 Smith & Morphy (2007: 13) have pointed out that: “[...] the forms of ‘repressive authenticity’ demanded by native title displace the burden of historical extinguishment from the expropriating agency of the State to the character of the claimant group.” The State, Commonwealth and full Court turned history upside down, invoking it on certain occasions and denying it on others, in order to define a lost authenticity and continuity, and overturn Justice Wilcox’s positive determination. The devastating effects of colonisation were therefore used to prove the Noongar’s impossibility to remain ‘traditional’.
Writing history
28 Another approach yet again was adopted by SWALSC, the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council. To be in a strong position to negotiate with the State, SWALSC had to counterbalance the decision of the full Court and build on the positive determination. One of the means was to use history as an empowering device. On their website, SWALSC published “An Introduction to Noongar History and Culture”, an eleven-page document revisiting history. It focuses on the Noongar’s survival, their connection to country and the continuity of their laws and customs despite colonisation.
29 This reinterpretation reflects a widespread desire among the Noongar for a reappropriation of history that I often noticed during my fieldworks. For instance, Glen Stasiuk, a Noongar filmmaker, directed The Forgotten, a documentary exploring the Aboriginals’ contribution to the Australian Armed Forces. He is currently producing Wadjemup: Black Prison – White Playground devoted to Rottnest Island, the site of the largest number of deaths in custody in Australia, now a popular tourist destination. As he told me, his films focus on healing and remembrance and aim to promote awareness and reconciliation. The Collards, a Noongar family I am also working with, tried to acquire a farm through the Indigenous Land Corporation (ILC) but their project was refused. Clifford Collard told me: the farm had so much history, truthful fact history that was still there, the Noongar lived there. [But ILC] didn’t believe there was so much history there, that there would have been an impact for the Noongars and the Wadjellas. They just wouldn’t believe it, they couldn’t believe it. (Clifford Collard, interview 30/04/2012)
30 What the Noongar witnessed and transmitted orally has now been turned into written words. SWALSC claim their intention to revisit historical writings in “Noongar Connection to Country”, another document published on their website: SWALSC are developing and producing materials and resources to provide a more accurate history of the south west and the Noongar people. […] Yes colonization did
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affect Noongar people, yet the Noongar People have accommodated the new arrivals and sustained traditions and culture. A remarkable achievement given the pressures experienced over almost two centuries. SWALSC then, is creating more accurate narratives that show Noongar people were here 40 000 years ago, were here when the Europeans came, are still here today and shall remain here forever. (SWALSC (2): 2, original emphasis)
31 In this Statement, SWALSC assert the Noongar’s presence and continuity, not only from sovereignty to the present day, but through time. The Noongar were already there, as far away in time as scientists can demonstrate, and will never disappear, as the use of the modal verb ‘shall’, rather than ‘will’, testifies.
32 “An Introduction to Noongar History and Culture” begins by attesting the Noongar’s presence in the South-West for at least 50,000 years, a presence supported by scientific dating. (SWALSC (1): 1) It then strives to retrace their history from the first half of the 17th century to the present day, in a chronological form punctuated by important dated events and ‘heroes’, recognizable by Western criteria. The history of the South West is thus told from a Noongar perspective. It continues with the history of the successive expeditions by the Dutch and the French to assert that the Noongar inhabited the South West before the British arrival and had their own history.
33 It seems important for SWALSC to demonstrate that British sovereignty was never accepted by the Noongar. The document refers to the 11th June 1829 as “the day that sovereignty was “assumed” over Noongar country by what is now the State of Western Australia. The 11 June 2011 marks the 182nd anniversary of the dispossession of Noongar country from the Noongar people.” (SWALSC (1): 2)
34 The succession of dates aims to write down a westernized form of history of the South West, one that reintroduces Noongars as central protagonists. It is also meant to create a depressing sensation of a never-ending process of dispossession and oppression and raise the reader’s empathy. These dates list the massacres, the creation of the so called ‘Protectors of Aborigines’, institutions, missions, programs to ‘civilise’ the Noongar, the Rottnest Island prison and so on.
35 A series of repressive governmental policies started in 1886 and progressively deprived the Aboriginal people of Western Australia of their liberties, segregated them and placed them in fringe camps. The 1905 Aborigines Act, labelled as the ‘most insidious’ legislation, “set up a bureaucratic structure for the control of Aboriginal people whereby they all [became] “wards of the State”.” (SWALSC (1): 4) Children were forcibly removed and placed in institutions and in 1936, the Native Administration Act introduced eugenic measures.
36 Despite all these policies, the Noongar managed to adapt and survive. SWALSC attempt to prove it through the use of various historical evidence of the Noongar’s continuing presence. With regard to the Moore River settlement opened in 1918, it is noted that “[ironically], and despite the appalling conditions, Moore River kept Noongar people together where aspects of law and custom could be shared and continued.” (SWALSC (1): 4) Photos are also used throughout the document to assert a continuous presence through their visual impact and Noongars’ testimonies provide the document with more personal and vibrant touches.
37 Conditions started to improve by the second half of the 20th century, but many inequalities still had to be overcome. In 1968, Stanner’s Boyer lecture is mentioned as a landmark when “[histories] of Noongar people [started] being written and oral
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histories [started] being recorded, revealing aspects of a previously hidden history. Noongar people [talked] of how they and their tradition, law and culture survived and how they avoided “the welfare”.” (SWALSC (1): 6)
38 Despite the fact that their history started being written down and recorded in the 1970s by social scientists, the Noongar still had to fight for the recognition of this history and their rights. The battle for Native Title started in 1983 and is retraced to the negotiations in 2010/2011. The chronology ends on an optimist note and the word ‘future’. (SWALSC (1): 7)
39 “An Introduction to Noongar History and Culture” concludes with the promotion of the book “It’s still in my heart, this is my country”: The Single Noongar Claim History and the website “Kaartdijin Noongar – Sharing Noongar Culture”, devoted to Noongar history and culture. The book is based on the historical report by John Host, the applicants’ expert historian in the Single Noongar Case. It is meant to reveal “the true history of the resilience of the Noongar people”. (SWALSC (1): 10) It is interesting to note that during the trial of the separate proceeding, it was the anthropological report that was principally relied upon. Now that the existence of a single Noongar community is formally established, history has become central. It is through this evidence that the Noongar can prove their capacity for resilience and continuity, and adopt a powerful position to confront the State in the negotiations.
Conclusion
40 To conclude, Justice Wilcox understood the symbolic importance of native title for the Noongar. He accepted their arguments for continuity and considered them as a changing social entity adapting to its historical context. By allowing a high degree of change imposed by colonisation, he recognized that the Noongar had a history and where part of the history of the South West. He thus found that native title continued to exist over the Metro claim area.
41 The State of Western Australia, Commonwealth and full Court endorsed a completely different interpretation of history. They harshly resisted a positive native title determination by requesting proof of continuity for each and every generation and refusing to take external causes for change into account. They deprived the Noongar of their capacity to adapt and defined them as a frozen-in-time social entity and thus denied the fact that they were part of history.
42 Eventually, SWALSC exploited history to build on Justice Wilcox’s positive findings and overthrow the full Court judgment. They undertook to write down a recognizable Noongar history that would prove their survival and continuity and would place them in a powerful position to negotiate with the State.
43 I would finally say that in the Noongar case, native title was in fact more than symbolic, it was used as a social and political reconstruction process by the Noongar. They started this process as part of the Metro claim proceedings and seized the opportunity offered by Justice Wilcox to fully implement it. History was one of their means of reconstruction as they transformed this form of narration into a tool, a social and political means of action. By proving their survival and continuity, they re-established their existence as a social entity and asserted their political existence. This allowed
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them to force the State into making an advantageous offer and to start preparing themselves for the outcomes of the negotiations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bennell v State of Western Australia [2006] FCA 1243. Federal Court of Australia. [Online http:// www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/download.cgi/au/cases/cth/federal_ct/2006/1243, last consulted 29/11/2012]
Bodney v Bennell [2008] FCAFC 63. Federal Court of Australia. [Online http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/ cases/cth/FCAFC/2008/63.html, last consulted 19/11/2012]
SMITH, Benjamin R. & MORPHY, Frances (Eds.) 2007. The Social Effects of Native Title: Recognition, Translation, Coexistence. ANU E Press: Canberra. [Online http://epress.anu.edu.au/?p=64921, last consulted 08/11/2012]
STRELEIN, Lisa 2009. Compromised Jurisprudence: Native title cases Since Mabo. Aboriginal Studies Press: Canberra.
SWALSC, HOST, John & OWEN, Chris 2009. “It’s still in my heart, this is my country”: The Single Noongar Claim History. UWA Publishing: Crawley, WA.
SWALSC (1). “An Introduction to Noongar History and Culture”. [Online http:// www.noongar.org.au/images/pdf/forms/IntroductiontoNoongarCultureforweb.pdf, last consulted 13/09/2012]
- (2) “Connection to Country”. [Online http://www.noongar.org.au/images/pdf/forms/BookOne- ConnectiontoCountry12p.pdf, last consulted 13/09/2012]
- (3) “Timeline Poster”. [Online http://www.noongar.org.au/images/pdf/forms/ TimelinePoster.pdf, last consulted 13/09/2012]
- “Kaartdijin Noongar – Sharing Noongar Culture” website. http://www.noongarculture.org.au
AUTHOR
VIRGINIE BERNARD EHESS-CREDO
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We are not a Christian mob, we want that UAM land back
Bernard Moizo
1 Hello everybody. I am pretty happy that yesterday Jon Altman said we would be hearing from the next generation today. So I believe Sylvie and I are part of the new generation. Secondly, that’s probably the first time in 25 years or so that I am attending a symposium or a seminar where I have colleagues who were enrolled in the PhD at the same time as I was, my supervisor, one of my examiners and very close friends as well, so it is a bit embarrassing. Not only for that, but embarrassing too because I am facing a panel of experts on Aboriginal studies and I only see myself now as a part-time “Aboriginalist”. Because since I left Australia in 1989, I think, returning briefly in 1991, I got a position with IRD which stands for the Institute for Research and Development. I have had several positions overseas for up to 5 years all together. We are very lucky at IRD to get posted overseas for such long periods of time. And I did work in Thailand, Madagascar and Laos, so even though I was not dealing with Australian Aborigines any longer I was confronted with many similar issues, like ethnic minority groups, and people that don’t get the status of indigenous people, although they are, but not recognised as such, struggling with land issues and recognition of rights to name only a few.
2 So, I had to dig for my old fieldnotes from the late 1980’s to remember what I would be talking about, and I also relied on work from the new generation, like Martin (Préaud) here and Catherine Thornburn, to share with you some ideas, maybe not as well articulated as the previous presentations we had yesterday and today, but some ideas about those land issues and how I was confronted with that in the mid 1980’s.
3 So, in Fitzroy Crossing, which is becoming very popular now, a kind of the flavour of the month as far as research is concerned. It was in the middle of nowhere at the time and the first time I went to Fitzroy I was invited by the former chairman of the Kimberley Land Council, just after the Nookanbah crisis in 1980, and I ended up in Junjuwa which was a town-based community, the only one at the time, and worked with the Bunaba people. And amazingly, when I first arrived, the people came to me and wanted to teach me Walmajarri because most of the anthropologists working at the
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time were learning Walmajarri language, which is a group from the desert but not so much of the local language… except for Alan Rumsey who did some work previously in Junjuwa as well.
4 So, I found myself confronted with those land issues in a very peculiar situation. Like Junjuwa was community, was not only a town-based, but a mixed community of people coming from different places, at different periods of time, with very different backgrounds as far as history and contact with the non-Aboriginal people are concerned. Also the Junjuwa community was not involved at all, in fact they took a lot of distance with the Nookanbah event, for those of you who heard about this. Nookanbah was a pretty big story at the time. It was also a period of quite strong confrontation I would say, between the Bunaba people and some other people who labelled themselves as River People, and Desert People. There was also a lot of internal conflict as I tried to explain in my PhD at the time. Also there was a very strong influence in the Junjuwa community of the United Aborigines Missions that was established in the early 1950’s and it’s the place where people settled when they moved in towards the Fitzroy Crossing town, after they were kicked out or left with their own will, the stations because the station owners had to pay the Aborigines and they were not prepared to do so and some other different stories that were pretty well recorded in the files of the Department of Community Welfare (DCW) which at the time became the Department Community Services (DCS). And consequently all these DCW files were destroyed in 1985-86 which is a pity I think because there was a lot of history to be kept and recorded for Aboriginal people, and that could be used for land claim and other things I guess.
5 There was a lot of frustration for the Bunaba people because first they felt there was very little recognition of their status as the boss, or the owner of the place, so-called. And the main thing, they didn’t have any outstations, they were all living in Junjuwa community whereas most of the Walmajirri people had outstations, as well as some Wangkajunga, a language from the desert area. And these people, in the Bunaba view, as some anthropologist colleagues and later on Thornburn recorded, most of the Walmajarri were involved in the community business like the Adult Centre, Language Ressource Centre, Art and Craft centre and the Bunaba were very rarely involved. It is not very clear whether they didn’t want to be involved or if they kept themselves away from that involvement.
6 So, definitely the local dynamics were in favour of the Walmajarri and moreover the access to the land, just to go fishing, or to go in the bush, or to collect bush tucker was very difficult for the Bunaba because they had to deal and try to get the permission from the station manager or station owner at the time. They had to go across most of the stations around Fitzroy Crossing, so it was very difficult for them to go to places of significance or just places to go out in the bush. Here, are some of the statements telling of how the people, what was the feeling of the Bunaba people to be isolated or trapped, if you want, in the Junjuwa community. Joe Ross, who was previously, not so long ago manager or chairman of Junjuwa if my information is correct, described the situation as being in a “fishtank, trapped in that fishtank.”
7 There was some celebrity too, if you want, at the same time. Not only because I was there, but Steven Hawk was there, it was Bob Hawk’s son, so he could attract a lot of attention to the situation in Fitzroy Crossing as well. Here you have map, done by the Housing Department I think in the early 2000. The black and white picture is one I took,
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and you see in the background, a very small house at the back which is where the first camp of where Aboriginal people settled in Fitzroy Crossing was positioned. And the small group of houses on the back was where the mission, so-called mission land, was at the time. The main houses on the front are of course the Junjuwa community with division between language group, was initially established didn’t work at all. So, in the early 90’s I had gone there by then, there was definitely a revival of the Bunaba language and the Bunaba culture as well. First, you had a lot of excitement about the Jandamarra story, Pigeon story as it’s called. There was even a project to make a film. I don’t know if they really made it or not, I had some contact for a long time and interest of many people, but my involvement in other things meant that I couldn’t keep contact as much as I would have liked to. And also several books came out on the lives of the Aboriginal stockmen of the area, so there was a lot of renewing, putting forward the Bunaba again and all the things seem to come back to a more logical order, in the understanding of the Bunaba speakers.
8 In my understanding, it really started in the late 1980’s, more 1986-87, just before the bicentennial. I think the initiative came from the United Aborigines Mission, who was really keen to hand over that lease just before the bicentennial. I had some other information saying that they are really short of money and they couldn’t afford any more to take care of the building and all the materials at the time, and I remember that there were very lengthy discussions between the Aboriginal leaders and the representative of the UAM to decide if they would buy back from them the material, and of course the Aboriginals said “look, we worked for nothing for many years so I think we should get the land and all the materials as well”. So, I couldn’t get much of the details because those United Aboriginal Mission people are not very talkative, especially not to anthropologists and maybe moreover to French anthropologists.
9 So, at the beginning, the UAM started to contact local agencies like Marra Worra Worra and the Kimberley Land Council. But since the Junjuwa people were not very involved and not very open to go through those agencies, gradually they directed, they shift the discussions with the Junjuwa leaders and then with the Bunaba leaders. It was quite interesting to see how the Bunaba suddenly came very aware of the power they could have in that negotiation of getting the land back. So the handover of the lease, so called by the people the Land Mission, happened in early 1987, I think February, and for most of the people, even the Walmajarri people, it was a recognition of the role and the importance of the Bunaba people, leaders in the area. So, that handing over ceremony was organized, and those of you who know these people there may recognise some of them who had an important position at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs at the time. Unfortunately that was a very difficult timing because a couple of weeks before the handing over, a very important Bunaba leader passed away, and of course there was a suspicion about the responsibility of death to some community, probably more on the Balgo side, it’s more convenient when you live in Fitzroy Crossing when it is the community not next door. But still, there was a lot of tension between River People and Desert People. And interestingly, and Marcia outlined yesterday that we anthropologists love initiation ceremonies, so just before there was an initiation ceremony and I attended several of them over the years, and for the very first time that initiation ceremony was not controlled by the Walmajarri speakers but by the Bunaba leaders who re-enacted some Dreamtime stories related to the river, the Fitzroy River and the Margaret River, the two main rivers of the area. And that ceremony became
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prominent in the year after. Some of the dancing that was performed at the end of the ceremonies was part of the public part of the dancing associated with the River People.
10 It was a very strong delegation coming from the United Aborigines Mission (the ones wearing ties, you can pick them out), a lot of Department of Aboriginal Affairs staff, a lot of the former residents of Junjuwa, a lot of old leaders, and some Aboriginal agencies representatives as well, and many, many people from nearby communities. Interestingly the role of Department of Aboriginal Affairs and the Aboriginal agencies came afterwards. It was more negotiation directly between UAM and Junjuwa community, which I think is completely different from most of the native land claim and that sort of thing, especially in a situation where, to my understanding, it’s sometimes very difficult and almost impossible for Aboriginal people or Aboriginal groups to prove that they were able to maintain the link with the land when the local history and the local situation forced them to be away from that land, and they needed to be engaged in other types of activities than the hunting and the gathering and doing ceremonies. So to me it’s a very strange situation and it’s not the only place where Aboriginal people had to prove that they were, they are still indigenous, to get access to the land they grew up on. And of course because it was a very strange event to have these United Aborigines Mission people coming to the land, there was suddenly a very big dust storm and heavy rain, and all the United Aboriginal Mission people disappeared, and only the Bunaba people dancing remained there. To me they didn’t care about the storm and the rain but they wanted to show how happy they were. Even though, on that piece of land they got back, there was not really any site of significance as far as maybe secret site or things were concerned, but to them that was very, very much in heart, as far as their arrival and settlement in Fitzroy Crossing is concerned, that was part of the history and of course it has a lot of meaning to them. So, Junjuwa and Bunaba leaders got back in front became very popular, and I had, not so much from the people talking themselves because most of the time Bunaba people were very proud of themselves and very proud of the link they maintained with their own country. But for the outsiders, like the non-Aborigines and people from other communities, there was definitely a sentiment of justice had been done to the Bunaba people and pride, and their position as leaders has been sort of recognised by that getting back their land. Also, it was very important for the Junjuwa people to be able to show that they were not church mob, as they were labelled most of the time, because they were not involved in the Nookanbah event, because they were under the influence of the so-called, two or three of the previous non-Aboriginal community managers were former missionaries from the UAM, so that could explain the way that sometimes they were labelled as church people. But, the Bunaba people were very much against that label and wanted to show that they were prepared to fight and to get the land back, even though the initiative came from the UAM and not from the Bunaba people themselves. And suddenly also, the community, the Junjuwa community found itself in a strong position towards local agencies because most of the buildings, the buildings of Kimberley Land Council, Adult Centre, Marra Worra Worra was actually on the land, the former mission land, so now the lease was in the hands of the community and these agencies had to sub-lease it, to get sub-leased to the community. So it inverted the power relationship, the Bunaba were not any longer in a dependent position towards these agencies, but if they wouldn’t renew the lease these people had to move somewhere else, so that was interesting to see also the shift of power.
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11 There was also recognition of Walmajarri and other non-Bunaba speakers, and the strong support of the Bunaba leaders, suddenly, and they felt a new start in their relationship between different communities. So, many changes happened afterwards and I listed some of them, as we all know, it’s a very complex and rapidly changing situation in many of those remote places. But first a Bunaba sub-group got Leopold Down Station and then Fairfield Station which is nearby, in 1991 and 1995, and you will see after I have some quotes from a non-Aboriginal person involved in the cattle industry in the area and they did a very good job in restoring the herds of cattle and then making profit gradually although it was quite difficult in the first years. Also, many places in the Bunaba country got the status of National Park, like Tunnel Creek, Brooking Spring, Wandjina Gorge and I know that now there’s a land claim still going on for the Native Title for the Bunaba people to get access, or to get the recognition of that status on these lands, on these places. And several camps of the Bunaba sub- groups were established after 1991 and 1992. So, there was definitely new opportunities like in the cattle industry for example, in tourism as well, and also in art and craft because up to the late 1980’s most of the paintings were from the Walmajarri, and suddenly with that recognition, because maybe the people did feel better about it, some people didn’t want to be involved in that painting business, as they call it, there was more painting done by the River People group and the business started. They lodged a land claim, actually they lodged several land claims in 1999 and they were grouped together so there was also that dynamic that instead of being competing between the sub-groups of the Bunaba speaking language, they regrouped together. I think the initiative has a lot to do with the personality of June Oscar, for example, the Junga Inc., Bunaba Aboriginal Corporation which has been created for the Pigeon movie merge into the Bunaba incorporated in 1999, so a lot of dynamic going on. And as you can see here, some of the quotes of the recent PhD submitted by Catherine Thorburn who has a very inside knowledge of what was going on, and she has pointed out a few times in her PhD that I got my prediction, or my description of the situation, how it could change in the future, was wrong. But also, she acknowledged that some of the things Eric Kolig and some other anthropologists that worked at the time, were still going on, so it’s a kind of changing situation and also some things are maintained in place.
12 I think that the cohesiveness of the Bunaba is mainly due to some strong individuality, and also the success of the Bunaba cattle company and running Leopold Down and Fairfield stations. As you all know, when the first claim to get the cattle station back and being run by Aborigines were mentioned in the 1980s, you could hear all sorts of negative comments, and maybe negative is not the proper word, it was even worse sometimes. “They would spend their day shooting bullock and eating meat, bla, bla, bla… we know what it’s like”. And they really did a very successful business at the time and again, restoring and being very proud of what they have been doing, and many of the Bunaba people just worked for nothing for many, many months to restore the community, the buildings, and to have all the equipment running again, and also to gather and herd all the herds of cattle that had been running wild for several years. And you have here the Bunaba cattle company visions as is put forward in their way of dealing with business, and I think they’ve been doing it pretty successfully so far. That Mcaw is a non-Aboriginal person involved in the cattle industry himself and he’s very respectful of the work that has been done in the area.
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13 I returned to Fitzroy in 1991 to do a small evaluation of the CDEP program, we also propped up a lot of solidarity within the linguistic group but also across, between different linguistic groups. And people starting really to do some projects at the community level. It was not that successful at the beginning but it was really coming, bringing some new initiatives and people were becoming aware, for the first time they really had the feeling they were doing things how they wanted them to be done, not done from the outside or because some government or some state decisions or even some white fellow being involved. The time I was in the field it was self-determination policy, and amazingly there were three times as many non-Aboriginal people working in the community, and being involved in the community than five or six years before. So, the thing is the pressure put on the people and all the paperwork they were supposed to give to the government and to the agencies outside, they had no training whatsoever to be able to do it, so they had to rely on non-Aboriginal to do the work for themselves which reproduced a situation, a post-colonial or interior-post-colonialism, as Jeremy Beckett used to call it. It was a very, very complex situation as well and as Sylvie said yesterday, when we are working in the field there is no way we can do research on one hand and not be involved in the community we’re working with. So I did my best at the time to record for the community, they had a computer that I know was from the beginning of Macintosh, so I organized some training with the local people and we also did a lot of surveys in the community for the census, the 1986 census. We also registered all the health problems, all the papers people had from driving license and all that sort of thing. And this was very much needed; they didn’t have the data at the time, so every time they wanted to apply for something they had to get the information to be recorded from the outside. So with the help of some other non-Aboriginal people involved in education and health issues as well, we recorded many of things that I believe was useful for the communities afterwards.
14 So, amongst the creations, there was also a Bungoolee tour agency created in 1997, which has been very successful I believe, it’s one of the guy I used to work with, he’s also at Leopold Downs Station and he received, I think, a prize for his agency business in 2005 or 2006. And then we are coming up with very recent news of December 2012, so after lodging a claim in 1999, so 13 years after, Bunaba people were at last recognised as the rightful owners of that traditional country, and I believe, as it’s stated underneath, in the mouth of June Oscar, it’s not the end of the fight but at least it’s a recognition of all the things they had to go through for generations. And listening to some speeches on the ABC radio from June, and also from the cattle stations which are located within that lease, the situation shouldn’t be as bad as it used to be as far as access to the land is concerned and involvement of the people with the cattle station. So out of this there’s some new dynamics as well. I could find in Catherine Thorburn’s work a dynamic going on for example with the newly created Bunaba cattle Inc. They pay for a full-time young person to work there, but he’s also following a part-time ranger project to have more people involved in the emerging or newly created industry. And there was a lot of complaint too; I came across a report on the Fitzroy River, of complaints from Aboriginal people, complaining of tourists touring the place, littering and not being respectful of different places. So, it is really important, and when I was involved in Laos and Madagascar in so-called “local tourism development”, it is crucial to have small leaflets in the local language explaining the things because it’s sort of restoring people’s self-esteem, to give pride to the people to be really respected. Whereas in most local tourism ventures that you see in places, they have
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guides, they may be indigenous people but most of the time they’re not from the area, they are from somewhere else. They know by heart all the Latin names of all the animals, plants and bla, bla, bla, but they don’t they don’t know the local history. And the local people are usually recruited as parking guards, like you park the car in the community and they get paid for that, and that’s about it. So, that’s dreadful and there’s a lot of movement going on at the moment within Indigenous groups to incorporate some change in that relationship as far as tourism is concerned, to have a real involvement of the local people and not only just on the surface and not to say where they get nothing from it whereas money is concerned. There is a strong program initiated to overcome the drinking problem with the young generation, once again June Oscar is behind that. And the venture between Bunaba Inc. and the Western Australian Conservation and Land Management to have land interest in protecting area in the West Kimberley, with all the places I mentioned before. And with this protected area it’s not only input on site as far as Australian landscape is concerned, but I hope that the cultural values and the sites will be put forward and really should stand out. And that’s about it.
15 Thank you very much.
AUTHOR
BERNARD MOIZO IRD
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Introduction to the discussion
Barbara Glowczewski
1 BARBARA: Because I didn’t introduce the session today, before I give the microphone to Bob Tonkinson, I would just like to make a few comments. I think it’s very important the way everybody has insisted on the importance of history, and also on the issue of cognitive kinship in Native Title because it’s not just an issue for Noongar people, for people who live where there are cities, but also everywhere in Australia where people in one way or another have been displaced, or were moving before the settlements were organised. The issue of Noongar land that was presented by Virginie Bernard, was already discussed in the 1990’s in Broome, for instance, when the Rubibi Corporation was created, with Yawuru around Broome, the importance of history then.
2 I would just like to tell a personal story because the reason why I was involved there at the time, in an oral history project that I was asked to work with my ex-mother-in-law who was a Yawuru woman. She had been recording since the early 1980’s the history of displacement in the Broome region. There were about 12 big families involved who were later in the Rubibi Corporation. This project led to a book that was going to be published by Magabala Books but the day before going to print, it was already announced to come out, it was seized by the State. And what was in this book? There were many, many testimonies, I mean transcribed, that was my job, and criss-crossed with any literature I could find in French, in English or in German that I organised to be translated in English for the Kimberley Land Council, for that project. It was all the conflicting interests that groups had because they had been displaced, in missions and so on. The old people were having their testimony in that book. It was seized but then it circulated between the 12 families who were in conflict, and they all used it, including Dodson, Peter Yu and I will not name any other names but they are very big figures in the Broome region who are famous artists, film makers and so on, or people who have nothing.
3 So history is a real tool, and I really feel that we have a responsibility, but I often feel powerless, so that this paradigm can be changed, so this history that we heard today for the Noongar. Why is it that it is the lawyers in court who decide what is the right to live for the people who were colonised in Australia? I just don’t understand! Now, a second point. Lise Garond was proposing to say that the issue between Aboriginal and
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non-Aboriginal people is not just a question of the State. It’s not a question of the State because it’s a question for all of us, everywhere in the world, how we relate. I don’t believe in otherness, how do we relate to any other human being, and this is a constant fight, I find, against the normative State. And again, in anthropology, what I believe to be able to address the questions that you propose to address, that you say were under- estimated Sylvie Poirier, in terms of objectivity, there is transversality in every person today and we all have to obey the State, but we also try to resist. In the interactions that we have with the Aboriginal people, they also have that transversality, the State is in them, some wide values are in them. If we work with Aboriginal people, or people here who have never been in Australia but who read some of our works, who buy the art, they also have some values they pick up from Aboriginal people. Yesterday Françoise Dussart was asking, why is it that we are so committed and we keep going back? Because personally, and this could be put to discussion, I believe that Aboriginal people do present precisely something for post-modernity in terms of the way they have conceptualised this network of relations which are transversal. It’s a subjectivity that has been constructed that we desperately need to have as an alternative to what the State is imposing on us, and especially today when there is a recognition of failure of all the multicultural policies. And I noticed that nobody, since yesterday, has used the word intercultural, while in the catalogue of Papunya it comes back very often, and it has been coming back very often in some of the Aboriginal literature produced in the last ten years. I don’t believe in interculturality, I don’t believe that there’s something like the White and the Aboriginal people with a space in between where exchanges are made. Of course Bhabha talked about a third space, but we all live in a third space, which is the only space which is reconstructed in different places.
AUTHOR
BARBARA GLOWCZEWSKI CNRS-LAS
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Wednesday, January 23rd 2013
Laurent Berger (dir.) Sustainable environments and new economies in Aboriginal Australia
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Introduction
Laurent Berger
1 Let’s begin this second panel. I’m very pleased to open and present the different panelists who will talk about sustainable environments and new economies in Aboriginal Australia.
2 But first just let me say a few words about the issues we’re going to deal with now. As I never did fieldwork in Australia, I would like to introduce a slight, thrapeutic dose of comparatism, not little (keep quiet) in the solipsist way. Australian anthropologists seem to tackle this topic and many others. That sounds obvious. The incorporation of hunting and gathering, animal husbandry or agricultural economies into the development of capitalism and stead (?) formation, has been taking place now for 5,000 years across Eurasia, Africa, America and Oceania. Even if these processes took place according to different modalities, everywhere I think the problem was the same. First, the commodification of land, labour and currency as factors of production. Second, the monopolisation of force and the territorialisation of power and taxation. The recent Nothern Territory Emergency Response Act, I think is precisely about all of that. These capitalist and territorial logics are not, of course, reducible to each other, but I think they are closely intertwined. The production, exchange and consumption of commodities, the private appropriation of this position of land, knowledge, debt, wealth, of tools, the development of wag earning and employee downsizing, the endless utilization of capital for money making profits. All these capitalist activities require sovereign territorial entities or territorial organizational forms to …….. by force if necessary. The institutional and ….. regiments, such as property rights, stable currency, free sovereign individual entrepreneur and consumer market laws and so on, that underpin their functioning. Moreover, the continuity and speed in the circulation of capital froze, today, the National Trust circulation of capital froze. It depends of the creative destruction of the land. I think this is a very important comment David Harvey made a couple of years ago, “ Economic growth, industrialisation, urbanisation, imply in fact the conversion of a great deal of land to commercial, industrial, residential, tourist, conservationist and infrastructural use. The result is the exclusion of certain kinds of people to acess of land and land use.
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3 So, the problem is, what are the relations of power at work in these transformations? Who are the actors promoting or opposing this change? What dilemmas and debates does this change invoke and provoke? Who wins, who loses, on different sides and scales? How to definitely put all these different questions, from Australia but also from all around the world in the history of humanity together, in a way that highlights both their interdependency and their adopted particularity. These are …. Issues we’ll discuss and deal with after this session I think, and that’s why I’m looking forward to listening to our first contributor Ian Keen, who has 30 minutes to talk.
AUTHOR
LAURENT BERGER Musée du Quai Branly
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The language of ‘rights’ in the analysis of Aboriginal property relations
Ian Keen
The analysis of Aboriginal “property”
1 In an earlier article (Keen 2010) I looked at the ways in which Aboriginal “property” was (mis)understood by English speaking observers from quite early in the colonial period through to the present. A concomitant of the process of the colonisation of Australia and appropriation of Aboriginal land has been the misrepresentation of Aboriginal concepts and processes of relations to country. Observers interpreted property, especially in relation to land and waters, as if it were akin to English land tenure. I concluded as follows: …[C]ommentators interpreted Aboriginal possessions not only in terms of the all- encompassing concept of ‘property’, including personal possessions, land, wives (in one view) and ‘incorporeal’ things, but also projecting English social structure onto Aboriginal social relations. The tribe is the equivalent of the nation, with its common language, territory (which the tribe defends) and body of custom. It is divided into family groups, each with an ‘eState’. In several accounts, individuals inherit property in land from the father post mortem and pass it down to sons or to other close relatives in the absence of sons. The ‘family’ is thus constituted as a succession of individual landholders—reminiscent of aristocratic families holding land in entail. Radcliffe-Brown’s ‘horde’ with its property in land is in effect an expanded family. Certain class elements are read into Aboriginal social relations in interpretations of prominent individuals as ‘chiefs’ (for example, Dawson 1881). (The later ‘clan’ model introduces an element with a Scottish but not an English equivalent.)
2 While both personal and real property were said to be held exclusively—especially land at the level of tribe—they are not described in terms of commodities. The language of commodities creeps in, however, when it comes to the exchange of moveable items,
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described as ‘trade’ or ‘barter’. After all, ‘trade’ was a synonym for ‘commerce’ in eighteenth-century England and contrasted with the landed interest.
3 [Thus] Aboriginal society—at least in its dimension of ‘property’—is depicted through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a primitive form of English society. Terms such as ‘tribe’ (from Latin tribus) and (later) ‘clan’ (adopted into Gaelic from Latin planta) give the structure its exotic, primitive character—‘tribe’ used initially to label elements of Hebrew society and clan to denote Scottish kin groups. It is only when we come to Warner[‘s ethnography] (1937) that ‘property’ begins to be qualified and the possessions of ‘clans’ are given a special status, more closely reflecting the kinds of distinctions made by Aboriginal people themselves.
4 The language of ‘rights’ has dominated anthropological discussions of property, including relations to land tenure (Keen 2011), and discussions of Aboriginal relations to country in the land rights era following the enactment of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976), and again following the Mabo case and the subsequent Native Title legislation (Bartlett 1993).
5 The language of rights developed during the evolution of the market economy through the Early Modern and industrial eras in Britain and other European countries, and is specific to a particular social formation, albeit widely exported through colonial expansion. Concepts of ‘rights’ and ‘property’ are contested in legal studies and anthropology, however. It is rather extraordinary, then, that concepts whose meanings have been taken to be so problematic are used by anthropologists as if they were transparent instruments for translating concepts in other cultures. It is also strange that they appear to have worked so well, although their success may be illusory in the sense that their use has given rise to distortions and misunderstandings. (Keen 2011)
6 We may go further to argue that the very language of “rights” may be misleading when used to translate concepts of possession or property cross-culturally, and that it may bring about a distortion of the ways in which people use language to constitute relations of possession (Keen in press).
“Rights” as an anthropological meta-language
7 For the most part anthropologists have construed the concept of “property” in terms of rights, obligations and interests. Indeed, the idea of a “bundle of rights” has been proposed as the foundation for a general approach to comparison (von Benda- Beckmann, von Benda-Beckmann, and Wiber 2006; Keen in press). Von Benda-Beckmann et al. (2006) propose that the ‘bundle of rights’ concept can be used to express the totality of property rights and obligations, or in relation to a ‘master category bundle’ such as private ownership, or particular property objects such as land, or in relation to valued resources held by a particular person or social unit. Hann (2007: 308) comments that the ‘rights and obligations associated with land, the key factor of production, and with concepts of ownership, both collective and private, can be unpacked with the help of the “bundle” metaphor’ (p.308).
8 By the early twentieth century property was no longer regarded in legal theory as ‘absolute dominion’, as in Blackstone’s ideal, or as sui generis, but as a disaggregated ‘bundle of rights’. The modern understanding of property as ‘disaggregated’ is traced to the writings of Hohfeld in the early twentieth century (Hohfeld 1913, 1917; see also
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Gordon 1995:96), although scholars attribute the expression ‘bundle of rights’ to Maine (Hann 1998).
9 Nancy Williams study of Yolngu relations to country is a good example of the “rights” approach to Aboriginal relations to country; she writes of “tenure”, “interests” and “rights” held by members of “corporate” groups and their relatives among Yolngu people.
10 The use of the terminology of “rights” as a universal metalanguage is questionable, however, for it is very much culturally specific. The concept of “rights” interposes a claimed or attributed capacity or power as an imaginary object between a possessor and a possession. A right to or in something has the appearance of a kind of possession in itself – something a person “has” (Alchian and Demsetz 1973). This mediating concept enables the things that possessors can do in relation to a possession to be differentiated and divided. Where “rights” and related concepts are used as part of a metalanguage these implications of “rights” may be quite different from, and distort, the indigenous constructions that are constitutive of possession relations (Keen in press).
11 Aboriginal languages seem not to have terms translateable as “rights” – how then do people talk about what anthropologists construe as rights? Few ethnographies give examples of Indigenous discourse about possession, but rather translate into anthropologese. A rich source of Indigenous discourse on possession of country is Nicholas Evans’ report written for a Kaiadilt land claim under the Northern Territory Land Rights Act (Evans 1998; Keen in press). Drawing on Evans’ work I look first at Kayardild concepts of possession. (The forthcoming article compares Kaiadilt discourse of possession with Navaho and Southern Song China.)
Kayardild concepts of possession
12 Kayardild, a Tangkic language spoken until recently by Kaiadilt people of Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia (Evans 1995, 1998), has few verbs of possession and no general verb of possession akin to “have”. The verb karrngija, “keep, keep hold of”, frequently used in discussion of country, can mean “look after”, “guard”, and “be responsible for” something in one’s possession (Evans 1995:55). Yolngu use the word dja:ga (“look after”) in a similar way, as well as ngayathama, “hold”.
13 Possession in Kayardild is indicated by possessive pronouns and grammatical cases, which denote a variety of possession relations from inalienable to alienable possession. The simplest construction is apposition – what Evans calls the NOM-NOM frame (Evans 1995, 1998).
14 The relation of the person to parts of the body requires apposition or the NOM-NOM frame, and having something on one’s person uses the associative and perhaps proprietive cases. As for potentially alienable possession of objects (“ownership”), the genitive and ablative cases serve for attributive expressions such as “x’s country”, and the utilative and proprietive cases are used for predicative expressions as in “country- having person” (dulkuru dangkaa, countryPROP manNOM). In another mode of indicating possession of country, individuals take the name of a focal site (Evans 1998:96).
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Kayardild possessors
15 Tables 2 and 3 provide examples of possessive pronouns in Kayardild: “my country”, “his country”, “my sea”, “my spear”; and of collective possession as in “the country of my mother’s mothers”, “other people’s food”, “country-owning group”.
16 There are no Kaiadilt land-owning groups akin to “clans”, for owners of the same “country” (dulk) may be connected to it in a variety of ways including spirit conception, birth, and cognatic descent (Evans 1995). Nevertheless, owners of the same country are thought of as a single “country-owning group” (dulkuru jardi) rather than a mere collection of individuals (Evans 1998:53)
Kayardild possessions
17 The Kayardild language has no general concept of “property” (Nicholas Evans pers. com.). The same may be said for Yolngu dialects. Kayardild possessions in the examples are identified by nominals in NPs that are the direct objects of verbs such as “trespass” and “steal”. The focus here is on “countries” (dulk) – discrete tracts of land and waters, including streams, sea, islands, and fish traps (Evans 1998).
18 Each dulk consists of an area around a cluster of named sites, some regarded as mystically dangerous. Like other Aboriginal groups, Kaiadilt people believe that ancestral beings created the land as well as animal and bird life, and humans and their customs, before being transformed into features of the landscape or “story places” that “bear witness” to these original world-creating exploits (Evans 1995:21). Thus ancestral creation underwrites the inalienable possession of dulk. Many dulk are named after single focal sites, and defined by boundaries or edges where one country “cuts off”, giving way to another, and by lists of places along the coast, paths or creeks, given in explanations for visitors or neophytes (Evans 1998:63-5, 72). In this way the category dulk encompasses topographical discourse, the identity of places, and totemic narratives, under a concept of a unitary object possessed by a group or an individual.
19 The enactment of possession relations includes both the use of possessions and transactions characteristic of particular possession regimes. Those to do with Kaiadilt country include succession or inheritance of land and waters, negotiations over the use of other groups’ countries, and action taken in the event of breaches of norms (Evans 1998).
Deontological entailments of possession relations
20 Possession relations are characterised by deontic norms governing possession, and give it its character.
21 Deontic norms are rules or principles that create obligations and grant permissions and powers (Keen in press). Some are established by statutes and regulations, while others are informal and customary. Scholars often associate norms with modal operators such as “ought” and “must”, but they can be expressed in a variety of ways (Finnemore and Sikking 1998; Hechter and Opp 2001). Deontic norms (Beller 2008) govern possession relations and give them their content; these are the deontological entailments of the
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connection between the possessor and the thing possessed. The bases of possession are recognized, and deontic norms governing possession are current and enforced, within intersecting and overlapping jural communities of varying scope and power, from the family to the State (Goodenough 1965; Finnemore and Sikking 1998; Hechter, Opp and Wippler 2001; Sripada and Stich 2006). Means are required within jural communities to change norms (Ensminger and Knight 1997), to adjudicate disputes, and to enforce norms governing possession (e.g. Fehr 2004).
22 Deontic norms are current and enforced within jural communities of various kinds. Jural communities in Australian Aboriginal societies are typically kin-based networks within which people recruited support to protect their interests and to take redressive action against perceived wrongdoers, now subject of course to structures associated with the nation-State. This structure of “self-help” (Berndt 1965) lay within an overarching regional consensus as to the nature of ancestral law, whose foundation is attributed to creator ancestors (Keen 2004).
23 Norms governing possession of country in Kayardild have to do with access to and inheritance of land, waters and their resources (Evans 1998).How do people express norms about possession and possessions in Kayadild?
The expression of norms in Kayardild
24 Verbal and nominal case are the main means for expressing deontic modality in Kayardild, especially the potential, hortative, desiderative and oblique cases, together with the counterfactual particle maraka (Evans 1995:264, 428). The examples, which are mainly about land and waters, include: • Strong prohibition, with the potential inflection in the negative; • Weak prohibition, with the hortative inflection; • Expressions of obligation, with the counterfactual particle maraka; • Conditional constructions, with a deontic modal (in the imperative mood); • Normative Statements linking wrong action to ancestral law in declarative sentences and quoted questions; • Lexicalisation of wrong action, such as the verb “steal” (Evans 1998).
25 Notice the absence of any terms translated as “rights”.
A brief comparison
26 It may be of interest briefly to compare Kayardild constructs of possession with the other cases in the longer paper.
27 Kayardild lacks a general verb of possession and relies on wide variety of grammatical cases to express subtle distinctions in varieties of possession relations, as well as possessive pronouns and apposition.
28 Navajo also lacks a general possessive verb akin to “own” and “have”, but employs possessive pronominal affixes, what is call a “genitive/BE construction” translateable as “my x exists” (I have a car = my car exists), and certain idioms such as “I pack a gun” in which verbs are specific to object type.
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29 The expression of possession in literary Chinese of the Southern Song includes a “have” verb (you) and possessive pronouns and particles for kin relations, personal attributes and possessions. It might be tempting to relate this to the Song market economy; “have” verbs, however, exist in a wide variety of languages, including some Australian Aboriginal ones (McGregor 2001), which were not associated with market economies before the British colonisation of Australia.
30 The three languages use possessive articles, pronouns and pronominal affixes to identify possessors, and these extend to kinship relations, parts of the body, and personal attributes.
31 Kayardild and Navajo have no categories of possessions that can be translated as “property” in general, although Navaho has terms translateable as “junk” or “stuff’ and “that which I carry about”. Literary Chinese has a rich variety of property terms, concomitant with the role of the market in Southern Song society.
32 The linguistic means for expressing norms governing possessions vary between the three case studies. Kayardild expresses deontic modality primarily by means of grammatical case as we have seen. Like Kayardild, Navajo lacks modal auxiliary verbs (like “should” or “must”), and uses tense and various verbal idioms to express obligation, permission and prohibition (such as “there is space for” indicating permission). Literary Chinese expresses deontic modality by means of verbal auxiliaries and a particle. There is, however, a striking similarity in the range of expression of norms about possession in Kayardild and literary Chinese, for example in the use of expressions such as “according to law” and “that’s the law”. (I could find no examples of Navaho expression of norms.)
33 The ontological correlates of possession also vary. The “consubstantial” relations between people and country typical of Aboriginal cosmologies (Bagshaw 1998; Magowan 2001) contrast with the commodification of land in the Southern Song. The former render land and waters inalienable, as the relation between Pr and Pm becomes akin to the relation of a person to a part of the body and/or to a kin relationship. This kind of ontology also pertained in Navajo culture in relation at least to Diné traditional territory as a whole, reflected in the use-ownership of Navajo land. Land in Southern Song China was measured, bought and sold, as well as inherited. (In the longer paper I briefly related these ontologies to Strathern’s critique of the use of the term “property” for the PNG Highlands.)
Conclusions
34 To return to the issue of rights, although the language of rights purports to be able to accommodate variation in “property” relations cross-culturally, expressed as diverse “bundles of right” (von Benda-Beckman, von Benda-Beckman and Wiber 2006), an implication of this talk (and see Keen in press) is that the approach misses the diversity of conceptualisations and expressions of possession relations. The language of rights and obligations tries to capture what people can, cannot, must and must not do in relation to things possessed, according to shared norms and laws. No word or expression that can be translated as a “right” in the legal sense has emerged in Kayardild, however (or the other languages of the comparative study). To express deontic norms governing possession in terms of rights and obligations would require
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processes of inference and construction. Used as a metalanguage, the language of rights obscures much of the language and culture of possession relations, and by imposing the alien concept of abstract rights as mediating possessions, it may well distort what it describes. Here I have tried to show how what become construed as rights and obligations in anthropological and legal discourse are expressed in Kayardild.
35 There is an aspect of Aboriginal relations to country that adumbrates the “bundle of rights” idea, however, and that is the distribution of relations to country among groups and relatives of groups (including especially uterine descendants). The bundle of rights notion distorts these relations, however, through over-specification and rigidity.
36 The issue is of more than anthropological importance, for the process of recognising Aboriginal connections to country following Mabo II and native title legislation hinges on the analysis of connection in terms of “rights”. This is inevitable I suppose, since the exercise entails the translation of Aboriginal concepts to those of the Common Law tradition. But in recognising traditional connections, the process inevitably transforms them. Furthermore, the translation of Aboriginal connection into the language of rights facilitates their whittling away to accommodate non-Aboriginal interests.
AUTHOR
IAN KEEN Australian National University
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Australian Indigenous ‘artists’ critical agency and the values of the art market
Géraldine Le Roux
1 The recent integration of Australian Indigenous arts in the field of contemporary art is the fruit of a complex historical process deeply rooted in social and political relationships. The Aboriginal art market has grown exponentially over the last 40 years and the artwork has become an international icon of Australian identity. However, Aboriginal art has been, and to a certain extent, is still endangered by cheap imitations, fakes and the transgression of Indigenous artists’ rights and community protocols. These issues have been addressed by various inquiries and reports since the 1990s. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged from the scholarship produced by researchers, such as Howard Morphy, John Altman and others. These scholars conducted research on the community-controlled art centres and outlined in particular how they could be taken as business models. In their studies, the art centres are presented as inter- cultural institutions, which are both commercial and cultural enterprises in which Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people are active agents. The expression ‘Aboriginal Art. It’s A White Thing’ of the awarded-painting Scientia E Metaphysica (Bell’s Theorem) by Richard Bell highlights another vision of the Aboriginal arts sector. Drawing on the debates generated by this prize-winning work, I will analyse how artworks and discourses surrounding these debates are entangled in a complex process of value creation.
2 In this paper, I will first use Richard Bell’s theorem as an example of the critical agency of Aboriginal artists living in metropolitan cities, in order to draw attention to their valuable contributions to the arts sector. I will argue that their position as urban-based artists as well as Indigenous people gives them an overview of the process of definition, representation, circulation and regulation of what constitute the Australia’s Indigenous arts sector.
3 As key agents from the art world use many evaluative processes to construct and justify their choices, in the second part of this paper I will demonstrate how the marketing
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process reveals complex power relations within the Australia’s Indigenous arts sector. Some reports recommend that art dealers benefit from funding because they are more efficient than public officers to increase exports. What are the limits and effects of this financially-driven vision? To address this question, I will take France as a case study. Firstly, I will show that some major points are missing in the lists established by the government-agency reports. Secondly, I will address the dangers of having art dealers solely representing Aboriginal art. My conclusion will address the economic, social and cultural potentialities of stronger interactions between the art market, public institutions and the civil society.
I. Urban-based Aboriginal artists’ contributions to the debate on the art industry’s regulation process
4 In August 2003 the 20th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Award was given to the painting Scientia E Metaphysica (Bell’s Theorem) by Richard Bell. The painting was accompanied by a text, entitled ‘Bell’s Theorem’, in which the artist describes his views of the art industry. According to Richard Bell, the Indigenous arts sector is dominated by non-Indigenous intermediaries (art coordinators, anthropologists, curators, art dealers and critics) who define, assess, and control Aboriginal art. Bell argued that these intermediaries favour personal interests over that of the artists, imposing a ‘romantic’ notion of Aboriginal art. Bell denounced the commercial exploitation and hijacking of Aboriginal imagery. He also critiqued the industry’s favouring of Aboriginal artists from remote communities to the exclusion of those from the Southeast, whose works, associated with New Media, continue to have limited exhibition in museums and commercial galleries. Through his theorem, Bell argued that the industry should evolve and commit to training Australian Indigenous people instead of funding the employment of non-Indigenous people. ‘Bell’s Theorem’ summarised the criticisms commonly expressed by Aboriginal artists working in cosmopolitan cities; it also echoed the critics developed in the report We can do it! The needs of urban dwelling Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples published in 2000.
5 The Contemporary Visual Arts and Crafts Inquiry, known as the Myer Inquiry, was commissioned in 2001 by the Minister for the Arts to “identify key issues impacting on the future sustainability, development and promotion of the visual arts and crafts sector”. Amongst the recommendations, it was Stated that the Federal Government should undertakes research into the needs of the Indigenous visual arts and craft sector. Following this recommendation, the Senate established in 2006 a Committee for inquiry, with particular reference to, as you can see, the needs to improve its capacity and sustainability.
6 Richard Bell wrote his theorem the year the Myer Inquiry was commissioned; the exploitation of the most vulnerable artists by unscrupulous art dealers was not known to the large public at the time. As he Stated in his introduction, Bell’s aim was to bring to the public eyes some of the issues that was at that time only addressed by scholars and experts. As Howard Morphy (1995: 234) and other scholars have shown, Australian Indigenous people have been struggling to make Aboriginal art part of the agenda of Australian society. From colonial times, elders have intentionally transformed some of their cultural practices in order to generate a space of encounter with non-Indigenous
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people. As Marcia Langton said (1994: 90): “it is a process of incorporating the non- Aboriginal world into the Aboriginal worldview or cosmology, to lessen the pressure for Aboriginal people to become incorporated or assimilated into the global worldview”. The recent growth of the Aboriginal art and its integration in the field of contemporary art are the fruits of a complex historical process. Nonetheless, the rapid growth of the sector has led to new issues that Richard Bell challenged in his theorem.
7 Richard Bell’s 12-pages theorem is a difficult document to work with as it is a mix of points made with irony, pathos, angry and seriousness. I agree with John Altman when he balances Bell’s demonstration saying that (2005: 1) “Bell is quite right, Aboriginal art is a white thing, without State patronage, without white art advisers, and without white audience for black art, Aboriginal visual art would probably not exist today, to any widespread extent outside its localized ceremonial contexts. But in another sense, Bell is quite wrong - the critical mediating institutions, community-controlled art centres are not white institutions, they are both inter-cultural and hybrid - they have been born of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal processes, they are both black and white.” If we agree that Bell’s Theorem isn’t a structured analysis of the Indigenous arts sector, I propose for our analysis to see it as a performance. In this instance, Bell’s performance is a practice that transgresses the norms, questions the artistic production and engages the viewer in the process.
8 Richard Bell highlighted several points that years after the publication of his theorem became addressed by a broad panel of artists, art-workers and scholars who urged the Federal government to regulate the sector. Indeed he described the issue of the middlemen that work around Aboriginal artists in remote communities and bypass the artists’ relationships with art centres. Bell also critiqued the art industry which at that time hadn’t yet regulated seriously the issues of copyright, appropriation and fakes. In his conclusion, Richard Bell Stated in favor of an artists’ resale royalty and recommended the establishment of an advocate that could intercede on behalf of artists to effectively deal with such issues . These three points are amongst the major recommendations made by many artists, scholars and advocacy bodies in their submissions to the Senate Inquiry.
9 It is interesting to note that the year after Richard Bell’s performance at the Telstra award, the Queensland Government founded a new agency. The Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency (QIAMEA) is dedicated to leading the international marketing and export of Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts. By promoting the diverse work of Queensland’s Indigenous artists this agency has done a marketing work similar to the one done by the art centres from the remote regions. It has established opportunities for arts-practices and training, network expansion and enable more artists to gain national recognition.
10 Although the Aboriginal art market appears to be successful, it remains fragile and dependent on State patronage (Altman, 2005). Public funds are often politically- motived and inconsistent. I argue here that Bell’s performance, as well as other artists’ discourses, are an attempt to address the lack of coherence of governmental policies in relation to Indigenous affairs. At the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous issues in April 2010, the Bundjalung artist and curator Jenny Fraser pointed out in her talk that the Federal Government who had orchestrated the national Apology to the Stolen Generations should be careful in distributing the allocated funds. She Stated that the funds should not be only directed to reports and consultation programs. Funds
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should also be allocated to Aboriginal initiatives and groups who are willing to conduct their own experience. The sharp blend of pathos and irony in urban-based Indigenous artists’s artworks and talks is often a response to a certain political context where public Statements and legal acts often do not point in the same direction.
To conclude this first part
11 Since the beginning of the 21th century, there has been a rise in initiatives and campaigns undertaken by key arts organisations, resulting in the establishment of new industry codes and in the introduction of a range of governmental measures such as the introduction of artists’ moral rights, Indigenous communal moral rights, and an artists’ resale royalty. Artists, both from remote and urban regions, have played a major role in this evolution.
12 Many urban-based Aboriginal artists have arts-related occupations in the fields of museum, education and media. Many of them also sit on boards of advocacy bodies and arts departments. This broad experience gives them a global view on the art industry, from the producer’s side to the regulator’s side. Furthermore, as artists living in cosmopolitan cities and as Indigenous people, they often have a high understanding and knowledge of public funds, both from Indigenous agencies and arts departments, as well as of public policies. Collaboration between researchers - scholars or consultants - and artists could therefore be explored to address the needs of the sector and its sustainability. Indeed museum studies foresee how the creativity generated through arts skills stimulates innovation in the academic and cultural sector.
II. International Market
13 As Fred Myers highlighted it in the 1990s Aboriginal culture became “increasingly, the source of Australia’s self-marketing for the international tourist industry, the ‘difference’ they have to offer”. (Myers, 1991 : 53). Indeed, Aboriginal art became the basement of a multi-millions industry. The Myer inquiry and many other surveys that aimed to address the economic, social and cultural benefits of the Australia’s Indigenous arts sector have pointed out the need to further developing international markets. These reports mainly frame the promotion of Aboriginal arts in terms of business opportunities. One of them States that the public sector is less skilled in the area of international cultural trade than the commercial sector. To question the effects and limits of this economic vision of culture, I will now address some issues related to the promotion of Aboriginal arts in France.
14 Austrade is the Australian Government’s export and international business facilitation agency. In their submission to the Senate Inquiry, they provided a list of 7 Indigenous art export initiatives that were held in France in June/July 2006. Without any further inquiry, I can already count five more initiatives. Amongst these missing files, some of them have been conducted by art dealers who were the first ones to promote Aboriginal art in France. One of the other missing initiatives is an exhibition which received the support of the Australian Embassy.
15 Several reports recommend that art dealers should benefit more from public funds: they argue that with their knowledge of the art world and their networking art dealers would increase Aboriginal art sales overseas. This argument is highly problematic: as I
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have shown previously, policies makers don’t always have a big picture of the art international circulation chain. Secondly, the art promotion by art dealers often reflects economically-driven choices. The economic rationality influences art dealers to promote certain artists and make choices that are often different from the ones made by curators. To give a quick example, amongst all the art dealers who are currently working in France or who have done business here, only one has ever worked with an urban-based Aboriginal artist. They explain this choice saying that it’s difficult to market urban arts; they prefer to work predominantly with artists from remote communities and mainly from the Northern Territory. What are the consequences of this economic rationality in regard to the representation of Aboriginal culture in France?
16 There are several arts dealers who promote Aboriginal art in France and their various experiences are reflected in their commercial strategies. The dealer who has the most classical training in art history emphasises the value of the aesthetic. Another art dealer emphasizes his own career as an artist who has lived in the bush, his way of life becoming the argument for the authenticity of the works presented. I mention these autobiographical strategies to show how a third art dealer who has neither the argument of the life experience nor the diplomas has shifted the focus on the value of the meaning. He publicly acknowledges Indigenous values while he is in fact introducing artificial values that mainly serve his own economic interests. Let’s call him Mr. Pinçont.
17 Pinçont has a small gallery in the French countryside but he often organises exhibitions and conferences all around the country and edits catalogues, mainly written by him and illustrated by his own art collection. In his public talks and articles, he focuses on the Dreamtime and presents it as a fixed/ahistorical notion.
18 Death has always been central to the art word and it is not different in the Aboriginal art industry. Art dealer Pinçont, establishes a parallel between the death of the artists and the death of Aboriginal culture. He comments widely on a so-called lack of interest of the youth for the initiation process and for Indigenous values; He often speaks about the drug and alcohol issues. With this discourse, he creates the idea that “his” artists are the last ones able to paint “authentic” stories. This vision does not only represent Aboriginal society as a dying society, it also leads to a dangerous process of being prescriptive about what Aboriginal art should be and dismissing experimental forms chosen by some artists (Tamisari, 2007).
19 With the international boom of the Aboriginal art market as well as the increasing number of scandals around the Aboriginal art industry, the art dealers based in France have modified some of their strategies. Since the mid-2005, art dealer Mr Pinçont has presented more secondary-quality paintings: to his audience, he describes them as artworks done by famous artists and he justifies his small prices saying that conversely to his colleagues he doesn’t take a high commission and do not pay art centres’ commission as he bypass them in buying directly from independent workers.
20 The Myers and the Senate Inquiries both analyse how independent workers make deals with Aboriginal artists, bypassing relations with art centres. Although some of them are respectable and pay artists a decent wage, others have dubious practices. The worst of the carpetbaggers’ practices are unfair prices, payment with alcohol, and violent conduct. The most unscrupulous carpetbaggers attempt to disconnect the artists from their communities, inviting them to paint in cities, in hotel rooms or in backyards. By
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isolating the artists for a few days, they can influence them to paint specific stories, patterns and styles. In so doing, they encourage artists to neglect Indigenous protocols and to produce what consumers expect.
21 Many Aboriginal artists are aware of the feeble amount of money carpetbaggers pay them, self-consciously creating poor-quality paintings in return. The famous painter Emily Kame Kngwarreye has commented several times on this strategy of producing bad quality paintings for bad people. As one can expect, Indigenous agency, such as the one expressed by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, is rarely made visible in the art dealers ‘discourses.
22 If Mr Pinçont is a clear example of the Aboriginal arts exploitation, we should also note that in France most art dealers promote artists only if they fit with a certain vision of aboriginality. Some of them dare editing the story that goes with the certificate of authenticity made by the art centre or create the whole story if there is no certificate in order to make the paintings looks more “Aboriginal”. To my knowledge, none of these issues are described in actual reports and surveys on the Aboriginal art exports opportunities.
23 At the moment, the Australian Embassy’s website draws attention to the Indigenous Australian Art Commercial Code of Conduct. The Code is the result of the Senate Inquiry and aims to promote fair trade practice.
24 On the Australian Embassy’s website it is Stated that “members of the Indigenous Australian arts industry are expected to have signed-up to the Code by early 2010, after which the Embassy will give preference to working with Australian commercial entities that are signatories to the Code”.
25 The art dealer referred in my paper as Mr Pinçont is in the list of art dealers indicated by the Embassy under the previous Statement although he is not a signatory of the Code?
Conclusion
26 The Big Picture project recommends that “the Federal Government needs to appoint more cultural officers attached to Australian embassies and consulates to facilitate international exposure of Australian art and craft, and opportunities for practitioners to achieve direct representation.” In regard to the French context, more cultural officers could indeed conduct investigations and establish archives from the various commercial and non-commercial events that have represented Aboriginal arts since the 70’s. Reports written in Australia reveal a good understanding of the complexity of the Aboriginal art production chain and its circulation within the national territory but as I have quickly demonstrated here, their representation of the French network and how Aboriginal art come to France is not yet that accurate. Some might object that public officers take such reports as indicators of a tendency and not as exhaustive surveys. But with regard to how the sector operates, I argue that such reports are both symbolic of the dominance of the financial value over the cultural exchange value and vehicles for its reproduction. From the research I conducted during my PhD I can State that there are many more export opportunities in France than the ones suggested in the reports. There are indeed several museums with historical and contemporary Aboriginal art collections and many other non-profit associations who are willing to
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foster their relationships with Aboriginal Australia. As we know in the field of social sciences, interactions between the art market, public institutions and the civil society can be beneficial to each sector, with an increase of knowledge and art sales in return. Artists frequently acknowledge small-independent projects and recognize the values of alternative models of education and art dialogue as a critical counterweight to the expensive art fairs and biennales. In regard to the French export market, it could be interesting to investigate further how Aboriginal artists value these alternative events in comparison with the more-traditional commercial exchange setting.
AUTHOR
GÉRALDINE LE ROUX Université François Rabelais
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Conservation as development in Northern Australia: from policies to ethnography
Élodie Fache
Introduction
1 Since the mid-1990s, “ranger” jobs, groups and programs have been established in many indigenous communities of Northern Australia.
2 “Rangers” form a new category of Aboriginal social actors who are employed and paid to deliver environmental services through their activities that are generally described as “natural (and cultural) resource management”.
3 Their role is presented as based on the formalisation and professionalisation of “traditional” responsibilities towards the land and the sea referred to as “caring for country”.
4 Since their creation, ranger jobs, groups and programs have become a major focus of economic policies for indigenous people in Northern Australia and beyond.
5 These policies can be described, using Paige West’s expression (West 2006 : xii), as “conservation-as-development” policies since they assume that environmental conservation can induce economic development for indigenous peoples, especially in remote areas.
6 Researchers with a background in the social or environmental sciences have contributed to developing and articulating these policies, that are presented as the result of a bottom-up approach. Through their influence, they have brought the Australian State into adopting these policies. In the last few years, the federal government’s Working on Country program which is part of the national environmental Caring for Our Country initiative has indeed funded a few hundreds of ranger jobs. However, the consequences of this State funding for ranger groups and programs are ambivalent.
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7 This paper will sum up what the implementation of “conservation-as-development” policies in Aboriginal Australia is expected to produce. The point of view of researchers aiming to support what they consider a community-based “caring for country movement” and that of the State and its objectives differ, even if both parties seem to aspire to sustainable environments and new economies in Aboriginal Australia.
8 I will further contrast these expectations with the impacts of a specific ranger group and its activities in a community of south-east Arnhem Land. My ethnography has revealed that “conservation-as-development” policies imply the bureaucratisation of the local people’s relationships with their country; create differences, rivalries and conflicts within the ranger group and within the community; and is dependent on the ongoing intervention of outside bodies and non-indigenous people.
From policies...
9 The literature dealing with ranger jobs, groups and programs in Northern Australia argues that these jobs, groups and programs can improve the management and the sustainability of ecosystems and biodiversity in the “indigenous eState”, as well as create jobs and opportunities for economic development for Aboriginal communities.
10 For instance, Seán Kerins (2012 : 36) who has a long experience of working with indigenous rangers in the Top End considers rangering as “being at the cutting-edge of cultural and natural resource management and Indigenous development”. Rangering is also often presented as a viable “alternate development” option for Aboriginal Australia.
11 Researchers generally highlight the many “benefits” produced by, or expected from indigenous “natural resource management” initiatives. In particular, they stress the positive outcomes in the domains of environment, employment, the socio-economic and educational situation, as well as conditions of health and well-being.
12 The Stated aims of the federal government’s Working on Country program introduced in 2007 are also oriented towards natural resource management and indigenous economic development.
13 This program is expected, I quote, “to protect and manage Australia’s environmental and heritage values by providing paid employment for Indigenous people to undertake environmental work on country” (May 2010 : 7). It is presented as one of the key Indigenous-specific initiatives that support the nationalIndigenous Economic Development Strategy 2011-2018 (Australian Government 2011 : 8).At first, Working on Country was well received by the researchers who were lobbying the Australian and Northern Territory governments to increase and consolidate their investments in indigenous “natural resource management” (cf. Kerins 2012 : 39). For instance, this program was described as: [a] formal recognition of the important role that Indigenous rangers play in managing country (Morrison 2007 : 256) by Morrison, and by Altman and others as: a symbolic and practical breakthrough in recognising, respecting, and recurrently resourcing innovative community-based resource management efforts on the Indigenous eState (Altman et al. 2007 : 44)
14 However, the links of the Working on Country program with the federal government’s recent Indigenous policy agenda is now being pointed out and criticised. It is indeed
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linked to the Northern Territory Emergency Response usually called the Intervention, launched in 2007 by the Howard government and that was continued by the following governments. It is also part of the Closing the Gap framework aiming to close the statistical difference on life conditions between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. Both are presented by researchers as seeking to mainstream indigenous people’s aspirations, representations, social relations, practices and economies (cf. Altman 2010 : 277, Kerins 2012).
15 The researchers who were willing to support and to empower indigenous rangers by securing more State funding on their behalf, and in particular proper wages, progressively realised the conditions and constraints associated to Working on Country and other State-funded programs. For example, a “risk [that] indigenous people’s values and world views will be incrementally captured and reshaped by State processes” rather than respected in their own right was pointed out by Kerins (2012 : 43).
16 Thus, what “conservation-as-development” policies adopted by the Australian State are expected to produce both reflects and opposes the ambitions of the researchers who have contributed to the development and to the governmental reappropriation of these policies.
17 The State reinterpreted the researchers’ conservation-as-development discourse according to its own arguable priorities.
18 My fieldwork in a community of south-east Arnhem Land in 2009 and 2010 has led me to consider the existence of a gap between the expectations embedded in the conservation-as-development policies – mainly in terms of sustainable environments and new economies in Aboriginal Australia – and what the implementation of these policies produced at the local scale.
... to ethnography
19 The Yugul Mangi Rangers with whom I worked are described as one of the many “ community-based Indigenous land and sea management [...] groups”currently engaged in “cultural and natural resource management activities” in northern Australia(Altman et al. 2011 : 1).
20 This group was established in 2002 in a community of Arnhem Land called Ngukurr which developed itself in the seventies from an Anglican mission created in 1908. In the context of the contemporary Indigenous policy agenda, Ngukurr counting about 1500 inhabitants has become a “Northern Territory Growth Town”: one of the largest Northern Territory Aboriginal communities on which State funding is focused in priority.
21 This ranger group was first created by and for women only. Yet, it followed the steps of a group of local men who had undertaken a landcare project in this community in the nineties. These men occasionally worked with the women rangers until 2007, when they officially joined the Yugul Mangi Ranger group. Then, in April 2008, this group became an incorporated body through the establishment of the Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management Aboriginal Corporation whose official principal aim is, I quote: « to assist Traditional Owners to care for their land and sea country ».
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22 During my fieldwork, the core of this group was composed of 8 rangers, 4 males or 4 females, and up to 4 additional local persons worked occasionally with the team.
23 The Yugul Mangi Rangers’ main activities in a large area around Ngukurr included: fire management, weed management, feral animal control, coastline and river management, participation in collaborative ecological research, and wildlife enterprise development.
24 A major focus of my study has been to analyse the social interactions within the ranger group, between the ranger group and the Ngukurr community, and between indigenous rangers and non-indigenous people involved in their activities.
Bureaucratisation
25 This ethnography reveals that in Ngukurr, indigenous “natural resource management” is inherently a bureaucratic enterprise.
26 A first evidence of this is that the Yugul Mangi Ranger group is composed of people having different statuses: rangers, senior rangers and a coordinator.
27 These statuses require and imply interchangeability of the individuals who occupy each status, a differentiation of skills, and a hierarchy of the work space – three elements that can be considered testifying of a bureaucratic organizationof work.
28 Bureaucratisation can indeed be described in this case study, as suggested by Nadasdy (2003 : 7, 2005 : 225) who worked in a Canadian context and followed Weber, as a process of “rationalisation” of procedures and authority with regards to how indigenous people deal with the land.
29 According to one of the rangers, this structure was more or less imposed on the group by the Northern Land Council that had played an essential role in the creation and development of ranger jobs, groups and programs in the Top End of the Northern Territory since the mid-1990s.
30 Further, the establishment of the Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management Aboriginal Corporation was supposed to provide the ranger group with a culturally appropriate “governance structure” promoting local empowerment (POCRT 2010a : 7). However, according to Philip Batty’s analysis of the creation of « Aboriginal corporations » as part of the self-determination policy, the Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management Aboriginal Corporation can be considered a product and an instrument of the Australian State. Batty (2005) argues that this kind of organization represents a major governmental technology reflecting a contradiction of the self-determination policy: the State was willing to restore Aboriginal people’s self-determination power by building an Aboriginal bureaucracy modelled on and linked to the State bureaucracy (cf. Nadasdy 2003, 2005). The Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management Aboriginal Corporation is part of this Aboriginal bureaucracy.
31 This corporation was supposed to ensure that the rangers’ activities would be controlled by a board of leaders and traditional owners representing the sevenlanguage groupshistoricallyassociated with the Ngukurrcommunity and region. In fact, the involvement of its board in the rangers’ activities was very limited in 2009 and 2010. Some of the board members were complaining that there were very few board meetings and that they could never go into the bush with the rangers. Some of them were not even sure if they still were board members or not. The Chairman of the board
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himself interpreted his role only as being a formality and considered the rangers as, I quote, « a new system introduced by the government » (05/08/2009).
32 None of the board members really knew about, understood or controlled the rangers’ activities. Thus, the board didn’t provide any feedback to the inhabitants of the community that they represented; and these inhabitants didn’t know much about “their” rangers’ work.
33 When the Yugul Mangi Rangers secured funding from the Working on Country program in 2008, a few months after the establishment of the Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management Aboriginal Corporation, the Northern Land Council was put in charge of the management of this funding on their behalf: the rangers paid through this program became the Land Council’s employees, and the bureaucratic organisation of their work was even reinforced. Above all, it was expected by the Land Council that rangers would follow some strict and externally imposed time management patterns and rules, such as the opposition between work and leave, leave being for recreational, personal or ceremonial reasons; work weeks of 38 hours, 9-to-5 work days and one-hour lunch breaks; as well as the planning of activities annually or several weeks up front.
Creation of differences, rivalries and conflicts
34 This bureaucratisation process of “caring for country” responsibilities is based on the de facto transfer of these responsibilities to a professional and specialist body: the Yugul Mangi Rangers.
35 In other words, it is based on an opposition within the Ngukurr community between the rangers who constitute a minority monopolising the financial and technical means available to look after country, and community members who couldn’t and still can’t satisfy their responsibilities towards their country.
36 It is the rangers – and only the rangers – that outside bodies provide with funding, assets and assistance so that they can be involved in indigenous “natural resource management”. It is also the rangers who are contacted in priority by outside bodies and non-indigenous people about any issue or initiative related to the environment of the Ngukurr region.
37 The Yugul Mangi Rangers thus benefit from a certain power of local representation, information management, decision-making, negotiation, and resource control concerning the entire region. This distinguishes them from other inhabitants of Ngukurr. Actors take advantage of this situation of power.
38 The rangers’ uniform is a noticeable sign of the distinction as well as of the bureaucratic systems to which they belong. The rangers are supposed to « assist Traditional Owners to care for their land and sea country ». But, they generally undertake their activities without the involvement of the concerned traditional owners, who don’t know much about their work.
39 For some inhabitants of Ngukurr, the transfer of “caring for country” responsibilities to the Yugul Mangi Rangers was a necessary and positive move, since nobody lives in the outstations and homelands of the Ngukurr region anymore. However, other community members see this transfer of authority as being imposed on the local population and as alienating. Some people would rather prefer to be enabled to
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personally care for the territories and sites for which they have “traditional” rights and responsibilities or at least be involved in their management.
40 Traditional owners don’t necessarily support the rangers’ activities. Within the community, the legitimacy of thisnew category of actors caring for country on behalf of its custodians is sometimes questioned, resulting in latentor even explicit conflicts.
41 For instance, in 2009 and 2010, some people were blaming the rangers for not asking permission before going to and working on their country or for “trespassing”. Some people also accused the rangers who had culled or hunted feral animals on their country of having killed these animals “for fun”. And one traditional owner didn’t want the rangers to work on his country in the context of one of their projects if they couldn’t provide him with substantial royalties.
42 The relationships within the ranger group are of equal complexity to that of the relationship between the ranger group and the community.
43 Rivalries were frequent in this group, mainly between male rangers and female rangers. They culminated in 2010 when the women felt the men were increasingly excluding them from the activities of the ranger group and were using them as, I quote, “slaves”. They started considering a breaking point: quit their jobs or break the ranger group into two autonomous entities, one for females and one for males.
44 There also were rivalries and tensions within the ranger group about other issues, such as the access to the status of senior ranger or coordinator. The ways in which some projects had to be and were carried out created disagreements among the rangers too.
Ongoing exogenous intervention
45 The implementation of conservation-as-development policies in Ngukurr is tied to the establishment of a new category of local actors: the rangers; and also to the creation of a new category of non-indigenous persons involved in local affairs. These were agents supposed to assist the Yugul Mangi Rangers in managing, conserving and sustainably exploiting the environment in the Ngukurr region.
46 None of the rangers’ projects was carried out without exogenous involvement: each of their projects was dependent on the punctual or ongoing participation of one or more non-indigenous persons who generally played a major role in the projects. The rangers’ work plan and program were therefore usually organised according to the visits solicited by these persons. During the latter’s absence, in fact, the rangers didn’t work that often on these particular projects.
47 Non-indigenous persons were generally involved in all stages and all aspects of the rangers’ projects: the initial idea and the definition oftheproject; the planning, organization,implementation andmonitoring of its activities; the practices,representations, knowledgeandskillsonwhich these activities were based.
48 These non-indigenous people’s involvement in the Yugul Mangi Rangers’ projects contrasted with and contributed to explain the exclusion of local Aboriginal people from these projects.
49 I argue that this ongoing exogenous involvement in the rangers’ projects is an inherent (rather than incidental) part of the “ranger” system.
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Conclusion
50 The Yugul Mangi Rangers are not representative of all ranger groups of Northern Australia, since each of them has its specificities. However, this particular group should not be considered as an exception either. It is based on the same bottom-up approach and the same model as the other ranger groups of Northern Australia, and its projects are comparable to other groups’ projects and are usually labelled identically. Concerning its composition, funding and outcomes, this group rather seems to belong to the average figure.
51 Despite my uni-sited but long-term fieldwork in Ngukurr – a practice that does not seem to be frequent in the domain of studying indigenous “natural resource management” – I believe my conclusions are more generic and are applicable to other situations.
52 Processes of bureaucratisation, of the reshaping of social interactions, and of non- indigenous involvement in the field of indigenous land and sea management should be systematically explored, so as to enlighten the implementation of conservation-as- development policies in Aboriginal Australia in a more critical perspective.
53 It seems indeed necessary to further engage with the emerging research that goes beyond the quite homogeneous discourse promoting ranger jobs, groups and programs as a way of empowering indigenous people while improving the ecological management and sustainability of the “indigenous eState”, so as to offer a nuanced view of what indigenous “natural resource management” is or could be.
54 I also believe that it is necessary to interrogate the scientific advocacy of “caring for country” initiatives, since these initiatives potentially encourage the issues of bureaucratisation, cleavages and dependence on non-indigenous intervention I have touched upon in this paper. It is here necessary to question our scientific responsibility.
AUTHOR
ÉLODIE FACHE AMU-CREDO
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Speaking for the land. Looking at Aboriginal tourism today through the Bardi-Jawi example (Kimberleys, Western Australia)
Céline Travesi
Introduction
1 Bardi and Jawi are two Indigenous language groups from the Dampier Peninsula, in the north-west Kimberleys, Western Australia. Originally, Bardi and Jawi-speaking people lived on different although adjacent “countries” or territories. Jawi were islander people while Bardi lived on the mainland. They share the same kinship system, social organisation, and the same Law (Robinson 1973 : 106 ; Bagshaw 1999, 18–20 ; Glaskin 2002 : 41). They finally went to form one single group for their native title claim. Today, the Bardi-Jawi community numbers about a thousand people living on the peninsula.
2 In 1986, the government agreed to give them back a part of their land as freehold. This land was used to operate a lighthouse that had just been automated. Bardi and Jawi turned it into a tourist place. Once a campground, Kooljaman at Cape Leveque became one of the most successful Indigenous owned and operated tourist “resorts” in Australia.
3 At Kooljaman, Bardi and Jawi people operate the place and take decisions while non- Indigenous managers run the place on a daily basis.
4 Today, Kooljaman at Cape Leveque hosts about 30 000 visitors a year. The place offers campsites and other accommodations (including safari-tents, cabins, beach shelters), and a restaurant. Visitors can stay for the day or more and book Indigenous tours.
5 The Indigenous tours are based on activities like hunting, gathering and fishing, the local Indigenous interpretation of the landscape, and information about the local culture and history. They also allow visitors to access normally restricted land.
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6 Anthropologists working on Australian Indigenous tourism are not many. Jon Altman made interesting contributions regarding mainly the socioeconomic issues of the development of Indigenous tourism in Australia. One of these issues for instance was that tourism could affect “traditional economic activities” or the “traditional authority structures”. With Julie Finlayson (1992) they identified key factors for what they called sustainable Indigenous tourism development.
7 I mentioned Altman’s work because it is one of main anthropological research on Indigenous tourism in Australia, still it mostly addressed socioeconomic aspects or political economy, as most of the other research on Aboriginal tourism. However Indigenous tourism can’t be reduced to its economic aspects.
8 And although its economic potential was the main reason for Bardi and Jawi to engage with tourism, it is not their only motivation. Here I argue that symbolic and political aspects are central to an analysis of Australian Indigenous tourism.
9 More precisely, I’m concerned with the politics of knowledge involved in Indigenous tourism. By politics of knowledge I mean not only the conditions of production and uses of knowledge, but also the dynamics of its transmission, circulation, retention or dispute. The idea is to pay attention to the situations where knowledge becomes a political resource, to the ways it is shared or not, and how it can involves or serve power relationships. Looking at these politics in Bardi-Jawi tourism, it is possible to suggest that Bardi and Jawi tour guides try to enforce a right to control land access, a right that was only partially recognised by their native title. In fact they try to convince visitors to respect restricted land access. In doing so they more generally assert an authority to speak about the land on its behalf. But they also assert a discursive authority, the right to produce authoritative discourses and knowledge about themselves. Bardi-Jawi tour guides then reverse a relation of domination that is made tangible in their interactions with tourists.
10 One of the hurdles of Indigenous tourism development that Altman and Finlayson identified was what they called the “Indigenous reluctance to regularity and punctuality”. Most Bardi and Jawi tour guides actually take their time. But they used it to stress the specificity of their tours : they tell tourists that they will have to expect a tour with a different pace and adapt to local temporality.
Speaking about the land on its behalf
Respecting the land and respecting the people
11 At Kooljaman, tourists are asked to respect restrictions on land access. Since the determination of their native title recognising their land rights, Bardi and Jawi people can refuse, regulate and control the use and enjoyment of their land by others. So they ask visitors to seek for permission and to be accompanied by a Bardi or Jawi person when going beyond the public main road and communities.
12 Understanding and respect are two words used by most Bardi and Jawi tour guides to explain what they expect from tourists in relation to the land and the local people. And this means respecting restrictions on land access indicated by road signs and notices. The first reason that the tour guides give to explain these restrictions is cultural.
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Certain places contain significant spiritual sites and ceremonial grounds that even Bardi and Jawi people only attend on specific occasions and with caution.
13 Another discourse is concerned with tourists’ safety. Bardi and Jawi tour guides talk about a « duty of care », of their responsibility to warn their visitors who could get mad and even die by going to the wrong places that are imbued with metaphysical powers.
14 Finally, Bardi and Jawi also tell visitors about the existence of many invisible burial sites that they could profane without knowing it. This is usually a convincing argument because tourists say that they feel deeply concerned with these matters (maybe more than with the cultural ones).
15 Bardi and Jawi tour guides also speak about their connections with land as well as about their responsibility to look after it, introducing places with the following words : “this is my father’s country”, or “I’m the boss for this place”. They also explain that these connections and responsibilities give them the authority to speak on behalf of the land.
16 During their tour, Bardi and Jawi guides share and promote some of their extensive ecological knowledge. And they explain how to read the land and how to interpret the landscape.
17 Bardi-Jawi relationship with their land is presented as a very special one, made of understanding and respect. But the tour guides also reappropriate globalised discourses on the importance of taking care of and respecting the environment.
18 Now why talking about their connections with land and responsibilities towards it?
19 And why so much promoting ecological knowledge and presenting relationships with land as so special?
20 I believe that doing so, tour guides reassert their cultural entitlement to take decisions concerning land use and access. This entitlement is given by their various individual and collective connections with land.
21 This entitlement is given more legitimacy by the impression that Bardi and Jawi people have an almost natural ability to look after the land and to know what is best for it.
Bardi-Jawi tourism and politics of knowledge
Tourism as a new context of seeking for recognition
22 Bardi and Jawi people are in fact connected to different places within and beyond the limits of their land. According to people I met, connection gives an authority to speak on behalf of a place, as well as the responsibility to look after it. Connection also gives access to the knowledge that is associated with the place.
23 The more connections one can claim, the more knowledge he can get and more authoritative is his status. One can tell stories or share knowledge associated to the places he is connected with. But sharing stories or knowledge with which one has no connection, is only possible if permission has been granted. It is also required to acknowledge the person who did so and the place where the knowledge comes from. Thus possession and use of knowledge, through connections with different places, is a validating source of authority for Bardi and Jawi people.
24 It is possible to consider that talking to tourists about theses connections in addition to the celebration of a unique understanding and knowledge of the land, all work in the
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direction of an assertion of an authority over land matters. And this assertion arises in a context where Bardi and Jawi people try to enforce one of the rights recognised by their native title determination. In fact, this right, to refuse, regulate and control use and access to their land was only partially recognised : it was not recognised over the ocean (part of Bardi-Jawi “land” includes adjacent islands and their surrounding waters).
Teaching tourists
25 I argue that Bardi-Jawi tourism can be seen as another context of analysis of the Aboriginal political consciousness (Tonkinson, 1999) where knowledge politics inform broader political claims and assertions. In addition to the authority of decisions over land matters, Bardi and Jawi also assert a discursive authority, not just about the land but also about themselves. For in tourism they don’t just talk about land. They also produce knowledge about their culture and about who they are, and are not. For instance, they stress that they don’t blow didgeridoo and don’t make dot paintings. And the authority and legitimacy of this knowledge is made tangible in the positions of students and the relation of dependence in which tourists are put.
26 In their relationships with tourists, Bardi-Jawi tour guides are not just trying to convince people to respect restrictions on land access, that is to enforce a right, nor are they just asserting their authority over land matters, they are also reversing a relation of domination where after being told who they were or should be, they explain who they are. They assert a discursive authority is made tangible in the way tour guides not just share their knowledge but teach it.
27 Teaching tourists is an important concern for Bardi and Jawi tour guides. One of them, calling tourists his students often says that he’s “working hard on their brains”. He regularly asks questions during his tour in order to check whether or not tourists listen to what he says. He also likes to tease tourists about their ignorance.
28 To some extent tourists are also in a relation of dependence towards their guide. First, to access local ecological knowledge and to learn about the local culture and people, but also for material aspects, including indications on how to deal with the local conditions like the heat, the mud, the mosquitos or on how not to get lost in the mangroves.
29 Indigenous tour guides also tell tourists about cultural protocols and they cannot be told.
30 Sometimes tour guides even play the anthropologist, talking about some of the matters we discussed here, giving their interpretation of the contemporaneity of Aboriginal people, modernity and change. Whether or not they reappropriate anthropological or more global discourses, probably yes, but I believe that it is more complex than that.
31 However this analysis in terms of relations of domination should not be overStated.
32 Most tourists like the idea of learning something, and in fact ask for this. Learning about the local culture and history was one of the main expectations that came out of a survey I conducted with tourists. Some of them even said to me « that’s why we’re here, to learn ».
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33 Some thought that there was a lot to absorb and that it was hard to remember everything. But they appreciated the educative aspect of the tour and their tour guide’s pedagogic skills.
34 Moreover the tourist encounter cannot be reduced to this. Not all tour guides have the same kind of relationships with every tourist, so the situation should not be oversimplified. It is in fact far more complex, tour guides and tourists also acting out a kind of communitas, both looking for an experience of sharing. The first thing that Australian tourists and Indigenous tour guides share is a passion for the footie. Most of the time it is the first thing with which they begin when they start a discussion. But they also exchange political views about Australian politics and ideas about Aboriginal social issues or the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
Conclusion
35 Anthropologists already stress the important issue of knowledge and its production and uses in various contexts of contemporary Indigenous Australian politics (Hollinswoth 1992 ; Beckett 1988 ; Tonkinson 1999) and it is often seen as a political resource (Trigger 1997).
36 In Bardi-Jawi tourism it is used to assert an authority to speak about the land on its behalf, and to enforce a right to control access and use of the land, by convincing visitors to respect restricted access. But it is also used to assert a discursive authority, the right to produce authoritative discourses and knowledge about themselves. Bardi- Jawi tour guides then reverse a relation of domination that is made tangible in their interactions with tourists.
37 I argued that Indigenous tourism could be seen as another context of analysis of Aboriginal political consciousness (Tonkinson, 1999), along land rights, aesthetics movements or the arena of political activism, where what is asserted, although not always explicitly, is an authority to speak about themselves and take decisions.
38 This analysis of Bardi-Jawi tourism is maybe a call to investigate more systematically contemporary Indigenous knowledge politics in various contexts. These politics can help understand wider politics.
39 As for Bardi-Jawi concerns, what they obtain from tourism is of mixed results. Most tourists respect restrictions on access and some even support Indigenous claims of control over decisions. But some also overlook restrictions and can often be seen wandering around Bardi-Jawi country.
40 This short analysis of Bardi-Jawi tourism and its knowledge politics could be developed further to include a reflection about the consequences of these politics or their relations with the distribution of status and positions within the Aboriginal community.
41 From what has been discussed yesterday, it seemed that the tension between applied and academic anthropology was stronger than between Australian and European anthropology. But what reunite us today is a fieldwork where we all have to negotiate the right and conditions of conducting research and where the once-so-called subjects of the research ask us to question our own practices. And we have to question the way we want to conduct research. It has to be done according to strong research ethics and we need to understand that the people with whom we work are concerned with issues
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of discursive authority, authorship and control over the circulation of their knowledge or of knowledge that is produced about them. We need to understand and respect local politics of knowledge. As one Bardi man never missed an occasion to remind me (and it is the same with tourists), I don’t know much myself. The once-so-called “informants” of anthropology no longer want their knowledge to be taken away from them, nor want to be told who they are or taught what to do. Today they want to share and exchange knowledge and teach others, among which tourists and anthropologists.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Altman, Jon C. 2010. « What future for remote Indigenous Australia? Economic hybridity and the neoliberal run ». In Jon C. Altman et Melinda Hinkson (eds), Culture crisis : anthropology and politics in Aboriginal Australia, Sydney: UNSW Press, pp.259‑280.
Altman, Jon C., Geoff Buchanan, et Libby Larsen. 2007. The environmental significance of the indigenous eState : natural resource management as economic development in remote Australia. Canberra: Australian National University, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research.
Altman, Jon C. et al. 2011. Indigenous Cultural and Natural Resource Management Futures. Canberra: Australian National University, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, CAEPR Topical Issue N°9/2011.
Australian Government. 2011. Indigenous Economic Development Strategy 2011-2018. Canberra: Australian Government.
Batty, Philip. 2005. « Private politics, public strategies: white advisers and their Aboriginal subjects ». Oceania 75(3): 209‑221.
Kerins, Seán. 2012. “Caring for Country to Working for Country”. In Jon C. Altman et Sean Kerins (eds), People on Country, vital landscapes, Indigenous futures, Sydney: The Federation Press, pp.26-44.
May, Katherine. 2010. Indigenous cultural and natural resource management and the emerging role of the Working on Country program. Canberra: Australian National University, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, CAEPR working paper N°65/2010.
Morrison, Joe. 2007. « Caring for country ». In Jon C. Altman et Melinda Hinkson (eds), Coercive reconciliation : stabilise, normalise, exit Aboriginal Australia, North Carlton (Victoria): Arena Publications Association, pp.249‑261.
Nadasdy, Paul. 2003. Hunters and bureaucrats. Power, knowledge, and Aboriginal-State relations in the southwest Yukon. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Nadasdy, Paul. 2005. « The Anti-Politics of TEK: The Institutionalization of Co-Management Discourse and Practice ». Anthropologica 47(2): 215‑232.
People On Country Research Team. 2010. Yugul Mangi Land and Sea Management Corporation. Canberra: Australian National University, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. http://caepr.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/cck_project_partners/2010/04/YugulMangi.pdf (Consulté le 27 juin 2012).
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West, Paige. 2006. Conservation is our government now. The politics of ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham, London: Duke University Press.
AUTHOR
CÉLINE TRAVESI Université de Lausanne
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Foundation and continuity: Kimberley Aboriginal geopolitics
Martin Préaud
1 Hello & thanks.
Introduction
2 Two snapshots from the 2011KALACC Warnamirnti Festival • Graduation ceremony for Aboriginal Rangers from the groups developed under the KLC’s LSMU and other initiatives (e.g. Yiriman) = inscribing ranger work at the heart of Kimberley Aboriginal political culture; • KLC’s communication event: constant reference to Noonkanbah, its foundational struggle, in response to the controversies surrounding the Jabirr Jabirr claimant group signing a multi- billion dollars agreements for the development of a gas precinct at Walmadany/James Price Point
3 Two events that highlight the ongoing tension between environmental work, in line with international actions and concerns, and the mining activities that sustain the national Australian economy in a time of global crisis. In the Kimberley region, this tension, takes a particular form that I call the Noonkanbah paradox: how can a historical conflict where Aboriginal people totally rejected mining on sacred ground be taken by an organisation born in this conflict as a foundation for negotiating mining agreements? It certainly makes for a strange continuity.
4 In terms of this session title ‘sustainable environment and new economies” the Noonkanbah paradox begs the question: what kind of sustainability for what kind of an economy? Another way to put it is to ask where the Kimberley Aboriginal political movement is headed?
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5 To answer these questions, we need to put current development in Aboriginal natural and cultural resources management activities into historical perspective. I intend to do so here by combining two approaches: • A geopolitical perspective that analyses systems of actors and representations at various levels of analysis (I will here focus on the regional, national and international levels); • And a perspective informed by Frances Morphy’s model of Aboriginal sociality in the Fitzroy Valley area as one that is grounded in mobility and anchored in networks of places and networks of peoples (Morphy 2009). • Combining these perspectives allows to see geographical levels of analysis are not hierarchically organised but are rather levels of territoriality (place-making + patterns of mobility) that are topologically connected.
6 Using these tools, my aim here is to trace a genealogy of current Aboriginal involvement in sustainable development that allows to see how it is not only a reaction to changing constraints imposed and proposed by the settler State but is also the result of the operation of local Aboriginal institutions, socialities and political culture. I will focus on three moments and places in the recent history of the Kimberley (i.e. from the last century and a half) to try to outline the historical trajectory of aboriginal political movements in this particular region.
7 One of the foundations of and trigger for this presentation is this map presented in the Kimberley Aboriginal Caring for Country Plan, developed between Aboriginal regional organizations, rangers groups and the university of Notre-Dame through its Nulungu Centre for Aboriginal Studies. The map presents the main cultural blocs (a rerm borrowed from the anthropological literature on the Western Desert) through which caring for country as well as Law and Culture is negotiated between Aboriginal groups. It is a map that defies previous ethnographic and linguistic descriptions and hints at something that is rarely seen or discussed: that there are power relations and political struggles within Aboriginal institutions (or the customary sector) and that they operate through networks of alliances which use organizations and communities as nodes and points both of power and emergence. In effect this presentation aims to explain how such a representation of the Kimberley Aboriginal political field came to be so represented as well as effective.
Sheep and Cattle Settlement: displacement
8 Unique position of the Kimberley region in the national political economy and environment, geopolictical characteristics of the that bear on its trajectory and situation = • Diversity people, language, culture and country but linked through networks of exchange • Far removed from settlers’ places of power
9 One of the last areas to be settled, after first successful walkthrough by a white man = A. Forrest 1879 (great great uncle of Twiggy Forrest). A place still removed from Perth and Canberra (hence the ‘seagull syndrome’ = defiance towards fly-in bureaucrats)
10 Settlement process = • allotment and distribution of land through pastoral leases (sheep and cattle).
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• Linked to local conditions (natural resources in the form of abundant grassland and labour) articulated to wider considerations: ◦ Economic and political independence of the colony (founded on an ill-chosen site and deprived of convict labour mid 1860s) ◦ Economy of the British empire
11 Impact on Aboriginal people and countries : From prison to labour • Death (disease, shooting and massacres, deportation) • Massive displacement and movement (mostly forced but also voluntary as in the great migration of people out of the desert) ◦ Ecological impacts on Aboriginal countries: unattended countries, imported ecosystem and struggle against local conditions and populations. ◦ See map: colonial institutions follow the appropriation of land either outside (to remove hostile populations) or within pastoral areas (to use their labour) = places where aboriginal population were supposed to establish themselves and remain (the Act preventing movement and free circulation) ◦ However, the colonial system in the Kimberley, after the initial and violent confrontation, amounted more to a form of what historians have described as “impoverished neglect” where the colonial discipline could not be absolutely enforced, leaving room to manoeuvre for Aboriginal people, especially in terms of circulation on Country for those people who were enrolled in the workforce on pastoral stations. The term “outstation” that is used to describe the homeland movement comes directly from pastoral work and practice. In many ways, the moving out of stations after the Award wages decision at the end of the 1960s had a greater effect in terms of sedentarization of Aboriginal population, at least until people could afford to buy their own vehicles and obtain to establish their own communities.
12 One of the key places of that era is the establishment of the government station of Moola Bulla (but there is also Beagle Bay): a government station to reduce costly incarceration rates + place for the relocation of stolen children. Evacuated overnight in 1955 and moved to the Fitzroy Crossing mission (assimilation policy) • = a core place for the transformation of Aboriginal networks and what may be described provocatively as a creolization process, where creolization designates: « this series of changes that are due to the displacement of populations, the mingling of different cultures, their moulding under the heavy constraints of colonial society, and the emergence of a specific society (Benoist 1996: 118) .7
Communities and organizations: creolization
13 Transformation of Aboriginal networks: fewer people on country, places of higher population density • Migration out of the desert towards the fringes in all direction, including the river country of the Kimberley, extension of the 8 skin kinship system as a common reference throughout the region, Walmajarri used as a lingua franca, circulation of new initiatory cults between desert groups (Akerman’s ring of fire). • New alliances and relations between people (and countries) that had not been directly connected previously, particularly in places for mixed-descent people (Beagle Bay, Moola Bulla, Swan River, etc.),
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• These new social entities became visible after the Award wages decision and the first phase of people going back to country to escape their impoverishment near towns, establishing communities and outstations on the basis of the communities they had formed within colonial institutions. • These communities are integrated into a network that has profoundly changed because of greater distances between places: the network exchange has taken a more collective character as described by Kolig about religious practice by and as shown in the network of trade drawn by Akerman in the late 1970s = from relations between individual people anchored in specific places to relations between communities. But while Kolig argued for a change in consciousness I would rather insist on the adaptation of Aboriginal practice to changed conditions (see also Widlok’s, Glowczewski’s and Poirier’s works on nomadic rituals).
14 Noonkanbah: Emergence of a regional political identity • These changes in aboriginal networks of alliance and trade fuelled by the migration out of the desert, but also changes in patterns of mobility, amount to a process of creolization insofar as they have resulted in the emergence of a regional political identity, despite the initial diversity of groups, people and circumstances. What brings people together at this time is a common experience of settlement, displacement and disconnection. A different society is born out of this historical trauma, although it is never expressed as such. The Kriol may be the main aboriginal language spoken in the region, it is not the support of new identities. Creolization in Aboriginal terms is rather expressed in the 2 way paradigm, the acknowledgement of difference as the foundation for relation. • These new societies born of the settlement history, represent themselves publicly for the first time during the Noonkanbah dispute at the end of the 1970s, which is also the moment when the first grass-roots aboriginal regional organization was founded, the Kimberley Land Council, inspired by the institutions established in the Northern territory after the 1976 Aboriginal Land Rights Act. • The Noonkanbah dispute, a conflict over mining on sacred land, represents the beginning of modern Aboriginal politics in the Kimberley in the sense: ◦ That it uses non-Aboriginal processes of representation and is fuelled by cooperation with non-racist whites (Kowal) ◦ That it creates or renders visible a new political identity “Kimberley Aboriginal people” that will be sustained by two other regional organisations (KALACC, KLRC) ◦ That it operates at different levels: ▪ Regional and national (Western Australian) through elections, political mobilisation through strikes and walk-offs ▪ National (Commonwealth) by sending delegates to the newly formed National Aboriginal Consultative Committee ▪ International by sending delegates to international conferences of indigenous peoples and to forums on indigenous rights with the United Nations system (Noonkanbah is, to the best of my knowledge the cause of the first aboriginal delegation to the palace of Nations in Geneva). • In the 1970s and 1980s, through the era that is sometimes described as self-determination (although the notion as applied in Australia should be taken with a lot of caution), community organisations have become the main vehicle for political engagement and involvement in the Kimberley as in the rest of Aboriginal Australia. They have become places in the strong sense of the term, and incorporated into Aboriginal networks of sociability, mobility and power relations.
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• In effect, aboriginal organisations incorporated under the Aboriginal Communities and Associations Act 1976 have become the point of articulation between State processes and policies of recognition and Aboriginal institutions. But the important point here is that this articulation was not fully thought through. In particular it proceeded from idealized notions of what Aboriginal cultures and societies were, not taking into account the transformations at work within aboriginal societies - in terms of demography, mobility and changing relations of power -, resulting in ambivalent results to say the least. • This is even more obvious when we consider the new political phase in the Kimberley opened by the adoption of the Native Title Act 1993, the only land rights process available for Aboriginal people of Western Australian, and the one on which recent developments in sustainable management are founded.
Native Title: re-territorialisation
• From the award wages decision, going back to country and securing recognition of Aboriginal people as authorities over the management and development of their countries, has been a major focus of political activity. In Western Australia, in the absence of land rights legislation, this process of re-territorialisation was permitted through the activism of the Kimberley Land Council as well as federal support and negotiated settlements through the Aboriginal Lands Trust. • The adoption of the Native Title Act in 1993 opened a whole new era for political activity in the Kimberley – 80% of the Kimberley being subject to native title claims (with 45% already determined in favour of claimants). In particular, the preparation of land claims has been crucial for allowing people to physically go back to countries that they had not been able to visit for a long time, particularly in remote desert areas. • However, native title processes do not amount to full title and they have profound impacts on aboriginal sociality through a regime of what Patrick Wolfe calls “repressive authenticity”, that is the necessity for claimant groups to conform to anthropological fantasies as formalised in juridical processes (Povinelli’s cunning of recognition, Debbie Roses’s deep colonialism). As such, native title processes participate to a fragmentation of Aboriginal identities and is a major source of conflict and violence within Aboriginal societies because they deny the effective historical and sociological processes of change, adaptation and transformation that I have outlined previously. • On another level, the Native Title Act has also profoundly transformed Aboriginal postcolonial institutions, especially the Kimberley Land Council; in fact, its transformation into a Native Title Representative Body and incorporation into the operation of the Native Title Act are at the core of the current conundrum at James Price Point (see also Patrick Sullivan’s recent work). • In many ways, native title captures Aboriginal processes of territorialisation and transforms them into something that is less flexible and dynamic, more controllable by State administrations. But they are also the main basis on which natural and cultural resources management programs can be developed. And while the native title regime is regularly condemned at the international level, sustainable management of country is promoted as an example of good practice at the national and international level. Indeed, the IPA process may be one of the rare areas in which the Australian Government is able to implement Free Prior and Informed Consent as it is understood in international law and in particular in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; the cynical point of view would be to
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say that it is only because IPA processes are conditioned by the recognition of Native Title which is the opposite of FPIC and negotiation in good faith. ◦ It is interesting in this regard to observe that the impulse for the development of land management activities by Aboriginal people in the Kimberley came from the community of Jarlmadangah, where land tenure is secured through a pastoral lease, rather than from a determined native title area. And it is even more interesting to see how the Jarlmadangah initiative has first been developed through the KALACC rather than the KLC, even when the KLC had set up its Land and Sea Management Unit and even though the main leader at Jarlmadangah is a former director of KLC and one of its permanent special advisors. Interestingly, prominent figures from this community have also been among the strongest advocates for the negotiation of a mining agreement at James Price Point, arguing that it is a necessary condition for true their self-determination.
15 In terms of geopolitics, the development of aboriginal ranger groups in the Kimberley crystallizes the convergence of processes operating at different levels of analysis: • International: alliance between ecological NGOs and Indigenous movements, developing the idea that Indigenous peoples throughout the world are the custodians of biodiversity and Mother Earth; willingness of the Australian State to appear as a promoter of indigenous rights. • National: ◦ incorporation of aboriginal socialities and activities into the market economy, promotion of sustainable development through a paradigm of private property/ownership rather than relation: “Caring for Our Country” rather than Caring for Country ◦ mimetic processes between regions, construction of a national network of aboriginal land managers (C4C conference), building up towards an international network • Local/regional: existence of 2 way leaders in the region, proven capacity to work through regional networks, close connexion to country as recognised through Native Title and other processes + representation of environmental work as inscribed in a long-term continuity of people caring for country through ritual and mobility. • The convergence of these processes goes some way to explain the successful development of NCRM activities on aboriginal land in the last fifteen years, but because it is based on opportunistic alliances it also raises the question of their sustainability and economic viability: the number of jobs created remain relatively small and there are ongoing concerns as to the long-term funding of the Working on Country program by the federal State. In a sense, this development resembles that of the painting movement as an economic niche for Aboriginal people living in remote areas and still actively involved in what some describe as a customary sector of the economy. Although the work in itself is directed towards sustainability, its economic basis may not be, even more so given the ongoing push for: ◦ A mode of development in remote areas closely articulated to mining activities, perhaps especially in WA ◦ The relocation of aboriginal people from remote communities and outstations towards better serviced urban areas.
16 CCL: Noonkanbah paradox = Choiceless decisions: the permanence of the political economy of the Australian State
17 In this presentation, I have attempted to outline the particular historicity in which current ‘Caring for Country’ activities are inscribed. I have argued that it is necessary to build a political history of Aboriginal organisations both in relation to Australian
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governments and in relation to Aboriginal institutions enshrined in patterns of mobility, exchange and sociality.
18 Going back to the title of this presentation, I would argue that the strongest continuity at work here is not so much situated within Aboriginal political practice (although there are continuities that should be taken seriously) but rather in the political economy of the settler State (Western Australia) which continues to see Aboriginal people and their Countries as resources that can be put in determined boundaries, appropriated and commodified, rather than as relations and interlocutors. The fact that the Commonwealth government acts differently - sometimes, and in very specific areas – goes some way to explain how Aboriginal organisations find themselves in situations of choiceless decisions so characteristic of the ongoing struggle and drama at Walmadany/James Price Point.
19 Thank you for your attention.
AUTHOR
MARTIN PRÉAUD LAIOS-ERC SOGIP
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Thursday, January 24th 2013
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Thursday, January 24th 2013
Michael Houseman (dir.) Kinship, gender, and social relatedness
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Introduction
Michael Houseman
1 OK, so today we’re moving onto a session on kinship, gender and social relatedness and all that jazz. This has been the object of a fair amount of debate in the past, and presumably it will be so in the future. For those who don’t know me, my name is Michael Houseman. I’m closely linked to Aboriginal Australia through affinity, but I’ve done a little bit on kinship as well, and this is Ian Keen who will be discussant and will take up the challenge of wrapping the different papers together, at the end.
2 So, we’ll start with André Grau, who worked in Tiwi island, and I know her as someone as the anthropology dance, but today she’s switch hitting as a kinship bias here, and she’ll talk about a quality of being, embodied kinship amongst the Tiwi of Northern Australia.
AUTHOR
MICHAEL HOUSEMAN EPHE
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A quality of being: embodied kinship among the Tiwi of Northern Australia
Andrée Grau
Setting the scene
1 Thirty years ago, almost exactly, I argued in my PhD thesis that, among the Tiwi, dance was kinship-in-action, not so much because it reflected kinship practices in other social domains - which it did - but because I observed on the dance floor kinship relationships being explored and new ones being generated. As I put it then ‘the kinship dances are not models of, but rather models for kinship practices’ (Grau 1983: 333).
2 The anthropologist Jane Goodale coined the term ‘kinship dances’. In her book Tiwi wives, she described them as ‘special types of dance performed by individuals or groups of kin who have a particular relationship to the deceased’ (Goodale 1971: 300). It is important to note here that among the Tiwi, almost all dance performances are dedicated to someone, dead in the context of mortuary rituals, alive in the modern contexts of celebrations for weddings, birthdays, or graduations. The bereavement term and status given to an individual becomes by extension the label given to the dance they are entitled to perform and the modern contexts follows the structure of the mortuary rituals.
3 In my work I have contrasted this part of the dance repertoire with another, which I have labeled the Dreaming dances.
4 In 2007 the artist Pedro Wonaeamirri, Vice President of the Jilamira Arts and Craft Association commented, in the context of an exhibition of the works of late Kitty Kantilla at the National Galery of Victoria.
5 I perform my brolga dance and my tide dance in ceremony when I dance with my cousin brothers [.W]e1 share the same songs when we dance for my uncle and aunty. But when I’m dancing my totem, it’s separate, because when I am dancing brolga, it’s a
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dance that belongs to me and also a special song to go with the brolga. When dancing in a ceremony, our dances are based on the relationship with the deceased person. Only sometimes I dance brolga at ceremonies. (Wonaeamirri 2007).
6 One can therefore see a contrast between the two groups: the Dreaming dances belonging to specific individuals and lineages, the kinship dances belonging to all, the former marking the relationships between dancers and environment, the latter cementing social relationships.
7 Although I knew from my reading prior to fieldwork that understanding kinship was essential to working in an Aboriginal community - that indeed kinship was then still the hard core of anthropology - I had not quite anticipated that I would end up compiling vast amount of genealogies in order to understand dance. On my very first day on Melville Island, however, I was made aware of the very close connection the Tiwi made between dance and kinship. When I mentioned my interest in dance, I was told: ‘you dance like this (with your fists clenched opposite your mouth) for your mother’, ‘like this (with the hands underneath your breasts) for your daughter’, and ‘like this (holding your leg) for your brother’. It was quite clear therefore that kinship was going to have a prominent place in my analysis of dance and I learned quickly that the kinship dances were at the core of the mortuary rituals.
8 Kinship, as Alan Barnard and Anthony Good would have it, ‘appears to be the one area of anthropological discourse where the ground rules are clearly laid down’ (Barnard and Good 1984:2). I could therefore be quite systematic in going deeper into the kinship dances. Many scholars had worked among the Tiwi and most had listed kinship terms and discussed kinship organisation. Drawing on this work, I started to ask questions of the type ‘how do I dance if such and such a relative dies?’, slowly building up the kinship dance system. Alongside I compiled genealogies so that I could correlate what was happening in practice, noting who danced what, with whom, and for whom and compared it with the model, being especially attentive to the instances where practice did not fit the system, since I was very much aware that one has to be careful with the very notion of prescriptive models. I was therefore contrasting what Laurent Dousset has referred to as the ‘rather formal grid of rules and expected behaviour tied to marriage prescription, kinship terminologies and kin categories’ with what he describes as ‘the more flexible form of relatedness’ (Dousset 2005: 21).
9 My first observation was that many of the kinship dances were focusing on specific body parts. The connection between body parts and kinship, or body part and land is fairly common in Aboriginal Australia. Indeed according to the linguist Michael Walsh ‘Australian languages are pervasive in the use of body parts metaphors’ (1996: 328). The anthropologist W. H. Stanner, for example, commented: ‘Our word “land” is too spare and meager […] the Aboriginal would speak of “earth” and use the word in a richly symbolic way to mean his shoulder or his side’ (Stanner 1979: 30).
10 What does not seem to be so common, however, is to have a whole body of kinship knowledge explicitly articulated through the dancing body, many body parts being linked to specific kin: the legs representing a certain kind of sibling, the cheek: another, the abdomen: a woman’s children or a man’s sisters’ children, the shoulder: the in-laws, especially a man’s mother-in-law, the groin: a man’s children or a woman’s brothers’ children, the big toe: the husband.
11 Many of the kinship dances are simple choreographically in contrast to the other dances of the repertoire, consisting often – but not always - of holding the specific body
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part with one or both hands while performing generic feet movements, shared with most other dances. Whilst this relationship between body parts and specific individuals was used in everyday life, for example when a man touched his shoulder to allude to his mother-in-law, nowhere else was it as clearly articulated as in dance.
12 Furthermore I would argue that the literal incorporation of kin within the dancing body is not metaphorical or symbolic, but that it is “real” in the sense that it is about creating a special quality of being and of relatedness between individuals. To use Michael Houseman’s expression, I contend that a special ‘quality of action’ (Houseman, 2006, p. 413) is created in the dance. I have discussed elsewhere (Grau 1993) how being a mother or father did not depend on sex or gender, for example: Tiwi men danced that they were pregnant, giving birth and breastfeeding, whilst women danced about finding spirit children. Being a mother or a father was therefore primarily a quality of relationship rather than being a biological one and both women and men experienced both roles.
13 The dance floor was also a space where the agendas of competing constituencies – often kinship based but not always - could be articulated and confronted with one another and where the heterogeneous aspects of the society could be sorted out (cf. Grau 1995). Through dance some Tiwi manipulated their social reality. Depending on how one looks at a genealogy, looking at the relationship between two individuals via the mothers, via the fathers, or via the spouses one can have different results about what role an individual should or could take in the dancing. Sometimes, in such cases, the dancers performed all the dances associated with their roles. Sometimes they chose to perform one role only, thus emphasising a specific relationship. And occasionally they manipulated the system to avoid performing the dance that genealogical connections prescribed them, and performed another dance related to the message they wanted to send. I have described elsewhere, for example, a woman who used dance in such a way as to protect her daughters from men she did not want them to marry (cf. Grau 1994).
14 I would therefore argue that for the Tiwi, and for many Aborigines, their relatives are inside their bodies. When individuals felt a pain, for example, they usually interpreted it as a warning of illness or even death of specific relatives and more often then not this was indeed the case. To me this embodiment of kinship is no different to the embodiment of land that is often discussed, as for example, when Aaron Stuart, the chair of the Arabana Aboriginal Corporation RNTBC (Registered Native Title Bodies Corporate) commented last year ‘Our land is our identity; It’s who we are’ (Stuart, in Hull 2012: 5). In neither case, I would argue, are people speaking metaphorically or symbolically.
15 Let me now turn to the kinship dances.
The kinship dances of the Tiwi
16 The Tiwi recognised both patrilineal and matrilineal principles of descent and belonged to descent units of both types. It was well illustrated in the kinship dance system, which can be divided into categories of patrilineal, matrilineal, and affinal dances. Goodale too recognised this broad division. Her analysis, however, described six kinship dances, whilst I observed ten. It is worth noting that some of these dances were physically almost indistinguishable one from another, unless one was constantly aware of them in movement terms and kept checking what the movements meant. Eric
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Venbrux confirmed my model. In his book A Death in the Tiwi Islands, he also refers to ten dances and, drawing on my and Maria Brandl’s work, he provides descriptions very similar to my own, given twelve years earlier (cf. Venbrux 1995: 235-237).
17 Time does not allow me to present the whole system here and in any case I have described it elsewhere (Grau 1998). I will first make some general remarks and then focus on one dance, the mutuni, the dance for the “cousin brothers” that Wonaemirri referred to earlier, as illustration. Throughout the following account I will use the past tense as it is based on observations made in the early 1980s and the late 1990s, rather than now.
18 Looking at the dances overall one sees that, although the kin terms stressed a speaker’s own and related matriclans (there were twelve terms used for people in this category as distinct from eight terms for patrilineal relatives) the dances stressed the patrilineal side of the family. Altogether there were five patrilineal dances, three matrilineal dances, and two dances associated with relatives acquired through marriage.
19 Four dances were reciprocal, i.e. the person for whom the dance was being performed would have danced in the same way if the roles had been reversed as they were of a similar, though not necessarily always equal, status. In these dances one sees that the mutuni, which I will discuss later, emphasised the patriline of the deceased, the paputawi stressed his/her matrilineal affiliations, and that the impala and the amparuwi recognised his/her affinal affiliations. Six dances were non-reciprocal dances, i.e. the person for whom the dance was being performed would have performed a different dance if the roles had been reversed. The units mamurapi turaa/wunantawi pulanga and krimirika/kiakiae emphasized the patriline and the meeting between Spirit Children and their fathers and fathers’ fathers. When men and children found each other the children received part of their identity in receiving their Dreamings. The unit mamurapi pularti/wunantawi pularti on the other hand emphasised the matriline and the link to the ancestresses, the daughters of Pukwi, the Sun-woman, who created the Tiwi world and from whom every Tiwi is descended.
20 Looking at kinship through the kinship dances gives a dimension different to those previously given by other anthropologists working among the Tiwi. It has been said, for example, that in Tiwi society individuals looked towards their matrilineal kin in the field of physical welfare but that in spiritual matters and in ritual obligations they looked towards their patriline (Brandl 1971:229). From the perspective of the dance, however, this observation needs to be qualified: it is true that the patrilineal dances were mainly concerned with Spirit Children, but the movement of the respective dances also showed the physical making of the child, as well as the physically caring relationship between fathers and children. Similarly although the matrilineal dances were about the physical welfare of individuals, in that they dealt mainly with pregnancy and motherhood, they were reaffirming the links with Pukwi and the Dreaming. In addition, the accompanying songs often related to specific Dreamings and the spiritual associations between individuals and their land.
21 The organisation of the final mortuary ritual followed a specific order of performances. The system, however, did allow a certain amount of flexibility in that not all categories of personnel necessarily had available members at the time, either because people were not around or because they simply did not exist. Usually the order was: first the patrilineal relatives, then the in-laws, then the matrilineal relatives, and last the amparuwi, people who were in the category of widows/widowers.
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22 Let’s now turn to the mutuni dance.
The mutuni dance
23 The patrilineally organised sibling group, the aminiatuwi performed the mutuni dance. One was mutuni if one called the deceased ngiaingkalapini (paternal half-brother belonging to a matrilineal «clan» other than one’s own), ngia ingkalapa (paternal half- sister belonging to a matrilineal «clan» other than one’s own)2 or if one was aminiati (pl. aminiatuwi) with the deceased, that is if one shared one amo (FM, FFZ, MFZ, FZD) or one amini (FF, MF, FMB, FZS). Aminiati was the only kin term, which implied equality between the people who used it. All the individuals who comprised the mutuni group were considered the «same». During the mutuni dance the performers held one or both cheeks with one or both hands. The accompanying songs often referred to the cheeks looking like rocks, such as those found on Pungalo.
24 It is interesting to compare the accounts and discussions about the aminiatuwi given by different anthropologists. Charles William Hart argued in the 1930s that members of this unit maintained exclusive rights to a geographical area validated by the presence of the grave of the common fathers’ father in the area, and that only those individuals descending from an important man (a man who had enough wives to produce enough children and grandchildren to enforce their claim and demonstrate their existence as a localised social group) belonged to such a group (1930:173-5). Goodale, on the other hand, who did her first Tiwi fieldwork in 1954, followed by a short one in 1964, and again a long one in 1980, when I started my own,3 disagreed with this view of the aminiatuwi being a non-universal social group. For her, it was a patrilineal sibling set, ‘conceptually parallel to the matrilineal sibling set so that members of such a set were considered as being «one person» by kinsmen outside the set’ (1971:97). However she saw it as being ‘overshadowed by the matrilineal system of affiliation’ (1971:98)
25 My own analysis brought another emphasis. Documenting the mutuni dance I was told that it ‘marked’ a relationship between equal individuals related through someone important, amini or amo (it is worth noting too that linguistically amini and amo are also masculine and feminine adjectival suffixes meaning «big»). Looking at who performed the mutuni dance together, my data also showed unequivocally that the sex of the linking relative was not always male, as had been argued by both Hart and Goodale, though it usually was.
26 The importance of this group was reflected throughout the Tiwi ritual life: during the annual Kulama yam ceremony men had to compose and perform over three days a song cycle; at one stage the songs had to be about people who had died during the year, at another they were about being specific women. In all the songs I studied over my different periods of fieldwork, covering six Kulama, the individual sung about, belonged to the same aminiatuwi set as the performer. I was told that the performers were ‘making them important’. During mortuary rituals members of the same aminiatuwi set as the deceased were also the decision-makers as well as the choreographers and composers.
27 What is to me particularly interesting in the kinship dances is that, through them, every Tiwi experienced all the social roles of the society, even those that were impossible to execute or socially unacceptable in everyday life. In dance both men and
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women found Spirit Children even though in everyday life women were not even supposed to know what they looked like; in dance one could be a spouse or potential spouse to both men and women regardless of one’s gender; and both men and women were pregnant, gave birth and nurtured the baby. Thus not only did the Tiwi have a system where men and women generally had valued complementary roles but they also had the opportunity through performance somehow to «become» the other, therefore experiencing the whole world rather than just the one limited by their gender or age. Within the kinship dance system they could somehow imagine and create social reality as well as reflect it. Through the kinship dances, one could argue, everyday life was transcended and the performers danced through the three parallel worlds of the Unborn, the Living and the Dead.
28 It was through my meticulous compilation of genealogies and movement observations that I was able to go into such details and add to the analysis of earlier anthropologists, and especially Jane Goodale who had been such a source of support in my early days in the field and with whom I shared my Kulama notes, as circumstances did not allow her to attend them during her stay (cf. Grau 1999 for a discussion of this). In her obituary, Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi recalled Jane’s commitment to ‘grounded ethnography based on engaged, experiential, dialogic, ethical, reflexive, holistic, and culturally sensitive fieldwork recognizing individual agency and variation’ (Zimmer-Tamakoshi 2010: 346). Whilst I do not pretend to have achieve all this, in a small way this is what I attempted in my fieldwork and analysis.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barnard, Alan and Anthony Good (1984) Research Practices in the Study of Kinship: Research Methods in Social Anthropology Waltham, Massachusetts: Academic Press.
Brandl, Maria (1971) Pukumani: The Social Context of Bereavement in a North Australian Tribe Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Western Australia.
Dousset, Laurent (2005) ‘Structure and Substance: Combining ‘Classic’ and ‘Modern’ Kinship Studies in the Australian Western Desert’ The Australian Journal of Anthropology 16 (1): 18-30.
Grau, Andrée (1993) ‘Gender interchangeability among the Tiwi’ in Dance, Gender, and Culture, Helen Thomas ed., London: MacMillan.
Grau, Andrée (1994) ‘Dance as politics: the use of dance for the manipulation of the social order among the Tiwi of Northern Australia’ Proceedings, 17th Symposium of the International Council for Traditional Music, Study group on Ethnochoreology, Nafplion: Pelopponesian Folklore foundation.
Grau, Andrée (1995) ‘Ritual Dance and «Modernisation»: the Tiwi Example’. In Dabrowska Grazyna and Bielawski Ludwik eds Proceedings of the 18th Symposium of the ICTM Study group on Ethnochoreology, Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences.
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Grau, Andrée (1998) ‘On the Acquisition of Knowledge: Teaching Kinship through the Body among the Tiwi of Northern Australia’, in Verena Keck ed. Knowing Oceania: Constituting Knowledge and Identities, Oxford: Berg Publishers, 71-94
Grau, Andrée (1999) ‘Fieldwork, Politics and Power’ in Buckland Theresa ed. Dance in the Field: Theory, methods and issues in dance ethnography, London: Macmillan Press, 163-174
Goodale, Jane (1971) Tiwi Wives: A Study of the Women of Melville Island, North Australia seattke: University of Washington Press.
Hart, Charles William Merton (1930) ‘The Tiwi of Melville and Bathurst Islands’ Oceania 1(2): 167-180
Houseman, Michael (2006) ‘Relationality’ In J. Kreinath, J. Snoek and M. Stausberg (Eds.) Theorizing Rituals. Classical Topics, Theoretical Approaches, Analytical Concepts, Annotated Bibliography (pp.413-428). Leiden: Brill.
Hull, David (2012) ‘This is Arabana Country: An interview with David Hull, director of Arabana Aboriginal Corp RNTBC’ Native Title Newsletter, December, 4-5.
Sutton, David and Renate Fernandez (1998) ‘Introduction’ Anthropology and Humanism 23(2): 111-117.
Venbrux, Eric (1995) A Death in the Tiwi Islands: Conflict, Ritual, and Social Life in an Australian Aboriginal Community Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Walsh, Michael (1996) ‘Body parts in Murrinh-Patha: incorporation, grammar and metaphor’ in Chappell, Hilary and William Mc Gregory eds The Grammar of Inalienability: A Typological Perspective on Body Part Terms and the Part-Whole Relation Berlin : Walter de Gruyter, 327-382
Wonaeamirri, Pedro 2007 ‘Tiwi Art and Culture and the First Old Lady’ in Judith Ryan (ed) Kitty Kantilla Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria (available online at http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/ ngv-media? sq_content_src=%2BdXJsPWh0dHAlM0ElMkYlMkZ3d3cubmd2LnZpYy5nb3YuYXUlMkZtZWRpYS1hcHAlMkZtZWRpYUtpdEFydGljbGVzJTJGMjglMkZkaXNwbGF5 20th January 2011).
Zimmer-Tamakoshi, Laura (2010) ‘Obituary: Jane Carter Goodale (1926–2008) American Anthropologist 112 (2): 344–347.
NOTES
1. The original punctuation of colon rather than full stop renders the Statement non sensical. Here I assume that there is a typo 2. It is interesting that kinship terms for the Tiwi are always preceded by a possessive pronoun. 3. Goodale was based in Milikapiti, whilst I was in Pirlangimpi, about 30km away, two villages of some 400 inhabitants on Melville Island.
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AUTHOR
ANDRÉE GRAU Roehampton London University
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From structure to substance and back: materialities in Australian Aboriginal kinship
Laurent Dousset
1 In Race et Histoire, Lévi-Strauss wrote a few very interesting sentences, which I must quote here to some extend as a start: “For all that touches on the organization of the family and the harmonization of the relationship between family group and social group, the Australians, although backwards with regard to economy, occupy such an advanced position in comparison to the rest of humanity that it is, to understand the systems of rules that they have elaborated in a reflected and conscious manner, necessary to appeal to the most refined forms of modern mathematics…. They have thus surpassed the level of empirical observation to elevate themselves onto the level of knowledge on mathematical laws that govern the system. They go so far that it is not exaggerated to consider them not only to be the founders of general sociology, but even more, to consider them as the true introducers of all measures in the social sciences” (1987:48-49; my translation).
2 One notes of course that, rather infrequent for Lévi-Strauss in such explicit words, he places social forms in some kind of an evolutionary comparison: Australians are backwards in economy, but the most advanced in the social mathematics. What is even more interesting however in this quote, is the following short but strong and very unexpected bit: “they have elaborated in a reflected and conscious manner” a system of rules. And as such, they become the architects of their own social system, but more, the founders of general sociology.
3 This clearly testifies of the admiration he had for Australian kinship and social category systems, which in other places he has depicted as the crystalline beauty of Australian classes and kinship (1996:41-42). But it is particularly unexpected because, as we know, he was first of all interested in the deep structures of things and relationships, those that happen unconsciously, those that are part of the human mind; and he was not interested in practice, as his famous response to Less Hiatt at the Man the Hunter conference testifies. He said: “my work on kinship has been concerned with a different
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problem: to ascertain what was the meaning of rules, whether they are applied or not” (1968).
4 But here, elaboration in a reflected and conscious manner, as he says, of what he elsewhere calls deep structures, must necessarily be part of practice. How could one consciously elaborate unconscious rules and systems?
5 I will not further engage with Lévi-Strauss, just to mention that the move from a conceptualization of kinship as abstract or unconscious systems underlying thought and practice, to an understanding of kinship as providing conscious means to engage in other domains, has been I guess a general tendency amongst most anthropologists working on questions of social organization in Aboriginal Australia; and has to some extend, along with the context and requirements of Native Title, been the reason for a resurrection the last 15 years and more of interest in these questions. – At least, this was and is my own approach to things that pertain to the domain: people know of course their system, and they know it so well, that they do bend, adapt, change what seem to be undisputable rules; and they can do so while still engaging with a meta- langue about and beyond these rules and their own practice. In other words, to make a long story short, when Lévi-Strauss said that people had conscious and reflected thoughts about kinship rules and their fabrication, he was right. But what he missed, is that these conscious fabrications, ultimately expressed in nearly mathematical language, have as object and subject other things than those these rules seem to be regulating in the first place. What he missed, was the materiality of kinship.
6 One other quote is close to being enough to make my point. And it comes from our friend Bob Tonkinson. In an unpublished seminar given at ANU in 1975, of which he has provided me with his preparatory notes, he explains the practice of ngaranmaridi among the Martu of the Australian Western Desert: …at the time of ritual introductions of strangers from different areas … when the particular kinship links are being determined, an element of choice exists as to whether to designate “FZ” as umari [WM] or gundili [FZ] and thereby differentiate their children accordingly. ... Discussions are held by Ego … and others to decide which if any of the stranger women who are initially all related as 'spouse' will be 'cut out' and thus become ... Z.
7 Here again, let us underline a few words in the quote: people will decide, he writes, whether a woman is a sister or cousin / wife, and thus reclassify their mothers as either mothers-in-law or aunts. Those of you who know what a so-called classificatory system of relationship is, and in particular one that is fundamentally based on a distinction of the world into affines (parallel kin) and consanguines (cross-kin), will understand that this “cutting out” of wives, as Tonkinson calls it, is not a simple operation flowing from rules alone. It is a decision; a decision involving the capacity to adapt realities to ontologies and vice versa; a decision which involves some of the most fundamental aspects of cultural values, such as incest and its prohibition, or marriage and reproduction.
8 What this seems to be all about is the capacity to adapt form to content, rather than the other way round. The form is well known: Australian classificatory systems of relationship. The content, however, is of a different matter altogether, and it is changing depending on context.
9 Let me illustrate this through a few examples taken from my own experience... and I must apologize to those who have already heard them in other places. With respect to
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the Ngaatjatjarra-speaking people of the Western Desert, terminology and practice, or form and content, have indeed caused a few serious problems to the mathematics. Elkin and others, staying often only a few weeks or even days with Western Desert groups, have claimed to have observed a system in which people do not distinguish sisters from wives. And since the distinction is not made, or in fact since wives are supposedly called sisters, they thought that Western Desert, or Aluridja as it was called, was a culture that did not even embrace the most elementary and nearly-universal aspects of incest prohibition. Difficulties increase obliviously when one observes, and Elkin did so already, that these people distinguish mothers from father's sisters, and thus fit well into the general cross-parallel distinction. Theorists, such as Lévi-Strauss or Tjon Sie Fat, have struggled with that problem. The former ended up calling it an “aberrant system” (1967), while the latter recalled that it was described as one of the most “intriguing” system with “anomalous or inconsistent terminologies” (1998:78).
10 The inconsistency is structural, it somehow does not reflect the exact mathematics. In fact, it reflects a different mathematics, and the solution is long-term fieldwork; when one is capable of observing the availability of different modes of classification within one and the same language; depending on context, and thus politics. Indeed, similarly to what Alan Rumsey (1981) said about Ngarinyin people, or David Kronenfeld (1973) about Fanti, skewing (also see Dousset 2012) — conflating cousins with a person of the upper-level generation — does most often not reflect actual systems from the classic anthropological perspective, but reflects terminological usages pertaining to particular contexts in which discourse and usage takes place. The basic calculation, however, remains that of a cross-parallel distinction.
11 What happens is that Ngaatjatjarra-speaking people, and other groups of the Western Desert, apply three terminological sets, or in fact three modes of classifying differently the same people; without, let me reassure you, creating a situation of confusion or aberration. The first terminological usage is one that testifies of closeness, if not of identity. It flows from an idiosyncratic expression: Kungkankatja, Minalinkatja (Dousset 2002), freely explained as “children of a brother and of a sister are identical”. What should be cross-cousins thus are first of all considered as brothers and sisters themselves. The cross-parallel is extinguished. They are made of the same substance, the same heritage, have often grown up close to each other, and thus become siblings. Cross-cousins are people that, potentially at least, could have sexual relationships and marry. Children of actual siblings of opposite sex, even though mathematical cross- cousins, would not dare to engage in such bodily relationships. Similarly, never would I call my actual uncle “wife's father”, or my actual aunt “wife's mother”, even though, again, mathematically speaking, they sit in the same category. To summarize; closeness is here expressed through a mathematically-speaking unexpected usage of the terminology, one that transgresses a structural rule. At the same time, this systematic transgression seems to point to another level of cultural prescription; about which I will come back below.
12 What is significant in here, is that the usage of the sibling terminology on people that are or should be cross-cousins is not limited to this apparent deviation to a structural rule, but is the result of other processes and situations that have not much to do with what we traditionally understand as being kinship. Whether children of actual siblings or not, people who share experiences or substances in a prolonged and repeated manner fall into the same appreciation: they become simply too close, too identical to
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being cross-cousins and thus potential spouses. Having grown up together or close to each other, having eaten food cooked on the same fire, for example, are fundamental elements for defining relatedness. A good example is nyuyurlpa (Dousset 2003), adoption, a very frequent practice in the Western Desert. The idiosyncratic expression used to explain adoption is:
Nyuyurlpa kutjupankatja mantjinu kanyinu purlkanu.
The adoptive mother from another one took[,] kept [and] raised
13 Adoptive mother is signified through the word nyuyurlpa, and a nyuyurlpa becomes then an actual ngunytju, mother. But the word nyuyurlpa denotes in fact “the one that adds timber to the fire”, that is, the one that creates the conditions for eating together food cooked on the same fireplace, and warming oneself at night around the same heat. Adoption is a process where difference becomes identity and sameness. But more, the value of ngunytju, mother, is one that describes the conditions for becoming same; and these conditions have not much to do with kinship as such.
14 Similarly, as Fred Myers (1988:17; see also Hansen & Hansen 1992) has explained, the word walytja, among Pintupi people, just north of the Ngaatjatjarra, which means vaguely family, or those with whom one identifies a connection and reference of similarity and inclusion, also means “my belongings”, my luggage, so to say, what I own and take with me. Thus, to own something is not that different from having relationships. Belonging to, and ownership of, are of the same culturally identified semantic entity.
15 And this goes all hand in hand also with the humanization of space, where people can be called and referred to using the geographical and mythological site to which they most closely affiliate to; and, vice versa, where these sites can be referred to using the person's name. But more, where the tracks between these sites in space have the same connotation as the lines that draw relationships between people in our genealogical charts.
16 Hence, yes, kinship terminology is associated to generic and typified behavioral expectations and norms depending on which category people sit in. However, the opposite is true as well: experiences, life experiences, can produce the conditions in which the usage of terminology is defined by other means than the categorical position in which the relationship stands. Experience creates kinship; a kinship that looks as formal as the one we deduce from category and terminology alone.
17 The second terminological usage, which I refer to as “sociological”, goes even further. In certain contexts, when generational opposition is the core of the discussion, actual uncles and aunts can be called father and mother without hesitation or confusion. In certain ritual contexts, where generational moieties play an important role and distribute people in space and function, all people of the opposite generation, and not just uncles and aunts, may be called father and mother, which work as cover terms. The sociological context is one in which generation and gender are the principal, if not sole factors creating distinctions. In these ritual conditions, the conflictual opposition but ontological complementarity of the parent-child couple is extended to all participants. They are the contexts in which people place themselves as actors within the
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reproduction of the cosmological order. Actual genealogical relationships here lose their significance.
18 The third terminological set sheds some light on the previously mentioned usages; at least from a materialist point of view. The other usages and their contexts underline the question of similarity and identity, of commonality. The third context, which I call “egological”, on the other hand, redistributes people in accordance to the mathematics Lévi-Strauss and others expected. It is at stake when interlocutors are discussing actual marriage of an actual person. It is about setting up alliance strategies between individuals and families. Here, distant aunts are aunts, not mothers; and distant uncles are uncles, not fathers: who knows, they could become actual in-laws. It is the potentiality of future affinal relationships that places people in the category in which they structurally already sit; they are not “cut out”, to use Bob's expression again. Obviously, placing people in the affinal category defines who can become a spouse or a parent-in-law.
19 The reasons for cutting out ? or not cutting out ? for using rather one or the other terminological set? Obvious, at least for those that have worked in the Western Desert. It is about network, about inclusion, about extending and creating new nodes of connectedness; as in opposition to the idea of bounded society and exclusion, of course. It is about what Ian Keen calls “shifting webs” (2002).
20 Marriage, so closely tied to terminology in this context, is the main element under discussion. Marriage and all the obligations and rights that come with it, with all the networking that is involved. And Ngaatjatjarra people are clear about how this should be done: the initiator, who must be someone from a distant community, promises his or a close daughter; and in return the initiator's son will marry the initiate's sister. Direct exchange as in the textbook. But Ngaatjatjarra people also have another set of rules and discourses about these rules: you should not marry someone you are already linked with, but you should marry somewhere else. No need to marry a man who is already your actual brother-in-law… it wouldn't be the right way, a woman once told me. Thus, hardly anyone marries his promised spouse, but rather finds yet another partner, from another distant location, while both, his promised and his actual spouse being, with their families, tied through comparable obligations and rights. Diversification is the motto: diversification of people and of access to resources.
21 We are in front of what seems to be one of those usual contradictions between discourse and practice; — between a structural repetition of identical marriages through direct exchange, which never happens and remains in the domain of discourse and meta-language; and actual practice where people tend to diversify as much as they possibly can the nodes of their embodiment in the geographical and social landscape. The opposition between discourse and practice, at least in this context but possibly beyond, is however not a fortunate representation of what is happening.
22 There are two series of ideals and discourses that cohabit, in fact. One on initiation and direct exchange where closure and confinement, repetition and confirmation are central values. Mythology and ritual are fundamental here. The second series, on the other hand, is about diversification, openness and network. Here we talk about politics and economy. The distinction between these rather arbitrarily separated domains becomes apparent when observing people's actual decision-taking processes. Shall one call a man father or close uncle, or shall one call him distant uncle and father-in-law. The decision has its consequences, as we now know. And it is elaborated, discussed and
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finally promulgated after taking into account the normative capacity of a man or a woman to become an actual in-law, of course, but more interestingly an explicit discussion about the intention and the possibility of getting involved in an affinal relationship with enumerated benefits: with cash economy, crystallizing people's attentions to particular “wealthy” families and communities has an impact on which terminological set should be applied. There is however no reason to believe that these principles were not at work in former days. There are indeed a few examples of religiously and politically important men who, before contact with the Western world in the late 1950s, were highly polygynous (more than two wives in an area were the incidence of polygyny is very low) and who were referred to by numerous persons as waputju, father-in-law, rather than kamuru, uncle.
23 I would like to recall what is my strong conviction. Opposing or differentiating these phenomena as a contradiction between discourse and practice is not the right approach. Western Desert groups are well known for their inclusivist ethos, as Tonkinson (2003) has remarked; that is, their capacity to underline connections with outsiders rather than stressing what differentiates them. Kinship terminologies or emic explanations of rules about marriage are not discursive devices meant to implement particular practices, but are devices that speak about values: in our case, these values reflect an accomplished inclusivist ethos in which the repetition of relationships stands for the exclusion of others; in which the reproduction of sameness is formulated through the repetition of relationships as forms. The existence of a parallel discourse on the prohibition of incest through diversification (as opposed to repetition), reflects these same values, this time however not as accomplished, but as a processual inclusivist ethos.
24 One could go further, and ask, how much of this is again a particularity of the Western Desert? Is this again an aberration? In the AustKin project in which I am involved with linguists from the ANU and in which Ian Keen is involved as well, this is the kinds of questions we can ask. Where and how much are there discursive devices (that is terminological elements, for example), that point to openness and closeness at the same time. That testify of reproduction of sameness and shifting webs simultaneously. While this project is yet not at its end, there is already evidence testifying that the coexistence of these two value-systems is far from being limited to the Western Desert alone, including extensive regions in Queensland and south-east Arnhem Land.
25 One could postulate the continuous tension between inclusion and exclusion, and between openness and boundedness, as signifying the notion of society (the thing that attracts an intention of belonging), which, as Godelier (2009) explains, is not coextensive with that of culture. There are at least two approaches depicting the idea of society based on these tensions. One is to reflect emic categories in etic typologies; an approach not that distant from the usual anthropological modus of investigation. The other has been designed as an actor-network theory that does not assume ontological entities.
26 Following the first approach a society is something that emically needs to erect three fundamental pillars of value-systems in order to reproduce itself in time and space: place, memory, and modes of recruitment and belonging. According to the second approach, on other hand, society is not a thing, but is some vague result of the extension and accumulation of relationships in which values, and thus discourses
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themselves, are simultaneously means of action and actors: cultural objects (Latour 1987).
27 Western Desert ethnography seems to be best depicted as a subtle combination of these two approaches, as I have tried to illustrate. In the light of current Native Title exigencies, however, where the continuous reproduction of bounded entities is expected, this poses obviously significant problems. How establish boundaries, be they social or spatial, when one important value defines the exact opposite: extending these boundaries, or in fact not being limited by them? More: the procedure of going through the Native Title process and other types of negotiations with the State, as I have observed it among Ngaatjatjarra people, has had significant impacts, shifting the local value-system from an open processual inclusivist ethos progressively to an accomplished and thus closed inclusivist ethos. People think of themselves increasingly as being “tribal”: with boundaries and enumerated membership. To take just one example. Ngaatjatjarra, the name of the group itself, was formerly designating a geographical area in which a particular mode of speech was put onto country by mythological beings. People that lived in this area thus were Ngaatjatjarra people because they lived in a country to which the Ngaatjatjarra dialect was associated. A person that would move out of this country would adopt the local mode of speech, and would not unambiguously be called a Ngaatjatjarra person, because the language stayed behind, in its original country. Nowadays, however, people use increasingly the word Ngaatjatjarra as a nearly genealogical marker. People take their dialectal name with them, whether they live in Ngaatjatjarra country, Alice Springs or elsewhere. The distinction between belonging and otherness, between insiders and outsiders, has in the past 18 years during which I have visited Ngaatjatjarra people, increasingly become an explicated and explicit means of talking about oneself.
28 My paper is entitled from structure to substance and back, and my intention was to illustrate modes and means through which kinship is the condition, but also the product of the material aspects of these mathematics Lévi-Strauss has evacuated, or in fact could not have taken into account because of his preoccupation with the deep structures. He was correct assuming that Australian kinship is the product of conscious reflections. In my experience, the capacity of Aboriginal people to enumerate, discuss and contextualize rules and systems is indeed phenomenal and testifies of a relativity, a cultural relativity, towards their own systems of norms and values. The application of kinship terminology does not flow from rules alone, but is conditioned by the context in which the terminology produces material and substantial effects on relationships. Kinship is not an independent social domain, and as such, cannot be investigated without placing it back into the context in which it is continually produced. We knew this. What appears interesting, at least to me, is that it takes the form of reflected and consciously elaborated systems.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
DOUSSET, Laurent 2002. Accounting for context and substance: the Australian Western Desert kinship system, Anthropological Forum, 12(2): 193-204.
DOUSSET, Laurent 2003. Indigenous modes of representing social relationships: A short critique of the “genealogical concept”, Aboriginal Studies, 2003/1: 19-29.
DOUSSET, Laurent 2012. “Horizontal” and “vertical” skewing: similar objectives, two solutions?. In Thomas R. Trautmann and Peter M. Whiteley (eds), Crow-Omaha: New Light on a Classic Problem of Kinship analysis. Tucson: Arizona University Press, p. 261-277.
GODELIER, Maurice 2009. Communauté, Société, Culture: Trois clefs pour comprendre les identités en conflits (Huxley Memorial Lecture 2008). Paris: CNRS Editions.
HANSEN K.C. & HANSEN L.E., 1992. Pintupi/Luritja Dictionary (3rd Edition). Alice Springs: IAD (Institute for Aboriginal Development) [SIL, Summer Institute of Linguistics [1974].
KEEN, Ian 2002. Seven Aboriginal marriage systems and their correlates, Anthropological Forum, 12(2): 145-157.
KRONENFELD, David 1973. Fanty Kinship. The Structure of Terminology and Behavior, American Anthropologist, 75(5): 1577-1595.
LATOUR, Bruno 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
LEVI-STRAUSS, Claude 1967. Les structures élémentaires de la parenté. Paris: Mouton [1947].
LEVI-STRAUSS, Claude 1968. Gidjingali marriage arrangements: comments and rejoinder. Discussions Part IV, 22b. In R.B. Lee & I. De Vore (eds), Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine, p. 210-211.
LEVI-STRAUSS, Claude 1987. Race et histoire. Paris: Denoël Folios essais [1952].
LEVI-STRAUSS, Claude 1996. Anthropologie Structurale II. Paris: Plon [1973].
MYERS, Fred 1988. Burning the truck and holding the country: property, time and the negotiation identity among Pintupi Aborigines. In T. Ingold, D. Riches & J. Woodburn (eds), Hunters & Gatherers 2: Property, power and ideology. New York: St Martin's Press, p. 15-42.
RUMSEY, Alan 1981. Kinship and context among the Ngarinyin, Oceania, 51(3): 181-192.
TJON SIE FAT, Franklin 1998. On the Formal Analysis of “Dravidian,” “Iroquois,” and “Generational” Varieties as Nearly Associative Combinations. In M. Godelier, T.R. Trautmann & F.E. Tjon Sie Fat (eds), Transformations of kinship. Washington & London: Smithsonian Institution, p. 59-93.
TONKINSON, Robert 1975. The Riddle of the Non-Marriageable Cross-Cousin, : ms: Séminaire donné à l'ANU (Australian National University), Canberra.
TONKINSON, Robert 2003. Ambrymese dreams and the Mardu Dreaming. In R. Lohmann (ed.), Dream Travelers: sleep experiences and culture in the Western Pacific. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 87-105.
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AUTHOR
LAURENT DOUSSET EHESS-CREDO
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The Body in Linguistic Representations of Emotions in Dalabon (Northern Australia)
Maïa Ponsonnet
1 In the Dalabon language of Northern Australia (Gunwinyguan family, non-Pama- Nyungan), body-part words are used in expressions denoting emotions. For instance, kangu-yowyow(mu), literally ‘flowing belly’ (kangu ‘belly’+ yowyow(mu) ‘flow’) means ‘feel good, be nice’. This is cross-linguistically unsurprising: most languages in Australia and around the world make use of body-parts to describe emotions. However, these body- parts can play different roles. They are often involved in metaphors. These metaphors are sometimes highly conventionalized and conceptually opaque to speakers; or they can be conceptually salient so that the body-parts in question are regarded by speakers as the locus of emotions.
2 In Dalabon, the body-part most closely acquainted to emotions in the belly (kangu). The belly is sometimes treated as the locus of emotions, especially inter-personal emotions. It is involved in a network of metaphors. The most widespread metaphor describes the belly as malleable or resistant. Someone who feels good may be described as someone with a malleable or fluid belly, and conversely someone who feels bad may be described as someone with a hard belly. In another metaphor, a broken belly corresponds to bad feelings, and a belly in good condition, to positive feelings. These metaphors are highly conventionalized, i.e. they are embedded in some of the most frequent Dalabon emotion words. Yet speakers do perceive these metaphors and elaborate upon them in non-linguistic or para-linguistic communication. For instance, gestures accompanying speech on emotions may involve the belly. Further, a Dalabon ritual performed on young children to ensure trouble-free emotional development elaborates upon the malleability/fluidity metaphor, involving floodwater and massaging the belly with sand. Thus, this ritual elaborates semiotically upon a Dalabon emotion metaphor. Its symbolism may be suggested by linguistic metaphors. However, it is not determined by these metaphors: speakers are free to choose which metaphors they make conceptually and culturally relevant.
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3 While metaphors are an important aspect of what body-parts ‘do’ with respect to the linguistic description of emotions in Dalabon, some body-parts also fulfill other functions. In particular, body-parts are often used to produce precise descriptions of emotional behaviors. For instance, in Dalabon it is easy to say that someone is ‘angry from the hands’ (when gesticulating: langu-yirru-mun, ‘hand’+‘angry’) or ‘sulky from the back’ (when turning their back: dolku-bruH(mu) ‘back’+‘blow/sulky’). This is also an important function of body-parts in linguistic descriptions of emotions, since such compound verbs allow speakers to be articulate specific description of emotional behaviors.
AUTHOR
MAÏA PONSONNET Australian National University
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Payback and Forward: Relatives as a Source of Weakness or Strength
Marika Moisseeff
1 We are all aware of the dreadful death rates of Aboriginal youth linked to suicide and other self-destructive behaviour (ABS 2012, Silburn et al., Brady 1992, Moisseeff 2011, Robinson 1992 a&b, 1990, 1995). During my last fieldwork in Australia, an Aboriginal friend in charge of an Aboriginal Youth Centre, Sherry, emphasised a problem which may seem obvious but which we need to understand more fully in order to allow for solutions that are more effective than those that already exist: youths are most vulnerable during the transition from childhood to young adulthood (Martin 1993, Moisseeff 2011, Myers 2011, Robinson 1992 a&b, 1990, 1995, Robinson et al. 2008). It is during this transitional period, Sherry pointed out, that young people have to decide for themselves how they want to live their lives. Belonging to a community which has been highly discriminated and which, for this reason, has become heavily dependent on the non Aboriginal welfare State for its survival, these young people are in the position of having to make such decisions all the while having to process the many negative and traumatic experiences they and their relatives have had and still have to undergo. Sherry went on to say “At this stage of our lives, we self-absorbed everything. We are like a sponge and you need to squeeze that sponge to get out the negativity. They don't want death, they seek the deadening of pain. Some have the strength to fight back, others make the choice of considering themselves as the mere victims of circumstances”.
2 My discussion with Sherry took place just before she had to explain to potential funding agencies why the Youth Centre was worth founding. To convince them, she chose to tell them a story which would show what one can achieved by supporting youth activities run by Aboriginal people.She took the opportunity of my visit to rehearse her presentation, and in turn, I am taking the opportunity of this conference to draw on her remarkable insights regarding a crucial issue for the attainment of adulthood in a contemporary Aboriginal community. I will call this factor “the transmission of the capacity for relational responsibility” and I will try to both outline and illustrate what it might be.
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Nurturing and filiative parental roles, and the transmission of relational responsibility
3 In previous publications (Moisseeff 1992, 2004 a&b, 2006), for heuristic and comparative purposes, I proposed to distinguish two parental roles according to the types of dependency between parents and children they entail: a nurturing function and a filiative function. During its early years, a child is emotionally and materially dependent on other individuals for survival and development; this is supposed to be a transitory State. But to be a child also means being the offspring of parents, a State which relies on kinship ties and enables individuals to continue to be their parents’ children beyond childhood itself. In the first case, dependency refers to the nurturing function that is exercised by parental figures in accordance with socially defined parental rights and duties towards under-age children (feeding, socialization, emotional sharing and so forth); it refers to parenthood. In the second case, dependency refers to a filiative function in which an individual is assigned a position within a kinship system that extends well beyond the immediate family to define a larger set of relational categories. Assuming a filiative function consists in bestowing a relational identity upon one's children by transmitting to them one's kinship relationships and, thus, inscribing them in one's kinship network; this allows the children to inscribe their own children within a relational network connecting the different generations.
4 My discussion with Sherry made me realized that it was worthwhile distinguishing the filiative function from another dimension that I mentioned above: the transmission of the capacity for relational responsibility. Up to that point, I had conflated them together as a single aspect of parental roles. The transmission of the capacity for relational responsibility also implies a hierarchical orientation. However, I take it to be distinct from either of the two parental functions already mentioned. It is a constitutive feature of sociality that pertains to the social system as a whole. In the case of Aboriginal society, this social system happens to coincide with the kinship system itself. It is, in this sense, an essential, generative dimension of what, in anthropology and more specifically with regard to Aboriginal Australia, has often been called “relatedness” (Myers 1986, 2011, Martin 1993). To assume a relational responsibility is to participate in the development of another person’s relational competencies so as to allow them to expand their own relational network and to provide them with the means to exercise, in turn, a relational responsibility towards others. A fully fulfilled relational responsibility may thus be thought of as a “meta-function” in Bateson’s sense: the transmission not so much of something than of the ability to transmit. The difference is analogous to that between teaching a given content and training others to teach. It consists in passing on the capacity to pass on to others. The responsibility assumed by Aboriginal initiators in the past and, to a certain extent, in certain remote communities at present, is in many ways paradigmatic of the type of responsibility I am trying to get at here. Of course, not everybody attains the more advanced grades of being an initiator.
5 Nurturing and filiative functions, as I have defined them, are included in the legal definition of parenthood in the West. However, from a legal or institutional standpoint, parenthood does not entail relational responsibility. Thus, it is not an institutionalized
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obligation for parents to contribute to the development of their children's relational networks, or to transmit their own parenting roles to them. On the contrary, everything is organized so as to avoid parents imposing their wishes in these areas upon their offspring. In contrast to this, in Aboriginal Australia, the transmission of relational responsibility by parents was an integral aspect of the kinship system. However, colonization and the violence with which it was imposed, in destabilizing this responsibility, subverted parent’s capacities to fulfill both their nurturing and filiative functions: the nurturing function was weakened by the workings of the Welfare system (Finlayson 1989 & 1991, Martin, 2001, Pearson 2000), the filiative function was weakened, among other things, by taking children away from their parents and, in certain cases, erasing all traces of their Aboriginal descent.
6 Reflecting on years of affiliation with Aboriginal friends, which has allowed me to follow the itinerary of a number of individuals, I could see that those young people who had been able to step out of delinquency and/or depression did so because they were given the opportunity to take on responsibilities for others. In doing so, they were able to recognize that they could become irreplaceable figures for certain of their relatives and, in certain cases, for the community itself. Previously, “burning the candle at both ends” had seemed to them to be the only way to replace an obstructed imagination of their future with an exhilarating present centred on the extreme body experiences afforded by risky behaviour like alcohol abuse or petrol sniffing (Brady 1992, Robinson 1990, 1992b). Samson, in the movie Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton 2009), is a good example of such a self-destructive choice. Persons such as Samson are stuck in a State of being nurtured by others, incapable of insuring a nurturing function for others or of helping others to develop their relational identity. Rather than choosing to develop their own relational personhood by assuming responsibilities for others, they remain totally dependant on others for their subsistence and survival. Being able to control one’s body by denying or giving it pleasure or pain, by oneself, becomes, for them, a way of trying to by-pass this reliance on others. Unable to become independent, they try to be self-dependant. And this death-dealing logic often leads them to suicide as the only liberty which remains open to them.
7 The alternative is to take one's relational responsibilities seriously, that is, with the perspective of transmitting them to the next generation. Envisaging oneself as a role model in this way allows one to project oneself into the future as a key figure within one's kinship network.
8 In my view, this is what Sherry was trying to convey to the representatives of the Youth Centre's potential funding agencies. An ethnographic vignette, along with Sherry’s account of the lessons she learned by setting up an Aboriginal basketball team, will allow me to illustrate different aspects of relational responsibility and to show how certain Aboriginal persons, by assuming this responsibility, even in precarious circumstances, are able to transmit it to others.
The Frazer/Tylor Payback
9 The Aboriginal people of the community I am referring to here live either in town, Hammerton, or in what used to be a mission established in the late thirties three kilometres away from Hammerton, later transformed into an incorporated Aboriginal Community. The latter is still designated, in the area, as “The Reserve” which I will call
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Clearview. During my last fieldwork in Clearview, I arrived in a community in which many houses had been recently wrecked and all the street lights destroyed. “Be prepared Marika, I was told, the reserve is not the same: it's shell-shocked”. Nine months earlier, a twenty year old man had been killed, repeatedly stabbed by a twenty two year old, presently in jail. Now, everyone in Clearview is related to everyone else in several ways. However, the victim and his murderer belonged to two families that had a long history of violent conflicts with each other. I will call these families the Frazers and the Tylors. As a result of the death, “a payback was on”, as people put it, and the community was strikingly subdued in comparison with its usual, noisy, lively State. As an Aboriginal friend expressed it: the community was in “lockdown”. A few months before I arrived, about six months after the murder, Joshua, a young man from the victim’s family, the Frazers, threatened with an iron bar Ruby, the big nana, the ancestress of the Clearview Tylors, saying that he was going to kill her. A few weeks later she had a stroke and had to be flown to the Adelaide hospital.
10 All the members of Ruby's family were afraid, waiting for one of them to be killed; some of their houses had already been destroyed, in one case by a fire lit while some old people were still inside. Just after the murder, the younger Tylor children were sent away to the APY lands1 for several months, their relatives being unable to guarantee their safety on the reserve. Thus, strangely enough, it was the little children and the old grandmother, those who were the least involved, who were presumed by all to be the feud’s next victims. As Paul, an eminent community member, explained to me: “They will go for the one that hurts the most, the innocent one”. “Of course, reiterated his wife, they'll always go after the innocent one”.
11 Because the members of the murderer’s family were all descended from Ruby who had looked after most of them, killing her was a way to deeply harm all of them. Although she was innocent, she nevertheless had to pay for someone else’s action. The same applied to the Tylors’ little children. This payback situation emphasizes both the positive and the negative aspects of relational responsibility, that is, of fulfilling one’s commitments as a relational being. On the positive side, by being relationally responsible, one acquires a network of persons who are the potential supporters of one’s undertakings. Those belonging to my network are able to help me, share my joys and griefs, thereby reinforcing my social status and enriching my emotional experiences. In this sense, relational responsibility is a source of pride and strength. However, at the same time, and for much the same reasons, it is a source of potential weakness. Indeed, relational responsibility implies mutuality. When a family member is struck down, I am struck down as well, and however I choose to act, I will be held accountable for my behaviour as a member of a relational network: there is no possible neutral stance. Doing nothing or refusing to take sides are themselves clear Statements that position a person within his/her network. In a similar way, when someone from my family strikes down someone from another family, I must be prepared to be struck down, even if I didn’t participate in, or even approve of their action. Indeed, killing an innocent family member, especially one who is taken to be the root or a bud of the family tree, is a way of making the offending party responsible for the death of someone dear in their own relational network.
12 This first example, the Frazer/Tylor payback, gives some idea of the stakes involved in relational responsibility. I now want to go a step further by providing some examples of how it may be transmitted. As mentioned before, the passing on of relational
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responsibility is an integral part of relational responsibility itself, such that to fully assume this responsibility is to transmit it to others. Not every one does this, the difference being that between those who are content with being a member of a relational network, and those who actively promote its reproduction and growth. On one level, relational responsibility implies mutuality. However, when more fully realized, that is, when it entails transmitting to others the ability to transmit, relational responsibility brings a hierarchical relationship into play.
Clearview Basketball Team
13 Over the previous few years, Clearview had been facing cuts in Government funding for all the services its Council had managed on its own since the 1980s when its Aboriginal CEO had successfully pushed the Hammerton Town Council to hand these services over to them. The Youth Centre was the only one which was still funded, and therefore, continued to be in Clearview, Aboriginal hands, rather than in Hammertonn, mainstream ones. This is why Sherry, who was in charge of the Youth Centre, was so determined to maintain its funding. She wanted to convince potential funding agencies by explaining the positive outcomes of the Clearview boys' basketball team she had set up the year before in spite of considerable hardships. Her story will hopefully allow me to further describe what fully assuming relational responsibility entails.
14 Each week, Sherry took her son Kevin to basketball practice, as he was a member of the Hammerton Basketball team. This led the other Clearview boys of Kevin’s generation to ask her to set up an under-13 basketball team of their own. With the exception of another boy with a limited experience of the game, the other Clearview boys who were determined to be part of this new team had no basketball experience at all. Sherry had only two weeks to apply for funding for this initiative; considering the poor attendance of Aboriginal kids in ongoing, organized activities in general, she was not sure that the effort was worthwhile. Her son and the other boys she shared her worries with managed to convince her to give it a try. She decided to trust them, but explained the rules she expected them to follow. They had to take responsibility for the choice they would make: they had to commit themselves to attend training every week or drop out but, in this case, to be respectful to her and her attempts to set the program, they had to let her know honestly.
15 Two adult players to whom she asked, accepted to coach the new team, and she put the boys in charge of making a list of who could be part of the team, of finding a name for it and of choosing the design for the uniforms. They were very excited and put their heart into these tasks. With the help of her co-workers, Sherry also asked the boy’s parents to support their kids by attending the training sessions and games, both in and outside of Clearview, which most of them did, accompanied by other family members. Sherry’s son, who had played basketball for years in school, belonged to the Hammerton team which was the team to belong to. He was thus guaranteed to participate in a grand final. However, she asked him if he would leave this team and come over to lead the inexperienced Clearview team. He accepted gladly and was seconded by the other, slightly experienced boy.
16 Two months down the track, Jerry, one of the team members, sent a message through a team mate: “Tell Nana Sherry, I am shame. I made my choice. I can't go to training anymore. I'm picking a life of petrol sniffing and crime”. So he stayed away, and sure
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enough, was locked up a couple of times. When Sherry saw him, she told him that while she was disappointed, at least he had made his choice, adding “You have to know that the friends you are following will destroy your life, but I still love you”. Five weeks later he wanted to come back to the team. Sherry’s initial reaction was to vehemently refuse. However, her son, Kevin, told her: - “It's not for you to decide.” - She kept saying: No! No! No way! - “Mum, you are not listening to me,” he said, “You have to leave it to us”.
17 After half an hour, she gave up.
18 Jerry came to training and the boys decided to have a meeting of their own without any adults. They sat in circle with Jerry in the middle. Afterwards, they called all the youth workers together and told them that they had made a decision: “We want him to be back on the team, but for a few months he is never to take the starting five [that is, be part of the game’s starting players]; he is a reserve”. Jerry accepted, and the team was happy, and he played all season. Because he had missed so many practice sessions, he lagged very far behind. He admitted that he should not have given up and apologized to the boys.
19 Sherry drew the following conclusion from this episode: “ It was a lesson for me as a mum and as the boss of the Youth Centre. I came to realize that I needed to empower the boys and to trust them about the fact that they would make the good decision. This boy was not ostracized. It was what I was most worried about. It was also reassuring to see that no matter what he had done, he was still accepted. At the end of the season, he stood up and got an award with the other players”.
20 Before pursuing Sherry's story further, let’s look at how it exemplifies what I am trying to convey regarding the transmission of relational responsibility.
21 First, the expressed desire of the boys to set up their own team was a way for them to imagine themselves in a positive undertaking which went beyond their immediate present and their solitary persons. They had a goal which involved others. Second, asking her son Kevin to leave a highly qualified team shows how Sherry was ready to give up her and his personal expectations of success to embark on a more hazardous, collective venture. By doing so, she handed over him her relational responsibility towards the community rather than towards their personal and nuclear-family wellbeing. Moreover, in asking Kevin to lead the team, while giving him the opportunity to act as a positive role model for others, she also passed on to him a relational responsibility similar, although at another level, to the one she had assumed by being in charge of the Youth Centre. Transmitting such responsibility necessarily goes together with recognition of the other’s increased autonomy in making their own decisions. And indeed, Kevin demonstrated that he was independent enough to oppose her when she refused Jerry’s return. However, Kevin did not take sole responsibility for reintegrating Jerry, but – a still further case of transmission – required that the decision be made together with the other players of his team. The boys made their decision, on the one hand, by excluding the adults from their meeting, and on the other hand, by including Jerry in it. The adults accepted this, showing that they were ready to acknowledge the boy’s autonomy and ability to decide for themselves. This would seem to be a clear example of the meta-function I qualified, in a Batesonian, systemic perspective, as the transmission of transmission.
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22 Third, Sherry asked all the boys to commit themselves to the basketball project, and accepted Jerry's choice to drop out on the condition that he take full responsibility for his decision, that is, to have the guts to let her know clearly, rather than let youth workers lose their time running after him. In doing so, she also respected the all- important Aboriginal sense of autonomy. According to her, the main reason she had opposed to Jerry’s reintegration was that she feared that he would be humiliated and ostracized. “Love, as she insisted, is very important”. The “love” she was referring to, I think, has to do with the emphasis Aboriginal ethos places on caring for others, also conveyed by the interjection, nganga, “poor one”, “sorry” in Adnyamathanha, one the languages spoken in Clearview, expression which is very similar, to my mind, to the Martu term Bob Tonkinson referred to yesterday.
23 One can see here that caring for others, and taking responsibility for them, is certainly not doing something for them, or in their place, instead of them, as endorsed by many welfare services workers. Of course, caring for others by accepting their self- destructive choices – because it is their body and their choice – has its disadvantages. If Sherry had maintained her decision to not reintegrate Jerry, he might well have continued on his path of petrol sniffing and crime with a potential lethal ending. But it is precisely because she assumed a full relational responsibility by accepting the team’s decision and their way of making it, that the actual ending was a happier one.
24 Among the other, not dissimilar difficulties Sherry and her co-workers had to overcome, was the case of David. David was living in a very unstable environment, constantly moving between four to five different houses; the youth workers had to go looking for him. As a result, he had very poor hygiene and the other boys made fun of him. At one point, his sport shoes were stolen and he got flogged for it. The Youth Centre decided to lend him a 200$ new pair of shoes which he could use each time he played, making him the promise that at the end of the season they would be his. According to Sherry, he was a typical victim with a very low self-esteem: he would not stand up and defend himself. However, he wanted to fit in and did not miss a single game.
25 The day Sherry discovered that he had not been fed for four days, she decided that that was enough. She could not but do something about it. She took the matter to her co- workers, asking them how they would address such a sensitive issue. At the end of their discussion, Sherry decided to give David's mother, who was also Sherry’s niece, an ultimatum: within a week, she had to come up with a better home: “You better do something about your kid! He may be taken away from you, and it will be your own fault”. As a result, David’s mother immediately managed to place him with a more stable relative who fed him properly. His hygiene started to improve and he gradually gained more and more self-confidence. As a result, the other boys started to relate more positively to him and by the end of the season, David was seen as a major player of the Clearview team.
26 For Sherry, confronting David’s mother, and the latter’s action was better than to have handed his case over to the Welfare Services. Indeed, Sherry does not trust in the latter's ability to insure a proper follow-up. According to her, giving the choice to the mother was very important because it put her in control of her actions, which allowed her to bolster her maternal role. As it turned out, David came back to live with his mother afterwards. Sherry's ability to play a positive role model for David's mother in giving her an alternative to the Welfare Services proved to be a way of giving her back
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the capacity to exercise a real nurturing function, while his team mates acted as positive role models for David himself.
27 Sherry stressed the fact that in dealing with the different issues she and her co-workers had to overcome, they themselves had been learning about the different challenges individual members of their community had to face. Indeed, they had to deal with many other problems as well, among them, the removal for several months of three children on the basketball team who belonged to the killer’s family in the Frazer/Tylor feud I spoke about earlier, and the workers’ and young players’ deep grief following the suicide of a eighteen year old who was related to all of them.
28 Despite all these hindrances and the boys’ inexperience, the Clearview team managed to go to the second Grand Final, missing out by only one point. The youth workers had wanted the boys’ families to be involved and the latter surely demonstrated that they were: the Hammerton stadium was packed with people from Clearview. And when, at the end, the Clearview team lost, one of the boy’s cousins who was with the Hammerton Team and had played against them, joined his Clearview team cousins and cried with them as did all the grand-mothers who came to offer them consolation. The final result was that the Clearview basketball team became an inspiration for all the Aboriginal kids of Hammerton. Many of them asked to join this new team.
29 This happy ending was an important occasion that soothed the many griefs the community experienced during the basketball season, and which are so typical of what any Aboriginal community has to face. It did not erase any of these traumatic events, but it gave both parents and children the possibility to be proud of being Aboriginal, of being parents, of being team mates. In the end, all were in a better position, each in their own way, to assume a relational responsibility. Hopefully, I have given you a glimpse of what, through Sherry’s story, I came to understand as the transmission of the capacity for relational responsibility. To assume a relational responsibility is to participate in the development of another person’s relational competencies so as to allow them to expand their own relational network and to provide them with the means to exercise, in turn, a relational responsibility towards others.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2012. ‘A Population Overview: Fertility and Mortality’ in 4725.0 - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing: A focus on children and youth, Apr 2011, released 23/05/2012: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/4725.0Chapter130Apr202011
Brady, M. 1992. Heavy Metal. The Social Meaning of Petrol Sniffing in Australia, Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press.
Finlayson, J.D. 1989. ‘Welfare incomes and Aboriginal gender relations’, in J.C. Altman (ed.) Emergent Inequalities in Aboriginal Australia, Oceania Monograph 38, Sydney, University of Sydney.
------1991. Don't Depend on Me: Autonomy and Dependence in an Aboriginal Community in Northern Queensland, PhD dissertation, ANU, Canberra.
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Martin, D.F. 1993. Autonomy and Relatedness: An Ethnography of Wik people of Aurukun, Western Cape York Peninsula, Ph.D. dissertation, Canberra, Australian National University.
------2001. Is welfare dependency ‘welfare poison’? An assessment of Noel Pearson’s proposals for Aboriginal welfare reform, CAEPR Discussion Paper No. 213/2001, CAEPR, Canberra, ANU.
Moisseeff, M. 1992. ‘Les Enjeux Anthropologiques de la Thérapie Familiale avec les Adolescents’, in C. Gammer and M.-C. Cabié (eds) L’Adolescence, Crise Familiale. Thérapie Familiale Par Phases, Toulouse, Editions Erès, pp. 205-27.
------1999a. An Aboriginal Village in South Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
------2004a. ‘Perspective Anthropologique Sur les Rôles Parentaux’, in P. Angel and P. Mazet (eds) Guérir les Souffrances Familiales, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 29-45.
------2004b. ‘Dépendance Nourricière et Domination Culturelle: Une Approche Anthropologique des Addictions’, Psychotropes 10(3-4), pp. 31-50.
------2006. ‘La Transmission de la Parentalité: Un Rôle Parental Secondarisé Dans les Sociétés Occidentales Contemporaines’, in B. Schneider et al. (eds), Enfant en Développement, Famille et Handicaps. Interactions et Transmissions, Ramonville, Erès, pp. 11-22.
------2011 ‘Invisible and Visible Loyalties in Racialized Contexts: A Systemic Perspective on Aboriginal Youth’, in Ute Eickelkamp (ed.) Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence, Oxford, Berghahn Books, pp 239-272.
Myers, F.R. 1986. Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self. Canberra, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies/ Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press.
------2011. ‘Fathers and sons, Trajectories of Self: Reflections on Pintupi Lives and Futures’, in Ute Eickelkamp (ed.) Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence, Oxford, Berghahn Books, pp 82-100.
Pearson, N. 2000. ‘Passive welfare and the destruction of Indigenous society in Australia’, in P. Saunders (ed.), Reforming the Australian Welfare State, Melbourne, AIFS.
Robinson, G. 1992a. Dependence and Confict: Adolescence and Family in an Aboriginal Community of South Australia. Ph.D. dissertation. Kensington, University of New South Wales.
------1992b. W.F.: The Reconstruction of a Suicide. MS, Kensington, University of New South Wales.
------1990. ‘Separation, Retaliation, and Suicide: Mourning and the Conflicts of Young Tiwi Men’, Oceania 60(3): 161-78.
------1995. ‘Violence, Social Differentiation and the Self’, Oceania 65(4): 323-46.
Robinson, G., U. Eickelkamp, J. Goodnow and I. Katz (eds). 2008. Contexts of Child development: Culture, Policy and Intervention. Darwin, CDU Press.
Silburn, S., Glaskin, B., Henry, D., & Drew, N. 2010. Preventing suicide among indigenous Australians. In N. Purdie, P. Dudgeon, & R. Walker (eds.), Working together: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mental health and wellbeing principles and practice, Canberra, Dept of Health and Ageing; pp. 91-104.
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NOTES
1. The acronym “APY lands” stands for Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara and refers to a large Aboriginal local government area located in the remote north west of South Australia. It consists of the Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra peoples (or Anangu).
AUTHOR
MARIKA MOISSEEFF CNRS-LAS
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Thursday, January 24th 2013
Marika Moisseeff (dir.) Ritual, art, and performance in Aboriginal Australia
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Introduction
Marika Moisseeff
1 So, I’m very glad to present Fred Myers, the discussant of the session, and of a very dear friend, I think we’ve known each other for quite a long time. And of course, Fred Myers is known for the book, the most quoted in Aboriginal studies, as Nick Peterson, who opened the conference was reminding us. The book is also really worth regarding Pintupi country, Pintupi self, but also for his extensive work regarding Aboriginal art, and he was in fact, and I will say the conference, and I want here to thank all my collegues from the Musée du Quai Branly who had the initiative of this conference, was prompted by the fact that there was this exhibition on Papunya Tula paintings, and Fred was in fact doing his fieldwork when the movement started, and I think you were also witness Françoise Dussart, of the first exhibition held in New York the Asian Society, so both of you were then present. So I’m very glad that you are the discussants of this session, and I will just now give you the possibility of speaking with your paper.
AUTHOR
MARIKA MOISSEEFF CNRS-LAS
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Fora of Identity: From Public Ceremonies through Acrylic Painting to Evangelical Preaching
Françoise Dussart
1 Thanks.
Introduction
2 This presentation has for aim to give you a glimpse, only a glimpse of manifestations of Aboriginality in a settlement in Central Australia where I have worked for the past 30 years. I address here in a truncated manner how what is now often called “indigeneity” become locally and globally rooted and routed through particular public performances. By examining various performances, which engage publically cross-cultural audiences, I highlight different repertoires of indigeneity:
3 Somethat privilege more traditional forms of identity politics, Others, which privilege newer forms of identity politics, forms which overlap but do not compete overtly with the more “traditional” expressions, And others which privilege forms of identity which reshape and at times reject traditional expressions. In this paper I argue that tracking the significance of public performances —ceremonies grounded in classical Aboriginal religion, acrylic paintings, and Evangelical church meetings, brings us closer to an understanding of the changing nature of social identity and kin relatedness in neo-colonial Australia.
4 My paper is accordingly organized in three sections. To be sure, in practice these divisions are not so neat and tidy and linear as my alliterative scheme suggests. Ever since anthropology 'discovered' Australian religion--starting with the midnineteenth century contributions of Spencer and Gillen, whose fieldwork fueled the more speculative armchair investigations of Durkheim and his heirs--much focus has been directed at the ritual manifestation of the Aboriginal cosmology known as the Dreaming. And though the frequency of ceremonial performances of the Dreaming has
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diminished for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, this quantitative diminution in no way negates the analytic dividends derived from the study of contemporary uses of public ritual performances.
5 Among the Warlpiri Aborigines of Yuendumu, a settlement located 300 km northwest of Alice Springs, perhaps the most significant changes in public performance of the Dreaming since sedentarization are those related to gender; it is women who came to dominate the public ritual life of the settlement in the 1980s. It is women who served as gatekeepers of the public expression of Warlpiri ceremonial knowledge. And significantly, this protective role not only functions within what Fred Myers calls the "intercultural space" that conjoins Aboriginal and White society, but also extends to settings of intra-cultural exchange-- neocolonial situations in which Aborigines define "Aboriginality”.
6 Warlpiri public rituals, however small in number are large in social significance. And up until the beginning of the 21st century, they were one of the primary arena in which the Warlpiri of Yuendumu negotiated their political identity in relation with non- Aboriginal people and other Aboriginal groups against the backdrop of non-indigenous neo-colonial hegemony.
7 The public ceremonies performed at Yuendumu resemble, at least on a superficial level, classic Walrpiri ceremonies conducted prior to sedentarization in the 1940s. Like their predecessors, current rituals are kin-based events hat reify the Dreaming myths that link performers to their relatives, to their ancestral lands, and their past. But the rationale for these performances has undergone significant change—change that serves to highlight indigenous response to non-indigenous domination. As such, an analysis of public performance as "a field of dreams" provides a window to understand the nature of Aboriginal social engagement up until the late-1990s.
8 To chart the nature of change in public ritual, it is important to trace the origins of the shifts from the early days of Yuendumu Warlpiri sedentarization (1946) to the passage of Native Title Act (1993), the landmark legislation that granted broad recognition of indigenous rights. As has been documented in some of my earlier publications, that the first forty years of public ritual can be characterized by three distinct, albeit overlapping, periods of ritual activity.
9 The first period—one that lasted some thirty years, until the passage, in 1976, of the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Rights Act—was principally indigenous in purpose and consequence. During that period, public rituals at Yuendumu were performed primarily by men for an audience that was exclusively Aboriginal and sedentarized. In the second period, demarcated and influenced by passage of the abovementioned Act, public ritual expanded to include female performers and an audience that extended to non-Aboriginal viewers. The performance of ritual by women and men during stage two—often (but not exclusively) motivated by new legal and societal pressures linked to the passage of the Act—followed complex lines of kinship that underlined expanded means of internal ritual representation. Earlier, wholly indigenous imperatives were less consequential during public ritual events stimulated by governmental land rights legislation. Public ritual moved from settlement to Land Claim courts, as externally politicized events generated forums and forms of Aboriginal self-representation in a cross-cultural context, and as such constituted an act of overt advocacy for new forms of kin relatedness and connectedness beyond the boundaries of the settlement. A profound change in the gender make-up of the public performances accompanied this
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realignment of purpose. Male ritual performers effectively ceded the public forums (and again, forms) of ceremonial representation to their female kin.
10 Once land claim litigation matters diminished in this part of Australia, another cross- cultural phenomenon arose in settlement life and it, too, spurred public representation of the Dreaming for non-Aboriginal consumption. The acrylic art movement catalyzed public ceremonies tethered to exhibitions of acrylic paintings produced by Central Desert artists. The newfound demand for public performance, which began in earnest during 1980s, transported the ritual representation of the Dreaming, beyond the homes and countries of the Warlpiri Ancestors and precipitated public ritual performances tied to art openings all over the world, starting in Sydney in 1982. The stimulus for public ritual was soon linked more to canvas commissions than to courtroom imperatives. Despite the foreign locale of representation, the performances, particularly in the beginning of this third phase, followed strict ties of residential kinship authority. Indeed, public ritual became a setting in which many residential battles played themselves out. Rights to perform were closely negotiated prior to enactment and exactingly compensated afterwards.
11 Furthermore, prior to enactment, there was extensive training to assure proper execution at the exhibitions opening events. These public ritual, whether performed by men or women followed the patterns of restricted rituals. They necessitated negotiation and surveillance between sets of kin whose ties were and continue to be at the very core of Warlpiri ritual expression. All that began to change, however, in the early 1990s, when the processes of collaborative oversight—a key part of all ritual representation—began to wane. Increasingly, ritual performers took greater self- guided responsibility over the enactment of the Dreamings that they owned; a change that pointed to the diminished role of residential surveillance. Women started to perform less and less for nonindigenous and more and more for inter-indigenous only events. Women shifted their foci of affirmation to other female leaders and other performers from other settlements, and by doing so privileged a form of personal prestige in matters of cosmological nurturance less visibly present during the public events performed prior to this shift. In other works, I have noted that the motives for public performance among ritually active performers included: “education, compensation, negotiation, protestation, association, and identification.” Of the last motive on the list, I wrote, “The last rationale [identification] was one pegged more to camp-specific kin group pride than to broader Aboriginal declarations of self.”
12 That was less true than it once were, as close study of the public ritual in the 1990s attested. Chronologically, this newest phase of public ritual engagement can be broadly grouped into two subsidiary phases: a transitional period of frequent, if diffuse, ritual engagements lasting three years until the passage of the Native Title Act in 1993, followed by a period of ceremonial consolidation and relative regularity linked to the “Women’s Law and Culture Meetings,” a gathering organized annually in different Aboriginal centers throughout the Northern Territory. These gatherings have now become highly restricted events.
13 So what happened? A sense of alienation. Complaints regarding Western scheduling demands and the effects of invasive "chatter" on the dilution of ritual potency grew and grew. Recognizing the limited impact of public ritual on non-indigenous viewers, the Warlpiri curtailed performances for non-indigenous audiences and intensified their commitment to the broadly attended Aboriginal ceremonies that brought them in
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contact with other Aboriginal groups from regional communities. Through their journeys to and performances at Women’s Law and Culture Meetings, and the moral and financial help of their younger kin, Warlpiri senior women shaped a “pan- Aboriginal consciousness” linked to classical values. While such identity-performances are controlled by a dying generation, the production of acrylics as public performances is accessible to all genders and generations.
Acrylics as public performances
14 Here in this second section I want to examine briefly how the performances of Dreaming stories on canvas have played and continue to play a crucial role —though ever changing—in the construction of Warlpiri identities since the early 1980s. Scrutinising painters’ motivations to paint Dreaming stories for sale reveals how the production of acrylics provides a site where identity politics are negotiated among generations, between genders, and among painters, art-coordinators and the
15 Australian society at large. In the early 1980s, Australian governmental policies of self- determination encouraged Northern Territory Aboriginal people to engage in various non-Indigenous art initiatives intended to counteract the erosion of Indigenous cultural identity. Of the various programs deployed to mitigate the negative effects of colonisation and forced sedentarization, the production of acrylic art proved the most resilient. Indeed, within five years of the program’s start-up in 1983, Yuendumu acrylic art captured the attention of critics, collectors and scholars worldwide. By drawing on research at Yuendumu between 1983 and 2007 among Warlpiri painters, I trace the social significance of non-Indigenous media on a settlement at large, and explore the changing nature of social identity.
16 In the first decade of the so-called Yuendumu Acrylic Movement, painters at Yuendumu created acrylic artwork that mirrored the patterns of ritual obligation in evidence during more traditional manifestations of ceremonial activity. To paint the Dreaming was to reenact and reinvigorate its ritual potency and, by extension, a means of tightening the social networks of the settlement. The burdens of ownership and managerial oversight — the relationship central to the maintenance of ritual obligation — strengthened through the gender-specific collaborations of senior members willing to paint public versions of their Dreamings. As such, the first decade of acrylic art movement (1984–1994) was marked by a renewal of kinship authority. Senior men and women actively involved in the ritual life at Yuendumu looked to the production of acrylics as a way of strengthening the learning of what should matter to Warlpiri people — their connections to the Dreaming, the land and their kin — and the senior painters’ places in sustaining more traditional ways and beliefs. Additionally, the settlement generally felt a rare sense of external affirmation thanks to the international attention the canvases stimulated. Travel to venues beyond the settlement, to events that celebrated the rich and seemingly robust iconography of the Central Desert cultures provided a fleeting sense of importance, though a consequential social sense of stress accompanied the non-Indigenous acclaim. In short, the acrylic canvases, as negotiated acts of translation, reconfigured both intra- and inter-cultural social relations; painters and audience both were transformed by the exchange. But by 1994, the tenor of acrylic art production had changed. Increasingly, the
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17 Warlpiri resisted the intercultural potential of the medium, despite the encouragements of the non-Indigenous art-coordinators. The second phase of the movement was marked by less productive tensions — conflicts of an intergenerational nature. It soon became clear that there was a growing divide between the senior painters who had spearheaded the movement, and younger kin resistant to the prospect of satisfying the ceremonial obligations that came with the production of the art. The mandates of the art-coordinators did not help matters. Non-Indigenous intermediaries dealt with external pressures that compelled them first to ‘preserve’ culture, and later to make it more economically viable through a more intensely commercialized sale of acrylics.
18 In absolute economic terms, the acrylic movement is now perhaps more robust than ever, but this increase in commercial success has come at a price. The crossgendered and gerontologically-constituted oversight is no longer guiding its production.
19 By taking the measure of change in the production of canvases over 30 years, it is necessary to acknowledge the dynamic transformations of the very nature of the exchange and production of artwork. And in this morphing negotiation it is possible to identify the broader more profound negotiations of identity that have informed and shaped the social and economic identities of the painters and their relatives. In other words, although the subject matter of the canvases painted since 1984 has changed little, the social structures of the canvas-makers have been anything but static. Yet it would be wrong to suggest that the acrylic painting is a mere reflection of the erosion of the social structures associated with the traditional ceremonial life of the settlement. The act of painting has in fact provided an arena in which ever-changing and often contrary motivations and priorities can find expression. Painters of acrylics at Yuendumu are carving new values associated with the production of Aboriginalities less tethered to traditional notions of ritual prestige, to residential group membership, and to expectation from the Australian society at large. Yuendumu circa 2007 was a settlement buffeted by the competing pressures of post-industrial non-Aboriginal market forces and the resilient residues of an egalitarian ethos that once found vibrant expression in ceremonial performances.
Charismatic Christianity
20 With the decline of traditional ceremonial performances, the changing values behind the production of acrylic paintings, and the coming of age of the generation of men and women who should have been taking over classical ritual life, a higher percentage of young people under 20, new national policies towards Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory since 2007, Charismatic Christian Churches (such as Pentecostal and Assemblies of God) have come to occupy a greater place on the battle field of identity in settlements such as Yuendumu. In short, many members of the settlements are attracted by the charismatic Christian message orchestrated around an appealing egalitarian philosophy itself relying on strong kin relations. While few are converted, many participate in Evangelical public performances where counter-narratives to Western and indigenized modernities’ dilemma, even at times across Christianities, as well as to classical Aboriginal life, are rearticulated. A new art of gendered public performances is taking shape. In engaging with the performance of public testimonies, sermons, stories of miracle recoveries, Church music and singing, and being part an
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audience, members of several generations at Yuendumu have come to challenge what Marcia
21 Langton recently has called the “cultural Aborigine”, —a cultural Aboriginal person often also reified in acrylic paintings— and challenged as well the image of an indigenous Christian produced by non-indigenous Christians [however that is imagined]. Such Charismatic public events provide productive spaces for their participants to think about various tensions of identity.
22 During weekly as well as impromptu “sing along”, members of different Charismatic churches aged between 25 and 65 years of age, along with their relatives (who are not necessarily members of the same churches) hold ceremonies during which usually men preach the word of God, men and women sing hymns both in English and in Warlpiri (or in other Aboriginal languages), and during which both men and women provide testimonies of conversion, miracle recoveries, and religious commitment. (see also Eva Keller 2005, 7). Through these diverse performances, participants not only articulate their own understanding of Christianity and what Christian precepts mean in their lives, but they do so — as they themselves note— in their own language, without an interpreter and without non-indigenous religious members. Public speaking and singing at Evangelical events become manifestations of Aboriginality perceived as orchestrated from within. They are claims articulated in both Warlpiri and Aboriginal English to Aboriginality, and to Christianity. The following quote encapsulates the points I am trying to convey here: “We did not understand before…It did not touch us because they [non Aboriginal missionaries] spoke English, we did not understand, now we have Aboriginal people preaching the bible. Now we understand by ourselves, now we speak to our own people. Now we understand our own people. Now we understand God. Now we understand that the Dreaming is part of God. It was given to us by God. God bring peace to the land, here and everywhere. We have to follow Jesus, without him we are nothing now.”
23 Following the life of Jesus is proposed as a superior alternative to their stressful lives, as they rearticulate relations to themselves and the society at large. Publically performing one’s commitment at Yuendumu and at any other church gatherings is considered THE practice of faith. As such members of Charismatic churches and most of their relatives (converted or not) consider attendance to meetings at local and national Church events of the upmost importance. Most travel regularly to other settlements as well as large cities, often funding these journeys with moneys they receive from selling their acrylics. Active participation to meetings small or large is interpreted back in the settlement as a proof of their religious commitment to Christianity, to their families and a more peaceful settlement. As one prominent member of an Assembly of God remarked:
24 When we are all together [at large meetings] it comes easy to us [Aboriginal people], we understand God, we can see clearly where we are headed. Some [people from Yuendumu] come, some do not. You cannot force anyone to come. If it does not become part of them, part of their lives, they fight, they bring sorrow for everyone.
Conclusion
25 Up until the mid 1990s, women’s public rituals were a means by which Warlpiri women became the gatekeepers of "Warlpiriness" to the outside non-Warlpiri world. Within
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the world of the settlement, the negotiations surrounding public events were rife with struggle and competition, expressing the efforts of both men and women to gain, for their kin groups, a measure of control. For the Warlpiri, the gender-shift in the public ceremonial life of the settlement and beyond did hide a
26 more telling component of post-sedentary existence: the primacy of kin-based residency.
27 The evolution of public ritual to acrylic paintings has been one marked shifts in gender and geroncratic responsibilities, as well as of changes in the tactics surrounding the selection of repertoire. And yet there was, consonant with that everchanging nature of function and perfomative representation, an indigenous constant of competition and relatedness. The production and circulation of acrylic paintings shaped Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal discourses on how “authenticity,” or “Aboriginality,” have been imagined locally and globally (see Langton 1993, 2000).
28 The works of Warlpiri female and male painters responded—and continue to respond— to essentializing ideas held by Aboriginal people about their buyers, and by the consumers about Aboriginality and authenticity. Working through their hegemonic resistance to colonial forms of Christianity, members of Charismatic Christian denominations reshape Aboriginal worldviews and lived practices, but once again the dominant organising value remains the value of kin-relatedness. For Warlpiri people, religious affiliations, economic welfare, and political allegiances have long been governed by the principles of kin-relatedness. I am not suggesting that contemporary kin-relatedness is the same as the kinrelatedness of the past, but rather that it has evolved in relation to increased engagement with the society at large, evangelical Christianity, intercultural forms of governance, and the demands of State institutions. Charismatic Christian performances as articulated by Warlpiri people circa 2012 do not seem to offer a bridge to secular narratives of Western modernity as they do elsewhere in PNG or Melanesia, however, they provide spaces whre religious identity politics are staged
29 Understanding the shifting meanings and practices of kin relatedness through time may help us comprehend the meanings and limits of citizenship, and the expansion of the fastest-growing religions in the world.
AUTHOR
FRANÇOISE DUSSART University of Connecticut
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Remediating sacred imagery on screens: Yolngu experiments with new media technology
Jessica De Largy Healy
1 When I first arrived in the Yolngu township of Galiwin’ku to undertake fieldwork for my doctoral thesis at the University of Melbourne and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, almost a decade ago to the day, a particular research question had been on my mind for some time. Over the past few years, I had been keenly following the development in Aboriginal Australia of several exciting projects making use of digital technologies – such as the Central Australian Ara Irititja interactive archive 1 or Barbara Glowczewski’s Dream Trackers’ CD-ROM conceived with Warlpiri artists from Lajamanu (Unesco Publishing, 2000). Considering the secret-laden nature of Australian indigenous religions and the complex revelatory system that still governs access to knowledge in many parts of the continent, I was particularly intrigued by the ways in which the proliferation of new media may affect the status, circulation and perception of ritual images in contemporary Yolngu society.
2 My ethnography focused on the activities of a newly established community organization called the Galiwin’ku Indigenous Knowledge Centre (GIKC), a pilot program which had just received seed funding from the Northern Territory government to develop its own “Yolngu friendly” digital archive. In a region that had been visited by a continuous string of researchers and collectors since missionary settlement in the 1920s, it had been a long time vision of many North-East Arnhem Land clan leaders to see their forefathers’ recorded “traces” return to the grounds where they came from. With several dedicated computers at the GIKC, these materials could now start being repatriated in a digital form.
3 As most people in the audience here would know, the anthropological legacy in this region of Australia is extraordinary and can be quite overwhelming for a newcomer to the field. I have spoken elsewhere about “a genealogy of dialogue” (De Largy Healy, [2012]2007) to describe the relationships Yolngu have built with anthropologists over time, some clan groups having fostered their own tradition of collaborating with
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researchers. Indeed, many of the current ceremonial leaders have developed a sharp understanding of past and present anthropological praxis. Furthermore, the existence of visual records that people have been able to consult partly as a result of these relationships, has resulted in a remarkable creative intellectual activity in the religious sphere, with some local “intellectuals” (Goody 1977) developing a critical reflexivity on their own performative traditions. Another consequence of this collaborative research history is that many Yolngu consider that anthropologists should also be working together. During my first fieldtrip to Milingimbi, a neighboring island community located at the west of the Yolngu region, sitting under the big Tamarind tree at Rrulku, I was told to contact my fellow anthropologist Franca Tamisari, whom I had never met at the time, to obtain copies of the stories she had recorded a few weeks earlier in the same place… a sharing of ethnographic material which is not particularly well developed in our professional field but which lay at the heart of the digital archiving project.
4 The Liya-ngärra-mirri learned men with whom I worked at the Galiwin’ku Indigenous Knowledge Centre valued the hundreds of bark paintings produced by their fathers, grand-fathers and uncles, as the “backbones of the land and the sea”, images of great power and beauty that revealed the foundations of Yolngu being. Like other ritual images mediated on wood, stone, sand or skin, the paintings in museum collections were said to derive from ancestral precedent, as truthful expressions of the various clans’ sacred Law (see for instance Morphy, 1991). Furthermore, historical bark paintings, I came to realize, were seen as authoritative ritual interpretations that could legitimize contemporary claims to particular bodies of knowledge and of land, influence social dynamics in the wider region and affect the content and meaning of ceremonial performance.
5 As the first digitized sets of bark paintings and ceremonial objects, together with audio- visual recordings from several archival and museal collections became accessible through local computer screens at the GIKC, I set out to examine how Yolngu experienced these new mediated forms of sacred imagery.
Religion, media practices and the transmission of Yolngu Law
6 The “media turn” in recent studies of religion remarked upon in a review article by anthropologist Matthew Engelke (2010) has renewed in fruitful ways old debates about religious experience, change and imagination. Central to these analyses is the idea that religion itself should be thought of as a practice of mediation: between the true nature of things, the transcendental, mediated by particular human relations and practices.
7 In this paper, I make use of the concept of remediation to explore how Yolngu imagine and re-create “authorized sensational forms” (Meyer, 2008: 129) for knowing and experiencing their ancestral Law (Rom). According to Grusin and Bolter (2000), the theorists who coined the term, “remediation” occurs when new media emerging from within specific cultural contexts refashion earlier media which are embedded in the same context. Remediation, writes anthropologist Ilana Gershon is “the ever-changing dialogue between media-ideologies as old media affect new media’s reception (…), and new media reconfigure how people perceive and use older media…” (Gershon, 2010:
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287). In this sense, it can be said that the Yolngu have historically engaged in processes of remediation in a variety of “new” media to bring forth, record and transmit expressions of their sacred law (Rom).
8 If we consider the technological changes that have occurred historically in north-east Arnhem Land, and the ways in which Yolngu have taken up introduced media that enable “inside” spiritual forces to manifest themselves by making themselves visible, the Yolngu engagement with so called “new media” does not appear entirely like a modern development. Since the first contacts with Macassan trepangers as early as the 18th century, and increasingly after missionary settlement in the region during the 1920s and 30s, new media such as cloth, steel, concrete, paper, photographs and so forth have found their way into Yolngu religious life.More recently, the increased availability of digital recording and storing devices – such as video cameras, computers and individual smartphones linked to social networking and content sharing platforms such as Facebook or Youtube – has clearly changed the contexts in which ritual images are mediated, can be viewed, appraised and responded to. These digital forms of mediation are best thought of as part of a continuum of negotiated changes, incremental “adjustments”, in the sense developed by Berndt (1962) following the Elcho Island memorial set up, in visual modes of religious revelation.
9 As is the case elsewhere, the introduction of new media in north-east Arnhem Land has established new registers of mediation of the sacred, the emergence of which was concomitant to questions of authorization, authentication and contestation (see van de Port, 2006: 444). The Galiwin’ku Indigenous Knowledge Centre project indeed became entrenched in controversies when the sensitive issue of access to digitized knowledge arose. People were worried that their sacred clan knowledge would be freely available to all, mixed up on a computer or stolen by others for political manoeuvres. To anticipate some of these concerns, GIKC director and scholar Joe Neparrnga Gumbula designed a conceptual matrix he entitled “Yolngu Knowledge Constitution”. Materialised as a painting, this model was conceived so as to graphically illustrate how the Yolngu knowledge system should structure the digital archive. It mapped how differential access rights to religious knowledge operated, by closely following the gurrutu or Yolngu kinship system (rights in one’s own clan’s knowledge, in one’s Mother’s clan’s, in one’s Mother’s Mother’s clan’s etc) (see De Largy Healy, 2008; 2012; Corn and Gumbula, 2006). In addition to this social partition of access rights, the painted model also showed the distribution of Yolngu knowledge into three interdependent domains, from the most open and public, called garma, to the restricted and closed, called ngärra. Too elaborate to be effectively put in place in a computerised environment, this knowledge constitution model nevertheless showed how digital images of ritual forms needed to be treated according to these same strict principles, under the same regime of value.
10 This conceptual model, initially conceived to structure the architecture and use of the GIKC digital archive, was also used by Joe Gumbula as a pedagogical tool in his own work on north-east Arnhem Land museum collections worldwide. In his contribution to the Swiss exhibition catalogue “Dream Traces: Australian Aboriginal bark paintings” (2010), Gumbula explained:
11 I try to negotiate a proper awareness and to inform people about the three domains of understanding that we have in the Yolngu world. I had the idea to use a universal sign, the traffic light, to explain how Yolngu knowledge works. The green colour is for the
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public knowledge, what we call the garma; the orange, dhuni domain, is semi-restricted knowledge, proceed with caution; and the red, ngärra domain, if for secret knowledge, restricted to initiated persons. People around the world use the same traffic light sign so they can easily understand this model. If you go back to Aboriginal beliefs, you have to have these three domains of law, restricted, restricted with a caution and then public access to anyone.
12 This interest in the changing status of ritual images in Yolngu society has sustained much of my research until now: from studies of body painting practices, to the historical creation of bark paintings for the early collectors, the international art market and in support of political claims. I found the idea of “authorized sensational form” conceptualised by Meyer (2008) useful to apprehend what is at stakes in the reproduction of religious imagery over time. This includes the movement of paintings and of images such as films more broadly from the restricted “inside” to the public “outside” domains, as well as the implications of these social dynamics for projects of digital repatriation in Yolngu communities. This issue came to the forefront during a research trip to north-east Arnhem Land I undertook in 2009 to work on the extraordinary collection of bark paintings put together between 1956 and 1964 by legal scholar, artist and anthropologist Karel Kupka.
Authority and rights in ritual images: religious knowledge and the politics of custodianship
13 It was while working at the GIKC that I became aware of a large collection of bark paintings from the 1950s and 1960s that was kept in France. The directors encouraged me to look into to this collection the making of which they had witnessed as children. Preliminary work undertaken in 2009 with the descendants of the artists represented in the Karel Kupka collection led me to examine the historical transmission of rights in religious images in Yolngu society. The idea was to analyse the reproduction of politico-ritual authority in the region through a comparative study of museum collections and contemporary ritual painting.
14 Working closely with the men considered by each clan to be their most authoritative painters, Kupka sought to put together “representative” collections that would reflect the diversity of ritual subject matters and individual styles in each community2. My intention was to work on an intercultural history of this collection, from the perspective of the collector, by using Kupka’s writings, personal archives and rich documentation, and from the perspective of the descendants of the artists, the current generation of leaders who are their sons and daughters and who continue to produce “the same” paintings today, for ceremonial purposes and for the art market (De Largy Healy, 2010).
15 The descendants of the artists perceive their historical collections of paintings as charters that legitimate their rights on specific ancestral events and particular ways to depict in art and perform them in ceremony. While, as I mentioned in the introduction, the paintings in early museum collections are conceived as models inherited from the ancestral past, they also present individual interpretations and perspectives – that of their authors – of particular mythical episodes. They are compared to historical documents whose return in digital forms can influence contemporary creative activity,
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in ritual and artistic domains, and politics in the region.In addition to providing new and often unforeseen insights into this historical material, the accounts of the painters’ descendants, the people who today can lawfully “speak for” particular paintings, demonstrated the ways in which the reproduction and circulation of ancestral and historical images partook in complex knowledge politics within contemporary the Yolngu region.
16 I found most remarkable at the time that people were not at all interested in discussing the meaning of the paintings. What mattered to them was to establish their kinship relation to particular paintings, examine how their forefathers had depicted particular mythical subjects, and comment on who had inherited the rights in the paintings today or whether people still painted the same way or differently.
17 While the men I spoke to never questioned their forefathers’ authority to bring particular paintings out of the ritual context, some images had since then returned to the “inside” (djinawa) and secret (ngärra) domain. Indeed, as Howard Morphy has stressed:
18 There is no set and agreed body of public or secret knowledge. Certainly in specific cases, general agreement can be reached over whether something officially belongs to the public or restricted domain. Over time, however, the content of the categories changes: what was once restricted becomes public and what was once public becomes restricted… (1991: 76).
19 I analysed a controversy that surrounded the current status of a painting from the Kupka collection painted by the powerful Gupapuyngu leader Tom Djäwa – Joe Gumbula’s father. While I had first been told that nobody painted like that anymore, and later that the painting was no longer public, I was very surprised to find shortly after in the storage room of the art centre two other paintings of Niwuda the Honey Bee almost identical to those painted by Djäwa. Those two paintings – one on bark and one on canvas – were attributed to Joe Dhamadji, son of Djäwa’s first wife, a painter in the process of becoming the main ritual leader of this branch of the clan. As is often the case in these situations, a consensus was found by the main actors involved to legislate on the status of this particular image: since the painting had “come out” during a dhapi initiation, a public ceremony, where it has been given to a boy, it had become public and Ok for all to see. As a public painting, it then could be included on a CD-ROM of the collection I would leave at the school library (De Largy Healy, 2012).
“Making true pictures”: authenticity, repetition and creation in Yolngu screen media
20 As a final example of the value of remediation, I would like to offer some thoughts on the perception of ritual film from the perspective of the Yolngu today. Since film media arrived in Arnhem Land, through missionaries and anthropologists at first, the ambition to “make true pictures” appears as a strong motivation for participating, collaborating and directing film projects. The idea of “making a true picture” comes from an address made by Yolngu leader Roy Dadaynga Marika, in 1970, in front of Ian Dunlop’s rolling camera. The filmmaker had been commissioned by the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit to make a “record film” of the development of mining in north-east Arnhem Land and document its impact on the local Aboriginal people. “This
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is our chance to record our history for our children, for our children and our grandchildren,” the old man said, “We should do this while we are still alive. Before we die we should make a true picture… our own Yolngu picture, that will teach our children our dances and law and everything – our singing, our own Yolngu culture”. This sequence was included in a film called Pain for this Land (1995) which serves as a general introduction to the Yirrkala Film Project, the extraordinary collection of 22 films made over a period of 30 years by Dunlop with the Yolngu of north-east Arnhem Land.
21 At the time of the “true picture” address, Ian Dunlop had just arrived in Yirrkala, an Aboriginal settlement established in 1935 by Methodist missionaries on the Gove Peninsula, in Arnhem Land’s north-eastern corner. A village council meeting had been scheduled by the clan leaders to discuss the filming and their decision to “open their law” to the public. The context of uncertainty and disquiet which prevailed in the region at the time of Dunlop’s arrival, following the development of the Nabalco bauxite mine and the building of the town of Nhulunbuy, is crucial in understanding this decision to record select aspects of their ancestral law (Rom) and sacred knowledge (Mädayin) “If it stays hidden, whites will wonder if we have any culture at all” (Yama, Gumatj leader).
22 It is clear that Yolngu saw the value of film as an instrument of education for the newcomers and of political persuasion for their government.Importantly, film was also taken up as a means of recording their culture for future generations of Yolngu and even of directly addressing those generations (Deveson, 2011 : 155):
23 “We want to tell you about this story before they build the township of Nhulunbuy. We tell you first and we teach you first what the old people, what our own law is, before the new law comes in, so you can know and hear our voices from every clan and you see us on this film what we have been discussing, and put the law through, our law through this picture, the movie . . . through this machine. (. . .) We are telling you, as your father’s father’s forefathers did…” (cited in Deveson, 159).
24 The Yirrkala elders were quite visionary in their use of recording technologies, although this trend reflects a shift in authorial control over ethnographic film that was also occurring elsewhere in Australia at the time.Reflecting on his experience as an ethnographic filmmaker and on the problematic question of “Whose Story is it?” MacDougall (1991) advances for instance that in the case of his film Familiar Places, also set in the late 1970s, which follows an Aboriginal family travelling across its country in the Cape York Peninsula, the film is “inside somebody else’s story”: it has become “formally part of an implicit Aboriginal narrative of ritual display” (MacDougall, 1991: 8-9). Films are thusconceived as one more “medium of reference, for ritually showing and thus giving recognition to objects and places… the film itself becomes a new story and object of totemic significance. It is not perceived merely as the filmmaker’s story; it becomes, in effect, Aboriginal cultural property (Sutton, 1978: 1, in MacDougall, ibid).
25 Many of the ritual films featured in the Yirrkala Film Projectwere literally commissioned by the Yolngu leaders who organized the ceremonies. This was certainly the case with the 1976 “Djungguwan at Gurrkawuy”, introduced on the opening screen as a “film monograph made by Ian Dunlop at the invitation of Dundiwuy Wanambi”. In accord with the ceremonial leaders’ wishes, a ten-hour film record of the ceremony – showing secret ritual sequences taking place in the sacred men’s shelter – was also created for archival purposes, its institutional access restricted according to Yolngu knowledge protocols.
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26 While the notion of “truth” in film has been widely debated by visual anthropologists and filmmakers alike, I am concerned more specifically with the ways in which ritual film, like ritual itself, by the evocation of ancestral powers and certain aesthetic effects, is generative of feelings of truth. The argument I wish to develop further is that, rather than being thought of in terms of the authenticity of the ritual form they display, a form that becomes fossilized through the recording process, ethnographic films are valued for the links they provide between past and contemporary performances, between the living and the dead and among the various clan groups of the region (see also Jennifer Deger’s work (2006) and her co-directed film Manapanmirr, in Christmas spirit, 2012).
27 As Howard Morphy and anthropologists working in other parts of Australia have noted, the multivalency and semantic density of Aboriginal religious forms also makes them ideal vehicles for cultural transformation. Ritual film records do not provide definitive models that need be replicated in exactly the same fashion. While Yolngu ceremonies such as initiations or funerals share a common structural core, each ceremony is ultimately a unique event, both from a semantic perspective (the meaning of the ritual action) and from a sociological perspective (the social relations at play). Through the choice of songs, dances, paintings and the revelation of sacred ritual objects, ceremonies make visible and renew social and emotional relationships as well as ritual and political links among the participating clans.
28 A final example of this creative use of visual media in contemporary Yolngu ritual performance is another DVD set called Ceremony: the Djungguwan of north-east Arnhem Land. Released in 2006, the set brings together three documentary films from 1966, 1976 and 2002 of the Yolngu Djungguwan ceremony, a regional initiation ritual used to teach the young about the ancestral law of their clans and to commemorate the dead of the organising groups3. This creative use of visual media to transmit ritual knowledge is clearly illustrated when one compares the 1976 and 2002 Djungguwan films. Both films grew out of the concern of the clan leaders of the time to make records of their culture for future generations. Significantly, the organisers of the 2002 Djungguwan are the sons of the main ceremonial leaders of the 1976 performance filmed by Dunlop. Wanyubi Marika was one of the young boys going through initiation at the time. Both men explain in the film that they want to stage the Djungguwan to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, to reactive their vision and pass on the ancestral law Rom. The ceremony is not impoverished through the record as new layers of meaning and experience are added each time, at each viewing, pending on the people present, those that have passed and those that are still remembered and cried for.
Conclusion
29 My research shows that sacred imagery captured in bark, film or digital format, does not freeze ritual forms and structures, but rather anchors them in a dynamic web of ancestral connections and social relations, providing a blue print for future ritual action. Contrary to common views that foresee in Aboriginal uses of reproductive technologies such as digital media the inevitable reification of ritual life, leading to situations where people just “copy” what they see on historically or scientifically sanctified visual records, I show in my research that Yolngu ways of perceiving mädayin images, both cognitively and sensuously, stimulate forms of repetition that are
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specifically valued for their generative capacity. Visual records of mädayin are generative of feelings of truth, the ritual images renewing and revitalising relations amongst the living, the dead and the ancestral beings. Captured on film, ritual images have the agency to “touch the märr” the “spiritual foundation” of the audience and to intervene in a very real sense into contemporary Yolngu lives.
30 In the past decade with the development of digital technology in the region, creative archiving experiments have multiplied across the Yolngu communities, in order to bring these images back to the place they come from and make them “perform” for the people, renewing artistic and ritual creation and general feelings of wellbeing. Films, as long and dense as they may be, can only offer an impoverished record of events. However, they have come to play an important role in the cultural process of the transmission of ritual action and meaning in north-east Arnhem Land. Considered as “traces” left for their forebears to follow, these records are used to draw inspiration for artistic and ritual creation as well as for political manoeuvres in and outside of the region. By showing ritual things and actions – paintings, objects, performances, or places – the various authorised forms of mediation of sacred imagery generate emotional responses that, like aesthetic experiences more broadly, play an integral part in the reproduction of Yolngu ritual, artistic and political creativity.
31 I would like to finish on a note of caution: While at the GIKC decisions to circulate particular ritual images had been firmly in the hands of the group of ceremonial leaders involved in the project – a problem in itself as the wider community became wary of a situation where everybody’s knowledge would be placed in the hand of a few -, today, with video recording devices readily available on later generation smartphones, anybody and especially the youth can and does post online, on platforms such as Facebook, photos taken during ceremonies, thus bypassing traditional lines of authority. This is an issue of considerable concern for the ceremonial leaders who, according to recent news, have tabled it as important subjects in community meetings.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berndt, R. 1962, An Adjustment movement in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory of Australia, Paris: Mouton.
Corn, A. and Gumbula, J. 2006 “Rom and the Academy repositioned: Binary models in Yolngu intellectual traditions and their application to wider inter-cultural dialogues” in Lynette Russell (ed.), Boundary Writing: An Exploration of Race, Culture and Gender Binaries in Contemporary Australia, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 170–97
Deger, J. 2006, Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
De Largy Healy, J. 2012 « La restitution des savoirs et ses enjeux locaux : les droits à l’image dans le nord de l’Australie », in Pessina Dassonville, S. (ed.) Le Statut des peuples autochtones. A la croisée des savoirs, Cahiers d’Anthropologie du Droit, Paris, Karthala.
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--- 2011, “The Genealogy of Dialogue: fieldwork stories from Arnhem Land”, in Henry, R. & Glowczewski, B. (eds), The Challenge of Indigenous People, Oxford, Bardwell Press, pp. 47-69.
--- 2011a, « Pour une anthropologie de la restitution. Archives culturelles et transmissions des savoirs en Australie », Cahiers d’Ethnomusicologie, numéro spécial “Questions d’éthique”, v. 24, pp. 43-63.
--- 2010, « Karel Kupka et les maîtres-peintres de la Terre d’Arnhem. La biographie d’une collection d’art aborigène », Gradhiva, v.12, pp. 198-217.
--- 2008,« The Spirit of Emancipation and the Struggle with Modernity: land, art, ritual and a digital knowledge documentation project in a Yolngu community, Galiwin'ku, Northern Territory of Australia », unpublished PhD Thesis, The University of Melbourne/Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
Deveson, P. 2011, “The agency of the subject: Yolngu involvement in the Yirrkala Film Project”, Journal of Australian Studies, Special Issue: Colonial visual cultures: ‘Double Take: Reappraising the colonial archive’, vol. 35(2), pp. 153-164.
Engelke, M. 2010, “Religion and the Media Turn: A Review Essay”, American Ethnologist 37(2), pp. 371-377.
Gershon, I. 2010, “Media Ideologies” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 20(2), pp.283-293
Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. 1999, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge: MIT Press.
MacDougall, D. 1991, “Whose Story Is It?” Visual Anthropology Review, 7 (2), pp. 2-10.
Meyer, B. 2008 “Introduction”, Material Religion, Special Issue Media and the Senses in the Making of Religious Experience,4 (2), pp. 124-135.
Morphy, H., 1991, Ancestral Connections: art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Van de Port, M. 2006, “Visualising the sacred : video technology, “televisual” style, and the religious imagination in Bahian candomblé”, American Ethnologist, vol. 33 (3), pp. 444-461.
Films and multimedia
Ceremony: the Djungguwan of north-east Arnhem Land, DVD set (2006, dir. Graham T., Film Australia, 366’)
The Yirrkala Film Project. A collection of 22 films made with the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land (1979-1996, dir. Ian Dunlop, 467’)
Manapanmirr, in Christmas Spirit (2012, Paul Gurrumuruwuy; Fiona Yangathu; Jennifer Deger; David Mackenzie, 60’)
Dream Trackers CD-ROM (2000, dir. Glowczewski, B. and the artists of Lajamanu, Paris, Unesco Publishing).
NOTES
1. The Ara Irititja Project http://www.irititja.com/ 2. Of a total of 730 objects collected during 3 fieldtrips to northern Australia for the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie in Paris and the Museum der Völkerkünde in Basel
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(Switzerland), there are 204 paintings and sculptures from north-east Arnhem Land, of which more than two thirds (162) come from the Methodist mission of Milingimbi, in Central Arnhem Land. 3. The films are The Djunguan of Yirrkala (1966, 50’/5h/17’), Djungguwan at Gurka’wuy (1976) and Djungguwan– Speaking to the Future (2002).
AUTHOR
JESSICA DE LARGY HEALY MQB-CREDO
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The East Kimberley painting movement: performing colonial history
Arnaud Morvan
1 This paper is based on PhD research undertaken at the EHESS -Paris and the University of Melbourne between 2005 and 2010. My fieldwork was based in the East Kimberley Region of north-west Australia around the community of Turkey Creek, and the towns of Kununurra and Wyndham. I collaborated with a group of contemporary artists named Jirrawun Arts, on the everyday running of the corporation and as archivist and anthropologist. The present paper will be mainly based on artworks by Rover Thomas, Paddy Bedford and Rammey Ramsey.
2 The Kimberley Region of north-West Australia hosted an important amount of anthropological research during the 20th century. Some of this early research took as subject Australian indigenous temporality, and in particular the dynamic local responses to colonization, through ritual performances (including, songs, paintings and body movements). Some of these ritual performances later developed into independent art forms that circulated internationally within the art market.
3 My own research focuses on one of these art movements called the East Kimberley school of painting, in its relation to colonial history.
4 European settlement began at the end of the 19th century through the development of cattle industry. Violent conflicts erupted between two groups, on one side the local Aboriginal people, on the other farmers and local police. This period is remembered today by local indigenous people as the “killing time”. . As a result of colonization, local populations were displaced, many suffered from disease, and various forms of mistreatment. By the 1920's, most Aboriginal families were living on or around cattle stations, working as cheap labor for the cattle industry. This situation of interdependency lead to a high level of intercultural exchanges.
5 It is in this post-contact context that several ethnographic fieldworks were conducted. In 1937 an archeology and ethnography expedition was sent from Germany by the
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Frobenius Institute in Frankfort to study Kimberley rock art and record firsthand accounts from indigenous people who had lived and worked with ancient and contemporary rock art.
6 The mission was led by anthropologists Elmut Petri and Andreas Lommel who worked in the West and Central Kimberley among the Wunambal, Ngarinyin and Worora language groups in 1937 and 1938.
7 Beside rock art material, Petri and Lommel's most valuable contribution to Australian anthropology was their precise description of several so called “traveling ceremonies” or myhto-history, showing how local groups integrated some element of the colonial contact into mythical narrative. The most famous and well documented of these ceremonies was called Kurangara. (also documented by Berndt in the south Kimberley and Tanami regions). This ritual, coming from the east, was reported by Lommel as transposing the destructive impact from European settlement in what he analyses as an apocalyptic myth.
8 Lommel explains that the Europeans were mythically associated with a new cultural hero named Tjamba, described in the following abstract: “his house was made of corrugated iron and behind it grow poisonous weeds. Tjamba is able to impart the unknown disease of leprosy and syphilis (..) He hunts with a rifle and ornaments his slabs with iron tool. To distribute his slabs to men, he uses aeroplane, motor cars and steamers. (..) (in exchange), he ask them for tea, sugar and bred. Following the myth, the modern cults demands exuberant feast with tea, sugar, bread and as much beef as possible but no meat from any indigenous animal. The cult places have to be in the vicinity of farms and station. ‘1
9 The Kurangara was an important step in the Aboriginal response and adaptation to colonization. The ritual shows some destructive effects of the European presence, associated with the diffusion of a poison. While Lommel analyzed this Kurangara as leading the an apocalypse, showing the incapacity of the Wunambal to integrate and react to the colonizer intrusion, others such as Ronald Berndt or Barbara Glowczewski, pointed out that the ritual also proposed the initiate with the possibility of appropriation of European technology to redirect their destructive powers toward the invaders.
10 In a wider historical sense, the Kurangara like other types of historical rituals that have circulated in the Kimberley in the 20th century, reveal an indigenous interpretation of the colonial contact, wich can be called counter-narrative.
11 The new art form of ochre paintings that emerge in the East Kimberley in the late 1970's, has a lot to do with counter narratives, an indigenous reading of the past, combining art, performance and history.
I. From ritual performances to a new art form
12 The East Kimberley region is located between the Kimberley cultural block on the west and the western desert cultural block on the east. Rock art can be find all over the area with dating going back to 20 000 years. Stylistically, it belongs to the Victoria River Basin area which shows naturalistic depiction of men, animals and mythical figures, painted with red ochre and highlighted with white clay.
13 The artistic singularity of the region consists of the use of painted wooden boards carried on people shoulder in public rituals. The first of these painted boards to have
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attracted non-Aboriginal attention were part of a ceremony called Gurirr Gurirr, developed in 1975 and early 80s' by the late Rover Thomas, an Kukadja man from the desert, exiled in the Kija community of Warmun. The Gurirr Gurirr ceremony consist of a large body of songs, dances and paintings, and aimed to follow the journey of a recently deceased woman spirit trying to return to its spiritual centre, at a distance of several hundred kilometres.
14 The Gurrir Gurrir ceremony is a narrative dance and song cycle of balga type, a medium by which both current and historical events and traditional spirit stories can be revealed in public. For each of the song-lines performers carry painted boards or other structures on their shoulders, following the movement of the dancers’ bodies. A few years after the first performance, the boards attracted the attention of several museums and art institutions. Soon a group of Kija painters decided to produce canvases, intentionally created as artworks. The early paintings and boards were relatively simple images illustrating a single site, spirit or event, emerging from dark red ochre or black backgrounds and rarely employing more than three colours
15 The ceremony was “found” by Thomas in a series of dream revelations starting shortly after the destruction of the city of Darwin by the cyclone Tracy in December 1974. In the Gurirr Gurirr, the destruction of Darwin was associated with the wrath of the ancestral “rainbow serpent” figure. The ceremony, was presented as a way to remember specific cultural sites and events that had been forgotten. It soon became an instrument of cultural appropriation of the land, and eventually was responsible for the development of a new art form of paintings on wood or canvas.
16 In term of style, the landscape is not painted from a fixed side view, but can mix a planar perspective and a lateral view. An object can be depicted from several angles at once.
17 Unlike desert art, which represents these traces with an ensemble of interlinked geometric signs, painters of the Kimberley create a raw expression, which consists of decomposing the visible or invisible elements of the landscape into large blocks of ochre, to be reassembled in the form of a topological map. The dimensions, distances and proportions are then redefined by the artists according to mythical, psychological or memorial criteria. The landscape is treated as if it had been X-rayed and unveils a geography invisible to the naked eye, suggested by transparency. As Judith Ryan wrote: ‘The Kija artists of Warmun in the east Kimberley look beneath the surface of the country to the bones, or structure. This organic structure determines the compositional rhythm of their work.’ 2
18 The paintings thus give the impression of a four-dimensional space: horizontal, vertical, in depth and movement which express the unstable relationships, the gaps and movements between the elements. Landscape here, in a holistic concept.
19 In terms of semiology and relation between images and memory, I refer to Peirce and the indexical nature of Kija signs. In the paintings, visual elements are in a causal relation with their referents, because the ochre used in the paintings are often come from the place depicted in the image. The painting then contains the very substance of the landscape, and also the trace of the artists hand as a residue of the performance of the painting, and associated songs. This indexical nature of the signs allows us to overcome the basic opposition between presence and representation. It also makes it
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possible to link the visual aspect of the concept of “trace” or imprint with its temporal nature as what remains of something that was once in a place.
20 As visual art tradition, Kija art moves away from a purely representational image to be something close to a mnemonic technique. The concept of imprint and indexicality is here quite relevant. I studied the way a painting creates a link between the visual aspect of an imprint as a visual mark, and its temporal aspect as memory.
21 Images, movement and songs need to be closely associated in order to understand the full reference specific events in the paintings.
II. The historical feature of the Gurirr Gurirr ceremony
22 Studying the Gurirr Gurirr corpus, I identified several song lines and painting that clearly refers to contemporary or historical events.
23 Paddy Jaminji was the first Kija artist to start painting on boards under the instruction of Rover Thomas. Thomas himself only took on painting around 1982-1983. The painting Cyclone Tracy, (c. 1983 -National Gallery of Australia), by Paddy Jaminji, typical of the simple compositions of the first boards, shows the destruction of the city of Darwin by ancestral forces associated with mythical figure of the Rainbow Serpent:
24 The painting shows the trace left by the cyclone after the destruction of Darwin. The larger part of the “U” shape is in fact the location of the ravaged city. We can read the movement of the cyclone, moving from bottom to top. We can see two distinct temporal references condensed in the same imprint: the destroyed city, associated with European settlement and colonial history, and on the other the Rainbow Serpent associated with the permanency and continuity of cultural life.
25 In the Gurirr Gurirr, on arriving at a place called Mount King (Karlarlungyu) near the Bedford Downs cattle station, the spirit of the old woman encountered what was described as “a shadow” over the mountain3. The shadow refers to a well-known Aboriginal massacre committed by station managers around 1924 on Bedford Downs Station massacre. Aboriginal stockmen were arrested by the police and sent to the Wyndham Jailhouse 200 km north, for the alleged spearing of cattle. They were subsequently sent back to the station, poisoned and burnt at Mount King.
26 Le title of the artwork, The shade from the hill comes over and talks in langage (1984 - Holmes à Court Collection),is the translation of the song XV of the Gurirr Gurirr : « Numpi-rrina kunya nyarima munga lurrpungu » in reference to the spirits of those killed by local farmers, in reprisal for the spearing of a caw. Here the spirits of the dead are only mentioned by the use of the word “numpi-rrina” (shade).
27 In the painting the white clouds represent the dead, only mentioned in this way because the massacre story wasn't open to a non indigenous public. Traces of the colonial presence became an undefined presence in the landscape. This massacre becomes more detailed and complex story in the art of another artist, Paddy Bedford, Kija traditional owner of the place.
28 Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford was born in the early 1920’s at Bedford Downs, a cattle station in the East Kimberley. Like a lot of men from his generation, he learnt to be a stockman and passed a large part of his life driving cattle from one side of the Kimberley to the other for simple rations of tea, sugar and tobacco. This difficult existence
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nevertheless allowed him to travel his land, visiting sacred sites and perpetuating the ceremonies that link people to the land and ngarangany (the Kija law and Dreaming). In 1997, he joined the artists group Jirrawun Arts, created by his nephew Freddie Timms and art director Tony Oliver. Jirrawun Arts was established with the intention of creating a community model constructed around a school, a painting studio, a performance space, and a cattle station to secure financial autonomy. Bedford, leader of the Jirrawun artists, became in the space of a few years, one of the most recognized painters in the country, one of his painting was transferred into the inside wall of the Musée du quai Branly in 2006.
29 Also Bedford was one of the traditional custodian of the site of Mont King where the Bedford Downs massacre took place. This allowed him to reveal more on this place, its mythical signification as well as its historical imprint.
30 Bedford’s painting ‘Emu Dreaming 2003’, shows the sacred site Emu Gap, at Mount King, (Karlarlungyu) depicted from a planar perspective. The canvas is divided into two sections: the white rectangle represents Mount King; the black section the area shows plain in front of the mountain. The mythical story of the two ancestral beings (associated with the Emu and the Turkey) refers to the alternation of day and night and is echoed in the monochromatic symbolism of the painting.
31 The paths, eroded into the mountain, trace the ancestors’ attempts to cross the ranges. In the story, the Emu gets “stuck” forever in the mountain, which, in the painting, is embodied by a white circle surrounded by a black line. The entrapped Emu is responsible for the splitting of the day and the night, and left an impressive gap in the mountain still visible today.
32 On the top left corner of the painting, the attention is drawn towards the only colored element of the canvas, a red circle that emerges from the black ground. The red pigment circle materializes the massacres location, the place where the bodies of Mr. Bedford’s ancestors were burnt after being killed. Today, a circle of tree stumps, reminiscent of pyres, are still visible.
33 The composition of the painting plays on the two focal points, the trapped Emu and the massacre site. Through the white circle, the mythical ancestors’ ending is incited, and in its red counterpart rests the evidence of the artists’ relatives’ deaths; historical marks on the country counterbalancing the mythical presence in the landscape. In this visual correspondence, the artist seems to suggest that the historical events are also linked with the ngarranggarni (dreaming), and that the massacre site is only a starting point. Indeed, Bedford and his brother-in-law, the late Timmy Timms, were the guardians of a cycle of public songs and dances (joonba) that tells the story of what happens to spirits in the afterlife.
34 After they die and their bodies are burnt, the spirits of the dead climb up the mountain to the west. They walk along the side of a cliff and look back to the fire where they had died, but eventually continue on travelling west until they meet a “clever man” (a shaman) and give him the song for the joonba. He tells the spirits that this is not their place and to go back to Kija country4. According to Peggy Patrick, the currentnt owner of the joonba, the ceremony was found by a Worora shaman (song man), in the west Kimberley, and was then “given back” to a Kija man through the traditional exchange network known as wurnan.
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35 In 2000, while working on these massacres paintings5, Paddy Bedford, and Timmy Timms began remembering the songs and performances associated with the painting. The old joonba was woken up and then reveal for the first time to a non-Aboriginal audience through a series of major paintings exhibition, and a series of performances in Darwin, Perth and Melbourne, mixing traditional joonba sequences with western style theatrical parts, in a cross-cultural performances.
36 In putting artworks such as ‘Emu Dreaming 2003’ in the public domain6 Paddy Bedford and Timmy Timms have revealed the full extent of the events that happened at Bedford Downs. The joonba’s paintings and performances integrates historical deaths into the ngarranggarni, sliding back and forth between historical and mythical dimensions.
37 I have attended some of those traditional parts in the outstation of Bow River and Rugun in 2007. This allowed me to get a better understanding of the relation between the paintings and the performances. What I tried to understand is how the visual representation of the historical event of the massacre was also expressed in songs and performances, and what relations happened between visual images, songs and movements.
III. Performing art and history
38 In his phenomenological approach, Alfred Gell emphasizes the concept of drawing as “residue”. Referring to the Layars’ analysis of Malakulan dancer’s path and sand drawings, he notes:
39 It is surely useful to consider the act of drawing as akin to dancing, and the design as a kind of frozen residue left by the manual ballet. Indeed, just this analogy seems to have suggested itself to Merleau-Ponty, after witnessing a close-up, and slowed-down, cinematographic record of Matisse’s hand and brush engaged in the act of painting.7
40 In the Bedford Downs joonba, the massacre event is specifically associated with the use of thread-cross emblems called woorrangoo, and shows how the combination of visual signs, movements and sounds, cause an object to manifest an event in a place while performed. In the ceremony, small woorrangoo, which refer to the spirits of the dead, are made from a double wooden cross on which blue, red and yellow strings are stretched creating a long, coloured diamond shape image. Dancers hold the woorrangoo during the performance, turning it rapidly from side to side around them, creating a coloured blur. When they are performed, they manifest both the burning of the bodies and the spirits of the dead people looking back at their burning bodies in front of Mount King at sunset8.
41 They are associated with the following song-line: ’Ngindil ba ’ngindil ma’nay, ’Ngindil ba ’ngindil ma’nay, Marrirri ma’naay, dilirri ma’naay, marrirri ma’naa dilirri ma‘naa Ngindil ba ngindil manaa dilirri ma naa dilirri ma’naa. - The sparking of the fire, the sparking of the fire, - The brightness of the sunset, brightness of burning, the brightness of the sunset, the brightness of burning, - The sparking of the fire, the brightness of burning, the brightness of burning,
42 For Peggy Patrick the right time to look at the woorrangoo is when the last rays of sun pass through the strings, re-creating the moment when the sun and the fire become one9. In the joonba song, the word marriri, the “brightness of the sunset” is associated
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with “dilirri” which describes the brightness of burning. This particular aesthetic made of the association of words, and the movements of the woorangoo manipulated by the performers, not only evokes the presence of the dead for the Kija but seduces the viewer into feeling it. It is important to State that one of the dancers was considered as the direct reincarnation of one of the murdered Aboriginal stockman10.
43 Digging deeper into this painting / performance relation and keeping in mind that the paintings are extensions of the earlier woorrangoo, I will goes back to the use of the painted boards during a ceremony.
44 A gestural experiment, observed while documenting the creation of a new joonba at the newly built Jirrawun Studio in Wyndham in April 2007, helped me understanding the relation between painting and performance. The sequence was referring to a song about the establishment of the first Jirrawun artist camp in the remote outstation of Rugun (Crocodile Hole) in 1998.
45 After several hours of recording songs for the joonba, the two main owners of the joonba, Phyllis Thomas and Peggy Patrick, started to initiate moves involving paintbrushes. A large painting on canvas was used as a screen. The two women come around from behind the painting, and danced slowly, one hand behind their back, and the other holding a brush, gently striking the air in a vertical movement. Each step on the ground was accompanied by a paintbrush movement going up and down.
46 This move was repeated during the entire sequence creating an invisible link between “stamping the ground” and using a stick or a brush to put a mark on the canvas. Footsteps on the ground and painted dots on canvas converge in the same intention of marking a surface whether it is ceremonial ground or canvas.
47 When this joonba was first performed in the small community of Bow River, the singers used their clap-stick not only directed the dancers, but also to marked on the ground (indirectly). Paintings made this inscriptive dimension of the dance visible.
48 If you consider ceremonial ground as a two dimensional plan on a bird eye view during a performance, the footsteps of the dancers would appear as a series of double lines of dots formed by the dancers’ feet. The lines come out from each side of the bush screen, joint in the center of the space, and continue on a straight line towards the group of singers. Then they performed the same trajectory on the way back.
49 The lines left on the ground make an intriguing design, very similar to the one that structure the paintings on boards or canvas and depict the landscape: dreaming path, rivers, hills, mountains, roads, fences, etc...
50 The irregular texture of paintings made of natural pigments also echoes the red dusty ground of a ceremonial space; its rectangular shape also reminds us of a canvas. Visually, the structural elements of a painting and performance have similarities, they mirror each other.
51 The position of the dancing board, carried on the dancers' shoulders, towering over their heads, is a key element. The multiple correspondences between the horizontal and vertical plans or surfaces (steps and dots, ground and canvas) become visible by the act of holding the board vertically. The paintings on boards reveal vertically the images of what is inscribed on the ground, like a mirror would.
52 The joonba is a display (or “mise en scène”) of the entanglement of horizontal and vertical space, between the surface of the ground and the surface of the board,
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combined through the performer's body. This creates a shift or motion from the steps to the dots and from the dots to the steps, creating depth out of two flat surfaces.
53 From this we can conclude that the paintings are not mere ritual representations of a place but they are also an image of the ritual itself, the ritual in its temporal dimension as an event. This particular event superposes and creates connections between at least three types of temporality: mythical, historical and biographical. The paintings show the image of a movement, a performance, the process of inscribing memory into a landscape. Through its formal and conceptual relation with the performance, the East Kimberley painting brings together the visual AND temporal aspect of an imprint, trace or landmark.
54 The painting makes visible the superposition of the temporalities that appears in a performance where people bring together ancestors, their collective history, and personal or biographical subjectivity as performers. As a type of performative “residues” of past events the East Kimberley artworks create a complex temporal space that can be considered as a new form of counter-narrative and demonstrates the profound historicity of indigenous contemporary art.
NOTES
1. Lommel Andreas,The Unambal, A tribe in North West Australia, (trad Ian Campbell), Takarakka Nowan Kas Publication, Carnarvon Gorge, 1997:23. (Die Unambal, ein Stamm in Nordhwest-Australien. Museum for Volkerkunned, Hambourg, 1952) (Lommel). 2. Ryan Judith, Images of Power : Aboriginal Art of the Kimberley, Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, 1993:40. 3. Thomas Rover, Akerman Kim, Macha Mary, Christensen Will, and Caruana Wally, Roads Cross, The Paintings of Rover Thomas, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994, p. 26. 4. Melbourne Festival and the Neminuwarlin Performance Group in partnership with Jirrawun Aboriginal Arts, Fire Fire Burning Bright, Programme produced by Nuance Multimedia, Melbourne, 2002, pp.9. 5. “Blood on the Spinifex” exhibition 2002, curated by Tony Oliver at the Ian Potter Centre in Melbourne, presented a selection of works by Jirrawun artists that depict similar stories. 6. ‘Emu Dreaming 2003’ was initially chosen by the musée du quai Branly in Paris to be reproduced on the facade of the Building as part of the Australian Indigenous Art Commission inaugurated in 2006. It was finally replaced by a different painting a few months before the opening. Also see Morvan Arnaud, ‘Retour d’exotismes. La présence des artistes aborigènes en France.’, in B. Glowczewski & R. Henry (eds), Le Défi Indigène, Aux Lieux d'Etre éditions, Paris, 2007, pp 125-149. 7. Gell Alfred., Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 95. See Also Layard John, “Maze -Dances and the ritual of the labyrinth in Malekula”, Folklore, 47, pp. 123 70. 8. Peggy Patrick, interview with the author, 2007. See also Lommel, 1997, p. 81. 9. P. Patrick,interview with the author, 2007.
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10. See also Morvan Arnaud, « Performing landscape and memory. Kija local and global art circulation », in Anderson, J. (ed.) Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, Melbourne, Miegunyah/University of Melbourne Press, 2009 : 827. Morvan Arnaud, « Traces en mouvement : histoire, mémoire et rituel dans l'art kija contemporain du Kimberley oriental », Unpublished PhD thesis, Paris/Melbourne, 2010.
AUTHOR
ARNAUD MORVAN Transoceanik program
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‘Under Western Eyes’: a short analysis of the reception of Aboriginal art in France through the press
Philippe Peltier
1 Good afternoon, I know you are all very tired and are over swept by the communications, so I am going to try to be brief. I am not going to read my paper because when I read a paper in English usually people don’t understand what I’ve said, so I am going to talk more freely. My starting point will be a sentence which is quite known among the art historians : “ce sont les regardeurs qui font les tableaux”, it’s the people who look at the picture that do the picture. It’s a Marcel Duchamp sentence and Fred Myers said in one of his articles “ce qui fait l’art… what does art is the place of its reception”, so he has the same idea as Marcel Duchamp: to look at art from the reception place.
2 To follow this idea I am going to, very simply, show you a press review, and sentences which are for me the main focus of the articles about Australian art. And, mainly I am going to talk about the reception of the Quai Branly project and the exhibition that we closed Sunday night (Aux sources de la peinture aborigène, 09/10/12-20/01/13).
3 It would be good one day to analyze the history of the relations between France and Australia. For the moment I will take examples from exhibitions I know about. There are probably more than that, but I take examples from all the main exhibitions that took place in France in the 80’s and in the 90’s. I have stopped my review in 2000. What I am going to do is to start with the 1993 exhibition at the Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (MAAO). This starting point has many reasons. One of them is that it was the first time that a national French museum showed modern painting s and it was also the starting point, in fact, in a very strange way, for the project of the musée du quai Branly. Starting from there is just to give you an idea of what was the reception at that time, so it’s a good starting point, and how it moved in time up to now. I must say that this 1993 exhibition was commented by Fred Myers in an article published in Terrain for
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a special issue on “le regard” (the gaze), once again what is it to look at something. The second reason is that, in an article, Fred Myers makes a review of all the evidence before 1993, so I’m not going back to that. Others and some of them are in the room like Barbara Glowczewski, Jessica De Largy Healy, Arnaud Morvan, have also have written on the reception of art. So, if you’re interested to have more documentation I send you back to those articles that are easy to find.
4 I will start with the exhibition at the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie. You should just remember that the exhibition was a presentation of two collections, the collection of Karel Kupka, (I show a photograph of the installation of the Karel Kupka collection before that exhibition because, very strangely, we have no photographs of the 1993 exhibition in the archives which is very strange, I don’t understand, but in the archives we have absolutely no photos of that exhibition!). So half of the 1993 exhibition was a show of the Kupka collection, and the other half of the exhibition was showing the new acquisitions and the collection of Aboriginal painting, mainly from Yuendumu. This second part of the collection had been collected in the field in 1991 by Roger Boulay who was in charge of the collection at that time, and Françoise Dussart. In this exhibition, the very long history of relations between France and Australia was also showcased. It started from Baudin and went through a few other examples. In fact, it was a quite complicated organization to understand. The other point of the exhibition was to show contemporary art. And the contemporary works were very, very controversial. Behind that controversy was a long history. At that time the Australian government waned the acrylic painting to be shown in contemporary art museums. So their dream was to organize an exhibition either in the Musée National d’Art Moderne (in Beaubourg) or at the Musée du Jeu de Paume which had just reopened as an exhibition space devoted to contemporary art. It ended up that that exhibition took place at the MAAO. And this was quite controversial because the MAAO was seen as a colonial museum. So there was kind of an argument going around which was quite interesting. The reception in the press was quite interesting too because clearly the press looked at the bark paintings from the Kupka collection but didn’t look at the acrylic paintings. I quote that from Emmanuel de Roux’s article from Le Monde, June 15, 1993 : « Les œuvres les plus récentes, collectées il y a deux ans, montrent l’appauvrissement d’une inspiration qui se stéréotype sous les lois de la demande. »
5 For de Roux, acrylic paintings are stereotyped paintings ! You can find many quotes like that. There is another article where they said that acrylic painting is to bark painting what the paintings of the Place du Tertre in Montmartre are to the paintings of Matisse. It’s a terrible remark!
6 When de Roux writes about the paintings he does not mention the situation in Australia. Dominique Blanc who writes an article in a monthly art newspaper in June 1993, is the only one who speaks about the situation in the Aboriginal community. She was the only one who pointed out the relation between the production of these paintings and the economic situation, not so much the political situation but the economic situation in the field: “Réalisées le plus souvent dans des ateliers, à la fois pour préserver et faire connaitre leur civilisation et d’une façon plus urgente pour aider à la survie économique des communautés aborigènes très démunies, les œuvres, celles d’hier et encore plus celles d’aujourd’hui, témoignent de la vitalité d’un imaginaire dont le prolongement formel semble inépuisable. » (Dominique Blanc, Connaissance des arts, June 1993)
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7 What she explains is that the production of paintings was to sustain the community, and she writes in a very interesting way, that for the people something that she calls imagination is going on, that the forms are quite interesting, that they are new.
8 On the side of the Australian press, I know about only one article on this exhibition. I extract a sentence from that article: « This historical bric-a-brac clearly indicates the continuation of a historical anthropological agenda in the MAAO’s conceptualisation and representation of Aboriginal art. This paradigm is made even more explicit in the MAAO’s – and the French press’s – insistence on the role of the French Museums in general and surrealists in particular in bringing Aboriginal (peripheral) art to the Western (that is, real) world, the ‘centre’.” (Stephen Todd, TheSydney Morning Herald )
9 Stephen Todd moves to a very political issue, the question of the center and the peripheral and behind that question the affirmation of a kind of French imperialism.
10 Some of these ideas you will find them again in the Quai Branly project. Some are going to disappear. At the opening of the museum, two times were comments by the press. First was the year before the opening, in September 2005, when John Mawurndjul came to Paris to paint the column which is now in the book store. At that same time some press reviews were published in Australia about the people who were involved in the project. The second time was when we opened the museum in June 2006.
11 The Australian project at the musée du quai Branly was a cooperative project between France and Australia. At the beginning we never thought that this cooperation was going to be set up! We were very surprised when the Australian Prime Minister sent us a letter and said “Banco I’m going to give you money to do those paintings, I’m going to help you do that”. It was quite surprising. It was the time of the Iraq war and it was shortly after the time of the nuclear bombing in the Pacific Ocean by the French, it was tricky time for the relations between France and Australia!
12 When John Mawurndjul was in Paris, there were a lot of articles published about his work. And a lot of articles were illustrated by this picture showing John working.
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13 It was remarkable because it shifted the focus from paintings, to an artist at work. The relation with the press was quite different because there was something going on, something to see. You could show someone working, not an abstract painting coming from Australia! The other thing for the press, especially the French one, was that John does not want to talk. They are used to having artists who talk, comment, but John refused to talk, he was happy to let Apolline Kohen, the art manager of the art center of his community, talk. This was a surprise for the French journalists. And Apolline said “John is painting a thing that is sacred”. And she couldn’t comment more than this. This was the end… So the journalists could in there paper only describe the artist but couldn’t really comment on what he was doing.
14 The other photo that was really widely published was John in front of the Eiffel Tower!
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15 I don’t think I need to comment it. It is really a strange image who can be read in two ways. This picture had been reproduced widely.
16 The journalists often quote a sentence by the artist Judy Watson who didn’t come at that time but it was published in the Herald Sun on June 21; Judy “we are swallowing the building”, you know, the artists’ are swallowing the building. So it was quite interesting to see how the artists make appropriation of the building. It was no more the building of the musée du quai Branly, it was the building that the artists were going to invest. They started to say that they had a very deep relation with that building and what they were doing with it. They have the conscience that what they were doing was very important for Australia. The same thing is almost said by Gulumbu (Yunupingu), she even added a little more. She said : “my stories are going to be in Paris”. Later, when she came for the opening, she developed the idea of a bridge between Paris and her society. This idea of a bridge was widely reproduced by the press at that time.
17 The question of territoriality comes back again. For example, in The Australian article you can read: “It seems to be an era of reverse imperialism on the banks of the River Seine […] Now western art from Oceania, Africa,Asia and the Americas, Australian Aborigines are conqueringthe Europeans.” (Emma-Kate Symons, The Australian. September 9, 2005)
18 I don’t need to comment. The sentence is clear. The building is seen as an Australian extension, a kind of reverse imperialism! The French don’t conquer Australia, Australia is conquering France and Paris!
19 The second time was the opening of the building, you know that eight artists have been chosen for the building: four women and four men coming from different regions in Australia, and among those were two urban artists, Michael Riley and Judy Watson. At the opening not all the artists came. Only a few. John Mawurndjul, Gulumbu, Judy Watson come and Tommy Watson was represented by an artist called Dawson. Ningura Napurrurla didn’t come. She became ill a few weeks before the opening and couldn’t come.
20 Interestingly enough, for the opening we have a very large review in the international press. In the archive it occupies at least 1 meter long. Interestingly enough too, none of the French press comment on the Australian building! You won’t find any reference. Everything was focalized on the opening. And God knows how we have been attacked! To have comment on the Australian painting you have to lock at the Australian press.
21 The first remark was that it was one of the largest commissions ever done for Australia. But behind there was another question: was it worth? Did we, us, the Australians, spend too much money on that? Did we give France too much money to do that? No one answered that question but that question was raised by the press. The other thing that was quite controversial was the reading of the building. Patrick Hutchings wrote :
22 « One French journalist has compared [the ceiling ] with the ‘tradition of 17th—century ceiling painting’.He ought to think about ‘the Self and the Other’s. Since Aboriginal persons for most of their history did not have houses, they had no tradition of frescoes on their interiors.” in The Age, 8 July 2006
23 The comparison with the 17th century comes in fact from Jean Nouvel himself. Jean Nouvel was very clear that his idea to paint the celling of the building come from the fact that when you walk in the street in Paris at night, in some areas, especially old areas, and you look inside the apartment buildings, you see painted ceilings. He did not
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mention the ”Grande Galerie” in Versailles but the idea is just behind. So, it started a kind of a controversy about the building: is it in a French tradition ? Where are we? French tradition or Aboriginal tradition?
24 As write another critic: “Ancient cave art has collidedwith cutting-edge architecture in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.” Fiona Hudson, Herald Sun, June 21, 2006
25 One of the answers to those remarks is : the building is a meeting place, it’s a cross- cultural building which mixes Australian tradition, modern architecture and European tradition. Another thing that was extensively quoted is Gulumbu (Yunupingu)’s comment, the one that I have already quoted. Once again we come to the idea of the bridge between France and Australia. Gulumbu visited the building the day before the opening. It was probably one of the most moving times of the opening. Gulumbu explained what she wanted to do as Cynthia Banham reported : «… she cried as she spoke publicly about her ceiling of painted stars on Monday. « “This building is a bridge between Australia and France” she said. “Your stars are like ours. It has made me feel like home”. » Cynthia Banham, The Sydney Morning Herald. June 21, 2006
26 Gulumbu wanted all of us to be under the same sky and the building to be a bridge between her and there. But I think it was a much deeper meaning in the speech of Gulumbu. Jessica De Largy Healy commented about those.i There was much more meaning behind what Gulumbu said!
27 The third example is the press comments on the exhibition that we closed on Monday night. This exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Victoria and Museum Victoria. The two curators were Judith Ryan and Phillip Batty. It is an exhibition we brought from the NGV without interfering with the setup, with the exhibition. The focus of the exhibition was to show what happened in Papunya in 1971-1972, with the idea that the Papunya paintings were coming from a tradition before. This is why we had that opening rooms with the shields that you see on the left of the picture. They are shields which were collected by Spencer & Gillen. They were shown in an introduction room. The exhibition, for those who didn’t see it, presented 280 paintings organised by artists. It was presentation of some of the production by twenty artists during two years. So, it was a very pedagogical exhibition. And the French press did understand suddenly that there was a deep history behind those Aboriginal paintings. It’s what they started to understand. An article in Le Temps, by Laurent Wolfe, raised a historical question: why does it start in Papunya at that time? For which reasons did the movement start in Papunya in 1971? The other point is that the critics understood that those paintings were contemporary art, a point that was made in 1993 in the MAAO exhibition, but was denied at the time and finally accepted twenty years later!
28 In one of the articles, you can read: «La force des Aborigènes aura été de faire face à ces contradictions et de leur trouver des solutions en s’adaptant au monde de l’art à l’occidentale sans rien perdre de leur singularité, de créer un art contemporain qui leur soit propre mais qui peut être intégré à l’art contemporain mondialisé. » “The force of Australian Aborigines is being able to face contradictions and to find solutions to them in adapting to the world of art understood in the Western sense, without losing their own singularity, to create a contemporary art that is their own but can be integrated into the world-wide contemporary art scene”) Laurent Wolf, Le Temps (Genève), 4 January 2013
29 Or, in another article, you can read:
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« Il n’y a pas une peinture aborigène mais des peintres aborigènes, des artistes singuliers qui puisent aux sources stylistiques et thématiques de la peinture du désert pour réinventer des formes. » « There is not one school of painting but many Aboriginal painters, singular artists that draw on their stylistic sources and themes on the painting of the desert to reinvent forms anew.” Pierre Grundmann, L’objet d’art, November 1, 2012.
30 And it goes even further. Some critics start to ask this question: are those paintings pure paintings? « De fil en aiguille, les peintres de Papunya se sont un peu éloignés des représentations traditionnelles pour laisser s’exprimer une créativité autrement varié.» “Step by step, the painters of Papunya distanced themselves from traditional representations to let another type of creativity, very various one, express itself. “Laura Purty, Trois Couleurs, Hiver 2012-2013
31 Do they have relation with traditional paintings? Are we in front of pure landscape paintings?
32 In one of the articles, the question is raised: are we in front of pure landscape paintings without history behind? Do Aboriginals painters try to capture simply the change of light in the countryside? Or are we still in paintings that are in relation with myths and sites? « L’exposition déploie des peintures de paysages où l’étude de la lumière sur des sites géographiques précis est primordiale » Francine Guillou, Journal des arts, 14 décembre 2012
33 Those questions raise another one which is probably going to be one of the main one in the coming years, to read historically that movement. The question for some of the European critics is not to read those painting as modern but something which belongs to a history.
NOTES
i. De LargyHealy 2009, « My art talks about link’: the peregrinations of Yolngu art in the globalised world », in Anderson, J. (dir.) Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, pp 817-822.
AUTHOR
PHILIPPE PELTIER Musée du Quai Branly
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A history of art from the Tiwi Islands: the source community in an evolving museumscape
Eric Venbrux
Introduction
1 ‘Morning tea with Tiwi Ladies’ is one of the attractions for tourists visiting Bathurst and Melville Islands in northern Australia. Indigenous graveyards and the production of arts and crafts are part and parcel of the itinerary. The islands have a history of one hundred years as a ‘destination culture’ (Kirshenblatt- Gimblett 1998) for tourists and anthropologists alike. From the early years of the twentieth century onwards museum interests have been a steady factor in shaping the islanders’ interrelationship with the wider world. Items of material culture were collected here in great quantities and ended up in museums all over the world. The current urge of metropolitan museums to set up a dialogue with source communities concerning collections assembled in the past, as well as indigenous people’s reclaiming their dispersed cultural heritage, has gained considerable attention in the museum-studies literature (e.g., Simpson 1996; Peers and Brown 2003). Although local museum buildings may be of recent date, many indigenous ‘source communities’ have long since been affected by the process of museumification.
2 In this chapter I want to consider this process, and extend the idea of indigenous museums, by looking at twentieth-century Bathurst and Melville Islands through the lens of an open-air museum. This case study thus seeks to contribute to a better understanding of indigenous people in an evolving museumscape. In particular, I want to make clear that due to its museumification the so-called source community can be conceived of as being part and parcel of the circuit of museums. In this regard the source community is not a mere source of artefacts, but another museum in itself: a type of museum that comes close to an eco-museum or open-air museum. The indigenous museum could be visited as such. De-accessioning of duplicates, of course,
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occurred to a greater extent than in metropolitan museums (although their involvement in exchanges with other such museums should not be underestimated). A shift in perspective, however, helps to see that the museal source community had its source in preexisting models of museumification. For example, the model of an open air-museum was around when Bathurst and Melville Islands opened in around 1905. It was a model with its antecendents in the world exhibitions (see Stoklund 2003). Museum interests had also become intertwined with the colonial enterprise (Fabian 2001). This was a ‘valuable advertisement of the country’s capabilities’, according to the then government resident, who established an ethnographic museum in his residence in the Northern Territory’s capital, immediately south of Bathurst and Melville islands (Herbert 1906). What is more, ‘Aboriginal cultural knowledge and material had been “up for sale” in the Northern Territory since the turn of the century’ (Povinelli 1993: 75). This commoditization also took place on Bathurst and Melville Islands (see Venbrux 2001, 2002), and it implied a production of difference. Baldwin Spencer, director of the National Museum of Victoria, conceived of them, in 1911–12, as ‘quite another world of aboriginal life’ (1928: 695). The islands were treated as an open-air museum. Museumification is closely linked to folklorization (De Jong 2001: 21–24), and likewise can be seen as special form of creation (Bogatyrev and Jakobson 1929). First and foremost, these are forms of cultural production sited in ‘an intercultural space’ (Merlan 1998; Myers 2002). In considering the museumification of the islands, both external influences and indigenous agency have to be taken into account. Below, I will discuss some of the conditions and local practices that constitute the process of museumification. I want to show how local, indigenous people have participated in an evolving global museumscape over the past hundred years. In the last few decades the islands have not only served as a kind of open-air museum, particularly in terms of small-scale tourism, but also boast indoor exhibition rooms. These galleries further enhance the process of museumification of local history and culture. Referring to the early twentieth-century example of Richard Thurnwald’s open-air museum in the island of Buin, Nick Stanley (this volume) States that the open-air museum provides a model that ‘thrives today in most of the cultural centres across the Pacific’. With regard to the case of Bathurst and Melville Islands I would like to go a step further, and demonstrate that this source community for a hundred years has been a de facto open- air museum. The process of museumification, in other words, may be more decisive than the formal product or institution when we are speaking of or conceptualizing an indigenous museum:the indigenous museum as a cultural form has a future firmly rooted in the past.
A Preserved Site
3 At the height of the ‘museum period’ (1880–1920; cf. Stocking 1983), Europeans gained access to Bathurst and Melville Islands. It was generally believed that in the two islands – at a distance of 60 km from the principal port in northern Australia – a pristine, primordial culture had been preserved. ‘For long ages past a narrow stretch of water seems to have isolated the Islanders with their remarkable culture’ (Spencer 1928: 709). The islanders formed ‘the one tribe which offered consistent, uncompromising resistance to European intrusion’ until the eve of the twentieth century (Reid 1990: 97). Consequently, the islands were seen as one of the few remaining locations where ‘the aboriginal in his natural State’ could still be observed (Spencer 1914: 41; cf. Klaatsch
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1908: 674; Basedow 1913: 291). Both the landscape and the inhabitants of this secluded space happened to be designated as ‘wild’ and ‘picturesque’ by early twentieth-century visitors (Venbrux 2001). In their gaze it seemed faithful to the image of a primitive isolate, ‘a hermetic aesthetic place’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991) not unlike a museum park. European visitors tended to regard the islanders as museum pieces, ‘a relic of the early childhood of mankind’ (Spencer 1922: 13). These Aborigines, ‘hitherto practically uncontaminated by European influence’ (Frazer 1912: 73), provided a unique opportunity to come face-to-face with humanity’s contemporary ancestors. Thus framed visits to the islands helped to create a local ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999) geared towards showing a primeval Aboriginal life-world in evidence.
4 Visitor expectations had their antecedents in social theorizing, and its popular dissemination in exhibitions, representing the Australian Aborigines as the primitive society par excellence (Kuper 1988, Morphy 1988, Hiatt 1996). How persistent the idea of a primitive isolate was follows from the account of a National Geographic expedition in the 1950s. The leader presents the islanders as ‘one of the few archaic peoples left on earth’. The visiting party was ‘travelling backward in time’ and ‘in the little-known land … would see man living as much as he did 50,000 years ago’ (Mountford 1956: 417). At that time, Bathurst and Melville Islands were Aboriginal reserves.
5 Throughout the twentieth century the islands, in addition to the physical boundaries, have been hedged around with legal barriers restricting access. They were initially leased to private interests, then declared Aboriginal reserves, and finally granted as Aboriginal land. Permission was required to gain entrance to the islands. (Since the 1980s tourists have been required to pay a visitors’ fee.) The marked-off area in this sense also resembles an open-air museum. The distinctive ‘world of aboriginal life’ that Spencer and others found here was attributed to the islands’ isolation until early in the twentieth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, sporadic exchanges took place with the crews of visiting ships. In 1824, Melville Island even became the site of the first colonial settlement in northern Australia. But the British Fort Dundas, a military and trading post, turned out to be a failure. Within five years the fort had to be abandoned (Campbell 1834). Although no friendly relations with the islanders were established, an indigenous graveyard with sculptured posts had been observed, the record of which was to inspire later European visitors. The remains of the short-lived fort would also become a popular destination for them. Among white people in Palmerston (the present city of Darwin, founded in 1869) on the mainland, the islanders had a reputation for hostility (Foelsche 1882: 17; Swoden 1882: 21) probably as a result of the earlier failure to establish friendly relations with them at Fort Dundas, and their subsequent attacks on people who visited or were stranded on the islands.1 Requests by prospectors, speculators and Jesuit missionaries to be granted land on the islands were turned down by the administration (Reid 1990). The financial crises of the early 1890s (Trainor 1994) must have paved the way for the government to give Europeans access to the islands’ resources, including timber and feral buffaloes (a legacy of the British fort). Hence, intermittent buffalo shooting took place on Melville Island from 1895 onwards. Some crews of Asian ships (operating from the mainland port) that frequented the islands’ waters developed more peaceful relations with the islanders (Pilling 1958: 17). Cape Gambier, in the southwest of Melville Island, was to be the primary ‘contact zone’; the closest anchorage to the mainland, a function that it continued to fulfil when Europeans took over.
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6 The Source Community as a Living Museum The new era, one of sustained contact with Europeans, commenced in 1905. The governor landed in the southwest of Melville Island with a party of Europeans ‘in the hope of meeting some wild natives, which was the principal object of H.E.’s visit to the island’ (The Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 9 June 1905). But they failed to meet them. In the second half of June, however, a white man named Joe Cooper established himself on Melville Island as the lessee’s manager. In the previous decade Cooper and associates had ventured into the island several times to shoot buffalo for their hides and horns. Encounters of these parties with the islanders had been of a violent nature. Cooper now gained access with the help of a few islanders he had kidnapped in 1896. He was accompanied by his brother and an armed workforce of thirty mainland Aborigines. Their gun power was instrumental in the ‘pacification’ of the islands. The Cooper brothers took up buffalo shooting; to a lesser extent they engaged in logging and trepanging (collecting sea cucumbers or bêche-de- mer). The Coopers and their mainland employees camped on various places on the island. Young islander men became attached to the camps, working in exchange for introduced foods and goods.
7 Once the enterprise was established it attracted a stream of European visitors. These visitors relied on Cooper’s protection and the guidance, transport and other facilities offered by him. A major objective was to view ‘wild’ Aborigines and their cultural expressions in the islands that had been out of bounds before. Already some European men and women had ‘availed themselves of this opportunity for a flying visit to the island’ when the Coopers shipped in horses and gear: ‘Mr. Corr, who had taken his camera with him, is said to have obtained a good snapshot of a group of wild natives, who are described as a far finer and healthier looking lot than their opium and alcohol contaminated compatriots in and around the settled districts of the mainland’ (The Northern Territory Timesand Gazette, 30 June 1905). The shift in the colonial frontier brought first-hand experience of ‘genuine’ Aborigines within reach. ‘The opening door’, to use Morris’s expression (2001: 79), was one to a living museum. Cooper was quick to pick up on this interest: evidence of the islanders’ authenticity and distinctiveness could be presented. His guests witnessed the performance of dances and ceremonies by the islanders, were shown burial sites, and often paid a visit to the remains of Fort Dundas. Furthermore, the visitors were given demonstrations of primitive technology, took photographs, and obtained ethnographic artefacts from the islanders in exchange for trade goods. An example of this pattern of visitor activities, is the account of a visit provided by a German scientist, Hermann Klaatsch, in September 1906. Europeans on the mainland were to read it, under the heading ‘A trip to Melville Island’, in the newspaper. Klaatsch considered his brief stay at Cooper’s camp ‘an experience never to be forgotten by him’. He not only had ‘the most invigorating and glorious natural bath conceivable’ in a waterhole (something still on offer for tourists) in a ‘picturesque valley’, but he also relates that he ‘on each night was an interested spectator of corroborees inaugurated in honour of his visit by the natives’ (The Northern Times and Gazette, 5 October 1905). Although the scientist was primarily interested in data to confirm his evolutionary theory that Aborigines represented ‘the missing link’, he sought to fund his endeavour by bartering for ethnographic objects at source and selling them to metropolitan museums.4 Given those museums’ demand for Aboriginal artefacts, he was able to get a handsome profit by playing them off against each other (Völger 1986). His trade, facilitated by Cooper, also smoothed his relations with the islanders with whom he was unable to speak (Klaatsch 1908: 586). What is more,
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islanders frequently took the initiative and approached European visitors. The islanders’ ‘mercantile ambitions’ (Fabian 2001: 129), resulting in a commodified display of culture, coincided with the quest of visitors to witness and document a pristine, authentic Aboriginal culture before it was ‘too late’. The formation of such a ‘destination culture’, an intercultural space, however, implied a shift in the context of indigenous cultural practices. In particular, the change in function and meaning of objects, dances and so forth, entailed their museumification (cf. De Jong 2001). This extended to the islanders themselves, being subjected to the visitors’ gaze (cf. Rooijakkers and Van de Weijer 2002). In accordance with the image of the islands as an open-air museum, there was a certain selectiveness as to what merited attention. The focus was on matters that demonstrated the authenticity and distinctiveness of the islands’ Aborigines.
8 For Europeans Aboriginal dances and ceremonies provided a sort of litmus test of authenticity (Povinelli 1993: 74), evidence that they were dealing with ‘genuine’ Aborigines. A clear example of the islanders’ adjustment to this expectation are the so- called ‘welcome dances’ with which they greeted European visitors upon arrival in exchange for tobacco (Klaatsch 1908; Basedow 1908; Spencer 1914, 1928; Gsell 1956: 47). The dances for entertainment, furthermore, could be staged at any moment and place convenient for a European audience (Murphy 1920; Hill 1943; Simpson 1954). Basedow remarks that ‘whenever we came into contact with the blacks and presented them with divers small articles, a corrobboree was immediately inaugurated; even though the encounter happened to occur in the middle of the day’ (1913: 305). Such dances are performed for tourists up to the present day. The staging of welcome dances for visitors was one thing, a flexibility in the schedule of planned rituals another. It is no coincidence (although they believed that it was) that one visitor after another had the ‘good luck’ or ‘good fortune’ to attend ceremonies being held (Venbrux 2001). They did not have to wait for long to see one; especially postfuneral rituals – dance and song ceremonies – that could take place between two months and two years after a death.5 Spencer (1914, 1928) regarded the mortuary rituals as ‘the wildest’ he had ever witnessed in the whole of Australia. They offered sought-after photo opportunities. The timing of the visitor-attended rituals can also be seen as an indigenous strategy to generate an instant collection of artefacts. Next, the second-hand, desirable ‘authentic’ objects could be transacted to the visiting Europeans, who collected such items – ‘used in ritual’ – almost without exception. The influence of external museum interests also showed in the preference for distinctive Aboriginal artefacts, unique to the islands. In demonstrating a particular interest in precisely those things that distinguished the islanders from mainland Aborigines, European visitors cum collectors contributed to a museumification of local culture that was not only selective but also determined by what stood out from a European perspective. In due time, however, these items also became accepted as cultural icons by the islanders themselves. The favoured objects included barbed spears, bark containers and grave posts, all decorated with geometrical designs. The period before the First World War, when Westerners – museums, in particular – had the greatest interest in acquiring artefacts of Australian Aborigines, was formative in this respect. Indigenous handicrafts were also included in submissions to exhibitions aiming to show the Northern Territory’s potential for development. At the first Australian Women’s Exhibition in Melbourne in 1907, for instance, ‘the work of Aboriginal women from Melville Island was particularly featured’ (James 1989: 71). For Cooper the transactions of his visitors went hand in hand with his
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commercial interests. It created the goodwill of visiting dignitaries and earned him some money. He not only facilitated the collection of artefacts by representatives of museums but also acted as an agent, trading in ethnographic objects, and if necessary commissioning them to size (Venbrux 2001). Cooper attained legendary status as ‘the only white man among hundreds of savages’ (Masson 1915: 57). He was appointed sub- protector of the Aborigines on Melville Island. In addition to the authorative knowledge of islander culture with which European visitors (including Baldwin Spencer) credited him, this seemed some kind of curatorial role.
9 In 1911 the federal government took over the administration of the Northern Territory from South Australia. At that point, Father Gsell, a French missionary of the Sacred Heart order, established a small mission station at the southeastern point of Bathurst Island, opposite Cooper’s camp on Melville. The southeastern part of Bathurst Island was leased to the Roman Catholic Mission, and the rest declared an Aboriginal reserve. When Cooper left the islands in 1916, his honorary role of sub-protector was transferred to a priest at the mission station. Although the European presence in the islands was of crucial importance for visitors, indigenous agency should not be underrated.
10 Some islanders acted as stranger-handlers. They specialized in guiding European visitors (Hart 1954). The latter were given demonstrations of the making and painting of, among other things, bark baskets, spears and grave posts. And they could hardly miss seeing dances and ceremonies. Even near the mission station performances of ‘pagan’ ceremonies were staged for parties of European tourists. Sometimes such an almost inpromptu ceremony ‘was not well done’ in the opinion of the Islanders.6 The visitors often happened to be too short of time for a properly prepared ‘corroboree’. ‘The advent of the due date was accelerated by a liberal distribution of tobacco’, notes a member of a party of nine Europeans visiting the mission station in 1920 (Murphy 1920: 79). It had become standard practice for Europeans to hand out tobacco and trade goods to Aborigines as an incentive (Basedow 1926: 100). These visitors often relied upon information from earlier visitors. They behaved in a predictable way, revisiting the same places (e.g., burial sites with the prized grave posts, waterholes, the remains of the British fort). Those in the business of showing Europeans around would also direct them to the camps of close relatives. Moreover, along established routes Aborigines approached or pointed the way. Important in this respect was the area around Papiau beach, in the northeast of Bathurst Island, at the Apsley Strait. Boats that went up the Apsley Strait had to wait for the tide to turn between Papiau, on Bathurst, and Fort Dundas, on Melville Island. During the stop-over Bathurst Islanders approached by canoe, taking the opportunity to trade their artefacts with European passengers.7Willing visitors were also led to an indigenous camp a little inland. Here they were shown, among other things, the production of bark baskets and aspects of ceremonial life.
11 Conigrave writes that at the Papiau camp a number of ‘freshly painted’ spears stood ready: ‘These, and many baskets and other objects of native arts and crafts, we took in barter, and we soon had a full cargo for the dinghy’ (1936: 169). Furthermore, it appeared that the Islanders were used to posing for photographs, even in the anthropometric style so popular with museums (cf. Venbrux and Jones 2002). Hence there was the perception of a ‘photographic salon’: ‘our subjects very quickly seized our anxiety to take them full face and profile. If when the former had been taken, a native
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was slow in turning for his other portrait, he was given some “hurry-up” by those looking on, and when the focal plane shutter went off with a snap, there was satisfied clicking of tongues against their cheeks that seemed to assure us that we had done our job well’ (Conigrave 1936: 170). The site had the double function of production centre and tourist trap. The Aboriginal reserve or living museum, if it may be called so, thus was less ‘uncontaminated by European influence’ than often supposed. The source community underwent dramatic changes in many respects (see Pye 1985; Venbrux 2000b), but despite the impact of external forces attention focused on those areas that were thought to represent ‘traditional’ (read: precontact) Aboriginal society, frozen in time. These were set apart, lifted out of context, as is characteristic of museumification. European visitors and museums wanted the tokens of ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ Aborigines. European representations of the Islanders (in museum collections, earlier accounts and popular culture) fed back into local cultural production. Time and again, while adjustments had to be made to economic and sociocultural change, emphasis was put – as regards hunting and gathering, ceremonies, and artefacts – on the past. The understandings of that past shifted in a process of negotiation between indigenous people’s current ideas about the past (palingari) and consumer expectations over time. ‘Being ourselves for you’, as Stanley (1995) notes in his book of the same title, can be read in two directions. The encounters contributed to a mutual process of identity formation.
12 In need of a tribal name for the Bathurst and Melville Islanders anthropologist C.W.M. Hart coined the word Tiwi (meaning ‘human beings’; Hart 1930). The Islanders themselves gradually accepted the designation Tiwi as an expression of their communal identity. Besides dance and ceremony, distinctive artefacts and a characteristic painting style came to be seen as icons of Tiwi-ness. The massive production of ‘authentic’ objects from the beginning of the twentieth century, kept in European museums, slowed down somewhat in the period between the two world wars. Yet, European visitors to the islands (and Darwin, where the islanders sometimes performed for Europeans and traded in artefacts) still wanted look-a-likes of these emblematic museum artefacts as mementoes. In time these would also end up in museums. To satisfy demand Islanders continued to produce the bark containers long after they had fallen into disuse. The large barbed spears that had proven to be ineffective against highpowered rifles at the time of ‘pacification’ (Powell 1988: 124) remained collectors’ items. The same was true for grave posts, often repainted by the islanders for European customers (Venbrux 2001). The cultural heritage presented was mainly so-called decorative art. Even previously undecorated bark containers were painted (see Venbrux 2002). Instead of the spear being three to four metres in length, and therefore difficult to transport elsewhere, the Islanders started to produce barbed spearheads. Members of the allied armed forces who resided in the islands during the Second World War acquired many of these transformed objects (some have now been repatriated to the Milewurri Museum in Milikapiti on Melville Island). In the next few decades islander carvers further transformed them into fantasy pieces (with exaggerated proportions and ornaments) for European visitors looking for ‘primitive’ art. These objects too ended up in private collections and museums, and came to be seen as timeless and authentic. ‘It is a marvel that their culture has survived with so little change’, remarks Mountford with regard to the year 1954 (1956: 417). At that time, however, the majority of the islanders lived at the Bathurst Island mission and on the two government settlements, Garden Point and Snake Bay, on Melville Island
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(formally an Aboriginal reserve since 1933). Goverment policy towards Aborigines had changed from ‘protection’ to assimilation. In 1953 a bill had been passed that made Aborigines on reserves ‘wards of the State’, in effect, inmates of a total institution (Rowley 1972). Placed under close supervision of European superintendents, they were supposed to adopt a European lifestyle and work ethic. Despite ‘a complete ecclesiastical ban’ on indigenous ceremonies at the Bathurst Island mission (Mountford 1958: 60), the missionaries encouraged the production of artefacts (along with other handicrafts) for sale (Venbrux 2000a). Mountford on Melville Island gave a new turn to the idea of local, ‘traditional’ Aboriginal society.
13 He did so not only by promoting a novel form of bark paintings (derived from the bark containers), but also by instigating mythological themes as the subject matter for the works. Although he had been unable to detect such themes in either islander designs or ceremony (see Mountford 1958: 110, 160), the new emphasis on myths of creation times demonstrated in European perception that the islanders were ‘genuine’ Aborigines. The Islanders responded creatively to the European desire for Dreamtime stories which were known from exhibitions and publications of Arnhem Land bark paintings. Adding to the mystique were figurative carvings of ‘mythical ancestors’, another innovation (emerging from the tradition of carving grave posts, and probably inspired by the statues of Catholic saints). This striking art attracted many visitors from the 1950s to the 1970s, wanting to see the islanders and getting work and stories from them. Because visitors needed permission of the responsible government department in order to enter the islands, white superintendents on both islands acted as intermediaries. Dances and ceremonies continued to be performed for European tourists.
14 The shift towards mythological interpretations in museum representations of Aborigines had a clear impact on the source community. The entanglement was to be even greater because the formidable collection of innovative work made and inspired by Mountford was disseminated to State museums, supposedly representing the source community’s tradition in its most authentic form. It was indeed becoming a tradition in its own right: repeatedly – in the 1960s, the 1980s, and around 2000 – Europeans engaged in the local arts and crafts industry referred islanders to (illustrations of ) the bark paintings with mythological themes from 1954 as the example of proper traditional art. In recent years, a number of islanders were sent to view them in museum stores in order to reclaim ‘traditional Tiwi imagery’ (Burbidge 2000: 17). There have been frequent exhibitions of carvings and paintings with a mythological story assembled by notable collectors (such as Dorothy Bennett, Karel Kupka, Louis A. Allen, Helen Groger-Wurms and Sandra Holmes) in the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Today these works dominate the representation of Bathurst and Melville Islanders in the Northern Territory Art Gallery and Museum in Darwin: ‘the museum effect’ (Kirshenblatt- Gimblett 1991: 410–413) has left an imprint on tourists to the islands.
15 A reflection of the museumification of islander culture in the postwar era can also be seen in the appearance of ceremonial scenes and artefacts as subjects of paintings on bark and in the carving of sets of miniature grave posts. The implementation of the policy of assimilation made inroads on the islander lifeworld (cf. Department of the Territories 1963). In the face of modernization it was believed that certain ceremonies were ‘no longer valued’ by the islanders themselves (Goodale 1971: 225). They would inevitably cease to exist (Mountford 1958). It could no longer be taken for granted that
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the mortuary rituals, forbidden by the missionaries, were still being carried out (Brandl 1971). A European visitor could not help observing the sociocultural change ‘without feeling the breath of a dying culture on the back of your neck’ (Simpson 1954: 162). Another visitor, cartoonist Eric Joliffe, was of opinion that ‘Melville Island bark paintings would shortly affect Western-style industrial design’: ‘The patterns are all original, which is what designers are looking for. They show no trace of influence by any other culture’ (The Northern Territory Times, 12 August 1954).
16 Other artistically inclined visitors, in 1958, commissioned new grave posts, rather than a repainting of discarded ceremonial ones. Islanders carved and painted the posts in front of cameras, as it was an event in itself, to be carefully documented for a museum (see Neale 2000: 82–87). This set of posts was the first Aboriginal work put on display, in 1959, in ‘a major art institution’ (The Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Jones 1988: 175). Although the posts had long been prominent in ethnographic collections from Melbourne to the Vatican, this new production of course increased the desirability of this icon for museums and for visitors to the islands of viewing the ‘real’ thing at burial sites or in ceremonies.
17 In the 1960s Aborigines gradually acquired civil rights. In 1977 a bill was passed to grant land rights to Aborigines on reserves in the Northern Territory. Government policy towards Aborigines gradually changed from assimilation to self-determination or self-management. To secure decision-making power over their lands, the people from Bathurst and Melville Islands created their own land council in 1978. The Tiwi Land Council, formed by delegates of the islands’ ‘traditional owners,’ administers the Tiwi Land Trust. With the decline in supervision of their daily lives, the right to social security benefits, and the regaining of their lands, Aboriginal societies in northern Australia underwent a cultural renaissance. The cultural revival in Bathurst and Melville Islands was, I think, initiated by the performance of two old-style ceremonies or postfuneral rituals in the 1970s. These were recorded on film at the explicit request of the close relatives of the deceased. In this respect the record differed from Baldwin Spencer’s filming of these ceremonies in 1912: the people concerned wanted to have it as a document of their culture. But they also took pride in the registrations being released as ethnographic films. That the rituals no longer needed to be hidden from the missionaries also meant that a wider participation was possible. This celebration of culture was further emphasized in the fact that the Tiwi Land Council welcomed anthropologists to document the reflourishing ceremonial life (cf. Grau 1983; Goodale 1988; Venbrux 1995). Sometimes such an anthropologist would hear islanders claim in theirs lyrics that they were ‘important’, because white people came to see (or listen) to them. The elderly, who had obtained the skills and knowledge, led the ceremonies; in areas of uncertainty they often referred to ‘the old people’ from the past to convince others that things had to be done in a certain way.8 Apart from burials, the other main ceremonies were held at weekends to fit in with a Westernized lifestyle.
18 An objectification of culture took place in the so-called ‘culture classes’ in primary schools. At times, older people were invited to tell the children ‘traditional’ stories, to teach them Tiwi songs, and to instruct them in bush crafts and the performance of ‘traditional’ dances, and to demonstrate the making of areifacts. ‘Tiwi culture’ was embraced in manifold ways at the Bathurst Island mission: in bilingual education, the decoration of the church interior and mission premises with Tiwi designs, hymns in Tiwi and sometimes the adding of ‘traditional’ dances to the liturgy, integrating Mass
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with islander funeral dance and song ceremonies, and even allowing grave posts (previously rejected as ‘a pagan symbol’, see Fallon 1991: 13) to be erected at the Catholic cemetery. Clerical vestments and chalices were produced in ‘Tiwi style’ by the local arts and crafts industry, started up by the missionaries in the late 1960s . Under the guidance of European ‘arts advisers’ this industry would further develop; also on Melville Island, drawing on the Tiwi picturial tradition and ceremonial life and objects of the past. Locally printed fabrics with a Tiwi Design trademark came into use as loin cloths and skirts and as payments for ritual services in mortuary rites, as well as being sold to tourists.
19 From 1980 onwards, the people from Bathurst and Melville Islands have been involved in the development of a local tourist industry. It was one of the first ventures considered to provide economic support for ‘Tiwi national development’ (Tiwi Land Council 1990: 5). Over the years Tiwi Tours has contributed greatly to the museumification of the Islander life-world. It has been run mostly by European managers or operators in joint venture. It focuses on cultural and ecotourism (see Venbrux 2000a). The idea of an open-air museum is strongly suggested by the promotional pamphlet. Here the itinerary and highlights on the map show what is on offer. Inevitably, visits are suggested to burial sites with grave posts and to the remains of Fort Dundas, with a swim in a scenic waterhole, demonstrations of the production of artefacts, dance and ceremony, and the purchase arts and crafts. Some islanders specialize in guiding the European visitors. The camps that were production centres have been replaced by workshops and art centres. Tourists arrive by plane, and are moved around in the islands in motor vehicles and motorized boats. The former church of the Bathurst Island mission, a wooden construction, has become part of the cultural heritage on display.
20 Nearby the story of the mission is told in a museum. The ‘picturesque’ towards the end of the twentieth century gained a new meaning with the ubiquitous paintings in Tiwi style in contact zones. This aestheticizing with the help of murals sends the same message as the freshly painted spears that stood ready for European visitors at Papiau camp in 1914. Tiwi fine art is now purchased in large quantities by all the major museums in Australia and several others overseas. It is through this continuous history of collection that indigenous people have been involved in an evolving museumscape over aperiod of a hundred years. The source community, in effect, has continued to exist as a living museum.
Museum Constructions
21 In the late twentieth century the people of Melville and Bathurst Islands have themselves adopted strategies of salvage ethnography such as recording oral histories and knowledge relating to practices, ceremonies, plant and flora (Puruntatameri et al. 2001). They have also collected traditional artefacts in museums, with a view to retaining their culture. Broadcasts on the islands’ closed-circuit television system serve the same purpose. In the 1990s the Tiwi Land Council, fearing a loss of culture, decided to start paying people for the performance of ‘traditional’ ceremonies, including mortuary rites. A long-term dream of a Tiwi Cultural Centre at Three-Ways (on Melville Island), where the roads to the three major townships meet, has not yet materialized. The maquette has become a museum piece in the offices. It may eventually happen
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under the new Tiwi Islands Regional Government. But here, as in other source communities such as the Torres Strait Islands (see Herle, this volume), there are more urgent matters and problems first to be taken care of (e.g., keeping the Australian government to its promises to fund badly needed health programmes). Yet, two local museums, one on Bathurst Island, the other on Melville, already exist.
22 The Patakijyali Museum at Nguiu (Bathurst Island) was started by Sister Ann Gardner of the Bathurst Island Mission in corrugated iron sheds on the mission grounds dating from the Second World War. The buildings had previously been used as a bakery and dining rooms for children staying at the mission. The museum initially consisted of a collection of artefacts, donated by local people, especially the late Raphael and Declan Apuatimi, who had a close association with the mission. The museum was ventilated by fans, but there was no airconditioning. From the 1980s onwards, the museum has become a small-scale attraction to tourists visiting the islands. In the early 1990s, the exhibition rooms were professionally upgraded under the guidance of curator Glenn Cole from the Department of Regional Museums of Northern Territory Museum of Arts and Sciences in Darwin. The museum is named after the founder of the Roman Catholic mission, Father Gsell (Patakijyali).
23 Currently, the museum contains three galleries, which have a similarity in style to the ones at the museum in Darwin. The first room celebrates the history of the mission. Next is the gallery known as Arraliki or the Tiwi Culture Room. Here ‘traditional’ artefacts, historical photographs and explications about the habitat of the mangrove swamps and hunting and gathering are on display. Finally, one enters Apupwamkiyimi or the Tiwi Dreaming Room, which connects creation myths with the yam ritual, mortuary rituals and the production of bark baskets (cf. Tungatalum and Cole 1996). Photographs, texts and objects illuminate the making of the bark containers. An arrangement of standing grave posts relates to the mortuary rituals. In the middle of the room a miniature diorama shows the scene of the performance of a seasonal ritual in progress. Photographs and accompanying texts provide some explanation. The last two galleries about the traditional way of life and the ‘Dreaming’ (ritual and cosmology) stand in stark contrast to the first gallery, which is dedicated to technological achievement and development accomplished by the mission. In order not to upset local Aboriginal visitors, pieces of paper are temporarily pasted over the tabooed photographs of the recently deceased.
24 The Muluwurri Museum at Milikapiti on Melville Island was founded at the end of the 1980s. Anne Marchant, then an adult educator, took the initiative. The air-conditioned, one-room museum or gallery is part of a larger complex of buildings containing the Jilamara arts and crafts centre. According to Marchant, the museum in the newly built complex had several functions: preserving a selection of locally produced artefacts or art, stimulating Tiwi artists, attracting tourists and serving as a community museum of culture and history (personal communication). Again, assistance was provided by the Northern Territory Museum of Arts and Sciences in Darwin through the government- funded Regional Museums Programme for the establishment of Cultural Keeping Places. The upgrading of the museums has also served to improve ‘the tourist infrastructure’ (Cole 1996: 19–20). On display are artefacts such as a set of grave posts, spears, clubs and throwing sticks, carvings of birds and human figures, and bark containers. Photographs depict islanders performing mortuary rituals. A small case
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shows some of the medals Tiwi men received for their services in the Second World War. From that period there are also repatriated spearheads hung on the wall.
25 Artists Pedro Woneaemirri and John Wilson proudly led me to their museum, in 1998, to show me some of their sculptural work in progress. Wilson, Woneaemirri and others, at times, used to paint inside the museum as a comfortable place to be. Unlike the other art centres in the islands, the people at Milikapiti only use ‘natural pigments’ for paint. Their work is in demand as, for instance, a significant order from a dealer in Amsterdam attested. Wilson produced a photocopy from a catalogue with works made at Milikapiti in the 1960s and 1970s. A female collector from Queensland had commissioned him to create a grave post containing carved human figures, similar to the one on the photocopy he received. Woneaemirri expressed a strong interest in my records of a seasonal ritual he attended as a child with his late grandmother at Pirlangimpi almost a decade ago (cf. Venbrux 1995: 119–49). He felt empty, he said, because so many of the older generation had died there. His interest in recent history took on a personal meaning. The photographs in the museum speak about relatives and events; like artefacts, they embody a history of social relations and distinctive, personal identities. The primary purpose of the museum attached to the art centre, as on Bathurst Island, is a display of Tiwi culture for visitors. These museums are part of the cultural-tourism infrastructure. So also are the art centres which serve as outlets for arts and crafts. The art centres are integrated into special art tours by plane. Tourists come to see indigenous artists at work in situ. Framing the visitors’ gaze not only contributes to ‘the museum effect’, as a ‘genuine’ museum with objects not for sale, but it also seems to increase the desirability for things that are apparently special and rare. In 2002, an art centre at Pirlangimpi (Melville Island) was also planning to start a museum. This was to be something different to the art and artefacts for sale on display in a special room. The Keeping Place at Nguiu (Bathurst Island), however, seems to have the magic and secrecy of museum.9 It is a striking building, the interior decorated with Tiwi paintings, hidden somewhat between the airstrip and the community.
26 Here tourists could freely look around among the artefacts on display for sale. A selection of these products went to museums, either directly or indirectly. Museum interests have helped to shape the islands’ destination culture. Bathurst and Melville Islands have been a locus of musealization ever since the era of sustained contact with Europeans commenced in 1905. It was in this initial phase that a pattern of interaction emerged which may be considered a cultural form in its own right. The source community from which artefacts were (and are) withdrawn gained the outlook of a living museum. It is as such a site of dialogue that can be seen as part of a global museumscape.
27 Had Baldwin Spencer, who ‘had always wanted to see Melville Island’ (1928: 641), visited the islands at the end of the twentieth century, he would have seen ‘quite another world of aboriginal life’ (1928: 695). Currently, a life-sized statue of Spencer is sitting in a glass box in the Melbourne Museum. He is surrounded by artefacts from Bathurst and Melville Islands, dating from 1911–1912. Islanders have come to visit.
28 The exhibit invites viewers to reflect on the terms of understanding, in the past and the present.
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AUTHOR
ERIC VENBRUX Radboud university Nijmegen
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