Culture

Sun - April 27, 2008

Indigenous Protocols: Kim Christen at the Kluge-Ruhe

Kim

Christen was at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection this weekend, delivering two lectures within five hours on her experiences building a digital archive of cultural and historical material with the Warumungu people of Tennant Creek. Christen, an anthropologist and assistant professor at Washington State University, is the author the forthcoming Aboriginal business: alliances in a remote Australian town, soon to be published by SAR Press. She also writes Long Road, a premier blog on issues Indigenous. And she is the architect of the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive, an Indigenous archive tool, that was the subject of her talks.

The first lecture, "Culture at the Interface" Digital Archives and 'Social' Rights Management in Aboriginal Australia," was actually given in the high-tech Scholar's Lab at the University of Virginia's Alderman Library to an audience interested in Christen's work from the point of view of "digital rights management" and the possibilities for encoding intellectual property protocols into software.

The second, "A Safe Keeping Place: Shifting Museum Spaces and Embedded Aboriginal Protocols," appealed to the Kluge-Ruhe's dedicated lecture audience interested in Aboriginal art and culture. In her presentation examined the ways in which the Warumungu not only keep their culture alive but are working to integrate their sense of themselves and their traditions into the ongoing adjustments of black and white in a multicultural community. Tennant Creek in on the Stuart Highway smack in the middle of both traditional Warumungu country and Australia's Northern Territory.

Christen has been working with the Warumungu in Tennant Creek since 1995 in a variety of capacities. At one point in her career she accompanied a group of people from the town to the South Australian Museum in Adelaide. There they were able to inspect thousands of artifacts that had been removed from Warumungu country since contact with white people began during the construction of the Overland Telegraph line in the middle of the nineteenth century.

A subsequent trip to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory was much less fruitful at first. Only three artifacts in MAGNT's collection were recognized by the visitors from Tennant Creek. They did, however, receive copies of about 700 pages of written material from the NT Archives relating to activities in and around Tennant Creek. These includied extensive records from cattle stations in the area that provided documentary evidence about the Indigenous people who worked in the area for the station owners.

But on the way back down the highway towards home, the group stopped to visit at the home of a former missionary who had lived in Tennant Creek. There they were shown dozens of boxes containing thousands of photographs taken in the latter half of the twentieth century. Many people still living in Tennant Creek, and many of their deceased family members were included in these photos. The former missionary had already scanned about 500 of these photos into digital images, which Kim loaded up on her laptop and took back to the community.

Inspired by this find, the community began contacting other people who had passed through Tennant Creek, and soon they had an extensive collection of letters, photographs, and even motion pictures. Kim continued to load much of this material onto her computer, sharing it with her Warumungu friends in the form of iPhoto slide shows. But she noticed as she did so that people often shied away or left the room as images of deceased family members or photographs depicting sensitive performances or site in the countryside were shown.

Christen's sensitivity to these cultural protocols, taken together with the delight that the Warumungu people obviously took in seeing and possessing much of this historical material, led to a series of conversations with the members of the community. The challenge was to devise ways in which this wealth of information might be shared with all who had the right to see it, while protecting those who did not. From this came the fusion of technical and cultural expertise that is now known as the Mukurtu Archive.

In her presentation at the Scholar's Lab, Christen noted that we in the west, when thinking of intellectual property management, are conditioned by a corporate and legal frame of mind that aims at creating proprietary systems that embrace centralized control and power. This tends to give the concept of "digital rights management" a bad name, especially in the United States. And indeed a discussion of the Mukurtu Archive appeared on the "news for nerds" website Slashdot back in January. The commentary quickly became quite heated, with allegations that "superstition mumbo-jumba gets in the way of progress." (The discussion was occasioned by an interview with Christen that appeared on the BBC News and is available as a podcast on Long Road.)

But as Christen eloquently stated, in both of her lectures in Virginia this weekend, what she, some American technologists and, most importantly, her collaborators among the Warumungu have done is to encode something approaching the lived social fabric of behavior and access to knowledge. This is a protocol that is appropriate to the community in Tennant Creek, that is flexible enough to respond to changes in attitudes and beliefs among the people it serves, and at the same time permits people to preserve and enjoy a record of recent and contemporary culture. The Mukurtu Archive sets out content via the Warumungu's own dynamic cultural protocols. Along the way, it provides the rest of us with an opportunity to rethink the notion of access restrictions and to gain an understanding of different cultural systems.

Once a photograph (for example) has been uploaded to the Archive, the "owner" of the photo can identify the subject and the names of the people depicted, and can associate the names of family, country, and skin. She can also note whether any of the people in the photograph are deceased. All of this information can be selected from drop-down menus, and can be easily modified at a later date. There is also an opportunity to set down a "story" related to the content of the photograph. In this way, the Warumungu people themselves get to annotate images of their culture in a way that is usually only available to curators or anthropologists.

Someone who wishes to view material that has been archived must first create a personal profile, a process that is doubtless familiar to anyone who is reading this blog, who has ever shopped online, or who has taken part in online discussion forums. In the case of the Mukurtu Archive, the viewer supplies information about gender, skin, family, country, as well as father's family and country and mother's family and country. Then when that person attempts to view the archive, she is only presented with information that is deemed appropriate to her role and position in Warumungu society.

(Two points of clarification here: I am using feminine pronouns simply as a rhetorical strategy to avoid infelicitous constructions like "when one views the archive, they see..."; information is accessible to all members of the community, male and female alike. Secondly, the archive, although it uses the technology of the web, is not online. It is available only in the part of Nyinkka Nyunyu that houses the community centre, which is currently accessible only to the Warumungu. Tourists who visit on their way through from Darwin to Alice Springs are admitted only to the shop and the museum in the building. Future development may allow some access to public, unrestricted images from a kiosk in the museum.)

There are a host of other features available. Viewers may leave comments, enhancing the story as told by the original depositor or owner. They can build their own collections of selected images, and burn those images to a CD, a feature that promises to allow for future sharing of some material in school presentations. One-click printing is available. A viewer can report offensive material, or note if she comes across the image of a person who is now deceased.

One of the most interesting features of the archive's implementation of Warumungu cultural protocols has to do with images of the departed. Fifteen years ago, Christen pointed out, there would have been no question that viewing images of the deceased would be inappropriate. Today, however, some people feel more relaxed about such matters. They recognize that it can be a question of personal choice. So instead of automatically suppressing such images, the program instead presents a pop-up window when someone clicks on a thumbnail or a category that contains a photo of a person no longer living. The pop-up warns the viewer and gives her the option to continue or not.

Another feature of the Archive that members of both audiences remarked on was the fact that all the written information is in English. As Christen explained, Warumungu was only written down in the past couple of decades. Most people speak Warumungu and the local pidgin, but those who read, read English.

In her evening lecture at the Kluge-Ruhe, Kim covered some of the same territory, but also provided us with some history of the creation of the Nyinkka Nyunyu Cultural Centre and some slides of the kind of visual presentations of Warumungu culture that are available in it. The Warumungu built en dioramas (roughly two by three foot) that present important stories from the people's history, including contact history, stories of cattle droving, and material from the NT Archives. Another exhibit explains the skin system, or puntu, through the use of large painted self-portraits. These bold images are wonderfully expressive of the individuals who incarnate the relationships embodied in puntu today. They are a far cry from the abstract information about kinship usually presented in tables in anthropological textbooks.

There are several ways that you can experience the brilliance of Christen's work for yourself, although unfortunately none of them come packaged with Christen's own wit, eloquence, and enthusiasm in quite the same way that we got to experience them this weekend in Virginia. (It was quite wonderful to see her adapt her presentation and her responses to the audience to the different concerns that each group brought to her presentation, and to gain therefore a deeper appreciation for the intelligence and commitment that informs her work.)

First, there is a demo site of the Archive that you can visit. It provides background information about the encoding of cultural protocols, and offers a few collections (mostly drawn from Kim's own family and friends here in the States) to browse and search. More information about the whole project is available from the online journal Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, where Christen and Chris Cooney have built a fascinating website called "Digital Dynamics Across Cultures." This website offers a taste of Warumungu culture in photographs and audio recordings and information about the history of contact in Warumungu country. Most importantly, is cleverly designed to force the viewer into experiencing something of the appropriate cultural protocols for herself.

Christen's work has already proven invaluable in providing a means to preserve a slice of Indigenous culture in one part of the Territory. It has the potential to serve, through the technology that has built the Mukurtu Archive, as the foundation for many other treasuries of indigenous knowledge. And although what we saw this weekend is the culmination of years of work, it was incredibly exciting to feel that we were present at the start of an entirely new chapter in the preservation and presentation of cultural history.

Posted at 07:30 PM

Sun - January 27, 2008

Law in Lajamanu

The Lajamanu community was in the news last week after reports of a serious breach in Warlpiri Law. Although the incident in question occurred on January 10, it apparently didn't make the news at the time because the lawbreakers were white police. What finally made a newsworthy story was a press release from the Central Land Council followed by a video posted on YouTube by a group of Warlpiri men.

I haven't been able to track down a lot of detail on what actually happened on January 10, but in broad outlines, it seems that a group of five police, one of whom was a woman, were engaged in a "traffic matter." This is a euphemism that falls on deaf American ears, but my guess is that they were chasing someone. In the event, the police stumbled onto a camp where young men had been taken, out bush, for a three-week period of initiation ceremonies. For anyone to have intruded on secret men's business like this would be a serious matter; that one of the intruders was a woman caused great upset in the community.

It appears that the police promptly made themselves scarce when they realized what had happened, and that they have since offered formal apologies. They've also offered to work with the community to make sure that such an accidental violation of the Law doesn't occur again.

The YouTube video is a simple set of speeches from Warlpiri men, talking-heads style, lamenting the intrusion, explaining its offensiveness, and asking for an increased respect on the part of the police for Warlpiri Law. There is deep sorrow and a hint (no more) of anger in what these men have to say.

There's been precious little else reported. The story was picked up at Crikey.com, and the responses there and on the YouTube site seem to be the extent of commentary on it so far. Sadly, a great deal of that commentary congratulates the Internet for allowing marginalized communities to raise a voice in the media.

So, in the end, I don't know what happened, what was seen that shouldn't have been seen. But the reactions of the men in the video allow one to judge the seriousness of the offense that occurred. These are men who are old enough, for the most part, to have been through the Law at a time when Lajamanu or Yuendumu barely existed as government settlements, in the days before there was a great deal of territorial control by whitefellas in the Tanami.

That would have been a time when an intrusion like this might have been engendered serious consequences. And to me, that's the story that's being kept silent today: the way in which blackfella Law has been rendered powerless.

After all, no one has raised the question of whether the police should be in some way punished for breaking the Law. I don't know how a transgression of this sort would have been met fifty or a hundred years ago. Would the offender have been speared? Exiled? No one's said.

The press has applauded the police for apologizing; and it's good that the police have done so. But Warlpiri Law cannot punish them. The old men can only ask " why can't the police ... respect our sacred sites and our law?"

The police say that the area was not posted. Whitefella law says that ignorance is no defense, but.

This is not so different from the way things were in 1971 when when the High Court decided against the Yolngu plaintiffs in Milirrpum v Nabalco on the grounds that neither Crown Law nor common law had provisions for recognizing a claim made under Yolngu Law.

The next time the hue and cry is raised over "lenient" sentences for black offenders, over how "traditional culture" excuses child abuse, or how powerful old black men control their communities in tight-fisted and oppressive regimes, remember the story of the police who violated sacred ground at Lajamanu. How they were never arrested, arraigned, or held accountable for their actions, let alone judged or sentenced. But mostly, ponder how inconceivable such a scenario seems.

For despite all the rhetoric about justice and law, despite talk of "two laws," and despite the comments at Crikey and YouTube about two legal systems working together, there's really only one law at work here, and it's not blackfella Law.

Posted at 01:30 PM

Sun - January 13, 2008

Aboriginal Rules: Yuendumu Magpies

It wouldn't be Christmas without presents, and this holiday brought some good ones. Among the first to arrive was one I gave myself, the new documentary from the Warlpiri Media Association: Aboriginal Rules: definitely more than a game, written and directed by Liam Campbell. It begins and ends with short, humorous clips of Francis Jupurrula Kelly as an old-time Warlpiri warrior in the Bush Mechanics mode. Here, instead of a Dreamtime Hero who can fix a busted-up transmission, we are treated to the mythical arrival from the sky of a football: Magpie Dreaming at its finest.

Now before I go any further, I have to confess up front that I've never been the sports-minded type at home in America, and so Aussie sport has been until this year a total mystery to me. (Let's not talk about cricket at all, OK?) When someone said "football," I had no idea whether they were talking about what Americans call soccer, or this strange AFL business, or maybe rugby. And believe me it didn't help to find out that rugby is never football, but it can be Union or League. I understand the distinction between those two may be the most important of all, but don't hold a knife to my throat and ask me to explain it or things could get messy, very quickly.

But I'm losing the point here. I just wanted to say that I'm grateful to the producers of Aboriginal Rules for including up front a brief, amusing, simple, and clear explanation of how the game is played and scored. Given that a good deal of the drama that follows in the film's 55 minutes relies on having at least a minimal understanding of the game, these preliminaries ensure that even outsiders can follow the story.

And it's a great story to follow. Of course, a lot of what makes this a wonderful cinematic experience is the excitement of the game on the field. There's speed, there's dazzle and dexterity, and let's face it, there's a fair amount a brutal physical contact that can leave you breathless. There's some humor too, as in the scene where one of the Magpie grapples an opponent from behind, grabs his shirt, and keeps traveling by. The other fellow loses his shirt, inexorably. And afterwards, when I thought the Magpie was bending down to haul his adversary back to his feet, it turned out he was only retrieving the shoe that he himself had lost in the tussle.

But there's more than that. The Yuendumu Magpies, the footy team whose members regard themselves as Warlpiri warriors, won the Premiership among Indigenous teams three years running, from 2003 to 2005, a remarkable achievement. But in 2006 the team lost the thread, and it's fascinating to see that this story of defeat and disarray become the focus of the film: this isn't your conventional hagiographical (or even redemptive) athletic saga by any means. But despite its willingness to chronicle hard times, it remains inspirational.

Much of the latter half of the film is devoted to the rebuilding process, to the stresses that operate on the team, and to the relationship between the team and the community of Yuendumu. The filmmakers are honest about the debilitating effects of grog on some members of the Magpies, and of the tension between autonomy and personal freedom on the one hand and community and team commitment on the other.

It turns out, for example, that the team bus, used to transport members to games in Alice, or Papunya, or Pukatja, has been smashed. As a result, team members are driving to games, or being driven, in small groups in private cars. Sometimes the trip home for one or more cars ends up at a grog shop or a hotel, and the players don't turn up for practices or games.

There's footage of the arguments over replacing the bus: demands for a licensed driver and for use restricted to the football team; admission that the bus has been wrecked too often in the past; the importance of supporting the team; the importance of the team to the community. In the end, the council agrees to buy the new bus, and there's a wonderful moment of quiet and sincere triumph when the new driver passes his license exam.

The importance of the team stepping up as role models, too, leads to a discussion of the rehabilitation program at Mt Theo, where the twin activities of hunting and football provide young sniffers and abusers with meaningful alternatives and a structured life. Footage of the young man shooting a kangaroo is followed by barefoot practice in the red dust oval.

Other problems are alluded to, but not explored: the threat of violence at the end of games is present in the prayers that the players offer, in the admonitions to a losing team to take a shower and go home, in the memorial ceremonies organized to honor past players that seem equally designed to keep the focus of the events positive and preclude rivalries escalating after the final whistle.

As the players themselves admit, they once were warriors, now they play football. The rivalry seems to be particularly intense against their Warlpiri "brothers" from Lajamanu, and some sports weekends have been marred with paybacks. It becomes clear that Yuendumu (at least) has built footy into their definition of culture, and that culture arises from a set of connections to community (people) and land. In this way, it is not hard to understand what some of the veteran players mean when they talk about football as a way in which you can sense "you're owning something; you're owning that jukurrpa." Or as someone else has it, "Football is like a ceremony."

Football in Yuendumu demonstrates how the Walrpiri can find that consonance between ancient traditions and modern institutions. It is one of the ways in which the Dreaming is kept alive: by renewing it and incorporating contemporary manifestations into the idea.

And so it turns out that Jupurrula Kelly is not just making a joke when he appears at the film's conclusion, in the company of a young boy, both clad in hairstring pubic skirts. They carry spears across the red stone country, and a large bag, which turns out to contain Magpie guernseys (sponsored by Warlukurlangku Artists).

These scenes with Kelly are in fact extracts from a short film called Japu Japu that is included among the bonus features on the DVD: it chronicles how a football once came hurtling down out of the sky, and the long trek that Jupurrula took to return in to the land whence it came--which turns out to be (of course) the MCG. He brings back from that sacred ground the guernseys with which he will paint the countryside and teach the new Dreaming to his countrymen.

The other extras on the DVD contain traditional contests like spear-throwing from the Sports weekend along with some classic Jupurrula comedy. The "Training Tips" not only show how to build a weight training regime using billycans full of sand or two tires and an axle as dumbbells, but also more advanced techniques like constructing a sauna using an electric kettle and the ventilation system of an otherwise broken-down utility vehicle, or building a jacuzzi out of an inflatable swimming pool and a vacuum cleaner. (You'll have to buy the video yourself to find out exactly how it's done.)

You can get some previews from YouTube, though, if you check out the excerpts posted by AboriginalRules.

The Warlpiri Media Association is offering a Christmas 2008 special for purchasers of the video: a special deal on the soundtrack album. Like most soundtrack albums, it contains lots of music that's only hinted at, heard in the background, or minimally developed in the film itself. Mostly the work of Big Bear (Thomas Jupurrurla Saylor), it's a great mix of country, hip-hop, reggae, rock tunes, and some surprises, like the Latin jazz stylings of "Warlukurlangku." My favorite track, though, is "1234," which start from the piano beats that are used to such great effect to build an air of relentless suspense during the film's highlights from the matches themselves. Here on the soundtrack they are the base for some outrageous high-speed rapping.

And if all that's not enough Warlpiri culture for you, check out the DVDs on offer that feature the Battle of the Bands performances from the Yuendumu Sports Weekend in 2003 and 2004. The production values aren't great, and sometimes the performances aren't as tight as they could be. That's especially true of the 2003 weekend performances, which comprise the rock 'n' roll show; the 2004 country music battle is more polished all around. It's also a bit less exciting and a lot less predictable. The rock concert features a lot of audience participation--dancing on the stage and some persistent vamping with a blond wig. However, when the bands are cooking and the saxes are wailing, it's only rock 'n' roll but I like it. The concert ends with a couple of songs from the Papunya School Band: these kids can't be fifteen years old, shivering in the cold August night air of the desert, but maybe they'll be back for concerts in the future.

Let's hope the Warlpiri Media Association will continue recording them for a long time to come. The record of the richness of contemporary culture that WMA offers here is unparalleled.

And, for the record, the final credits note that "Two kangaroos were killed and eaten in the making of this film."

The Yuendumu Magpies, led by Steven Japanangka Brown, circa 2000. From the collection Centre Bounce: Football from Australia's Heart by Jesse Marlow. The photographs were exhibited in Melbourne by Alcaston Gallery and published as a book by Hardie Grant in 2003.

Posted at 03:08 PM

Wed - December 12, 2007

Aboriginal Internet Meme

Warning: Frivolity ahead!

Wikipedia defines an internet meme as "a catchphrase or concept that spreads in a faddish way from person to person via the Internet." This particular version is a bit like a chain letter, in that you are asked by someone to respond with eight answers to each of eight questions, and then to "tag" three people to follow on with their own answers.

Normally, I would pipe this to the "null" device (which is techspeak for the trash, the bit bucket, the place where the internet goes to die). But since I got tagged by my friend Jonathan, to whom I owe the habit of blogging in the first place, and since I realized it was an opportunity to sum up a few themes pertinent to this blog very quickly, and heck, since it's the holiday season and we all deserve a break, here's my contribution to the electronic chain.

1) Eight things I am passionate about:
Aboriginal art
Aboriginal culture
Australia
Blogging
Reading
Libraries
Rock ‘n’ roll
Appropriate access to information

2) Eight things I want to do before I die:
Turn this blog into a book that someone else will want to publish
Learn to speak an Aborginal language, at least a little
Live in Sydney for an extended period of time
Live in Perth for an extended period of time
Live in an Aboriginal community for an extended period of time
See Nabarlek in concert
Kick around Alice Springs for a day with Neil Murray
Celebrate the appointment of Australia's first Indigenous president (or even Governor General or Prime Minister) (stole this one from Jonathan Shaw, who got me into this meme in the first place)

3) Eight things I say often:
Aboriginal value systems are way different from our own.
Imagine Martians landed in your back yard and took total control of your town….
As the great anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner said….
These paintings can be read as maps of country.
It all started when we saw the Dreamings exhibition in New York in 1988….
Someone needs to hear what Aboriginal people themselves want.
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Damn!

4) Eight books I've read recently:
(Sticking with titles I haven’t reviewed here yet)
Howard Morphy, Becoming Art: exploring cross-cultural categories (Berg, 2007)
Philip Jones, Ochre and Rust: artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers (Wakefield, 2007)
Quentin Beresford, Rob Riley: an Aboriginal leader’s quest for justice (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006)
Tara June Winch, Swallow the Air (Queensland, 2006)
W. E. H. Stanner, People of the Dawn: religion, homeland, and privacy in Australian Aboriginal culture (Solas, 2001)
Elizabeth Povinelli, Labor’s Lot: the power, history, and culture of Aboriginal action (Chicago, 1993)
N.G. Butlin, Economics and the Dreamtime: a hypothetical history (Cambridge, 1993)
Mary Durack, Keep Him My Country (Constable, 1955)

5) Eight songs I could listen to over and over:
Warumpi Band, "Kintorelakutu"
Warumpi Band, "From the Bush"
Yothu Yindi, "Treaty"
Lajamanu Teenage Band, "Teenage Band"
NoKTuRNL, "Neva Mend"
Chris Jones, "Get a Grip"
Nabarlek, "Najorrkon"
Sammy Butcher, "Dancing Brumbies"

6) But if I were doing a triple CD set, I’d include (8 x 3 = 24)
The rest of the Warumpi Band’s Big Name, No Blankets and Go Bush! albums.

7) 8 things that attract me to my friends:
They laugh at my jokes
Their jokes make me laugh
Curiosity
Generosity
Kindness
Courage
The ability to listen and ask good questions
Humility, which is a very complex virtue
(I stole all 8 of these from Jonathan, because I couldn’t improve on them.)

8) 8 movies I've watched at least into double figures
(I’ve never watched a movie 10 times, but here’s a few I’d consider:)
Yirrkala Film Project: Djungguwan at Gurka'wuy
Yirrkala Film Project: Dhapi Ceremony at Yirrkala
Yirrkala Film Project: Madarrpa Funeral at Gurka'wuy
Benny and the Dreamers
Where the Green Ants Dream
Black Fella/White Fella
Yolngu Boy
Australian Rules

With some trepidation, I must now tag three others to fully expiate the meme, so I salute fellow bloggers whom I know only internetly, Jangari, Deborah, and Megan. To quote Jonathan one last time, I won't be offended if none of you takes up the challenge, preferring to continue having a life.

Posted at 08:45 PM

Tue - December 4, 2007

Terpsichore 2

The Chooky Dancers have scored another YouTube hit: a second clip of their interpretation of Zorba the Greek has been posted. This one is shot from close-up, on stage, and the lighting makes it look almost like a dance done by the light of a campfire. There's less of a sense of the dance overall, but the atmospherics are great. Thanks to Bernie Eggington of Austrade-Darwin for bringing this to my attention.

Posted at 08:15 PM

Sat - December 1, 2007

Elizabeth Povinelli on Digital Archives

Last Monday I had the good fortune to hear Elizabeth Povinelli lecture at Duke University. The opportunity arose through another piece of good fortune, my recent acquaintance with Jane Anderson, who is doing a post-doc this year at Duke after a year at NYU where she worked with Fred Myers and Faye Ginsburg. Jane is a scholar of intellectual property (with a Ph.D. in law from the University of New South Wales) with an emphasis in her work on legal systems and indigenous knowledge. She has worked for many years at AIATSIS, and was responsible for much of the research that went into the Native Title Business exhibition and catalog (Keeaira Press, 2002). On our first meeting about a month ago, Jane charmed me right out of my socks. So the chance to meet up with her again, in a forum that focused on a shared interest in digital archives, and right after the elections--well, there was too much to celebrate and every reason to skip out of work early.

Nor did Dr. Povinelli disappoint. Povinelli, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, is the author of (among other works) Labor's Lot: the power, history and culture of Aboriginal action (University of Chicago Press, 1994) and The Cunning of Recognition: indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism (Duke University Press, 2002). (I wrote about the latter a year ago in a couple of posts, "The Burdens of Multiculturalism" and "The Economics of Aboriginal Work.") Both of these monographs explicate the ways in which non-indigenous knowledge, discourse, and systems conflict with and seek to control indigenous self-definition in Australia. For the purpose of illustration, let me reduce her thesis in The Cunning of Recognition, a vast and complex work, to a single sentence: Australian Aboriginal land rights law requires Indigenous people to prove their Aboriginality and their connectedness to land in terms defined wholly by the requirements of non-indigenous Australian law.

Povinelli's talk at Duke on Monday was entitled "Recognizing Digital Divisions, Circulating Socialities." It is a chapter-in-progress from her latest work, and is concerned with the means by which indigenous knowledge is currently being captured, encoded, and preserved in web-accessible digital formats.

There's a lot of this going on right now. Desart is exploring means of preserving the activities and records of its art centres, and has recently completed work on two pilot projects. One of these had as its goal digitizing the certificates of authenticity created over the last two decades for paintings created under the auspices of Warlayirti Artists in Balgo. The other inventoried the records of Mangkaja Artists in Fitzroy Crossing: when I visited in July, the project archivists were poring over scrapbooks of photographic prints of the painting of the Ngurrara canvases.

Other digital archives incorporate materials relating to Aboriginal culture into more widely defined projects such as Picture Australia, wherein a search for the term "aboriginal ceremony" will retrieve photographs that Povinelli pointed out are probably not properly seen by most of the people who can access them in this online medium. (At the very least, the archive provides no information about the circumstances under which many of these photographs were taken, who authorized them for what purpose, and offers only the most standard of "cultural warnings" about viewing the images of deceased persons.)

In terms of giving due consideration to Indigenous protocols, more successful digital archive projects include Ara Irititja, whose aim is "to bring home materials of historical and cultural significance to Anangu" people of the Central Desert. Another newly launched endeavor is the Mukurtu archive created by the Warumungu community at Tennant Creek with the assistance of Kim Christen, Craig Dietrich, and others. (For a glimpse of this project, check out the Digital Dynamics Across Cultures site.)

In approaching the topic of digital archives, Povinelli is concerned here ultimately with questions of what happens when two modes of “sociality” meet. Concretely, here is the intersection of Indigenous knowledge and cutting-edge technology. The two have vastly different fundamental structures and underlying assumptions, and Povinelli is intrigued to discover what happens when they intersect: will they produce new, intercultural forms of social interaction, will one come to dominate and potentially extinguish the other, or will the interaction of the two transform the form and structure of each?

She noted that archives, and now digital archives, are usually framed by issues of preservation, circulation, and access to the materials contained in them. This indeed looks to be the intentional focus of sites like Mukurtu and Ara Irititja. These archives want to hold material for the Indigenous communities out of which they grew; they help to keep history living and may also aid in reaching out to younger generations, providing a way for young enthusiasts and computer literate teenagers to involve themselves in culture. In the case of the Ara Irititja project, the developers are making the software available to other communities beyond the APY lands. Indeed, the software has been adopted by the Northern Territory Library’s and Knowledge Center Model.

A key feature of both these projects is the ability to control access to their contents. In Povinelli’s words, they force the viewer or user to have a “social skin” that enforces rules about the circulation of knowledge, and highlights awareness of cultural protocols.

But these Indigenous protocols are not the only ones at work in the digital arena. Povinelli spoke repeatedly about the collaborative nature of the development of these projects and about how much depends on having “the right people” around the table as development proceeds. (And she noted that part of the challenge is determining who “the right people” are in the first place.) Intellectual property protocols on both sides of the indigenous/non-indigenous boundary come into play, as do capital, legality, and more.

During the Q&A period that followed the lecture she told of a software developer whose work could hold great promise for mapping projects relating to Indigenous knowledge of land and sea. However, his strong commitment to the notion of the the notion that “information wants to be free” would cause serious strife in the sphere of restricted Indigenous knowledge protocols.

Characteristically, Povinelli went deeper than this, delving into the logic of digital means of communication as it is expressed in the programming code itself. She described the ways in which programmers who create the software are bound by the conventions of the languages themselves, and by the concepts that underlie the expression of content through their code. In the javascript coding that underlies these websites, there are events (digital objects such as text and graphical files) and “gateways” of Boolean logic (and, or, not, and other logical operators).

These gateways can be exploited to control the circulation of information in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous spheres: given the “social skin” of the user, certain gateways can be open, or they can be blocked. The world outside the community that owns the information, or that created it, can be given only limited access to viewing some of the information, and can be denied the ability to modify or contribute information. Or people outside can contribute information, but only in ways that affirm the rights of the community to accept it or modify it or place restrictions on access to it.

Thus in the end, these logical programming structures that enable digital storage, retrieval, and circulation emerge from a decidedly non-indigenous context built upon a framework that fundamentally assumes, for example, that everything can be reduced to a binary opposition, yes or no, open the gateway or keep it closed (or open it if a certain condition can be established in a binary fashion—true or false). It is important that people involved in the creation of these archives hold this fundamental truth about the nature of the information system in mind as they adapt it to profoundly different arenas of Indigenous discourses and systems of thought. Sometimes, Indigenous knowledge cannot be adequately represented in such a framework of binary oppositions.

Ultimately, Povinelli dreams of digital archives that move beyond the realm of merely circulating, preserving, and providing access. She would like to someday see digital archives that enhance social obligations, build responsibility, and create attachment. While freely admitting these things are not “programmable,” she nevertheless spent some time speculating on how such conditions might be simulated.

She asked, for example, what if the purpose of “coming to knowledge” were not to gain information. What if gaining knowledge from a digital archive were instead a means of creating social attachments to other people?

She illustrated this in a material-world sense by describing the ways in which time spent with elder women near her research locus of Belyuen, during which she gained much information about the seasonal variations in climate and insect life, tides and fish, gradually brought about a sense of attachment to country and to individuals that survived the passing of some of these women. The physical experience of being in country afterwards was sufficient to revive a palpable sense of attachment.

Clearly, the current state of digital archives—which represents a huge advance over only a year or two ago—is far from providing the locus for social relations that Povinelli imagines. Internet technologies promise to deliver ever-increasing approximations of sociality via, for example, gaming simulations and virtual reality applications, which have their own fraught implications, as the controversy over Telsta's representation of Uluru in Second Life has already raised.

And Povinelli recognized that digital media will never really be able to reproduce the corporeal element of social experience. She described the stress of nearly drowning as she and a group of women tried to negotiate tidal waters at the mouth of a creek near Melik Beach, and alluded to the negotiations with the Dreaming that can calm those waters (described beautifully in Labor’s Lot). But she dreams, a bit puckishly, of ways that programming might effect such experiences.

In these notes I have glossed only the simplest of the ideas Povinelli floated in her lecture at Duke. Her thinking is subtle, complex, and challenging; her ideas are still very much in development, as she quickly cautioned several times. It was undeniably exciting to watch a great thinker in action as she speculated about what the future might hold. The inspired thinking is Elizabeth Povinelli’s; the mistakes in representing it are wholly mine.

Courtesy of Nicholson Cartoons, 2007.

Posted at 12:21 PM Read More

Sat - November 3, 2007

Terpsichore in Ramingining

Just in case you've been vacationing in Antarctica for the last week and haven't heard the news, the latest international YouTube sensation (71,000+ views as of this morning) features the Chooky Dancers from Elcho Island performing at the Ramingining Festival back in September. Dressed in nagas or soccer shorts, ochred up, and driving the audience wild with a soundtrack out of Zorba the Greek, the young men had the crowd howling with delight. The ten dancers mix unequal parts of traditional Yolngu steps, disco line dancing, Busby Berkeley, and Greek syrtaki moves with plain old foot stomping rhythm. According to ABC Radio National, the Chookys have gotten invitations to perform in Canberra and at Darwin's Greek festival, Glenti, and have been broadcast in the town square of the Greek Island of Kastelorizo.

According to comments left on the YouTube site, the group has an unfilmed Bollywood dance in their repertoire as well. Maybe we'll have a chance to see that soon. In the meantime, enjoy this one.

Posted at 01:01 PM

Sat - August 11, 2007

Western Desert Nganampa Walytja Palyantjaku Tjutaku Initiative for Dialysis Support

Seven years ago, artists from Kintore and Kiwirrkura created four large collaborative paintings in support of the Western Desert Dialysis Appeal. These works (a men's painting collaborative and a women's from each community) were auctioned off and raised $1 million to support the establishment of a dialysis unit at Kintore.

The benefits of having such a unit available in the sparsely populated Yanangu lands on the border of the Northern Territory and Western Australia were obvious. It allowed people with life-threatening renal disease to receive treatment in their homelands. It alleviated some of the problems inherent in having to travel to towns like Alice Springs, provided comfort to those who were afflicted, reduced the well-documented problems associated with family needing to be far from home in order to be close to ailing kin.

The Kiwirrkura Men's Painting from the 2000 Western Desert Dialysis Appeal

Now the Western Desert Nganampa Walytja Palyantjaku Tjutaku Aboriginal Corporation wants to take their work a step further by introducing a mobile dialysis unit that can travel the Western Desert lands, from Kiwirrkura to the west, Blackstone to the south, Nyirrpi to the North, and Hermannsburg to the West.

Again, the benefits are many and obvious. By bringing treatment to the communities, the project can, it is hoped, provide health education in a less threatening and more culturally appropriate manner. It can help preserve in situ cultural transmission by allowing aging patients the opportunity to pass on their knowledge in their own communities, an opportunity too often cut short by the need to relocate to urban areas. The artists of the area are once again ready to participate by creating paintings that can travel with the unit, which again can help to sanction its use and overcome cultural obstacles emplaced by fear, misunderstanding, or lack of knowledge.

The Corporation has created a document which outlines the hope and the scope of the project's plans. I recently received a copy of this paper from Papunya Tula Artists, and am making it available for downloading here. This is summary of the project's objectives as stated therein.

Firstly, and most centrally, the mobile dialysis unit will extend WDNWPT’s capacity to return people to country for extended visits and, in doing so, allow them to re-engage as important members of their Western Desert groups and to transfer through language and performance valuable knowledge, stories and rites to those coming up behind them.

Secondly, the mobile dialysis unit will serve an explicit and symbolic educational function, with its kit of human and material resources for building more understanding of the relationship between life history and kidney health for Yanangu and the options available to them for the prevention and management of the disease that threatens their long-term survival.

Our third objective extends beyond our own region and recognizes that chronic renal failure is a problem that is threatening diminishing indigenous communities in other remote regions around Australia and beyond, where lifestyle has rapidly changed, accompanied by poverty and a lack of resources. We are confident that the mobile dialysis unit, as a regional prototype, will encourage and inform similar initiatives for other remote or rural contexts without renal facilities and demonstrate the tangible cultural benefits of returning senior aboriginal people to their traditional lands, communities and culture. We will endeavor to disseminate information at every opportunity, through own presentations at public and professional events, our newsletter and website, and via the distinctive mobile unit itself to visitors in the region. Finally, we will encourage the kind of positive and widespread media reportage that has followed our organization from its inception and allowed us to both share our findings and extend our own frame of reference.

Please help to spread the word by passing the link or the document itself along to anyone who may be interested. Inquiries can be directed to the WDNWPT Manager Sarah Brown.

Sarah Brown <wdnwpt@bigpond.net.au>
PO Box 5060 Alice Springs NT 0871
T. 08 89 532002

Addendum: Thanks to Glenn, a faithful reader from Brisbane, for letting me know that WDNWPT has successfully secured three year funding for the mobile renal unit. Tax-deducatible contributions are welcomed to help with ongoing costs, made to the organization at the address given above.

Posted at 01:39 PM

Sat - March 10, 2007

Denial of Culture

I expect that most of you have by now read Louis Nowra's "Culture of Denial," which appeared in The Australian Literary Review on March 7. I hope that you have also gone back to read the comments that were posted online since its publication. It's interesting to note that the earliest comments were generally outraged at Nowra's racist abuse; over the course of the week the tone seems to have swung more to the other side, reiterating Nowra's outrage at the violence and his condemnation of Aboriginal culture.

There is no point in denying the existence of violence and abuse, and little hope of refuting how out of proportion it is in some Aboriginal communities as compared to the rest of the country. And although the past year has seen much reporting on it in the press and on the ABC, the history of violence has been well documented for decades in anthropological studies, word-of-mouth reports, and even from sympathetic incomers to communities (see, for example, Neil Murray's fictionalized history of the Warumpi Band, Sing for Me, Countryman, recently republished by Griffin Press). I find these reports appalling and frightening and profoundly depressing. And the intractability of the problem magnifies its obviously lamentable qualities.

But beyond all that, what I find depressing and unnecessary is the constant need to draw in "Aboriginal culture" as the primary motivating force, the special circumstances that explain the problem and that need to be rooted out in order to resolve it. I'd like to say I don't understand why seemingly intelligent people like Nowra have to resort to racist diatribes to urge the need for a solution. And I do believe that racism is at the root of Nowra's complaint--unlikely as that might seem coming from someone who wrote the screenplay for Rachel Perkins' Radiance and was married to Rachel Maza, one of its stars.

Pace Noel Pearson, who wrote in another Australian opinion piece ("Failure to act also criminal," December 30, 2006) that claims of racism do not advance a solution. But articles like Nowra's likewise do nothing to solve the problem. More importantly, they make solutions more difficult to achieve by promoting the notion that Aboriginal people are beyond hope, are the cause of their own problems, and are condemned to this cycle of despair and violence unless they break free of the chains of the culture that has brought them to this impasse--and the "culture" so implicated in the indigenous one, not the colonizing one.

Take for example the following paragraph from Nowra's article, in which he offers an example of how anthropological studies have helped us "gain a clearer picture of the relationship between Aboriginal men and women."

Betrothal was universal across the continent, with some marriages arranged before a child was born. A feature of Aboriginal life was that of the considerably older man, a middle-aged elder, marrying a girl barely into her teens. Polygamy was also practised.

I've recently been working my way through several works on Tiwi culture that support and document this practice in great detail. No arguments there. But how does Nowra get from that statement of fact to the following conclusion mere sentences later:

Despite local variations, there is a consistent pattern of traditional men's treatment of women that could be exceedingly hard and sexually aggressive (gang rape, for instance). Given its pervasive nature across Australia, we can say that it was ancient and long-lasting.

That is not analysis; it's not even logic. It is one man's repugnance at a custom that conflicts with his own cultural prejudices. And from that custom of child betrothal he extrapolates a culture of gang rape! Are not the statistics on the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases and the evidence of women horribly scarred by beatings enough of a call to action? Why does he need to drag in child betrothal as a generating cause? Why is there this need to blame traditional Aboriginal culture, to single it out as the wellspring of a modern malaise?

The permit system is similarly abused as a significant contributing factor--and as a uniquely Aboriginal one. The silence of the Moree community and its refusal to cooperate with the prosecution of Phillip Boney for rape is given similar prominence in Nowra's litany of condemnations. If one wants to invoke ethnographic studies, surely one can point to the similar culture of protection of abusers among orthodox Jews, or the violence that is hidden behind the concept of omerta in Italian societies. Similarly, Nowra states that "[r]etribution by relatives of the accused is common." That is true enough, but not only among Aboriginal people. It is not a defining and differentiating mark of Aboriginal culture, but a commonplace in many cultures.

Throughout, Nowra displays his ignorance of traditional Aboriginal culture far more than an understanding of it. (And while understanding does not and should not imply approval, it is nonetheless important in an analysis of social problems that seeks solutions rather than simple complaint and condemnation.) He is shocked that no one intervenes in public brawls, failing to take into account that there are no private brawls in communities where life is conducted out of doors. More importantly, he fails to understand that the presence of onlookers in such public fights often acts as a deterrent. Yes, the abuse is publicly condoned. But the public presence can also assure that the violence does not go too far, as Basil Sansom has described in great detail in The Camp at Wallaby Cross. As with drunkenness, it is the public nature of the behavior at least as much as the behavior itself that is being judged. It offends our "civilized" eyes, and thus relegates the offender to the category of "uncivilized." Civilized people come home from a bad day at the office, close the door, kick the dog, and get quietly drunk in the privacy of their parlors.

The kind of sloppy thinking and selective logic that characterizes and undermines much of these ad hominen arguments extends in a particularly vicious way to the concept of "defense." Nowra perpetrates a common myth and misunderstanding of the facts when he makes statements such as "[c]ustomary law or traditional law began to be used as a common defence." Customary law has been invoked by lawyers pleading (in non-indigenous institutions) for lenient sentencing in cases where the accused has already been found guilty of the crime. I'm not aware that it has ever been used--at least successfully--to defend the actions prior to the verdict being handed down. You can accuse me of splitting hairs here, but it seems that the legal system under which these prosecutions take place excels at splitting hairs and making distinctions that are in themselves highly culturally biased. Remember that for many years Aboriginal people could not testify in a court of law because, not being Christians, they could not swear on the Bible to tell the truth, and without that sanctified assurance could not be trusted. How ironic now that Aboriginal people are now condemned for not stepping forward to offer evidence!

I will freely admit that in writing all the above, I am being as selective in choosing my arguments as Nowra has been in choosing his. I guess I am attempting to assert that there are more sides to the story than are being told here, and I am frustrated at the persistent racism that underlies quality of the ongoing media attention to a matter of humanitarian concern. "Human rights come before cultural rights," Nowra concludes, oblivious to the fact that "human rights" as he blithely proffers them is a cultural construct that varies in time and space. What remains constant is the condemnation of the other.

Racism is insidious in its workings. It is also extraordinarily hard to understand if one has never been the victim of it. Twenty years ago I went back to graduate school while working full time, and to accommodate my working schedule, enrolled at North Carolina Central University, the first college in the state founded to offer higher education to "Negroes" in a state predominantly Anglo-Celtic in its ethnic composition. Its student body remains 95% black today. I told friends and colleagues that it was "interesting" to find myself a minority student and surprising to be offered a "minority scholarship" as an inducement to contributing to the diversity of the student body. It wasn't so interesting to be looked at with suspicion as I made my way across campus to classes. One winter day, wearing black Levi's and a leather jacket against the sharp wind, I was crossing the parking lot when I heard another student shout, "Don't matter how much black you wear, you still white." I was shocked. And speechless. It wasn't just that I couldn't come back with a snappy retort. Even afterward, thinking over the incident, I just couldn't work out any response that sounded good, that didn't sound hostile, defensive, or just plain whiny. I had been silenced. And that made me angry. And I viscerally understood something about racism that had always eluded my liberal sensibilities until that moment.

There is no doubt that lives are being destroyed in Aboriginal communities by the violence in them. But screeds like Nowra's do nothing to advance a solution, and I assert that they in fact do more harm than good. The demonization of Aboriginal culture only adds to the lack of mutual understanding, to the simplistic, thoughtless reaction, to the offhand, casual, and cruel dismissal of the humanity of the people who are trapped in the mire of poverty, substance abuse, boredom, and yes, violence. We may not be able to leave race out of these discussions, and we may not be able to leave racism out of the conversation either. But let us please be very, very careful about what we do with our racism.

Posted at 01:11 PM

Sat - February 3, 2007

Hail and Farewell

Ron Ramsey is going home to Canberra.

For the past three years, Ron has served as the Director of Cultural Relations at the Embassy of Australia in Washington DC. Prior to accepting that post, he worked at the National Gallery of Australia in the senior administrative position of Access Director. He will be returning to the NGA as Assistant Director, Development, Marketing and Commercial Operations. Our loss will most certainly be Canberra's gain.

The article in the Sydney Morning Herald which profiled Ron upon his appointment to Washington in 2004 made much of his ability to move easily in the worlds of art and politics and of the breadth of his responsibilities for promoting Australian culture in the US. Equally at ease with United Nations politicos and chamber orchestra impresarios, Ron joked that in 2004 no one in the USA identified Australia any more with Crocodile Dundee. "Now it's Steve Irwin," he deadpanned. Today, Emily Kngwarreye may still not be a household name over here, but the profile of Aboriginal art in the States is certainly higher, thanks to Ron's unflagging enthusiasm and energy.

In May of 2004, the Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing Export Agency brought a marvelous show to America, called Out of Country. The show opened at Gallery 1601, the ground-floor exhibition space of the Embassy of Australia at 1601 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington DC, for which Ron had recently become responsible. The exhibition included fifty-six works showcasing the diversity of indigenous art from the Sunshine State: huge canvases from the Lockhart River Gang, bronze and wooden sculptures from Aurukun, Aleck Tipoti's prints and Brian Robinson's 3-D constructions representing the Torres Strait Islands, Richard Bell's take-offs on Roy Lichtenstein's comic book romances, painted rivers by Joanne Currie alongside prints by Judy Watson and triptychs by Ian Waldron. Craig Koomeeta was there at the opening, resplendent in a tux; Ken Thaiday was less formal--just a jacket and tie--but no less commanding a presence. Late in the evening, someone asked Fiona Foley (who was in town visiting while on a six-month residence in New York City) if her works were in any American collections and she replied, "Well I heard these two guys bought a couple of my paintings off the internet...," an introduction I stepped right into.

I don't remember who introduced us to Ron that night in 2004, but I do know that it was one of those fortuitous encounters that seem to characterize our adventures in Aboriginal art. By the end of the evening, Ron was offering letters of introduction and photocopies of recent articles on Aboriginal art collections. In the years since then our paths have crossed many times. Later that same summer, when Out of Country toured to the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Ron was there again, helping us with croc-shipping arrangements. The following spring, once more at the Kluge-Ruhe, we enjoyed Ron's company at the conference Media Matters: representations of the social in Aboriginal Australia (and at the party afterwards). Fast forward another year, and there's Ron again, helping us make contacts at the Australian Embassy in Paris prior to the opening of the Musee du Quai Branly. A few months later, he chauffeured us back to our hotel after the opening celebrations at Ambassador Richardson's home for Dreaming Their Way in Washington, DC. Last October, as we sped out of our hotel to the same exhibition's debut at the Hood Museum on the campus of Dartmouth College, there was Ron, just arrived on a delayed flight up from New York City and stopping in Hanover for an evening in town before heading on to another event the next day in Boston.

Apart from the purely aesthetic pleasures of being involved with Aboriginal art, there are wonderful friendships that we have formed from Perth to Paris and points in between. I'm glad to count Ron among those friends. I'm even looking forward now to another trip to Canberra...and not solely for the aesthetic pleasures of the NGA. I'm sure that all of us here in the United States will miss Ron's warmth, enthusiasm, and generosity, and will join me in wishing him every success in this new phase of his career.

Posted at 02:46 PM

Tue - September 26, 2006

Poms Slaughter Dancers; Fall Asleep

I've been amazed in recent weeks to read the reviews of Bangarra's performances in London at the Sadler's Wells Theatre on September 14 - 16, and then on tour.

While the best parts of the show - which feels long for its 75 minutes - are a lush and hypnotic celebration of nature ... other sections suggest not much beyond girls in strappy tops doing a Jane Fonda workout in downtown Sydney. ... I sensed shuffling and heard yawns. --The Independent

Dreamtime, you call that — though I found much of its 75 minutes more like sleep time. --The Times Online

And while the arc of creation is unmistakable in Stephen Page and Frances Rings's choreography, there's also the dead hand of earnest solemnity. ... Are the women practising labour squats? Are they hoeing the ground? And is that a yoga class in full swing, with downward dogs followed by shoulder stands? Oh, look, now they're having a nice sit-down in the lotus position. ... The venerable Kathy Balngayngu Marika, senior woman of the Rirratjingu clan, suddenly looks like a bag lady dancing to the music in her head, not least because of the mysterious pouch hanging from her neck. ... But these moments were all too rare in an evening that, judging by those seated to my left and right, was less about Dreamtime and more about bedtime. --The Telegraph

The audience seemed absorbed, but the magic began to pall .... The soundtrack... also began to grate. --The Times Online

The drawback to Bush is its choreography.... --The Evening Standard

The results, though overwhelmingly atmospheric, were at times frustrating in the lack of insight they allowed for. There's an unshakeable sense of something missing at the centre of the piece, a need for some unifying element. --MusicOMH.com

Bangarra is known for its insistence on sources, its care for respect and authenticity. Page and his collaborators certainly mean well. That doesn't save Bush from glibness. --The Independent

OK, I confess that I've chopped and tortured these reviews, and they did have some good things to say about parts of the performance. The British Theatre Guide actually published a review that was complementary in its entirety and concluded insightfully:

All in all, though, Bush is a wonderful piece of storytelling through dance, and evokes the Dreamtime and Aboriginal Australia in a way which complements the ritual, tradition and modern day living.

One of the dancers, Jhuny-Boy Borja, had some reservations of his own, which he published on his blog :

Last night Bangarra opened Bush at Sadler's Wells and a handful of enthusiastic fellow alumni were in audience. As far as our performances go, it was possibly a bit too excited. It was our first performance for about a month after extensive cleaning and sensing the importance that comes with performing at this venue I was trying so hard to keep calm. "It's just another show." Am glad to get that first show out of the way now.

Other issues relating to peforming here at Sadler's:
 - with the distinct lack of eucalyptus trees in England we had to order gum leaves from a florist! They were undoubtedly quite pretty but it would have been better if we got a few rough branches in with the bunch.
 - the venue hosts ballet companies as well as contemporary, with the results being that their rosin covered tarquet made performing our show quite difficult. Who cares if the odd ballerina falls off their pointe, when we're unable to slide across the floor? Ban rosin, I say!
 - and what's with London's distinct lack of decent air-conditioning?

What was the audience expecting, The Royal Ballet? Actually, they probably were.

As I think I've said in other posts, I live in a progressive college town (Chapel Hill), and there are two other large universities within twenty-five miles of the one I work for. Durham, the next town over and the home of Duke University, has been host to the prestigious American Dance Festival for at least 30 years now. And Raleigh, home of North Carolina State University (an engineering and agricultural school) is where I first saw Bangarra perform: they were on tour of the US with Bush in 2004. So we get to see a lot of dance here. The American Dance Festival, despite its name, brings in many, many international modern dance companies. In the 20 years or so that we had season tickets we saw companies from Argentina to Israel, India to Japan, China to Canada. I think in all that time there was one British company. So part of the problem in London was probably that the audiences don't even have the exposure and the vocabulary to appreciate modern dance, much less when it is leavened with Aboriginal elements.

If I had to try to come up with an explanation for the reactions contained in these reviews, it would be that the work was too opaque--that the Aboriginal elements were incomprehensible, or at least obscure--or that the "modern dance" elements weren't quite up to snuff. In essence, the reviewers were reacting badly to the hybrid nature of the choreography. Unable to judge it on its merits as indigenous performance, they fell back on the standards they could relate to and found the work wanting. In a few cases, they showed a stunning inability to open themselves to the unfamiliar: surely it can't take too great a leap of imagination to conceive that a "mysterious pouch" might have some ceremonial significance.

I'm not sure I have a point to this essay, other than outrage to get off my chest. I found Bush to be mesmerizing; it was the only the second time I'd seen anything of Aboriginal dance live--before that my experience had been mostly ceremonies that were part of the Yirrkala Film Project--but I found that the two traditions blended in a supple and invigorating manner. The second time around with Bangarra (Boomerang at the Sydney Opera House in 2005) there were moments that were almost sublime: the Manta Ray segment was on the brink of terrifying in its transformations and its power. I remember thinking at the end of the performance, "Pina Bausch, eat your heart out." Bangarra is a world-class act; it's too bad that the London press isn't cosmopolitan enough to recognize that.

Posted at 08:27 PM

Tue - August 8, 2006

Telstra and Technology Notes

Tonight, some news from ABC Radio, followed by two technology tips that I've recently adopted. The first helps me get automatic downloads of podcasts from ABC Radio. The second is for readers of this blog who want to make the librarian in me happy.

NATSIAA News

The latest edition of Awaye! on ABC Radio features an interview with Franchesca Cubillo of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, in advance of Friday's NATSIAA awards. She doesn't give away any secrets, although there was one piece of news that I hadn't heard: the prize is no longer acquisitive. Host Daniel Browning notes that the decision was controversial when announced (the man has a gift for understatement, I guess).

I think this is a terrible shame. Cubillo explained that the logic of the decision allows the winner to sell the award-winning work at the going market rate, and I guess I can't complain about that. But it seems to me from this distance that it's just another sign of diminishing support for the prize. There was a lot of hoopla last year about Telstra's new five-year commitment to the award, but it struck me at the time that they were getting an awfully good deal in terms of publicity for their million dollars. Meanwhile, MAGNT can't afford to acquire the work that judged to be the premier example of indigenous art, and I guess we can forget about ever seeing a catalog again.

But enough cynicism and carping....

Podcasting

The good news is that I was able to hear the broadcast on Saturday--maybe the same as many of you--thanks to a new innovation that ABC and Awaye! have implemented on their web site. They now offer news of the programming via what's called an RSS feed.

Basically, you can think of RSS feeds as a bookmark in your web browser that "listens" to the site it points to, and lets you know when there's something new available on the site. So I now have a bookmark for Awaye! that looks like this:

feed://www.abc.net.au/rn/awaye/rss/aye.xml

I've put it in my "bookmarks bar" (or "favorites" as it's called in other browsers; I use the Macintosh Safari browser), and when a new radio broadcast is posted the bookmark's name changes from Awaye to Awaye (1) to alert me that there's one new listing since I last looked. Pretty cool. But that's not all.

The radio programs, or most of them at any rate, are also now available as podcasts. Again, since I'm a Mac user, I listen to my podcasts through iTunes. So in iTunes (or whatever podcasting software you may use) you just paste in the following link:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/aye.xml

Whenever I open iTunes, it quickly goes out, checks to see if there's a new podcast available at the Awaye! site, and downloads it for me. I don't even have to pay attention. (That's why the RSS feed is good, because it alerts me to something new that's probably already on my computer.)

Find It In a Library

There's a new feature in the right hand column of this blog page, called Find It In a Library. Regular readers of this blog know two things about me: a) I'm a librarian by profession, and b) I talk about books a lot, and try to provide links to Bookfinder.com or Amazon searches for most of what I write about or refer to. And although I'm an incorrigible book collector, I do borrow a lot of those books either from the magnificent library I work in (it's one of the 20 largest research libraries in North America) or from other libraries around the world.

There's a great new tool for searching the contents of the world's libraries available in beta form now, and the new box on this page let's you try it out. It's called WorldCat, and it's a huge database of library holdings, at last count representing 1.3 billion items in more than 10,000 libraries worldwide. (Now before you get too excited about the "billion," take a deep breath and realize that probably 50,000 of them are copies of The DaVinci Code.

But it's still an awesome tool for finding books, videos, microfilm, manuscripts, journals, music, and more. Type in "great sandy desert" and you get back a list of 42 books, maps, and movies ranging in subject matter from Jimmy Pike to geology. In the column at the left of the list of results you can limit the results by content (what I'd called subject), author, date of publication, or language. Limiting leaves a trail of breadcrumbs across the top of the screen that makes it easy to back up if you don't find what you want.

Once you find a book, clicking on it will bring you to a screen where you can find libraries near you that own it. For my Australian readers, "near you" means anywhere in the country--the service is rather USA-centric. There are 294 Australian libraries that participate, ranging from the Australian National Library to the Metropolitan Fire Brigade Library in Fitzroy, Vic.

Give it a try, and I hope you find new and wonderful things.

Posted at 08:01 PM

Wed - May 24, 2006

Bardi Dancers at Stonehenge

State of the Arts News carried a short note today that's blown my mind. The Bardi Dancers from One Arm Point are doing a stint as cultural artists in residence in Salisbury, UK. And on June 5 they will be dancing Ilma at Stonehenge.

I've seen videos of Bardi dancers performing in the firelight on a beach in WA, but I still find it hard to imagine what the performance will be like in the company of these world famous monoliths. Other performances are scheduled for Salisbury Cathedral, Wardour Castle, and Old Sarum.

If anyone out there knows more about this residency, I sure would appreciate hearing from you. I'm planning to be in Salisbury in mid-June--not soon enough to see the performance on the fifth, but maybe I'll get lucky on another date.

Update (May 26): There's much more to the Salisbury International Arts Festival on from May 26 through June 11 in the UK this year: David Page brings Page 8 to town, and the Yirra Yaakan Noogar Theatre performs Djitty Djitty Flies North. Flim screenings include Rabbit Proof Fence (Doris Pilkington and Lillian Holt will be on hand), Five Seasons, a documentary about Numurindi people from the Gulf of Carpentaria, and Ivan's Sen's Beneath Clouds. Dreaming the Dreaming: the Kurrir Kurrir dance boards of the East Kimberley will be on exhibition at the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum from May 26 through June 10, on loan from the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia. The Salisbury Arts Centre will be the venue for Dennis Morris's exhibition Dreamtime: an Aboriginal Experience, photographs from the Mowanjum community. The Bardi Dancers will be performing in the inner circle at Stonehenge on two dates, June 5 and 7.

Posted at 10:21 PM Read More

Mon - March 6, 2006

Fred Myers and David Betz on the Air

Saturday afternoon I tuned my web browser to KWMR in West Marin (outside of San Francisco) to listen to Fred Myers and David Betz be interviewed by Ellen Shehadeh on "all things aboriginal." My first reaction was one of an hour-long cringe, but over the course of the day, thinking it over, I've come to realize how snobbish that reaction was, and what a really good introduction to Aboriginal culture David and Fred supplied in response to questions that addressed what most Americans are likely to know about Aborigines: wichetty grubs, Rabbit-Proof Fence, didjeridus, and Mutant Message Down Under. As I listened, it became clear to me just how difficult is is to convey to anyone just what Aboriginal culture comprises in 2006.

So the questions were pretty basic, but the answers were pretty amazing for what they packed in to less than an hour's worth of instruction. Sometimes, they were downright eloquent. Here are some of the questions asked and highlights of the answers.

Where did Aboriginal people and their languages come from?

Fred's first answer was that Aboriginal people will tell you that they come from spirits left behind by the Ancestors. Scientists will tell you that they pretty much don't know, apart from a common human origin in Africa. The only people with remotely similar DNA live in Papua New Guinea, but the populations have been isolated for so long that most common traces are swimming in the deep end of the gene pool by now. Fred subtly but clearly pointed out that there's no discernible connection to African peoples at this point in time--something that I'm sure Americans are often mistaken about.

What is the traditional social structure?

Again, Fred fielded this one, and gave the best 30-second synopsis of Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self possible, stressing the patterns of dispersion and aggregation in the Desert, exogamy, the importance of creating connections through travel histories, religious ties, and marriage exchange. He spoke about the nature of foraging, and made the important point that until about fifteen years ago there was little known about women's business, and that the notion that men dominated Aboriginal social structures thoroughly was an artifact of the limits of anthropological study rather than of the culture itself.

Have you ever participated in secret/sacred religious ceremonies?

David said that he had never been privy to secret/sacred ritual, but that he had experienced much ceremonial type behavior, and praised its beauty in manifesting environmental and spiritual relations, and spoke of ceremonies as integrating the people into the environment and as a means of giving back to the natural world. He commented on how ceremonies help to keep natural cycles moving, insuring rainfall and other seasonal events. Fred took up this theme and pointed out that these ceremonies are not magical in the sense that indigenous believe believe that the world will cease to function if the ceremonies are not completed. He said rather, and I thought this was a wonderful statement, that they represent man's part in the orchestra of the world.

What about those odd foods that Aboriginal people eat?

David confessed to having enjoyed honey ants and dugong flippers, kangaroo tails and bush yams, and spoke about how the older people in general enjoy the chance to get away from Western staples and reconnect with the old ways through bush tucker. He suggested a link back to the theme of ceremony: that these things are all part of a deep connection to the land that nourishes in many ways. Fred elaborated on the changes in diet brought about by contact, especially the introduction of refined sugar and the negative effects it has had on people's health. He gave a lovely example of a story about native honey that he found illustrated in a painting by Michael Nelson Jagamara in which the glistening surface of the painted design recalls the light of dawn shining on the dew lying on a honeysuckle, which is scooped up and drunk before the sun gets high. It's an example of what David was talking about: the combination of poetry and daily life.

What about Mutant Message Down Under? Is it really true?

Both men displayed remarkable tact in answering this one. David said it would be a nice parable if it weren't represented as a true story, and skewered Morgan for implying, in the preface to the mass-market edition (when the publishers demanded she write a preface indicating that it was not a true story) that the discerning reader would recognize it as a true story, despite the forced disavowal of its veracity. He characterized it as "new age wishful thinking" and "cocktail party chatter" for people who thought that Aborigines should be taking care of Americans. Ellen seemed a little taken aback by his judgment, and laughed when Fred said "Oh, I'd probably have worse things to say about it." Picking up on David's final remark that the book fails because it doesn't do justice to the very hard life of indigenous people, Fred addressed the problems of people who are a minority in a state dominated by another culture, and how important it is for indigenous people to control representations of themselves. He noted that Aboriginal people were very incensed by the book, and that although it may have struck a chord in the United States, it struck a very different chord in Australia.

What about this very confusing concept known as the Dreaming?

Davis gave a brief and concise history of the concept, explaining it finally as a sort of alternate reality that happens along side normal waking reality. Fred noted that the English term, which is a hybrid of many concepts and many words among many different Aboriginal groups, never quite captures all that is meant by it. No matter how hard we try to define or translate it, we're always leaving a part of it out. David agreed, noting that in our compartmentalized Western society where art, drama, music, religion, and science are each segments of reality to us, the Dreaming offers all these things at once, expressed in what he described as a "multimedia performance art." Fred went on to say how Aboriginal people will often explain something as "from the Dreaming," noting that precedent and creativity lie with the Dreaming and not with human agency. Aboriginal people will assert that these "multimedia" forms are not made by humans, but come from the Dreaming. While as an anthropologist he believes that all these forms are ultimately human creations, he stressed that in Aboriginal society, while there are undeniably extremely creative individuals, the emphasis is not on individual creativity so much as it is on execution and the ability to carry out these manifestations of the Dreaming.

And what about the Stolen Generations and the story that was told in Rabbit-Proof Fence?

Again, Fred's response to the question was nuanced and focused on the personal effects of the politics. He discussed the varying policies of the state governments, and the variety of motives for the removals. Noting that it emerged as a huge problems in the 90s, he said that many Aboriginal people feel that the removals are at the roots of pathologies that have resulted from the experience of terrible loss at an early age and the unanswered questions people have about why their mothers gave them away. This "fundamental trauma at infancy" has resulted in injuries to trust, to the ability to relate to others, and to hope.

David used the change in Australian policy in the 60s, and the granting of citizenship to indigenous people along with the stirrings of self-determination as a bridge to a discussion of art, the contemporary emergence of which he noted as being related to the change in self-perception brought about by changes in law and policy at that time. He spoke of the specificity of place, and said that the more that he knows about the paintings, the more he can feel the singing and dancing that lies behind them. Fred gave a very concise review of the early history at Papunya, Bardon's influence, and the "explosion" that occurred when the first painting men realized that people were interested in learning more about their culture. He spoke briefly as well about the differing traditions that have survived in the north, and about the hybrid of western art and politics that characterizes the work of artists from urban areas where traditional culture had all but been destroyed by the end of the 20th century.

Next came a musical interlude, with David Betz offering "Dingo Howling for its Mate" on the didjeridu, much to the amazement and delight of the host.

And finally, what of art and money?

David spoke of the contradictions and complications of a traditional, egalitarian society, where sharing is the norm and individual recognition is not, in the face of the Western world of art. He explained how the money filters down through extended families, how Paddy Sims is supporting thirty to forty people with his painting, and how that helps, in David's view, to keep the old man alive. But David also pointed out that large amounts of money flowing in affect Aboriginal people in the same ways that they would affect most everyone. "Easy" money allows the communities to buy vehicles that die in a few weeks time, and encourages behaviors that wouldn't have been allowed before the boom, behaviors that are not always healthy. But the simple fact remains that the art is the only basis for an economy (in Western, capitalist terms) in these communities.

Fred closed out the hour by stating that the best artwork comes out the the community art organizations, run by outsiders savvy in the ways of the white marketplaces, but owned by the artists themselves. In these cases, the artists have the most important say in how things work in the communities. While this is generally very positive, when there are large amounts of money involved, artists will go into Alice Springs and paint for people who don't necessarily have their best intersts at heart. He noted the claims that artists have been locked up sometimes and forced to paint, and concluded that things work best in the communities where the work is built around a strong cultural focus.

And that was the hour. I was reminded of my own first visit to Alice Springs, when chance got us on a small tour through the Western Macdonnells with a guide who had a rich and deep knowledge of local history, black and white, and who spoke frankly and plainly, and ignited an interest that has never wavered since then. Looking back, perhaps much of his commentary was elementary, but it gave me an orientation, piqued my curiosity, and planted the seeds of respect. I think KWMR was able to pull off something similar in only an hour, and Eleen Shehadeh deserves to be congratulated for that.

Posted at 08:07 PM

Fri - March 3, 2006

Talk Radio: Fred Myers and David Betz

Here's a very late notice of what I hope will be an interesting radio broadcast from California less than 24 hours from now. Any early-risers in Australia may be able to catch it. I checked out the link to the radio station this afternoon and the directions given below seem to work well--a very simple process.

On Saturday March 4th at 11 am U.S. Pacific time Dr. Fred Myers, chairman
of the New York University Anthropology Dept and author of Painting
Culture, the Making of an Aboriginal High Art, and Songlines' curator David
Betz will be interviewed on ViewPoint by host Ellen Shehadeh for a
discussion of Australian Aboriginal art, music, and culture. Certainly An
ambitious topic for a one hour show.

ViewPoint is a live radio show broadcast on KWMR in Point Reyes Station,
California. Shows are streamed live over the World Wide Web at
<http://www.kwmr.org./ > At the site Click the button that says ON AIR, you
are then asked if you want a 128kbps stereo stream or a 48k mono stream.
The second option is probably the best for those of you with a slower
connection.

The show will air Sunday 6:00 Am Sydney time, and Saturday 7pm London
Time, and Saturday 8pm Paris time.

Posted at 04:42 PM

25 Years of CAAMA

Barunga Stories

Inalienable Rights in Northeastern Arnhem Land and the Western Desert

Colonized: Two Laws

Bush Mechanics Update

Urban Dreaming

On the Antiquity of the Dreaming, Part 2

Two Laws

An Aboriginal Rashomon