Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community (Visible Evidence)

Shimmering Screens

VISIBLE EVIDENCE

Edited by Michael Renov, Faye Ginsburg, and Jane Gaines Volume 19 :: Jennifer Deger Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community Volume 18 :: Abé Mark Nornes Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary Volume 17 :: Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, editors F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing Volume 16 :: Michael Renov The Subject of Documentary Volume 15 :: Abé Mark Nornes Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima Volume 14 :: John Mraz Nacho López, Mexican Photographer Volume 13 :: Jean Rouch Ciné-Ethnography Volume 12 :: James M. Moran There’s No Place Like Home Video Volume 11 :: Jeffrey Ruoff “An American Family”: A Televised Life Volume 10 :: Beverly R. Singer Wiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American Film and Video Volume 9 :: Alexandra Juhasz, editor Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video Volume 8 :: Douglas Kellner and Dan Streible, editors Emile de Antonio: A Reader Volume 7 :: Patricia R. Zimmermann States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies Volume 6 :: Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, editors Collecting Visible Evidence Volume 5 :: Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, editors Feminism and Documentary

Volume 4 Volume 3

Volume 2

Volume 1

:: Michelle Citron Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions :: Andrea Liss Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust :: Toby Miller Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media :: Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs, editors Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary

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V I S I BL E E V I D E NCE , VOLU M E 19



Shimmering Screens 

Making Media in an Aboriginal Community Jennifer Deger

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Copyright 2006 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deger, Jennifer. Shimmering screens : making media in an aboriginal community / Jennifer Deger. p. cm. — (Visible evidence ; v. 19) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4921-1 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8166-4921-9 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4922-8 (pb : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8166-4922-7 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Yolngu (Australian people)—Social life and customs. 2. Aboriginal Australians and mass media. 3. Aboriginal Australians in motion pictures 4. Motion pictures in ethnology. 5. Video recordings in ethnology I. Title. DU125.Y64D44 2006 305.89'915— dc22 2006021200 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

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In memory of Bangana Wunungmurra and my mother, Dorothy Deger

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Contents

Acknowledgments

1

2

3







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Prologue

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Introduction

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Culture and Complicities: An Indigenous Media Research Project

1

(In)Visible Difference: Framing Questions of Culture, Media, and Technology

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Tuning In: Mediated Imaginaries and Problems of Deafness and Forgetting

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4



On the “Mimetic Faculty” and the Refractions of Culture

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Taking Pictures: Media Technologies and a Yolngu Politics of Presencing

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Flowers and Photographs: Death, Memory, and Techno Mimetics

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Technology, Techne, and Yolngu Videomaking

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Shimmering Verisimilitudes: Making Video, Managing Images, Manifesting Truths

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Worlding a Yolngu World: Radiant Visions and the Flash of Recognition

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Glossary

247

Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

The long years of research and writing for this book have been the most precious and difficult of my life. Without the friendships and collegiality I encountered along the way, I would have given up long ago. Fond thanks to those who welcomed me to the Northern Territory and into their lives and workplaces: the staff and committee at TEABBA, including George “Burri” Butler, Kelly Baylis, Frank Djirrimbilpilwuy, Tony Binalany, Gilbert Walkuli, and Dean “Smurf” Sultan. Also to Suzanne Gibson, Robyn Glynn, Michael Mackenzie and Lynette Hillbrick, Jitendra Kumarage, Sue Jackson, Samantha Wells, the staff at the North Australian Research Unit, and Marcia Laugton, Michael Christie, and Bill Perrett at (the then) N.T. University. The people of Gapuwiyak opened their lives to me with patience and goodwill. Thanks especially to Frank Gambali, Bobby Wunungmurra, Mickey Wunungmurra, Alfred Wanambi, Shirley Nirrpurranydji, Lyn Wunungmurra, Douglas Djurrati, and their families. Also to Penny Short, Louise Hamby, Peter Toner, Tim and Ruth, and Colin Tidswell, who shared cups of tea and the rhythms of community life. Above all, I am indebted to Bangana Wunungmurra, his wife Susan Marrawakamirr, and their children Jacko, Natasha, Samantha, and Lai’pu. Their humor, warmth, and familiarities continue to enliven my sense of “fictive kinship.” The Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies provided a vehicle and funding that made so much more possible. I am most grateful. I owe a great deal to the team from CAAMA productions, Shane Mulcahy, Jason Ramp, David Tranter, and David Hayes-Marshall, who responded to an invitation to work with a Top End community with equal measures of professionalism, enthusiasm, and openness. Many thanks also to Lisa Stefanoff for dealing with my requests for copies and clearances

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with a careful attention to the new forms of image ethics that such productions give rise to. Macquarie University has supported me in many ways in my progression from postgraduate to research fellow. My Ph.D. supervisors, Annette Hamilton and Jennifer Biddle, provided inspiration and direction, while allowing me the freedom to find my own way forward. Jennifer’s writerly sensibility and intellectual insistences pushed me further than I might otherwise have gone; always acute and encouraging, Annette got tough — in all the best ways —when it mattered. Without their respective insights and inputs this would have been a different, and much reduced, work. The concrete halls of Macquarie University have also fostered friendships. I have leaned on, and laughed with, Jovan Maud, Malcolm Haddon, Fiona Boxall, Michael Hopes, Rosemary Wiss, Frances Happ, Kirsten Bell, Chris Lyttleton, Kalpana Ram, and Ian Bedford. Likewise, Ute Eickelkamp, Lynda Newland, Franca Tamisari, Gillian Cowlishaw, Andrew Lattas, and Andrew Campbell have offered much-needed support, encouragement, and provocation. Many, many thanks to Faye Ginsburg, whose generosities and insights have made this project possible —in both intellectual and practical terms —right from the start. Special thanks also to those who offered close readings and engaged responses to the manuscript at various stages, particularly Howard Morphy, Jeremy Beckett, and Laura Marks. Thanks also to Jason Weidemann, Laura Westlund, and Nancy Sauro at the University of Minnesota Press, and to Lynn Walterick, a wonderfully astute and meticulous copy editor. I owe my family, especially my parents, Jim and Dorothy, who gave me a home and so much more during the periods of illness that interrupted my writing. I wish they had lived to share the joys of completion. Christian Tietz has a special place in the history of this project, and I am ever grateful for our enduring connection. Jane Sloan’s friendship, generous intelligence, and extraordinary editorial eye have enriched this text on so many levels. I know the world differently because of her. Finally, to Evan Wyatt, who is suspicious of sentimentality and knows how very much I owe him.

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Prologue

Ethnography-writing, becoming-anthropologist, I hang my favorite photograph from fieldwork above my desk. This is no shot of clay-smeared ceremonial dancers, although I have plenty of them. There is other cultural work going on here. The photo is one of a series of portraits taken as a memento of a trip to Darwin in 1997. In a professional photographic studio in front of an ugly, dappled, colored backdrop, my main informant Bangana and his family posed for the camera. This photo is the final one of several configurations of family reproduced that day, including the couple shot, the nuclear family of mum, dad, and the four kids, and, finally, this one that includes me, the “adopted” anthropologist. In the back row from left to right sit Jacko, Bangana, and Natasha, in the front are Yawulwuy, Susan (Bangana’s wife), Lai’pu, and me —yapa (sister) to Bangana, mukul (auntie) to his children, dhuway (sister-in-law) to Susan. Our smiles are caught as we followed the photographer’s instructions: saying “monkey” together on the count of three. The studio was the last stop on our week-long visit to Darwin; the final splurge before we began the twelve -hour road trip back down the Stuart and Arnhem highways to the bush community of Gapuwiyak. We’d come to town for a Fulbright symposium on indigenous communications, taking advantage of the transport and accommodation to combine business with pleasure. It was Bangana’s and Susan’s chance to take the family to the city for the first time. So, in between conference sessions, we went to the movies, to McDonalds and Pizza Hut, and wandered the airconditioned shopping malls. Back at the symposium, the kids contributed with a performance of Culture for Bangana’s paper on Yolngu radio.1 Painted in clan designs with acrylic paints, they danced a traditional clan bungul while their uncle played yidaki (didgeridoo) and Bangana sang to the beat of his bilma (clapsticks). The performance had been included for

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a non-Yolngu audience as an explicit demonstration of the continuities of past. And although some misunderstood the point of the paper, that is, the links between the activities of Ancestral Beings and contemporary Yolngu radio production, there was no mistaking the Culture on display. The flurry of snapping cameras confirmed the success of the spectacle —just as we had expected. Our trip to the photographic studio entailed another dressing up, another kind of posing, but this time for ourselves. Each of us felt flash in our new, city clothes. Bangana, usually a singlet and shorts kind of bloke, put on the tie I’d found among the endless racks of polyester at K-Mart, chosen in a tentative play with iconicity—the pattern and color could be seen to represent Bangana’s clan and moiety. He wore it with a wry enthusiasm, its meanings embellished by the sword pendant that hung around his neck, newly purchased in the Darwin markets to explicitly represent other dimensions of his clan’s mythic past. 2 In fact, there are multiple enthusiasms at play in this photo. That’s what enlivens it, enabling a transgression of a photographic genre that this anthropologist has eschewed all her life from a snobbish Bourdieuian-type need to claim herself as distinct from the suburban. I love this shot for many reasons. It exudes an unruly happiness and self-confidence. Unlike the painfully frozen expressions often evident in the faces and postures of uneasy Balanda (non-Aboriginal) families taken in such moments, this family was glad to have these photos taken. 3 And

Figure 1. Family portrait, Darwin, July 1997.

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it shows. In my cold office, so distant in time and space, the image evokes a swag of affectionate memories and identifications. Particularly, I am touched by the way Yawul’s gaze breaks away from the camera, providing an acknowledgment of my place in the frame and family; it represents an unlikely moment in my own project of “going native.” For, make no mistake about it, this image does not document the triumph of assimilationist policies. Bangana and his family are not cowed into the uneasy acquiescence depicted in early shots of mission blacks. Neither have they abandoned their sense of a distinctive cultural identity in order to assume a quintessentially modern pose. On the contrary, the picture makes a powerful statement about contemporary Yolngu being at ease with foreign frames, now taken up as their own. It resonates in a mimetic play of continuity and transformation between the more traditional shots of Yolngu and the family portraits favored by suburban Australia. Playfully defiant of any easy definition, the shot is simultaneously subversive and assertive. Behind the grins one might discern a postcolonial wink, a sly pleasure taken in the appropriation of genres of representation. The photograph makes a clear statement that Yolngu can play with multiple versions of who they are, in a decisive breaking of the bounds of tradition and Culture. But what continues to draw my eye, what teases my imagination, are the things I cannot see. For there is more going on than a representational frame can expose, or that my affectionate Balanda eye can perceive. To truly grasp the layers of meaningfulness embedded within the shot, it is necessary to examine the particularities of Yolngu perceptions and histories. And so I turn to Bangana’s uncle, Old Bill Manydjarri, whose tale (and its translation) I retrieve from my collection of conversations recorded on cassette. In more familiar accounts of Aboriginal contact and colonization, the frontier is breached by the violence of pastoralists’ guns and missionaries’ zeal. Yet as Old Bill’s story suggests, photography and film have played a significant role in the breaching of cultural boundaries. His words remind me that Bangana’s appropriation of foreign frames takes place after only two generations of intensive colonial encounters. Bill’s memories go back to a time when Yolngu still lived the nomadic lives of hunter-gatherers, visited occasionally by missionaries and by anthropologists with cameras and movie projectors: I first saw a movie at a place called Balngu along close to Trial Bay way, one of the films that Dr. Thomson did of the old people and he showed that at that place Balngu.4 That’s when I saw the first picture [ . . . ] It was just mainly old people starring in that picture. Naked, old people mala [group]. 5 Bayangu girri [no clothes on]. They also had pictures about other countries,

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showing wanga mala [different places]. Moticar [cars] and different new things. And at that time they’d also been told by Balanda that if you keep on making films like that for Balanda people, Balanda people might give you something in exchange like a bala [house] or a moticar or rrupiya [money]. Because of the films they were taking. At that time they had examples of wanga mala from other countries. The Balanda told the Yolngu that in the future you will see more of these things coming to you more. Guns, rrupiya, everything that Yolngu people never thought of. They were told that these things soon will come this way to you more. You will see more. At that time the old people weren’t really interested in those things. They were too busy with their galpu [woomera], gara [spears], bulpul [baskets], bathi [dilly bags]. Making dilly bags. You know they were too busy in their own little world, Yolngu world. At that time a lot of people were demonstrating to a lot of Balanda people like using paperbarks or mattresses [tree fibers] for cover-ups . . . covering themselves for the Balanda people. (JD: For the movie?) Yo [yes]. But before that time it was all naked, bayangu girri . . . [laughter]. So some of the things like moticar, the houses, and all that—after watching these first movies it was slowly coming real. Slowly and now today it’s all here. And I can see it. So today I have seen that change and it became real now. All the stuff I’ve seen like in exchange for the films that they were taking before, and the things that the Balanda were talking about. It’s all become true now. Today when I look around, I think about that day. All those films that they made of gara and galpu, the old people and all that [and how] like in exchange all those things have come now. (Bill Manydjarri, Marrangu Clan, aged approximately fifty-seven in 1997. Translated by Bangana Wunungmurra)

In Old Bill’s story, two worlds meet via camera and screen. Through his eyes, an exchange of images somehow precipitates the extraordinary material and social transformations experienced by Yolngu over the past decades. The account illustrates the complicated entanglements of images and imaginations. It indicates how Balanda’s desire for images of Aborigines, coupled with an indigenous desire to “demonstrate” themselves to the modern world (albeit covered up, both literally and figuratively) has produced a particular kind of self-consciousness in Yolngu. Bill laughs knowingly at both the nakedness and the act of covering up. It would seem from this account that the world of the old people cannot remain real under the impact of a Western gaze and the new cultural horizons offered in the movies. Yet Bill’s compelling tale of mimetic technologies and cultural transformations offers no straightforward account of media imperialism and cultural loss, at least not as it is usually told in the West. The story raises questions about what it means to mimetically produce images and what it means to see them from a Yolngu point of view. His story indicates a particular take on the efficacy of photographic technologies and their images, suggesting an almost magical

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link between pictures and seeing in a context of colonialism and cultural transformation. It seems that from Bill’s point of view early ethnographic film projects paradoxically began the process of changing exactly what they set out to preserve. His words seem to imply that such images have been productive of more than self-consciousness: there appears to be no uncertain connection between seeing and the “real.” As Bill describes witnessing images of cars and houses becoming real as the spears disappear, I glimpse a worldview in which seeing is not only believing but, in a profound and ontological sense, seeing entails a becoming. Or, to put it another way, making something visible has effects. In the intervening sixty-two years since these encounters between Yolngu and camera technologies, in the subsequent transformation of Yolngu from “old people” to the “new generation” (as most Yolngu refer to themselves now), lies a history of cross-cultural and intergenerational engagements and exchanges mediated by media technologies. Bangana and his family, with their new clothes and wide grins, make a startling contrast to the tentative-looking, naked, old people in Thomson’s shot. Stripped of body paint and props such as didgeridoo, spear, or dilly bag, it is difficult to see the “culture” in the Wunungmurra family portrait. The camera cannot reveal the continuities, transformations, and reconfigurations, which enable

Figure 2. The anthropologist Donald Thomson posing with his Yolngu friend Wongo and family in front of his photographic darkroom at Trial Bay, 1995. Photograph by D. F. Thomson. Courtesy of Mrs. D. M. Thomson and Museum Victoria.

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the cultural self-confidence that underlies this photo and the conditions of its taking. It is impossible to read from the glossy surface the means by which Bangana and other Yolngu make claims to multiple and even nontraditional identities, all the while asserting an authenticity posited on the Ancestral. Apart from gestures made by Bangana’s miniature sword and geometric tie, the photograph offers no clue as to how to perceive the links to kin and country, Ancestral Beings and sacred objects, which the studio portrait might invite a Yolngu viewer to make. How might one locate and perceive culture in such a frame? What constitutes the Yolngu eye that can find pleasure and meaning in recognizing the links between the “traditional” and the “modern” in such photographs? What might these pleasures, identifications, and understandings be? And how might others learn to appreciate such meanings?

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Introduction

This is a book about media, technology, perception, imagination, and culture(s). It describes the ways in which Aboriginal people in Gapuwiyak, a small settlement in the sparsely populated tropical north of Australia, are taking advantage of the increasing prevalence of media technologies —from privately owned still cameras, audio recorders, video cameras, and VCRs, to small-scale government-funded local radio and television facilities —to explore issues of identity, community, and belonging.1 The ethnography investigates how these technologies are contributing to the emergence of new kinds of practices and new forms of cultural production, which are, in turn, stimulating a growing reflexivity among the local population about what it means to be “Yolngu,” and more precisely “modern Yolngu,” at the beginning of the twenty-first century. More generally, this work explores the implications of seeing and knowing the world —both oneself and others —through electronic media. With satellite dishes pointed upward and government-funded facilities for the production and retransmission of local programs installed in a tiny council office, this small community provides a fascinating, fresh place from which to (re)think established notions of media and its efficacies. Drawing inspiration from a very different cultural tradition than our own, Yolngu media raise new kinds of questions about the nature of visual communication and aesthetics, mediating culture via the senses and the possibilities of, and limitations to, intercultural understanding. For, as I will describe, Yolngu imaginations have not been colonized to the extent that it is only possible for them to perceive the world according to the representational logics of a Western technological modernity. Even as they are becoming inextricably incorporated into a global mediascape (as producers, viewers, actors, and photographic and recording subjects), there remains a crucial local specificity in the ways that Yolngu understand the effects of

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taking photographs, listening to the radio, making video, or broadcasting TV. Yolngu use these technologies for their own purposes—putting them to work for remembering, imagining, connecting, and becoming-in-relation to the Ancestral —in practices that profoundly challenge conventional Western assumptions about the ontological nature of media and the kinds of cultural worlds that they engender. The descriptions of Yolngu actively reproducing the Ancestral in new forms and contexts directly challenge the residual evolutionary thinking that often surfaces in relation to this topic. As I will show, there can be no simple equating of traditional with past and modern/technological with present in this context: a Yolngu modernity does not necessarily entail the exclusion or replacement of traditional forms of knowledge or ways of being-in-the-world. The use of these technologies is not evidence of a loss of culture, nor of Yolngu becoming Western. On the contrary, such productions are evidence of the enduring creative genius of the Yolngu imagination. Indeed, in order to understand this medium, the binarisms produced by categories of past and present, traditional and modern, Yolngu and Balanda must be undone and refigured. Media also provide people from Gapuwiyak an important new way to engage non-Yolngu audiences and to persuade them of the value of Yolngu ways of being-in-the-world. The video production I describe here represents a critical phase in the history of ongoing, strategic Yolngu interventions into the intercultural spaces that simultaneously expand and delimit the possibilities of their lives.  A “Remote” Aboriginal Community

In 1931 the gazetting of Arnhem Land as an Aboriginal reserve closed the region to outsiders, with the exception of the missionary societies. 2 Previously, the physical characteristics of northeast Arnhem Land had meant that although the region had been considered to have economic and settlement potential since the mid 1850s, the distance from the southern cities, and the demanding climatic extremes, meant that there was no permanent European settlement until several Methodist missions were established during the 1920s and 1930s. 3 Today there remain tight restrictions over who can enter Arnhem Land: tourists are a rarity; film crews must seek permission to visit, as must anthropologists. To get to Gapuwiyak you must drive or fly two hundred kilometers from Nhulunbuy, a mining town with a couple of supermarkets, a petrol station, regional government offices, a hospital, a yacht club, and a

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pub. About 820 kilometers (much of it dirt road) in the other direction lies the city of Darwin. Historically, these isolating factors provided something of a buffer from the violence, dispossession, and dislocation endured by Aborigines in other parts of the country. Unlike many Aboriginal people, most Yolngu living in the so-called remote communities of Arnhem Land have ongoing (if intermittent) connections to Ancestral homelands and have been able to maintain a certain continuity of cultural practices and knowledge. In Gapuwiyak, where my research was based, Djambarrpuyngu language is the lingua franca spoken by people with different clan dialects; English is a second or even third language, used in interactions with Balanda or Aboriginal people from other places.4 This is not to say that people in Gapuwiyak exist within some kind of cultural cocoon, outside the reach of a broader national imaginary. Com munity representatives sit on locally elected councils administered by government-paid bureaucrats; a Yolngu principal and other Yolngu teachers work alongside Balanda staff to deliver an English-language curriculum in the local school; local health workers treat the growing range of lifestyle -related illnesses according to Western medical models at the clinic. Small twin- and single-engine planes provide transportation from Gapuwiyak to other nearby communities, to outstations (smaller government-funded clan settlements), and to the regional airport in Nhulunbuy. People take the jet from Nhulunbuy to Darwin for training, holidays, and hospitalization; they fly to the southern capitals and, sometimes, overseas, to take part in art exhibitions and rock concerts. Mail arrives several times a week; public and private phones replaced the twoway radio service more than a decade ago; and the launch of the satellite communications in the mid-1980s made television and radio available in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These days, the majority of homes in the community have a television set, and often a DVD player and portable radio/CD player. Most Yolngu are as familiar as I am with contemporary pop music, popular film, and television, perhaps more so.  Envisaging Change

During my fieldwork in the mid- to late 1990s—the period of time that is the main focus of this book—Yolngu had already developed a highly reflexive sense of the possibilities and challenges arising for themselves, and their children, as they lived through major technological and social changes. Although life in Gapuwiyak was clearly complex and demanding,

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I found optimism to be the predominating mood among the people I was closest to, even as we discussed their fears and concerns for the future. This is no longer the case. Over the past few years it has become clear that Yolngu have not been able to escape the ennui, frustration, and associated patterns of violence and substance abuse characteristic of life in many other parts of Aboriginal Australia. While its relatively small size, its physical distance from a town, and its historical position as a quiet, conservative place continue to make Gapuwiyak—arguably—a less difficult and troubled place to live than many other remote communities, the sense of hope and possibility that I first encountered has noticeably waned. The reasons for this change are manifold. A dizzy range of wellmeaning (but all too often ill-conceived and implemented) policies aimed at furthering indigenous self-governance, education, and health outcomes (instituted by bureaucrats and advisors of varying levels of capability and commitment) have failed to produce, or sustain, their objectives. The vast majority of people in Gapuwiyak lead existences hinged to welfare policies now blamed for entrenching poverty and inertia (Beckett 1987, Pearson 2004). There are few full-time jobs; the only alternatives are poorly paid, part-time positions in community development projects administered under a “work for the dole scheme.” Chronic lifestyle diseases, including depression, are on the rise, as are levels of drug and alcohol consumption. In recent years there has been a surge in youth suicide, domestic assault, and other forms of violent crime. As these become normalized aspects of everyday life, a significant proportion of peoples’ time and energy is spent attending funerals. Many people are dying in their twenties and thirties —dead after “only half a life,” as my adopted kin remark with sorrow. I find it hard to spend time in Gapuwiyak these days without being overwhelmed by a sense of the ever-accumulating loss that Yolngu live with: a loss of control, leadership, and purpose; a diminishing of dignity, direction, and hope. Yet, equally, it is impossible to overlook the remarkable and resilient seams of joy, humor, wit, warmth, and care that flow through the lives and relationships of the people I know there. This book is an attempt to give a sense of these lived complexities as they played out in a particular moment in history. It is a chance to document and recall an alternative perspective, at a time of difficulty and discouragement. For, as I will describe, the early experiments with using media technologies to explicitly and self-consciously “strengthen Yolngu culture” represent an extraordinary opportunity to reconsider questions —and conclusions — about the nature of culture, loss, and change.

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 Global Worlds, Mediated Imaginaries

Over the past decade anthropologists have begun to take up the conceptual challenges posed by the global spread of media. Exploring how media technologies breach the boundaries between cultural worlds, scholars have recognized the ways that new communications technologies reconfigure social spaces and the relations between subjects, places, and images. 5 These ethnographers are at the forefront of a disciplinary paradigm shift, and their work demonstrates the need to adapt theories of culture in order to reflect the contemporary lived realities of technologically mediated social worlds. For, as Anthony Giddens writes, media technologies have been instrumental in producing a profoundly new—and distinctly modern—sense of the world for contemporary subjects: Everyone still continues to live a local life, and the constraints of the body ensure that all individuals, at every moment, are contextually situated in time and space. Yet the transformations of place, and the intrusion of distance into local activities, combined with the centrality of mediated experience, radically change what “the world” actually is . . . Although everyone lives a local life, phenomenal worlds for the most part are truly global . . . in very few instances does the phenomenal world any longer correspond to the habitual settings through which an individual physically moves. (1991, 187–88).

Much of the anthropological literature on media is informed by a suggestive constellation of ideas about imagination, consciousness, and new forms of identity making. Building on the highly influential work of Stuart Hall, scholars have come to conceptualize “mass media as vehicles of culture, as modes of imagining and imaging communities” (Spitulnik 1993, 295, cited in Ginsburg 1999, 297). Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s (1983) exploration of the relationship between the development of print media and the formation of national consciousness, anthropologists and other media scholars have begun to explore the place of media in the everyday lives of cultural subjects. Appadurai’s (1996) influential ideas about the role of imagination and the place of ethnography in charting new spaces that media produce have informed and directed much recent analysis. Identifying the increasing significance of imagination in social life arising out of the spread of media technologies, Appadurai highlights the need for an anthropology that is able to account for these changing contexts of cultural creation. This concern with imagination is related to the concept of the social or “cultural imaginary”—a term increasingly used in anthropology and

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other cultural theorizing to denote “a constructed landscape of collective aspirations . . . now mediated through the complex prism of modern media” (1996, 31).6 A focus on the imagination brings a new conceptual freedom to the literature. It enables a recognition of the agency and creativity of cultural subjects who are no longer inextricably bound by tradition or a fixed, geographically determined sense of locality. Especially in the scholarship on “active” media audiences, there is a tone of expansiveness and possibility. This work provides a counterargument to earlier theories of media spectatorship and subjectification variously formulated according to theories of ideology, cultural hegemony, and technological imperialism.7 Viewers are now represented as engaging with texts on their own terms, and media consumption is depicted as a pleasurable event; audiences are not simply passive receivers of meanings but active interpreters, capable of resisting the ideological constructs embedded within programming as they produce alternative readings of media texts. In the most effusive of these formulations, access to the ever-expanding mediascape dramatically expands the possibilities and choices for identity, enabling viewers to take on new affiliations and affinities with the flick of a remote control. Yet as anthropologists such as Appadurai caution, there is a danger in reaching unduly simplistic conclusions about the nature of our engagements with media. Calling for an ethnography of the “lived imagination,” Appadurai warns that while media provide “a rich, ever-changing store of possible lives,” some of these new sets of meaning “enter the lived imaginations of [ . . . ] ordinary people more successfully than others” (1996, 53). In other words, media scholars must take care to investigate the complex and bi-directional phenomenological qualities of these encounters; the outcomes of these engagements and “resistance” are not to be presumed. What is critical are the processes by which cultural subjects take on and make sense of media in the contexts of their own lives and how they incorporate these new understandings into their own lived struggles for meaning and meaningfulness. As Appadurai insists, ethnography must redefine itself as that practice of representation that illuminates the power of large-scale, imagined life possibilities over specific life trajectories. This is thickness with a difference, and the difference lies in a new alertness to the fact that ordinary lives today are more often powered not by the givenness of things but by the possibilities that the media (either directly or indirectly) suggest are available. (55–56)

In short, not only are media the site of potential clashes and/or convergences between cultural imaginaries; this struggle is borne out—media

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are made sense of—in ongoing ways by local cultural subjects at the level of the lived imagination.  Imagination and Ontology

In taking up the challenge of describing how local subjects make sense of the world via media, I have become particularly interested in the ways in which technologies “mediate culture” (Ginsburg 1999). In other words, I have located the question of culture in the medium itself, rather than in the texts that are circulated via media. This distinction is important, as it marks a theoretical move beyond linguistically derived models that approach media in terms of processes of signification, and reception as a form of decoding, or reading. Instead, I will bring a phenomenological attention to the visual and aural dimensions of these new, non-print-based modes for communicating, representing, and evoking. I draw inspiration in this respect from Hamilton (1993), who argues that in order for scholars to fully apprehend the impact of these technologies it is necessary to undertake a new theoretical turn, “away from the rationalising modes of modernity and towards a different grasp of the nature of knowing itself” (5). As she suggests, scholars have barely begun to grapple with how these new technologies, with their unrivaled capacity for the reproduction and distribution of sounds and images, make and remake “reality.” These technologies do not simply produce multiple versions of “reality,” they constitute the very grounds of what is knowable. As she so succinctly puts it, “from the viewpoint of the emergent visualaural culture of the twenty-first century, “what’s on” creates the context for what is known and hence finally for what ‘is’” (5, my emphasis). Like Hamilton, I am interested in the way in which these technologies produce new kinds of experiences and knowledge that, in turn, lay the foundations of culture and subjectivity. At the heart of this book is a question about the nature of modernity: I want to closely consider how media technologies produce, or as Heidegger (1976) would say, “enframe,” particular ways of relating-in-the-world. In other words, interested in approaching media in ways that move beyond theories of representation, I want to consider the nexus of technology, imagination, and culture understood in terms of ontology, and to explore the ways that electronic media allow for the (re)production of knowledge through the senses, particularly, in this case, the visual. For these reasons I am drawn to the work of two highly influential twentieth-century philosophers, Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger.

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Both specifically sought to explore the role of technology in making modernity a new and distinct period in the history of human experience. In his 1936 landmark essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin described how the introduction of mimetic media technologies heralded the advent of a new historical-cultural era for Western modernity. Two years later, in 1938, Heidegger delivered a lecture that was to become the other foundational philosophical work on the role of technology in modernity, “The Age of the World Picture.”8 In this essay he advanced his argument that technology “enframes” the world, producing the relationships of objectification and mastery that, in turn, produce what he identifies as a distinctly modern sensibility. Although, in many important respects, these are extremely different essays written by very different theorists, Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s works nevertheless share certain preoccupations. For instance, they are similar in the recognition of cultural difference as a product of history and technology; they attempt to apprehend the ways that technology mediates and produces a particular kind of relationship between subject and object; and they approach these issues as a matter of sensibility. Both argue that the refractions of perception produced by technology create a particular kind of relationship between subject and object. In short, they recognize the issue of technology to be profoundly ontological. Where they differ, as I will explain in due course, is in their conclusions regarding the possibilities of being and becoming modern via the sensuous circuits of technology. Yet I must stress that mine is neither a Heideggerian nor a Benjaminian analysis in any conventional sense. I have not applied their theories and concepts directly to my ethnographic material; indeed there is often an uneasy, even awkward, fit between these thinkers and my own project. Nonetheless, I have been profoundly inspired by their phenomenologically inflected sensibilities, borrowing and adapting their concepts in order to develop ways to think and write about this culturally and historically specific situation. Like Michael Taussig, another seminal thinker and key influence on this project, I am interested in using these concepts to enliven and refigure an analysis of the sensuous and technologically textured spaces of the intercultural. Yet, again, I do not seek to reproduce a Taussigian thesis —if such a thing were even possible. Equally, I have taken direction and inspiration from other ethnographers working in Aboriginal Australia, particularly those who have, in recent years, turned to phenomenology. As Fred Myers (1986) has noted, in relation to the Pintupi of the Western Desert, Aboriginal people themselves tend to bring a phenomenological rather than a structuralist approach to cultural forms. In this cultural milieu, lived experience is often

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emphasized over conceptual frameworks as the source of knowledge and insight. The phenomenological turn thus represents something of a corrective to the previously predominant semiotic model in which Aboriginal people are described as inscribing the Ancestral in cultural production and reading country for signs of Ancestral activities.9 This theoretical trajectory with its emphasis on embodied and experiential knowledge brings an important and revealing new dimension to non-Aboriginal understandings of the constitutive dynamics of meaning-making in Aboriginal cultures. As I will describe, a culturally sensitive phenomenological sensibility helps to bring to light—and discursively frame —ways of being-in-the world that deeply infuse and inform Yolngu lives, otherwise lived and known as a kind of cultural common sense.10 This approach enables a new depth and richness of engagement with the lived imaginations of Aboriginal people that both challenges and complements the rather more abstracted analytic approach of semiotics. In short, to invert Lévi-Strauss’s famous dictum, in this cultural context, phenomenology is “good to think.” In turn, Gapuwiyak proves to be a good place to “think” media. I found that in order to do justice to the ways that Yolngu use, see, understand, and experience media, my analysis had to push the boundaries of established traditions of Western media theory. For example, although a theory of technological mimesis propels my analysis, when Yolngu express either enthusiasm or distress about the mimetic effects of technology, their concerns reveal a very different appreciation of the efficacies of mimesis than those held by Benjamin or Taussig, or, indeed, the everyday orthodoxies that underpin ways of thinking about audio and visual technologies in contemporary Western societies. However, although throughout the analysis I draw distinctions between Western and Yolngu understandings and applications of media technologies, I do not mean to suggest that these categories are fixed or immutable. Ultimately, I hope that readers might learn something relevant to their own lives from Yolngu use of media. This book therefore aims not only to facilitate an appreciation of Yolngu media usage in ways that move well beyond stereotypes of “primitive” or magical thinking but to provoke new ways of understanding the power of these technologies to touch, connect, and move each of us beyond the everyday bounds of time and space.  Overview of Chapters

In chapter 1 I introduce Bangana Wunungmurra, the cultural broker whose self-styled “vision for Yolngu media” made this project possible. Chapter 2

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locates my project within the rapidly expanding literature on visual culture and a genealogy of important anthropological research that began in the 1980s with the work of Eric Michaels, Terence Turner, and Faye Ginsburg. I then discuss emerging theoretical paradigms that allow me to push this project into new areas, especially the work of David MacDougall and Laura Marks, film theorists who share a phenomenologically inflected concern with the relationship between culture and filmic forms of knowledge. Chapter 3 explains in further detail how the ethnographically specific context of my research made certain kinds of theoretical demands. I describe how my commitment to attend to Bangana’s project, on his own terms, required that I adopt a form of theory that attends to the effects of media as Yolngu describe them, namely, in terms of the effects of hearing and seeing. In other words, I had to come to terms with a local theory of identity in which subjectivity is understood to be constituted via the senses. In chapter 4 I explain how a theory of mimesis provides me with a conceptual framework appropriate to my project. Gaines (1999, 8) has suggested that “to see the legitimacy of mimesis and resemblance as routes to discovery is to appreciate an aspect of the documentary aesthetic that has gone unremarked.” This comment has a particular resonance in a Yolngu context. Via a discussion of Walter Benjamin and Michael Taussig, I establish a sense of a Yolngu “mimetic faculty” that is culturally and historically specific. As such, I argue that it provides a valuable and provocative counterpoint to these theorists, for, as I describe, Yolngu are concerned with using mimesis to produce relationships generated by the recognition and reinforcement of similitude and sameness (without denying difference), rather than alterity. In the five chapters that follow, I use this notion of mimesis to explore Yolngu uses of media in various contexts. I pay close attention to the particularities of lived, embodied, cultural imaginations and to the ways in which these encounter and respond to the kinds of imaginaries embedded in, and imaginings fostered by, these technologies. Chapter 5 introduces a discussion of the role of photography in “exchange relations.” I explore the ways in which the unique mimetic powers of the camera and other recording technologies raise ontological issues for Yolngu that require that a politics of representation be rethought in terms of what I call a politics of presencing that is attentive to ontological questions regarding what is given and what is taken in the act of photography. In chapter 6 I extend my analysis of presences and the dangers of mimetic excess into the lives of the “new generation” of Yolngu in order to consider an apparent cultural shift regarding the nature of photographic recordings. The final three chapters deal with the video production Gularri: That

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Brings Unity. I describe how, by drawing from the structure and authority of revelatory ritual, Bangana sought to amplify the potency of the images the camera recorded and open up the spaces for “seeing” in this work. Ultimately, I will argue that in this cultural context video mimesis operates as a practical modality for revelation as opposed to representation: it is about a bringing forth, a connecting and making visible the immanent, underlying Ancestral relations that undergird what Bangana called “the Yolngu world.”  On Names and Images

Bangana died in February 2002. Apart from representing an extraordinary loss for so many people, this tragic event raised an array of issues in relation to the production of this book. According to Yolngu protocols, the name of a person who dies becomes restricted from spoken and written language (McIntosh 2004), and that person’s image is removed from public view, usually for a period of years. (See, for instance, Biernoff 1974, 100). At the time of publication of this book these restrictions have not been officially lifted. I have, however, been given permission by Bangana’s children and his wife, Susan Marrawakamirr, and other kin with ritual responsibilities in relation to such matters to use both his image and name in this context. The fact that this was allowed —encouraged, even —is significant and goes to the heart of the concerns that I will explore in this book. For, as I will explain, these issues are starting to matter in new ways for Yolngu. It is not simply the case that Susan believes that the distance between my academic world and Gapuwiyak renders such protocols unnecessary. Nor is it the case that she considers me, as Balanda, to be exempt from such practices. On the contrary, my use of his name and image in this context—always, necessarily, with permission—reflects an awareness of, and investment in, the realm of the intercultural and the new forms of knowledge production that shape the possibilities of Yolngu lives. As I will explain, her hopes that my work might generate a form of recognition and respect for her late husband and his project arise out of contemporary Yolngu cultural imperatives. Susan is concerned that Bangana should be identified and represented in this book. She was, therefore, uninterested in my adopting a pseudonym or any other writerly device that would obscure or erase his identity. Nonetheless, I remain acutely aware that Yolngu will respond to the book, and the images in it, in ways I can neither control nor predict. Although there has been a dramatic easing of restrictions surrounding

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the viewing of photographs of deceased people in recent years, these images are not generally deemed suitable for public display. Family members view images of the recently deceased in private, controlled circumstances (as I describe in chapter 6). Consequently, some Yolngu may see the inclusion of Bangana’s photo on the cover of this book—in full pubic view, rather than being contained or shielded within the covers—as provocative, even improper. This is probably unavoidable, given the varying ways that Yolngu assert and manage the constellation of rights, responsibilities, and powerful effects associated with certain kinds of images. (In this instance, these issues may be amplified by the fact, as I will explain in chapter 1, of Bangana’s somewhat controversial status within Arnhem Land.) However, from the point of view of the immediate family, those who, according to local protocols, have the right to decide such matters, the cover image is appropriate. They see it as contributing to the efficacy of the book, enhancing the publication’s potential to generate international recognition for Bangana and his vision for Yolngu media. To put it in Bangana’s own words, jotted down in my notebook after a now eerily prescient conversation some years before he died: such an image, in such a context, is a great opportunity to “show the world who I am . . . or, who I was.”11  Writing Glimpses: The Sensuous Apprehension of Culture

The book’s underlying theme is that not only is culture constitutive of perception but perception—in all senses of the term—is constitutive of culture. As I will show, Yolngu understand the processes through which knowledge is acquired to arise from an intrinsic relationship between the conceptual and the sensuous; as I will explain, this epistemological system in knowledge arises from an interplay of impressions, instructions, and insights to generate the processes whereby one comes to see for oneself. Yet, as I will describe, such understandings require a shift of imagination that can be difficult to achieve —for the anthropologist, let alone for a reader far removed from this cultural context. Quite literally, it can be extremely difficult to grasp the cultural processes and meanings that I describe. For this reason my account is, at times, very personal. This is a deliberate discursive strategy. I aim not only to provide a subjective accounting of fieldwork dynamics but to use my own experiences to present a certain kind of ethnographic “data.” I have incorporated and interrogated my own shifting perspectives and responses into the analysis for the explicit purpose of pointing toward the deeply affective, intersubjective experiences that I argue are central to the power and meaning of Yolngu media.

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Accordingly, I have used the notion of the glimpse as an underlying metaphor for my own project. In my writing I attempt to evoke, necessarily partially and provisionally, the ways in which Yolngu subjects acquire knowledge through glimpses —through the sensual, incrementally acquired layers of understanding gleaned through ritual experience and exposure to Ancestrally significant places, objects, and designs.12 To this end, I have attempted to write in ways that invite identifications through what will hopefully be the reader’s own glimpses. I have structured the book so that each chapter builds to the insights of the final chapter. Taking the form of a spiral, the argument gradually moves inward beyond first impressions to understandings facilitated by a deepening relationship with certain Yolngu developed over time and shared experience. In the types of stories I tell about my fieldwork experiences, I want to bring the reader into relation with my own coming-to-knowledge by using the shared experience of knowing the world through media technologies as the basis for learning something critical about what matters to Yolngu about these technologies. Similarly, I have selected images that reward a second look. As I describe, Yolngu use photographs to actively remember and reconstitute a constellation of relationships and meanings beyond those visible on the surface of an image. The photographs therefore work with the text to

Figure 3. In memory of Bangana Wunungmurra (right) and my mother, Dorothy Deger, invisibly present here as the eye-behind-the-camera, framing a photo for the family album.

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demonstrate my arguments about the inextricable and cumulative connections between the sensuous and the cognitive, the subjective and the intersubjective, the “inside” and the “outside”, the emotional and the intellectual. Figure 3 is a case in point. This image does much more than illustrate a shared moment between the anthropologist and her informant. In this instance, the photo not only reaffirms my relationship with Bangana; it invisibly presences my mother in her capacity as the photographer: our relationship made manifest with the knowledge that she is the eye-behindthe-camera, on holiday in Arnhem Land, taking a snap for our family album. I include this image here as a means of gesturing toward the multiple layers of invisible connections enabled by these technologies, and, in the process, to enact and affirm my dedication of this book to these two key figures in my life in a “Yolngu kind of way.” As I have indicated, my analysis has been propelled by a theory of mimesis. Seeking to write against the kinds of primitivist narratives that have tainted Western cultural appreciations of mimesis and the “natives” who excel at it, I have endeavored to produce an ethnography that will enable my readers to draw on knowledges born of their own “mimetic faculty.”13 I want to tickle readers’ imaginations and memories, enticing them to a level of identification that crosses the bounds of culture and difference by drawing on the kinds of shared, sense-derived experiences of oneself and the world such as arise when looking at photos and watching films. As Taussig describes (via Benjamin), mimetic knowledge emerges as a flash of recognition (1993, 39). Constituted in the play between perception and apperception, between the sensuous and the cognitive, the mimetic operates as lived “theory”—far better shown and seen, demonstrated and recognized, rather than abstractly described and objectively considered. Consequently, this book is structured as a series of impressions from which certain kinds of insight, explanations, and questions follow. My arguments are written such that they might be apprehended through processes arising out of—and exceeding—forms of knowledge gained at a merely cognitive level. In the process I hope to generate for the reader a kind of cumulative and layered appreciation of not only the issues and ideas but the imaginative processes at work in Yolngu engagements with media technologies. By the end, readers will be positioned so as to draw from their own senses, memories, and imaginations—occurring in conjunction with my argument and analysis—in order to appreciate for themselves something crucial about another culture’s way of seeing-in-the-world. This approach to writing ethnography can also be seen as offering a response to broader debates regarding the place of anthropological knowledge in contemporary cultural debates. In recent years many critiques

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and deconstructions of the “ethnographic eye,” both within and beyond the discipline, have focused on the imperialist assumptions embedded in the Malinowskian project of “grasping the native’s point of view.”14 In this book I seek to contribute to a reclaiming of a visualist project for anthropology. Contrary to those who would dismiss the old-fashioned Malinowskian ethnographic endeavor as irredeemable, I want to assert the ethical, imaginative, and analytical importance of envisioning culture and difference. Indeed, I would argue that the ethnographic method uniquely enables an exploration of the perceptual and cognitive processes by which others see, and, in a profound sense, know the world.15 For surely the deconstruction of “the ethnographic eye” and the growing awareness of the ocularcentric impulses of the Western eye more generally only serve to highlight the fact that cultures must see, know, experience, and hence represent and reproduce the world through equally complex cultural lenses. As contemporary social theory increasingly comes to terms with the ways that culture is produced through the sensual conjunctions of power and perception, imaged and imagined, it is possible to bring a different kind of consideration to the project of describing other kinds of gazes and worldviews. As I will demonstrate, these theoretical perspectives allow for a refiguring of the Malinowskian project by making the processes of “seeing” far more literal (and simultaneously both more politically and philosophically complex) than he envisaged. Indeed, I would suggest that a renewed ethnographic effort toward illuminating how others know the world through vision (and other senses) and images (both “ours” and “theirs”) is particularly appropriate at this particular moment in social history when intercultural politics are so deeply aestheticized.16 In writing this book I have sought to explore how ethnographic research might generate the possibility of glimpsing another way of seeingthe-world. As I will describe, the intersubjective and intercultural demands of fieldwork in Gapuwiyak entailed, and produced, particular kinds of “looking” and knowing that have shaped this work at every level. My experience of these ways of looking and knowing has led me toward analytic outcomes that are substantially different from those produced by theorists who engage with similar material (i.e., filmic representations of culture and difference) from afar. For, unlike the wry, detached, and “cool” deconstructions arising out of much critical theory undertaken in this area, this analysis is compelled by the sensuous, ethical, intellectual, and imaginative engagements that, in my experience, fieldwork uniquely enables. As I will describe, I am positioned within this project not only as anthropologist but as a media trainer/producer and, no less, as an adopted

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member of the Dhalwangu clan. These roles have required a certain shifting between perspectives. As a visiting anthropologist committed to a Ph.D. research project, my point of view was necessarily self-interested, selective, and searching. Yet over time, my ethnographic “line of sight” has become increasing entangled, bound up as it is with the kinds of affections, anxieties, responsibilities, and personal agendas engendered by my fieldwork experiences. As a result, at times my writing departs from academic conventions. These moments of personal reflection and emotional engagement are intended to highlight—and affectively perform—a central theoretical argument: an argument, put crudely, that particular kinds of relationships and ways of relating generate particular kinds of experiences, which, in turn, allow for particular kinds of insights. As I will argue, Yolngu prioritize and privilege the spaces of the feelingful and the sensuous spaces of the intersubjective.17 Such a cultural milieu is deeply concerned with the ways in which lived relationships between people, places, and things constitute the grounds of the social. Hence, I use my writing to demonstrate that an active participation in Yolngu life on its own terms at times demands ways of looking and seeing that challenge the critical detachment of the classic participant-observer. As a strategy for ethnographic writing, such an approach is as fraught as it is fruitful. To speculate on how someone else sees the world is a fundamentally difficult, if not impossible, proposition, a dilemma compounded by the communicative limitations of written, scholarly language. Moreover, trying to induce a particular kind of mimetic engagement from my reader —actively seeking to entice an empathetic knowledge of what an earlier anthropology called “sympathetic magic”—could potentially result in difference being subsumed by the pleasures afforded by an identification across the bounds of culture. Writing about my own experience and understandings risks effacing the differences that exist between Yolngu and myself that matter just as much as our connections and identifications. Thus, while trying to overcome the anthropological tendency to reify and write otherness, I find myself with the opposite problem: reducing Yolngu to a radical sameness. Realizing the danger of obliterating culture, I have to remind myself—and the reader —of the importance of difference as it mediates against any possibility of a complete mutuality, connectedness, or understanding. In order to proceed, I have had to continually ask myself: What and where are the specificities that might constitute an irreducible difference that separate the Yolngu I describe from me (and even more so between my readers and my central character, Bangana)? What are the critical aspects of Yolngu knowledge, experience, and worldview that Yolngu viewers share and that I (we, Balanda) cannot? How am I to prevent a form

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of imperious reduction—an erasure of the differences that matter between our culturally inflected mimetic faculties —even as I seek to reproduce a sensual understanding and regard? As the phenomenologist and social theorist Alfred Schutz insists, while the intersubjective encounter may produce an assumption of a shared knowledge of the world, because our experiences prior to this moment differ, we can never fully make sense of one another. He succinctly states, “I ascribe to you an environment which has already been interpreted from my subjective standpoint” (1972, 105). Accordingly, any reflexive posture on the part of ethnographers must necessarily involve a radical questioning of how it is that we come to “know” our subject(s). What are the prior experiences and understandings that inflect our perception of new situations? How might local subjects bring different kinds of experience and knowledge to the same situation? This kind of reflexivity—an attention to the active processes by which one makes sense of one’s world—allows a different position from which to consider difference —as well as sameness. In short, in writing this book I want to foreground the cultural factors that influence and limit my own ethnographic imagination. I want to acknowledge the frameworks and structuring factors that directed my own “looking for culture” and that shaped my impressions and, at times, prevented me from perceiving the very things I sought. Even if, following Yolngu imperatives, I privilege mimetic identifications as the grounds of culture and knowledge, there nonetheless remains an essential difference. By describing and contextualizing the moments of insight that have shaped my understandings, I hope to leave space for the ambiguities, tensions, and discordances that still trouble my own academic desires for order, consistency, and cohesion. In this way of writing, I seek to avoid a seamless narrative or an unseemly ethnographic authority by explicitly acknowledging how much there is that I do not know, how much more that remains for me to “see.” Ultimately, while I recognize “Yolnguness” as something that will always inevitably elude my best efforts to know it, I remain convinced of the vital importance of the kind of imaginative, ethical, and aesthetic understanding I describe —for both Yolngu and myself.

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Culture and Complicities: An Indigenous Media Research Project

All fieldwork, I suspect, hinges on chance encounters that profoundly determine the course of research. However, perhaps more than most anthropological projects, the data and culture considered in this ethnography are the result of the enthusiasms, reflexivity, and vision of one very particular person. Had I not met and worked with Bangana Wunungmurra, the Yolngu man who became my chief informant, my Aboriginal brother, co-producer, and, in a Balanda (non-Aboriginal) sense, friend, this would have been a very different work. This chapter traces the entangled imperatives of theory and methodology, research and analysis. It tells the story of how my project of multisited fieldwork came to be focused on one man’s singular vision for media production. It recounts the serendipitous circumstances of our meeting while at the same time acknowledging that my relationship with Bangana was no coincidence. The enthusiasms that fueled our collaborations—which kept us talking into the evening and provoked phone conversations and the promise of new media projects long after my return from the field—turn on a mutual concern with the relationship between culture and media. Or, to be more specific, Yolngu culture and Yolngu media. I use these terms deliberately. They emphatically and provocatively announce a conjunction of ideas about identity, culture, and media that will be the subject of sustained analysis throughout this book. Yet, as I will soon show, the meanings of these terms are by no means self-evident. I begin by tracking the intertwined discourses of culture that have given rise to indigenous broadcasting in Australia and elsewhere, in the process examining my own investments in ideas about culture and media and how they have inextricably shaped this project.

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 Representation, Resistance and “Survival”

I came to anthropology in the early 1990s with a dreamy interest in culture and difference. I had a degree in communications and had worked in radio and television as a researcher and producer. Bored and burned-out, I began taking classes in undergraduate anthropology with the hope that I might come up with material for film proposals, or, possibly, begin a career in ethnographic filmmaking. Instead, the “crisis of representation” I encountered within the discipline led me toward self-critique.1 With a large measure of discomfort, I came to recognize the primitivist motivations and dubious practices that underpinned my seemingly well-intentioned desires to video other cultures. Stung, I put my filmmaking ambitions aside. During the same period I began reading the work of Eric Michaels, Terence Turner, and Faye Ginsburg. These anthropologists describe the emergence of what has come to be known both in the literature and (at least in Australia) by its practitioners as “indigenous media.” Their ethnographic descriptions of media production by Warlpiri in central Australia, Kayapo in the Amazon, and Inuit in Arctic Canada made me aware for the first time that video and other media technologies might be used to explore and express alternative cultural values and aesthetics. Inspired by this literature —and excited by the concomitant emergence of a range of government-funded indigenous media projects across Australia—I planned my Ph.D. research. From the outset it was clear that a certain upbeat, discourse about the relationship between broadcast technologies and cultural survival was driving the funding and rollout of broadcasting technology, particularly in remote bush communities. Enthusiastically describing the appropriation of “modern” technologies to indigenous cultural pursuits, indigenous advocates, bureaucrats, and scholars were emphasizing the ways in which video could be used to maintain indigenous cultures and enhance prospects for what has variously been referred to as “cultural survival,” “cultural resistance,” “cultural revitalization,” or a “cultural future.” It seemed to me that although there was no doubt a strong rhetorical appeal to such arguments, many commentators tended toward a somewhat uncritical, even euphoric, embrace of the idea that indigenous culture would be “strengthened” by the conjunction of an oral culture and electronic media technologies. Although hugely sympathetic to the project of indigenous selfrepresentation, and pragmatically aware of the appeal of such discourses

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to jaded policy makers and activists alike, I was suspicious. 2 I wanted to know more about the kinds of bidirectional intercultural processes that were surely informing this so -called cultural revival. And so my research proposal took shape. I wrote: I am interested in how notions of “culture” and cultural survival have been picked up and used by Aboriginal media producers. [But] . . . what kinds of reifications are at work as culture becomes Culture? What kind of exclusions and transformations take place as song, dance, art and other “traditional” practices are turned into objectified, cross -culturally recognizable signifiers of tradition, authenticity and difference? Where does a notion of culture as produced in and through “everyday life” (de Certeau), habitus (Bourdieu) or “lifeworld” (Schutz) fit into conceptual frameworks attuned to Culture? . . . What about all the cultural stuff that isn’t identified as Culture?

These questions about the relationship of what I had come to think about as Culture (i.e., objectifiable and cross-culturally recognizable as Indigenous) and culture (i.e., the less visible, less spectacular, and less self-conscious processes and practices that produce everyday meaning and meaningfulness) informed my decisions about where and how to do fieldwork. I decided to undertake a multi-sited research project: a methodology that would allow me to examine the range of discourses, policies, and practices that shaped the possibilities of BRACS (the Broadcasting in Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme) and other media projects of representation, resistance, and “cultural revival.”3 I planned to start by spending time working as a volunteer within national and regional media organizations, positioning myself to gain access to a field site somewhere in “remote” Australia where, as Marcia Langton confidently asserted, media production was generated by distinctive local cultural concerns, aesthetics, and values (1993, 14).4 I was in no position to realize, in those early stages of research, that what I was setting out to investigate was something that (at least at that point in time) existed largely in the imaginations of bureaucrats, academics, and indigenous media advocates. It would take more than a year of field research to locate an appropriate site for my case study and longer still to find an indigenous media maker who fit my expectations.  The Broadcasting in Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS)

At the beginning of my research, there seemed to be almost too many potential research sites. In 1987 the implementation of the Broadcasting in Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS) by the Department

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of Aboriginal Affairs had resulted in the equipping of more than eighty remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities with the technology for local video and radio production and local retransmission. 5 BRACS represented a federal government response to the perceived threat to indigenous language and culture in remote Aboriginal communities posed by the launch of the first Aussat telecommunications satellite in 1985. Developed from models of local media production that derived from early experiments with pirate (i.e., unlicensed) television in the central Australian communities of Yuendumu and Ernabella in the mid-1980s, BRACS was, in essence, a mini –radio and television station packed into a laminated cabinet. The BRACS package included a satellite dish, an FM radio aerial, an audiocassette recorder, two videocassette recorders, a video camera, television and radio decoders, and retransmission equipment. It provided isolated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities the means to receive mainstream media and also the potential for the production and broadcasting of locally made radio and video.6 In short, BRACS was a unique broadcasting initiative designed to allow local people to control what was broadcast into the community (at least in theory). It was envisaged that programming deemed inappropriate (sexually explicit scenes or programs that mention the names of recently deceased people, for example) would be switched off. It was anticipated that communities would replace this culturally offensive material with their own “culturally appropriate” television or radio productions, which could then be broadcast on BRACS and received within a five-kilometer radius of the community. Embedded within the policy, and much of the commentary, was the assumption that media technologies enabled a natural progression from an oral culture to an electronically mediated one, effectively bypassing the ubiquitous reliance on print as the major means of communication.7 This notion that Aboriginal people might resist Western imperialism through a combination of high technology and traditional culture proved to have a widespread appeal to the Australian imaginary.8 The celebratory tone of commentary that declared “the world’s oldest cultures” to be productively using “the world’s most modern technology” slid from popular discourse into bureaucratic and scholarly reports on BRACS as commentators uncritically played up the conjunction between Aboriginal culture and electronic media.9 Thus, BRACS arose out of a coinciding of technological advancements with developments within Australian social and cultural histories, government policy, and scholarly theory. Supported by policy makers, academics, and indigenous advocates, BRACS was promoted as a vital strategy for “fighting fire with fire,” a phrase adopted from a state-

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ment made by Kurt Japanangka Granites in an early Warlpiri media video (Michaels 1986, 36). These intertwined themes of culture, media technologies, and resistance have remained largely unproblematized in the literature about BRACS —and also by many of those working within the remote indigenous broadcasting sector.10 For instance, in 1998, ten years after the initial BRACS installations, Neil Turner, a trainer and coordinator with extensive experience in remote area broadcasting, continued to assert a zealous commitment to the original vision: BRACS has a huge potential to benefit indigenous populations in remote communities. It gives them the means to tell their own stories —to use and control their own media for purposes of language maintenance, cultural regeneration, essential information delivery, education and entertainment— in ways that observe cultural protocols and customary law, reinforce an indigenous world view, promote self-esteem and social identity and generate employment and income. (1998, 33)

 Tracking Discourse

Although there were numerous detailed policy and discussion documents available in Canberra, when I began my research in 1993 there was still very little information available about how BRACS was, or wasn’t, working in the bush. The ATSIC policy officers I interviewed who produced national strategies for indigenous media had never visited a BRACS community. They directed me to the newly established (and now defunct) National Indigenous Media Association of Australia (NIMAA) in Brisbane, which had only sketchy, anecdotal data about the kinds of production BRACS was enabling. When I visited regional indigenous media associations in Broome, Darwin, and Alice Springs, which were committed to supporting BRACS communities, I found them to be underresourced and concerned with establishing their own regional FM radio stations, and thus they had little contact with BRACS operators. No one I met had an example to offer of active community video production. Instead, I got the impression that BRACS had not produced the expected outcomes and instead functioned primarily as a scheme further enabling the retransmission of mainstream services. I heard sporadic reports about radio broadcasts of prerecorded music, especially in the Top End of the Northern Territory. But, with the notable exception of Ernabella in South Australia, I could not find one example of a community in which there was any sustained local media production at that time.

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Nonetheless, the people I met still believed in the unrealized potential of BRACS and were in the process of actively lobbying the government for increased funding, equipment, training, and community consultation. Although they were unfailingly critical of the implementation of BRACS, the “culture-strengthening” role of BRACS was never questioned (at least not in my presence); yet I couldn’t find anyone able to elaborate on how this “strengthening” might be achieved beyond simply broadcasting local languages and stories. The reason most often offered for the apparent failure of BRACS was a lack of training and technical support. The project’s budget had been weighted heavily on capital expenditure with seemingly little regard for the (im)practicalities of setting up mini–community media organizations in places where it was unlikely that the potential operators would have the practical experience, or literary skills, required to decipher technical manuals. Moreover, while the retransmission equipment was of a professional quality, the production equipment supplied with the original BRACS was extremely basic. There was no mixing panel for radio production; there were no CD players, only a twin-cassette deck. Video production facilities were equally basic. Editing had to be “crashed” from one VCR to the other, a cumbersome and inexact practice; there were no facilities to add effects or mix the audio tracks. These kinds of technical/ training issues provided the basis for the first scholarly discussions of BRACS.11 What was becoming increasingly apparent was the advantage of an in-house BRACS advisor/trainer. Warlpiri Media had developed with the support of Michaels and other subsequent white advisors; Neil Turner had been working at Ernabella’s PY media for almost a decade. Clearly there was something critical about this kind of support that enabled these projects.12 Strengthening my resolve to find a case study, I determined that, if necessary, I would seek permission to research in a BRACS community that was not actively broadcasting. I would help to get things going by providing the training and infrastructural support myself. This decision was also driven by feeling ungrounded, even disorientated, by my multi-sited approach to ethnography. Although I was now familiar with how many indigenous media people conceptualized their project within a broader politics of representation, I felt unable to penetrate beyond the repetitive discourse of “cultural maintenance,” which I was finding increasingly problematic, especially given the lack of production in the bush. An initial approach to base myself in Broome and to work with neighboring BRACS had been tentatively approved by the Broome Aboriginal Media Association (BAMA). However, BAMA’s reluctance to support

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my funding proposal to AIATSIS (on the basis that they would prefer an Aboriginal researcher) eventually led me to switch my focus to Darwin and the Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association (TEABBA). Part of my difficulty in gaining permission was that (as I became painfully aware during my early research with regional and national indigenous media organizations) anthropologists are seen to embody a scrutinizing colonial hierarchy of power and knowledge that has by no means been relegated to the past. My research was often recast by indigenous sources as a project involving the appropriation of indigenous knowledge for my own career development. In response, I attempted to demonstrate my commitment to indigenous struggles for, access to, and control over the airwaves. I did this by declaring (in funding applications, research proposals to Aboriginal organizations, and whenever I was directly challenged about the legitimacy of conducting anthropological research on “the most researched people in the world”) that my interest was in indigenous media as a topic that argued for the importance of self-representation. As I told anyone who asked, my project was concerned with documenting, promoting, and supporting Aboriginal people to tell their own stories—to both indigenous and nonindigenous audiences —on their own terms. I constructed my project within a postcolonial politics of research, positioning indigenous media (and my support of it) as a long overdue inversion of colonial structures of “showing and telling.” Even so, I remain aware that it is impossible to entirely wriggle off the hook in terms of questions of power/knowledge and ethnography, especially in this kind of context. Indeed, I consider that any attempt to sidestep the difficult questions raised regarding the politics and ethics of representation that necessarily ensnares any researcher in the Aboriginal domain is not only impossible but disingenuous. These issues remain potent and problematic, and they inform my work in ways that will become evident in the course of this book.  The Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association

In June 1994, my request to base myself with TEABBA was approved. Established in 1989, TEABBA’s primary aim as a media organization was to support the broadcasting ambitions of the twenty-eight BRACS communities in their region. TEABBA operated both as a radio station, providing satellite coverage across the Top End (excluding urban centers), and an organization providing BRACS with technical and administrative support. Crucially, TEABBA provided me with access to bush communities and

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to BRACS operators. Over the next few months I worked with TEABBA as a volunteer technical assistant, helping with the upgrade and repair of the original BRACS installations. My trips to many of these communities enabled me to witness firsthand what I saw to be the neglect and inactivity of most BRACS (a view I have now modified as I have come to realize the spasmodic nature of these kinds of endeavors). In BRACS, as in many community-based projects, potential can lie dormant for long periods. Productivity depended on a number of factors, especially the demands on the attention and energy of the BRACS operator. Ritual and family responsibilities, extended stays in outstations, the eruption of tensions between clans, the lure of card games, the jealousies of spouses, childcare commitments — all these figure in whether or not the BRACS worker actually goes to work. At other times things grind to a halt: the ennui produced by the heat and dust, the lack of equipment, the lack of support, and the low pay (in comparison to other jobs, like those in the school and clinic) overwhelm the individuals who choose to take on the challenge of BRACS.

Figure 4. Top End BRACS communities and regional centers.

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Despite these factors, there were periods of activity and creativity. At that time, Yolngu broadcasters were particularly active in the communities of Galiwinku, Milingimbi, and Ramingining. With the advent of the TEABBA network these established BRACS operators had a new wider audience and began contributing programs via telephone linkups. Listening in from the TEABBA studio (TEABBA did not broadcast into Darwin), I became enormously encouraged by the vitality and confidence that infused programs in which operators played prerecorded popular music from Australia and beyond while speaking in a mixture of English and local dialects to an audience dispersed across the Top End. Although not quite what I had expected, BRACS was working in these places. Anxious to spend time with these broadcasters, I followed established research protocols and requested approval and support for my research from the respective BRACS operators and their community councils. I sent numerous letters and left phone messages but did not receive any replies. In retrospect I can see how those BRACS operators must have been wary of my plans. In my enthusiasm and eagerness I probably appeared pushy, intrusive even. It took several months of waiting in Darwin to recognize their smiles, promises, and unanswered letters as forms of passive evasion. I knew I had to look elsewhere. In October 1994, I spent ten days working with the TEABBA technician on the installation of BRACS in Gapuwiyak, a relatively small Yolngu community on the shores of Lake Evella in northeast Arnhem Land. During this visit, between mixing cement and wiring up equipment, I approached the council with my proposal and an offer to work as a voluntary BRACS trainer/administrator. This was timely. Neither Yolngu nor Balanda understood how to operate the equipment, so I would not be imposing on an established BRACS operator. Although I required housing (a scarce resource in such places), I nevertheless proved an attractive proposition for an organization already stretched by the demands of administering the local clinic, roads, workshop, sanitation, and housing. And so I moved to Gapuwiyak (also known as Lake Evella) in March 1995 to begin research on something that did not yet exist.  A “Traditional” Community

Established in the late 1960s by a small group of Yolngu, Gapuwiyak was originally settled as a sawmill operation for the neighboring Elcho Island Methodist missionary. It then became the site for a breakaway mission community for Yolngu with a vision of a “traditional” community. These

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“founding fathers,” I have been told, envisaged that Gapuwiyak would be a place where rom (Ancestral law) would be respected and followed. Unlike neighboring communities, which were deemed to be abandoning their culture for Balanda pursuits and pleasures, Gapuwiyak was to be a “traditional community.” To this end, discos and rock and roll bands were banned, a restriction that endured throughout the 1990s despite the international chart success of Yothu Yindi from neighboring Yirrkala and the popularity of indigenous music from other communities. (The only exception to this ruling on playing and performing electric music was a gospel band that has grouped and regrouped intermittently over the years.) Gapuwiyak Yolngu offered their active attendance and participation in ceremonies as evidence of their ongoing commitment to the traditional culture so valued by their forefathers. Yolngu from other places were often criticized —although generally not directly—for neglecting or forgetting their culture.13 Clearly, such ideas about culture have arisen from colonial and postcolonial relations. Aboriginal people have long been valued in terms of possessing Culture —or not—by a variety of interested onlookers. During the 1980s and early 1990s, this focus on Culture became institutionalized by one of the major ideologies underpinning government policies, that of “Self-Determination.” Government policy reflected concerns that Aboriginal peoples maintain their culture, leading to a range of initiatives in education, health, administration, and welfare that attempted (with varying degrees of success) to accommodate Aboriginal practices and imperatives. The establishment of BRACS is a prime example of this. Although often tokenistic (and mostly inadequate to the enormously complex task of managing the differences between cultural systems), such programs were nonetheless far preferable to Yolngu than the assimilationist policies of earlier eras. It is therefore hardly surprising that Yolngu became increasingly complicit in representing themselves to themselves, and to others, in these same culturalist terms. Whereas other Aboriginal people are often cast as “failures of indigenousness” because of an apparent lack of Culture (Povinelli 1999, 23), Yolngu have actively solicited and exploited the possibilities arising from being perceived as quintessentially Aboriginal. Over the past several decades, Yolngu have become visible nationally, and even internationally, because of their confidence and self-conscious assertions about culture and identity. I raise this not to assert that Yolngu from Gapuwiyak are more “authentically” cultural than Yolngu in other places but rather to emphasize the place of Culture (as a self-conscious and reified basis for identity) within the stories that the inhabitants tell themselves, and others, about who

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Figure 5. Yolngu actors from Gapuwiyak won an Australian Television Industry Logie Award for their performance in the film Alinta the Flame (1982). Courtesy of Bob Weis and Generation Films.

they are, and where they have come from.14 Competitive claims to cultural superiority are a common feature of relations between Aboriginal groups. In Gapuwiyak, this explicit and self-conscious story underpins an important dimension of community identification, by providing a narrative that draws the disparate clans of the community into a commonality based on a shared cultural prowess. Culture discourse confirms an ongoing commitment to the ideas and traditions of their forefathers. While Yolngu from Gapuwiyak admit that Yolngu from other parts of the region view their community as something of a backwater, a small place where not too much happens, they take pride in representing themselves as more Cultural than these other larger, better-resourced settlements. This selfconfident attitude particularly infuses their understanding of their position vis-à-vis other Aboriginal people who are deemed to have “lost their culture” through processes of colonization. Outside the region, Yolngu from Gapuwiyak and other settlements show off their Culture with something of a swagger as they perform traditional music and dance at regional, national, and international events.

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 The Place of Culture in Gapuwiyak BRACS

Before my arrival, Yolngu from Gapuwiyak had never made their own radio or video programs, although several of the council staff had workrelated training with video cameras. The public address system remained the preferred broadcasting method for news or community information. Those seeking to make an announcement of a meeting, provide updated information about a ceremony, make an appeal for council workers to work, or vent a personal gripe or disagreement would use the old and distorted PA system to broadcast their views. These messages often turned into an extended haranguing, a kind of communication that was, I was told, based on traditional ways of addressing the camp by raypirri (a kind of preachy exhortation or admonishment that, despite what sounded to me like an angry tone, was described as a form of encouragement). This more basic and more direct form of broadcast took advantage of the contained space of the community (although there were problems with speaker distortions and the people at the far end of town not being able to hear the message) and the simplicity of the technology. Old men who never entered the BRACS were quite comfortable using the PA to express their point of view when they were of a particular mind. They never used the radio for this purpose. Because of the lack of interest in and/or experience of the making of radio and video I was clearly not going to be documenting a preexisting, self-sustaining cultural practice. Instead, I anticipated being witness to an experimental moment of cultural production as Yolngu took up the camera and microphone and negotiated a new, technologically mediated relationship to culture. In a surprisingly short time, the little office that housed the broadcasting equipment became a busy place. In those early days BRACS was still a novelty, attracting a number of different Yolngu for training. In a couple of days I could teach new trainees the basics of operating the radio panel and switching equipment. Cutting in over the satellite services, they would take turns playing a variety of prerecorded music on their radio programs. They developed their own styles of programming by listening to broadcasters from neighboring communities, and so became DJs. Two broadcasters —Frank Gambali Wunungmurra (who adopted me as his sister) and Lassie Forbes —stuck with the work.15 As is the way with the acronyms that define so much in the Aboriginal arena, BRACS took on its local meanings. The BRACS was the room where all the broadcasting equipment was housed; it was the air-conditioned

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space where Gambali’s brothers and Lassie’s sisters-in-law would stop by and watch TV to escape the oppressive heat of the day.16 BRACS became a subdepartment of the community council’s infrastructure, administered with a budget for capital upgrades, repairs, travel, and one modest wage from ATSIC funds. The BRACS operator became an official council position. For my part, I brought specific professional skills including an embodiment of Balanda authority and responsibility that meant BRACS was like every other official organization in the community. Even though I was officially the trainer, not the boss, the neocolonial dynamics underpinning such Aboriginal communities meant that my presence entailed a certain kind of legitimacy in the eyes of the council and even the BRACS workers. As a Balanda, I was deemed more likely to succeed in extracting petty cash from the grumpy Filipino accountant and so would provide the morning tea and biscuits—the kinds of benefits associated with a “proper” workplace. I also served a useful cultural purpose for Yolngu in being someone outside of kin relations who could be blamed for enforcing council rulings, such as not lending out BRACS equipment to relatives for private use.

Figure 6. In 1997 the leaders of the land-owning clan of Gapuwiyak approved a new name for the BRACS: Warrkwarrkpuyngu Yolngu Radio and Video. Frank Gambali, the BRACS operator, designed the logo (shown on the sign for the building). Although something of a mouthful for the on-air presenters (especially the TEABBA radio staff in Darwin), the naming made a particular kind of Yolngu meaning by poetically linking an Ancestral Being who called other clans on his yidaki with the contemporary communicative potential of the satellite radio network.

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Clearly, with infrastructural support—including a sympathetic council, a supportive regional media association (TEABBA), and a measure of training—BRACS could be an active, productive place. Nonetheless, as the weeks passed, I felt a growing disquiet in relation to my real work—my anthropological project. Despite the welcome relief from the afternoon heat offered by the air conditioning, I was growing increasingly uncomfortable as I realized that Gambali and Lassie were quite content to be what I saw as “just” DJs, playing a selection of current hits and old favorites and broadcasting action movies. Although we kept the microphone for the PA in the BRACS, and the duration and significance of some announcements meant that the broadcasters would suspend the programs, it never occurred to Gambali and the other BRACS workers to use the radio or television for raypirri. Their radio shows featured an eclectic mix of country, rock, gospel, and reggae, their selections evidence of a long-standing appreciation of Western popular culture. Although they took pleasure in playing contemporary Aboriginal music, including Yolngu bands from neighboring communities, they showed no interest in recording and broadcasting the manikay (public clan songs) that were a vital part of daily life.

Figure 7. The newly upgraded and relocated BRACS in 1997. Equipment included two CD players; a mini-disc player/recorder; radio monitor (bank of equipment on left); announcer and guest microphones; audio mixing desk (center); original BRACS switching panel for overriding satellite services (first black box under television); and telephone interface device for sending programs to Darwin for regional broadcast (lower black box under BRACS switching panel).

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While the knowledge of Australian popular culture demonstrated by the BRACS operators and their audience was suggestive of a breadth and depth to Yolngu culture extending beyond traditional Culture, this was not what I had come looking for. I had expected a form of cultural activism; I anticipated productions that could be analyzed in terms of local cultural priorities and compared with mainstream practices. But instead, I encountered what appeared to be a disconcertingly relaxed pursuit of Western pleasures. When Gambali turned up for his on-air shift still smeared with white clay from ceremony, the contrast between Culture and what went on in BRACS seemed even more pronounced. Despite all expectations, the station appeared to be actively generating an intercultural sameness rather than a distinctive cultural difference.  The “Failure” of BRACS

For a long time I resisted speaking to Yolngu about BRACS in overtly culturalist terms, worried about skewing the results of this cultural experiment. Instead, I obliquely suggested we take the camera out to Gambali’s clan country, but on these trips about the only things shot were kangaroo. Finally, unable to contain myself, I finally suggested to various Yolngu council members that BRACS might be used for recording and broadcasting something about culture. As I started to explain, it became apparent that even though BRACS had never been considered in this way, such a “Culture story” made sense locally—just not in relation to media. When I spoke to the council chairman, he reassured me that Culture was already being taken care of at school on Friday afternoons with old people telling “olden time” stories, singing manikay, and teaching pandanus basket weaving. This response acknowledged that traditional song, dance, and story were a form of cultural capital recognized and valued as such by Yolngu themselves. Yet BRACS still remained a Culture -free zone. Not even the public and seemingly community-sanctioned events organized by the school seemed of interest to Gambali. He listened politely to my suggestions that we might record the old peoples’ stories and then went off and put together a list of new CDs to be shipped from Darwin. Eventually, this lack of any overt interest in Culture forced me to rethink my project. It made me realize that my approach was predetermined by the appeal of a model, if not of “cultural resistance” as such, then certainly of Culture as a self-conscious project. My expectations that Yolngu, or any other Aboriginal people, would be interested in media from a

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“cultural” perspective, or as Michaels put it, in “inventing television,” seemed misguided.17 It seemed I had too quickly and unquestioningly adopted Michaels’s model of a proactive or interventional research strategy. Perhaps, then, BRACS was “failing” as a project of cultural maintenance not because of a lack of funding or support but because of the burden of Culture placed upon it.18 The Gapuwiyak radio production further challenged these assumptions about the relationships between culture and media production. Clearly, in their practices and pleasures, the Yolngu BRACS operators and their audiences may not have been strengthening Culture, yet they were certainly participating in its creation, or, to use Ginsburg’s (1995a) term, “mediating culture.” But what was the nature of these mediations? These practices and programs challenged my analytic frame; the disjunction between the Culture I was looking for and the everyday cultural production of BRACS was too profound. I felt disappointed by my inability to take up Gambali’s and Lassie’s broadcasts in a more meaningful way. I did not want to dismiss their programs, but I was unable to adequately appreciate or conceptualize them. Videomaking presented similar challenges for me. I had arrived in Gapuwiyak with the intention of applying the credo of “black hands on cameras” used by the Whitefella trainer Neil Turner (personal communication) at EVTV in the Anangu homelands in South Australia throughout the 1980s and 1990s. However, this policy of leaving the hands-on work of representation to Aboriginal people seemed of little concern to the Yolngu I worked with at BRACS. When we were out videoing an event, I often found myself being given the camera when Gambali wanted a break; there was no hint of the highly politicized agenda that would have made this unthinkable in other indigenous contexts, nor any indication of concerns that my Balanda eye might not be able to see like and, therefore, shoot video like a Yolngu. Instead of a racially based politics of representation demarcating the tasks of the work place, there was a pragmatic and interculturally inflected ethos of mutuality and responsibility. As we worked together as both kin and colleagues, I ended up shooting video with my Yolngu workmates working around the edges of whatever was happening, grabbing vision like a local news crew. Having read Michaels’s (1994, 110–16) description of the way that Warlpiri encoded Ancestral and historical significances with their untutored camerawork, I resisted teaching too much about camerawork and framing for fear of imposing Balanda culture in the form of style or technique on my trainees. As a consequence they didn’t know much about framing or holding a shot for any length of time —when we replayed the

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resulting footage it looked (at least to me) just like the ad hoc, visually erratic enthusiasms of home videomaking rather than anything specifically Yolngu.19  The Telling Absence of Culture

And so, despite my prime position within BRACS, the kinds of cultural production I had set out to record and analyze remained elusive. In time, however, I began to suspect that the absence of Culture on the airwaves was revealing in itself (as was my incorporation as co -videomaker). As I started to understand the ways in which local kinship relations and responsibilities informed the production of the radio shows, I began to recognize how culture inflected their shows, determining, and limiting, programming choices. In his role as a radio announcer, Gambali could not approach his audience as an undifferentiated mass: he was related to each person in a different way. For Yolngu there is no generic idea of a person or audience — everyone is already constituted in kin relationships. These relationships determine the mode of address, style of language, and even the subject matter of conversation. Thus the notion of an intimate yet undifferentiated audience that informs Western broadcasting models is fundamentally at odds with Yolngu modes of communication where the singing of songs and the telling of stories not only transmit knowledge but work to affirm connections between people. From Gambali’s perspective behind the microphone, each relationship entailed different kinds of responsibilities and demanded different forms of address and ways of speaking—or, not speaking at all, in the case of his classificatory mukul rumaru (mother-in-law). Such complex, contextualized, and differentiated relationships create a very different notion of audience and place particular demands on the presenter. In light of this, Gambali’s propensity to make every song a “request” (regardless of whether or not it had been actually asked for, or even whether the “requester” was actually listening at the time) makes a particular kind of cultural sense. The act of “sending out” a song to a clan brother in another community, or to a classificatory mother working at the clinic, affirmed particular connections; the broadcaster marked and reinforced a relatedness that would be recognized and enjoyed by the listening audience. These so -called requests gave the radio shows a certain social texture; and the constantly shifting trajectories of connectedness mitigated against the potentially indiscriminate communication implied by Western understandings of broadcasting.20

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Further, I started to realize that just as kin relations had shaped his request shows, so they were also determining Gambali’s choice of broadcast material. Gambali could not do his radio show without considering the kinds of relationships he might be producing (or potentially contravening), so there was no way for him to broadcast local clan stories or songs without becoming ensnared by an even more complex, difficult, and even dangerous web of Ancestral relations and responsibilities. As I will describe in later chapters, the act of recording, copying, replaying, broadcasting, and other forms of media distribution is understood to have effects on the represented subject. As a result, the songs, stories, paintings, and sacra that form the sacred capital of each clan cannot be reproduced without careful reference to the social networks of ownership, as well as careful attention to the possible effects of this reproduction. All these issues pose serious challenges to a culture concerned with the dynamics of hiddenness and revelation, including the management of “invisible,” secret, or “inside” objects and knowledge. Thus I began to realize that, ironically, the real reason for what I had initially perceived as the failure of BRACS to take up the possibilities of representing/mediating/strengthening culture lay in the very nature of Yolngu culture itself. It was not simply that the notion of remote indigenous media production was a Balanda fantasy; rather, Yolngu were actually protecting Culture —perhaps even actively protecting Culture —by not recording and not broadcasting their stories and songs. And so, eighteen months into my field research, I found I had a thesis. I felt destined to write a policy critique;21 a case study of unacknowledged disjunctions between bureaucratic discourse and Aboriginal cultural practice in relation to BRACS. I would argue that as a project intended to help protect indigenous peoples living in remote settlements from unwelcome outside influences, BRACS was both impractical and culturally inappropriate. Because there was no way to preview programs, it was impossible to know what might be inappropriate or upsetting until it was too late. More importantly, the notion that committees would make decisions on behalf of the community was based on Western ideas about “community”—a problematically abstract construct in a setting where kinship networks largely determine social interactions and activities. It was highly unlikely that Yolngu, with their emphasis on individual and clan-based identifications and responsibilities, would care to make such decisions on behalf of any other clan about what was, or was not, appropriate to watch. Furthermore, I would argue that in the planning of BRACS, and the subsequent establishment of BRACS as a paid council position, there had been no consideration of the fact that the younger people interested in the

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technology and the job of BRACS operator might be too inexperienced, or in the wrong kin relationships, to take on the difficult and potentially dangerous responsibilities of recording and/or broadcasting such material. Or that those elders in a position to negotiate and authorize such matters might be deterred by the modern technology. Above all, I would argue that the supposition about there being a so -called natural conjunction between an “oral culture” and “electronic broadcast technologies” was not only far too simplistic; it failed to acknowledge the degree to which recording and broadcasting technologies actually posed serious epistemological challenges to a society in which the “ownership” of songs, story, and country is strictly managed, and where access to information and images is controlled by an elaborate politics of knowing and telling, seeing and revealing.  Enter Bangana

It was at about this time that I took a trip to Darwin. While I was away, the community chairman phoned to tell me about a Yolngu man with an interest in the “culture side” of BRACS. On my return, I arranged to meet him. Expecting another would-be community DJ, I encountered Bangana Wunungmurra. A heavy-set Yolngu man in his early thirties, with enormous appetites and energy, Bangana made a big first impression. Quick-witted and wily, generous and enthusiastic, he was adroit and sophisticated at maneuvering through culture(s), equally at ease chatting with pop stars or politicians on transcontinental flights or leading the clan songs in regional rituals. 22 Bangana was a year younger than I and the father of five. As Gambali’s classificatory brother, he was also my brother. However, unlike many of his brothers, Bangana refused to answer to his Balanda name, Alan—“Just another Balanda four-letter word,” he liked to say. After a brief introduction, he took control of the conversation, revealing a grasp of English that surpassed that of most of the Yolngu I had met and an attendant understanding of how things worked “Balanda-wise.” Quizzing me about funding, technological capacity, and limitations, he made a quick appraisal of BRACS and its potential. After all these frustrating months his summation caught me by surprise: “Yapa [sister]” he said, “We can use this media to strengthen Yolngu culture.” And so we found each other. From that moment this book became possible. As a result of our meeting I decided to extend my field research by a

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further eighteen months, suspending my scholarship and Ph.D. candidature, and supporting myself by working part-time as a cleaner in the council office. At BRACS, I became the production coordinator, playing a supporting role to Bangana’s role as producer/director. Together we recorded clan songs and raypirri to be incorporated into local radio programming. We undertook an innovative, large-scale video project titled Gularri: That Brings Unity and worked on numerous collaborations with nonlocal media organizations. Through my relationship with Bangana I was able to participate in everyday Yolngu life outside the BRACS. He took my “adoption” into his family far more seriously than Gambali ever had, actively incorporating me into a network of kin relations with all its attendant sociality and responsibilities. I spent a lot of time with his family sitting on mattresses and blankets on the floor of his house watching television and video, or sitting on the veranda listening to cassette tapes, especially his favorite musician, the South African reggae musician Lucky Dube. His children tutored me in Yolngu matha (local clan-based languages, literally “tongue”), dropping in to my room in the council accommodation for meals and biscuits. His sisters taught me to dance during ceremonies and would leave their children to sleep with me while they went to late-night cards or lingered in a circle of kava drinkers. At other times they would request my help with collecting firewood and supplying food for our grandmother. My research-funded vehicle enabled us to drive to clan outstations, to go hunting, plan video projects, and attend ceremonies. During these trips, Bangana kept a close eye on me, instructing me on what to do (and what not to do). He told me family histories and pointed out sites created by Ancestral Beings. He wiped the sweat from his armpits over my eyes to “introduce me to the wanga [country]” and thereby keep me safe when we visited powerful and dangerous Ancestral places. He shot kangaroo, bush turkey, buluki (wild cattle), and emu. His wife, Susan, made us damper and remembered that I didn’t like sugar in my tea. Often, at his suggestion, we’d pose together for photos by waterholes and campfires. 23 As we spent more time together, I widened my original focus from indigenous media/BRACS to consider the place of media technologies such as video, photography, and audio recordings in everyday Yolngu life. Although in many respects we worked as a team, I often felt like the sidekick. My dependency on Bangana became particularly difficult for me during times when he was consumed by other responsibilities and interests or simply seemed to lose interest in our work together. He would be obliged to spend weeks away at funerals and other ceremonies; then there were the council meetings, the parents’ association at school, other com-

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Figure 8. The hunter.

munity responsibilities, and the demands of an ethnomusicologist studying clan songs. Sometimes he would turn up looking for cigarette money or a cup of espresso and then take off again. At other times he retreated into a lethargy fuelled by kava or ganja (marijuana) and I wouldn’t see him for days, or weeks.

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In short, Bangana’s position as the BRACS cultural advisor didn’t take the form of a nine-to-five kind of job. We worked together according to his moods, the circumstances, and, sometimes, my health. Yet when we did work, he was capable of making things happen, of motivating others and gaining the requisite authorizations, approvals, and cooperation like no one else I had encountered in the course of my research. For his part, Bangana used our projects, especially the Gularri video, to increase his knowledge of country and gain kudos with ceremonial leaders. This proving of himself to the elders was an extremely important aspect of his involvement with BRACS. It was particularly necessary in light of an incident that had occurred prior to my arrival in Gapuwiyak. In the midst of a family dispute, and in a drunken rage, Bangana had willfully torn up a clan bathi (sacred dilly bag). Fueled by frustration, anger, and alcohol, he had declared to his brothers that if they didn’t respect him, then they didn’t respect the bathi—a powerful, sacred object belonging to their common patriline. This extraordinarily serious transgression —perversely an act of cultural destruction undertaken in the name of rom—resulted in his being exiled to Darwin for several months.

Figure 9. Master of ceremonies at the grand final of the local football competition, 1997.

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During this time there had been talk of severe reprisals, including death by spearing. Other Yolngu sought retribution through the Balanda legal system for retribution, seeking to have him sent to prison for the desecration of a sacred object. 24 Ultimately, the issue was officially resolved in a meeting of clan elders. Nonetheless, the incident cast a pall over his life and reputation. Although I did not know it until later, the period following his return to Gapuwiyak and subsequent involvement with BRACS marked the beginning of a tentative process of social rehabilitation. BRACS allowed Bangana to publicly demonstrate his unique bicultural skills and an overt commitment to Culture (while keeping away from certain ceremonial contexts where his presence was now sometimes less than welcome). Over the years he had worked in almost every paid position on council available to Yolngu. He’d been town clerk, workshop manager, and the local representative of the power and water authority. At various times he had been elected to the ATSIC regional council and had been appointed to consultancies to representative bodies such as the national Reconciliation Council and the Northern Land Council. 25 These experiences had equipped him with advanced skills that were highly valued within the community. He was regularly called on to deal with visiting camera crews, politicians, pop stars, and, increasingly, anthropologists. During my time in Gapuwiyak, I worked with him to lobby council and local government agencies for a paid position as cultural advisor. This never eventuated, owing to a lack of funding and limited bureaucratic imagination, so Bangana continued his work, including the BRACS, while living on the meager income offered by social security. It was never Bangana’s primary ambition to be a media producer or video director. When he said to me early on, “I’ve been thinking about this all my life,” he was not referring specifically to media making but to a broader concern with the forms that a Yolngu modernity might take. His life had been marked by a multiplicity of engagements with, across, and between cultures. He was committed to finding an enduring and meaningful place for Yolngu culture and identity within the shifting and increasingly complex contexts of contemporary life. He was motivated by a need to foster and communicate what he called his “vision for Yolngu rom in the modern world” in whatever arena he could access. 26 Clearly, Bangana’s mimetic rendering of the pervasive Culture/ cultural survivalist discourse was no accident. He knew the culturalist lingo, having spent long enough moving in government and indigenous circles where such discourses have currency. Indeed, I am sure he discovered the expediency of telling Balanda what they wanted to hear when it came to matters of funding or other kinds of support. Not only did he

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recognize the cross-cultural significance of Culture; he was willing and able to produce it for visitors by rounding up “the boys” for an impromptu performance of bungul (public ceremony) or manikay (song). When asked if he would demonstrate traditional activities, such as making a didgeridoo for visiting film crews, he could keep up a friendly banter while making sardonic remarks about “bullshit Culture” to me behind their backs. Given his abilities and history, it was not surprising that he expressed his interest in media production in the prevailing discourses of culture, difference, and identity. The combination of his Yolngu knowledge and the status it brought, his English-language skills, and his thoughtful reflexivity meant that everyone (myself included) recognized him as the best person to work on Culture for BRACS. This combination of talents meant that he was able to negotiate the difficult relationship between culture and Culture. When it came to my work—when we spoke formally about the concepts and processes behind his vision —he proved an invaluable facilitator in discussions and debates. As an informant/friend/collaborator he had far greater skills in my cultural world than I would ever have in his. I paid him on an hourly basis as a research assistant/translator to spell out difficultto -pronounce names, to answer my questions, and, if needed, to consult

Figure 10. The clan singer performing for a German television crew, 1998.

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with others about definitions and explanations. During our more formal recorded interviews he would turn off the tape recorder as an explicit way of marking what was for my ears only and therefore not for publication.27 Clearly, he enjoyed the conceptual work that our conversations demanded. Although I realized that not every Yolngu would or could offer the same exegesis, others clearly trusted his capacity for cultural translation and for dealing with me as an anthropologist. When I attempted to engage with others about their ideas for BRACS and Bangana’s vision for Yolngu media, they usually referred me back to Bangana. Although this could be interpreted as an example of what John von Sturmer (1981, 17) has identified as the Aboriginal cultural tendency to avoid directly contradicting or disagreeing with another person’s version of events, it seemed to me that these referrals were also a form of deferral: a public acknowledgment of Bangana’s particular proficiency at mediating between cultures. 28 Yet for all his enthusiasm and commitment, Bangana was not particularly interested in getting his hands on the technology or becoming a BRACS operator. Apart from taking the odd shifts on the radio in order to demonstrate to me and the other broadcasters what he had in mind, he preferred to work as director and producer. As a Yolngu man of a particular age, status, and ability, he was positioned socially and culturally (as someone holding ritual knowledge) to generate these projects in ways that Gambali, Lassie, and, especially, I could not. Able to imaginatively grasp potentials that neither his brother Gambali nor clan elders could immediately see, Bangana’s vision for Yolngu media enabled him to work through the kinds of cultural issues that had appeared, at least to my eyes, to present insurmountable obstacles to the success of BRACS. He took charge of the “big picture,” as he would say. Gambali and other Yolngu trainees remained the official BRACS operators, with Bangana taking on the (unpaid) mantle of cultural advisor for the BRACS. I provided the material possibilities of production —keeping the equipment working, sourcing funding, providing access to a vehicle, hiring video crews and helicopters, keeping track of the budget—and became a valuable ally in dealings with council and other funding bodies and in gaining access to international conferences and to other media producers. Although he had to undertake extensive consultation and introduce a measure of innovation before he was able to record or broadcast anything in the name of Culture, Bangana demonstrated that modern technologies had a potential place in “the Yolngu world” that had yet to be fully appreciated by other Yolngu. Under his direction and authority, a potentially difficult and dangerous disjunction of culture and technology proved to

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be both powerful and productive, as I explore in full in later chapters. As a result of our time together, he was able to develop and demonstrate his own version of what Yolngu media could be. Simultaneously, I had the makings of a thesis.  A Vision of Culture

Bangana would often refer to his vision for BRACS. He’d talk about how he had spent a lot of time just thinking about our culture, our rom. How we can educate people. Making videos, broadcasting radio to use Balanda technology for Yolngu rom [culture]. But first, yapa [sister], you have to start to think and picture it in your mind.

Despite his repeated use of words such as “picture,” for a long time I only understood it in terms of a Balanda phrase meaning a plan or perspective. I understood him to mean a personal vision; expressing, in his typically self-confident manner, that in taking on BRACS, and a video project, he could see and imaginatively grasp potential that others couldn’t. Only much later, when Bangana began to translate his vision to the small screen and onto the radio waves, did I begin to understand the significance of his words as encapsulating a notion of envisioning: he was concerned with local ways of seeing, knowing, and becoming and how they might be facilitated by so-called Balanda technologies. Although usually generous and understanding of my own need for explanation, at times Bangana would tire of my questions and instruct me to start learning like a Yolngu, to observe and experience the ceremonies and country that he took me to in order that I might see for myself. 29 While initially I had understood that my ethnography on Yolngu media would be largely dependent on his exegesis and texts, I increasingly paid more attention to his idea that the shared experience of working together, making video, taking and exchanging photos laid the grounds for a different—and, in Bangana’s terms, more Yolngu—kind of knowledge. Ultimately, I came to see that Bangana had a distinctly different grasp of the nature of Culture and the potential of the technologies from that of the bureaucrats, scholars, and activists who had established BRACS. Indeed, he often commented with frustration that neither the Aboriginal broadcasters based in Darwin at TEABBA nor the associated funding bodies and national policy makers had any real understanding of his project or why it mattered. Although they could recognize and even celebrate his

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Figure 11. The cultural broker. Bangana and BRACS operator Frank Gambali “paint up” prior to presenting a paper on Yolngu media and culture at the Fulbright Symposium on Indigenous People in an Interconnected World, Darwin, 1997.

programming for its obvious Cultural content, that is, the local languages, traditional song and story, and so forth, he knew that because of differences in cultural-historical background they couldn’t properly appreciate the uniquely sophisticated nature of his vision, or its significance. As Jeremy Beckett (personal communication) has suggested, my decision to write an ethnography through the presentation of Bangana as a particularly insightful, reflexive individual highlights the place of individual agency in Aboriginal society. This critical aspect of social dynamics is largely overlooked in the literature that still tends to approach Aboriginal culture in terms of clans or other configurations of kin-based groupings. Certainly also within Yolngu culture itself there is a public ideology that plays down the creative role of the individual in relation to cultural production such as painting or music. Nonetheless, despite the cultural tendency to displace the locus of creativity from the individual to the Ancestral, people are recognized for their individual talents; and individual subjects do operate as agents. I want to push this point further to suggest that it is essential that ethnographers become more explicit in exploring and acknowledging the crucial significance of working with particular informants. In Aboriginal Australia, the intense relationships between ethnographer and informant, such as I have described above, are common, even usual

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(see, for instance, Morphy [1991, xv] on his debt to Narritjin Maymuru, and see also Magowan [2001a], who does foreground individual characters). Nonetheless, these key figures remain largely unacknowledged and undertheorized. Although most ethnographers do gratefully testify to their debts to their informants, these tributes generally remain separated from the analysis in the preface (Morphy, 1991), acknowledgments (Keen, 1994), or, in the case of Warner’s A Black Civilization (1969), a final chapter. While many of these scholars go to great lengths to describe the ways in which Aboriginal people operate within an epistemology that recognizes knowledge as always both partial and positioned, the particularities of the relationships that inform the ethnographer’s own version of Aboriginal culture —the things that make their own accounts also inevitably partial and positioned —tend to be glossed over. These ethnographies rarely take into account the degree to which they are dependent on a particular person providing information. Although informal discussions with Balanda specializing in studying Yolngu do elicit an acknowledgment of the pivotal importance of such characters on research outcomes, even then, the fact of their influence is used to explain the different renditions of “Yolngu culture” that we anthropologists research and produce, and the variation between our accounts is figured as a demonstration of the differences between clans (Peter Toner, personal communication). 30 I would go much further here to suggest that, despite the detached authority and depersonalized tone of analysis, most ethnographic explanations of Yolngu culture are derived from highly individualized portraits of society authorized and authored by local cultural activists. As Ginsburg has noted, indigenous media tend to attract a particular kind of reflexive character, individuals who “occupy a historically unique intergenerational position” (1991, 102). 31 The life experiences of such individuals and their familiarity with the pressures and possibilities of the ever-present “Balanda world” position them with a take on culture and its intercultural significances that is in many ways more sophisticated than that of the anthropologists who regularly turn up to document it. Like other prominent Yolngu cultural brokers such as Yothu Yindi’s Mandawuy Yunupingu and his brother, the Northern Land Council’s Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Bangana was self-consciously taking up and articulating a perspective on Yolngu identity and culture with a focus on the difference between cultures as it arises as a lived problem of contemporary Yolngu life. 32 More self-consciously and actively engaged in a project of culture than the term “cultural broker” usually implies, these highly influential figures are deeply implicated in the ongoing production and promotion of contemporary circuits of meaning making that extended beyond the local.

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They are actively participating in the fashioning of discourses about culture and identity that could satisfy both Western imaginations and local Yolngu concerns, carefully constructing explanations that aim to traverse both the intercultural and the intergenerational. As a result of these engagements, new kinds of understandings, self-consciousness, and discursive practices are emerging for both Balanda and Yolngu in the name of Yolngu Culture. At the same time, these highly intelligent and skilled individuals gain access to new arenas of influence through their engagements with anthropologists, politicians, and others, attaining prestige and power as well as more altruistic outcomes “for their people” through the promotion of Culture. Ultimately, then, this book works toward an exploration of the productive dynamics of imaginations, cultures, and technologies as manifest through the vision of one exceptional man. My project has become focused on attempting to explain just what it was that made Bangana’s media Yolngu —in his view. I work to locate his projects and productions and ideas within the logics and dynamics of the cultural context of their primary audience, namely, Yolngu themselves. As a result of spending time in Gapuwiyak, I began to think carefully about the relationship between Bangana’s media projects and traditional forms of Culture (especially ritual). In many ways, the delays and the disruptions caused by Bangana’s ritual commitments and other local responsibilities were the real making of this project. They forced me to extend my research in Gapuwiyak far longer than I had intended. The longer I stayed, the more I glimpsed the complexity—and cultural specificity—of his processes of envisaging media. I saw that it was not possible for me to understand his Yolngu media without long-term local research. I began to understand how much a temporal depth —spending time sitting with Bangana and his family, going hunting, attending ceremonies, watching television —was essential to the establishment of relationships and experiences that would prove crucial to my understandings. To understand what was really going on, I had to take up questions of culture in ways that pushed beyond the purely discursive and representational. As time went by I saw, for example, what it was about the painting of restricted clan designs or the performance of ceremonial song that was so powerful, even dangerous; I began to understand how Bangana envisaged video and radio being used to produce similar —yet potentially less problematic—effects. I now could see that only by adopting a more traditional, long-term, site-specific research strategy could I begin to appreciate how much the profoundly local ethnographic background to these productions mattered. I realized that I had to abandon any notion that I could methodologically

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contain Bangana’s project as a case study within a broader analysis of an indigenous mediascape. Accordingly, the rich and detailed work of more traditional ethnographers, such as the monographs of W. Lloyd Warner (1969), Howard Morphy (1991), and Ian Keen (1994), took on a deeper relevance as I began to understand the enduring significance of local culture in the less than conventional fields of cultural production that I had selected as a topic for ethnography. In short, only once I had taken into account the particularities of Culture and media as they mattered in relation to Yolngu imaginations and priorities could I return to the broader issues of culture, of difference, and of sameness that compelled both Bangana’s and my interest in this work. Only when I began to understand the ontological priorities that informed local production could I comprehend the role of media in Yolngu attempts to envisage and mediate their place in the world. Only then could I begin to see how Bangana attempted to effect a “speaking back”—to both Yolngu and Balanda—that derived authority and impact from the Ancestral. Belatedly, I became committed to a far more traditional anthropological approach than the one I had originally envisaged. Settled into a long-term project with my Yolngu brother, I was finally in a position to recognize and appreciate the workings of the Yolngu imagination. In the process, I was able to apprehend the dynamic and productive entanglements of the social and the technological on a different level from that of the ready-made discourses of resistance so frequently offered by those seeking simple answers to questions of media and culture, based on ethnocentric presumptions about what media might be and mean. I left the community in October 1997 shortly after the Gularri video went to air for the first time, having significantly extended the duration of my fieldwork in order to document the completion of production and its first local broadcasts. Over the following years, as I struggled to write while recovering from a long-term illness and the deaths of both my parents, Bangana and I kept in touch, making plans for more videos and laying the foundations for the development of a Yolngu AM radio network for the Northeast Arnhem region. Then in February 2002 everything unexpectedly fell apart when Bangana died from a heart attack at the age of thirty-seven.  Glimpsing Difference

This ethnography begins with an extended introduction to my Yolngu informant/brother/translator/co-worker/co -producer, and friend for many

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Figure 12. The anthropologist. Bangana borrowed my camera to take this photograph, laughing at how “silly” I looked —eyes down, taking notes by the side of a mangrove alive with stories and tucker.

reasons. My decision to focus my project on one particular man (thereby inverting the depersonalized conventions of classical anthropology) reflects more than a politically correct compliance with a trend toward the inclusion of “local voices” in ethnography. Equally, Bangana’s prominence in my narrative is more than simply a means by which to position this book as a eulogy, although, in many ways, such an outcome is both unavoidable and compelling. The fact is I had planned for the ethnography to focus on his particular vision of culture —and my attempts to glimpse it—long before he died. To finish this discussion of methodology and ethnographic happenstance, I want to make the point that while our complicities provided the basis for an ethnographic project, this is by no means the end of the story. As I will describe in the chapters to follow, the longer Bangana and I spent time together, the more I realized the extent of the disparity between our notions of Culture and our understandings of media. 33 Although we were deeply and productively complicit in a project of Culture, apparently united by a shared vision for BRACS, we were, in fact, operating with quite different perspectives on our project. It was not simply because we brought very different and complementary expertise to our work, although this was crucial. There were also profound differences between the imaginations we brought to the job. Although Bangana’s work may have been shaped by

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imported discourses of Culture and resistance, his project was also deeply informed by a local cultural imaginary with a particular kind of emphasis on the primacy of rom (culture) and a notion of a “Yolngu world.” And so having located Bangana’s project of Culture as an intensely individual product of a particular conjunction of historical, technological, and social circumstance, I devote this ethnography to attempting to discover what it was that Bangana himself understood and valued in his project of media and culture. As I will describe, this is not to discard or downplay the central and structuring issue of our complicities or the influence of my presence but rather to consider these kinds of relationships and mediations from the perspective of local imperatives and understandings. In other words, I want to look at the ways that Yolngu understand that media technologies might work to mediate the spaces between cultures, between clans, between individuals, and between anthropologist and informant. As I will show in the chapters that follow, “thinking culture” through the dynamics of our relationship and the intersubjective spaces it opened has not only produced a particular kind of ethnographic writing: it produced the grounds for a particular kind of knowledge. As I will demonstrate, while our mutual predilection for what my supervisor called “culture mongering” produced the video and radio broadcasts that were proudly identified by Bangana and others as “Yolngu media,” perhaps even more importantly, our relationship provided the basis for understandings that cannot be directly demonstrated by the tapes I brought home from Gapuwiyak. So much more than mere methodology, my rela-

Figure 13. A couple of “culture mongers” behind the radio console in BRACS, 1999.

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tionship with Bangana proved a source of unexpected kinds of “data,” generating experiences and understandings that I could never have imagined at the outset of my research. Quite simply, yet paradoxically, while apparently offering up everything I had been looking for, Bangana allowed me to begin to see things quite differently.

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[

2

]

(In)Visible Difference: Framing Questions of Culture, Media, and Technology

During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. ::

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. ::

Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure

In this book, I give analytic priority to the ways Yolngu use and talk about media technologies —photography, audio recording, radio, video, and television. In a broad sense, this ethnography advances an indigenous theory of culture, media, and modernity in northeast Arnhem Land. More properly and precisely, this work is my account of an indigenous media project as I came to conceptualize it. As such, I work the spaces between fieldwork and data analysis, Western theory and Yolngu conceptualizations, my eyes and Yolngu descriptions in order to discuss something that has come to be known both by its producers and within the academy as indigenous media. In the previous chapter, I indicated that the prevalent idea that indigenous media would strengthen culture in remote Aboriginal settlements was, at least in part, derived from academic commentary. In this chapter, I examine the anthropology of indigenous media in more detail. I consider the theoretical and political concerns that have shaped the kinds of scholarly analysis that have given credence and academic weight to these enthusiastically voiced yet sometimes problematic claims. As I will argue, approaches to this subject have been constrained by implicit and, at times, ethnocentric assumptions about the nature of media and modernity. By considering indigenous media within broader theoretical debates

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concerning the nature of visual culture(s) and the efficacies of the filmic image, I move toward opening a different kind of theoretical space for the analysis of media, one that is better able to apprehend and analyze alternative registers of cultural difference and, indeed, other kinds of media “resistances.”  Theorizing Visual Culture

Questions of the visual, the modern, the technological, and the cultural lead into an enormous and emergent literature. In recent years there have been significant moves across a number of academic disciplines toward critically exploring such matters. In what Martin Jay has described as “a paradigm shift in the cultural imaginary of our age” (1996, 3), scholars have begun to interrogate what it means to live in a world increasingly known and experienced through images. The scope of the theoretical response is vast, engaging scholars in philosophy, art theory, cultural studies, film studies, postcolonial studies, sociology, and anthropology. This awareness of the image, vision, visibility, and visuality is variously referred to as “the figural,” “the pictorial,” “visual culture,” or the “postlinguistic turn.” Often characterized by a renewed appreciation of phenomenological theories of embodiment, perception, and aesthetics, this new interest in visual cultures considers the relationship between “ways of seeing” and the production of subjectivity and power. These days, any analysis of visual culture demands an acknowledgment of the sensual dynamics of power relations inherent in what Jenks (1995) calls “seeing” and “seen-ness,” dynamics which in other circumstances have been variously figured through the tropes of the gaze, surveillance, and the production of spectacle.1 Another important dimension of this epistemological shift is the move away from the distinctly semiotic analysis of earlier “representational” theory, toward accounts of the visual that move beyond the model of the text. This requires new ways of thinking about the transmission of knowledge, experience, and information. Increasingly it is being recognized that conceptual models in which images are being read or decoded fail to adequately capture the relationships between the image, the imaged, and the viewer. Instead, scholars are considering what it might mean to know the world through particular ways of seeing and particular kinds of imagery. 2 Such visualist perspectives understand worldviews to be constituted through processes somewhat more literal than is often ascribed by social theory. Subjectivity and knowledge are seen as products of a relational process of making sense of the world. That is, perception is understood

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to be, inextricably, a product of culture. As scholars recognize the importance of the place of the visual within the social, cultural perspectives are being investigated in terms of visual regimes, practices, and somatic attitudes. These studies emphasize that it is essential not to presume a one -dimensional or mechanical hegemony of ways of seeing. Rather, the stress lies on the transformational and heterogeneous social practices generated in, and constituted through, the field of visibility. In short, the contemporary visual culture literature points toward the promise —and indeed the necessity—of developing a different way of thinking about the role of the visual in the power-laden spaces of the intercultural in order to move beyond the classical sense of the gaze and its relationship to power and subjectification as figured through theorists such as Foucault (1979), Sartre (1966), Lacan (1978), and Mulvey (1975), toward a more culturally and historically specific and, ideally, more mutual moment in what Gaines (2000) has called “looking relations.”  The Visual in Visual Anthropology

In light of the above, anthropology, with its methodological and theoretical emphasis on the specificities of the local, would appear to be ideally positioned to contribute to contemporary discussions about the nature of visual culture(s). However, until recently the discipline, and in particular the subdiscipline of visual anthropology, has failed to take up the challenges posed by these developments in critical theory. Although anthropologists have long puzzled over the nature of the knowledges that the camera produces, until recently these concerns have not progressed far beyond largely empiricist reflections on the role of the camera as a means of collecting anthropological data. Only in the past few years have anthropologists begun to apply a more sophisticated philosophical/political sensibility to questions of the visual in contexts that extend beyond practical photographic practices and research methods. 3 Even still, as Marilyn Strathern has argued, visual anthropology, despite its name, has rarely considered the nature of vision, or the cultural dimensions of perception (1997, 224). In many respects the implications of recent visual theories for anthropology have been taken up more seriously outside the discipline. Film theorists such as Trinh Minh-ha (1989), Bill Nichols (1994), Rachel Moore (1994), Rey Chow (1995), Fatimah Tobing Rony (1996), Catherine Russell (1999), and Laura Marks (2000) have raised questions regarding the relationship of culture, difference, visuality, and power to the ethnographic project. These authors explicitly challenge the traditions of visual anthro-

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pology and ethnographic filmmaking by highlighting the relationship of the camera to regimes of knowledge/power and pointing out the colonialist objectifications and appropriations that are produced in films about cultural others.4 What interests me are the challenges that the scholars and filmmakers mentioned above have set in terms of revisioning the relationship between the camera, culture(s), and ways of seeing. As Ginsburg has argued, there remains an urgent need for visual anthropology to more fully embrace the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by the expansion of visual technologies into societies throughout the world—and to take seriously the new kinds of dialogic possibilities these technologies open up for those who traditionally have been the objects of anthropological attention. She writes, Without an expanded intellectual and empirical base, visual anthropology and the practice of ethnographic film are in danger of becoming atavistic and myopic, especially as images of other cultures are interpellated increasingly into the spectacles of cinema and the seamless flows of television. (1999, 295)

 Visual Anthropology and Indigenous Media

The study of indigenous media has played a significant role in attempts to revitalize, or perhaps even relegitimize, visual anthropology. 5 During the 1980s and early 1990s, minority and disenfranchised peoples in many parts of the world began their own experimentation with media production as a result of the affordability and availability of portable and relatively robust and easy to operate electronic recording and broadcasting equipment. As Ginsburg has observed, the emergence of indigenous media projects during this period seemed a natural focus for anthropological enquiry, apparently occupying a “comfortable position of difference from dominant cultural assumptions about media aesthetics and practices” (1999, 301). Indigenous media also raised a range of questions about emerging global/local relations produced by and through these technologies. Together with the overtly political and pragmatic dimensions of these fledgling representational projects, indigenous media offered researchers an enticing opportunity for a new form of “engaged” anthropology. Consequently, many of the early experiments by indigenous peoples with media—at least those that have been documented—are the result of interventions by, and collaborations with, anthropologists. During the 1980s and 1990s indigenous media became a distinct field of study largely as a result of the work of Eric Michaels with Warlpiri

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in the Central Desert of Australia, Terence Turner with Kayapo in the Brazilian Amazon, and Faye Ginsburg’s analysis of developments in Australia and Canada. Through this influential work, indigenous media have come to denote a particular kind of representational project. For the purposes of this overview, I will specifically attend to the above scholars and the critical discussions their work has given rise to.6  Reading Culture through Film

The academic study of what would become known as indigenous media began in 1966, when the communications scholar Sol Worth and the anthropologist John Adair taught the basics of film production to a group of Navajo. Equipped with cameras and film-editing facilities, these Navajo filmmakers were encouraged to make whatever sort of films they chose. The researchers gave no specific instructions to the participants regarding form, style, or subject matter. Indeed, they hoped that the films would produce a new or different kind of filmmaking, that the experiment might reveal something about an indigenous way of seeing the world. The resulting films became a new form of anthropological data: visual texts that could provide researchers with a different perspective on the nature of Navajo cultural construction. Using a semiotic analysis, Worth and Adair sought to identify cultural patterns or codes embedded within the structures of the films.7 The forms of visuality and ways of seeing that Worth and Adair explore in Through Navajo Eyes (1972) derive from a linguistically inspired model. Their focus was on film as a culturally coded text. Since Worth’s and Adair’s pioneering study, ethnographers of media have turned away from the screen to examine the social dimensions of production, circulation, and reception.8 In 1982 the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) commissioned Eric Michaels, an American anthropologist, to undertake a study of the potential effects of television on remote Aboriginal communities. From the outset, Michaels’s project was impelled by a sense of urgency emerging out of debates about the “impact of media” on isolated Aboriginal settlements that were due to receive mainstream services with the launch of the AUSSAT satellite in 1985. Basing himself in the desert Warlpiri community of Yuendumu in central Australia between 1983 and 1986, Michaels took up a proactive research strategy, actively facilitating the local production and pirate broadcast of Warlpiri video and television. Rather than adopting the predictable stance that Warlpiri culture

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would decline under the onslaught of Western media, Michaels argued that if Warlpiri were given a measure of control over media, media could be incorporated into Warlpiri culture. Taking aim at the technologically determinist, cultural imperialist “impact” theories prevalent at the time, Michaels demonstrated that Warlpiri production and reception of media were informed by their own cultural predispositions.9 In “Hollywood Iconography: A Warlpiri Reading” (1988), he made an important, early contribution to the emergent anthropological literature on media by describing the ways in which Warlpiri viewed Hollywood movies through the lens of culture. The idiosyncratically local interpretations he described demonstrated that culture enabled Warlpiri to (at least partially) deflect the supposed hegemonic impact of Western narratives and values delivered by television. He argued that productions do not operate as complete or authoritative texts in Yuendumu, where distinctly local interpretative frameworks shape the way the text is read. In characterizing Warlpiri use of this medium —as viewers of both mainstream media and their own local productions —as “evocative,” rather than “denotative,” Michaels makes a incisive distinction that underscores a crucial cultural difference that I also encountered in my research, many hundreds of kilometers distant in the tropical north. In his analysis of local video production, Michaels describes how Warlpiri used the technology to encode relationships and meanings derived from the Ancestral, making videos that are at once full of meaning and open to interpretation. These experimental productions led him to the provocative conclusion that, rather than undermining the significance of cultural practices and concerns, local video and television production would actively enhance the possibility of a “cultural future” based on traditional values.10 In theoretical terms, Michaels’s work was greatly influenced by Worth’s and Adair’s models of visual communication. According to his mentor, Jay Ruby, Michaels arrived in Yuendumu armed with a model of media informed by semiotics, a model concerned explicitly with communication as a form of information (2000, 225). For Michaels, Warlpiri culture was primarily concerned with the distribution and regulation of knowledge. As he wrote, “culture is itself information, and [ . . . ] kinship structures are communications systems which bring certain people together, but exclude others protecting communications pathways and the value of information they carry” (1986, 153). This model of information provided a neat framework for a discussion of media. Michaels approached the “impact” question by looking at how certain technologies facilitated or hindered information flow. He positioned

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what he called the Warlpiri “economy of knowledge” as being at odds with Western values that prioritize the open and free distribution of information (1985). In making this comparison, he argued that video provided Warlpiri with the means of distributing and controlling information locally. As opposed to a centralized model of broadcasting, video would be circulated between groups along paths that followed the travels of Ancestral Beings. Tom O’Regan observes that Michaels did not simply claim “a difference in the ‘use’ of a neutral technology . . . [but] a fundamentally different TV” (1990, 56). Indeed, as Michaels’s provocatively titled 1986 monograph suggests, he believed he was documenting the Aboriginal invention of television. Michaels’s analysis demonstrated the importance of the social processes and cultural values that informed local video production. In a description of a Warlpiri video production entitled Coniston Story, he pointed to a distinctly local sensibility embedded within the frame. Arguing that the techniques of shakey pans and seemingly random zooms across an apparently empty landscape is far from meaningless for Warlpiri viewers, who, with their knowledge of the Ancestral meanings and historical significances of the country and story being depicted, are able to follow the camera as it tracks across a scene laden with meaning. He describes Warlpiri reading stories of epic authority in the videoed landscape whereas the nonWarlpiri viewer can only perceive “a home movie, in the most banal sense of that term” (1994, 116).11 Apart from offering important insights into the role of interpretation in Warlpiri viewing practices, Michaels’s most significant contribution to media studies was to emphasize the significance of what happened off camera. He made important arguments about the social processes of media, describing local meanings and imperatives that could not be apprehended in analyzing only the text. He pointed out cultural imperatives governing the control and circulation of information that shaped production and identified the importance of the social organization of video production. The way that tapes were made, distributed, and accessed reflected Warlpiri concerns determined by kinship and group responsibilities.12 Even though he took the critical step of widening the scope of analysis to situate Warlpiri media texts within a broader arena of social relations, his apprehension of the social was based on notions of exchange and the control of information. This limits the scope of analysis. Michaels’s semiotic approach meant that he approached Warlpiri media as a form of encoding, interpretation, and circulation. He understood viewing to be reading, videos to be texts, broadcasting and distribution to be circuits of information flow. For him, the Warlpiri eye remained a device for encoding and decoding rather than a sensuous mode of perception.

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Writing about these productions for a wide-ranging audience of bureaucrats, policy makers, anthropologists, and media scholars, Michaels infused his analysis with an impassioned and theoretically savvy cultural politics. His assertions regarding the possibilities of agency, resistance, and cultural survival—and his descriptions of the main Warlpiri videomaker, Francis Jupurrurla Kelly, as an engaging cultural broker clad in a Bob Marley T-shirt—proved both compelling and highly influential and resonated with the anxieties of a particular moment in history. For many, both Aboriginalists and media scholars (including myself), Michaels remains a key figure in anthropology, his work demonstrating the possibilities of a new kind of ethnography. Yet for all his ethnographic innovation and iconoclastic impulses, Michaels’s vision for a Warlpiri “cultural future” remains constrained. Despite his best intentions, Michaels’s celebration of indigenous media ultimately defines Warlpiri lives and futures in terms explicitly linked to the traditional or the “Dreamtime.” In the process, he ends up reproducing a version of the very things he sought to deconstruct, namely, the dualistic categories of tradition and modernity, and the reification of the local and the traditional as the source of a cultural “authenticity,” that for so long have underpinned the analytic logics of anthropology.13 While he was certainly an innovative and influential ethnographer, it seems to me that Michaels never developed a deep enough sense of an indigenous way of seeing and thinking that might have, as I will argue in the chapters to come, provided a means of more effectively refiguring, or even transcending, such conceptual binds. Although Francis Jupurrurla Kelly features explicitly as an agent of Culture, Michaels does not discuss his motivations for making video in any detail. Rather, it would seem to be the anthropologist who not only determines the cultural significances of media production but also outlines the vision for a cultural future. My point is that the kind of cultural future envisioned by Michaels, including his reservations and occasional ambivalences about its viability in the face of current social-historical circumstances, is, in a profound sense, his own. This also seems to be the Warlpiri view. In the postscript to his essay “For a Cultural Future” Michaels acknowledges that “the people at Yuendumu were not entirely happy with this text. . . . It was said by some that the pessimism I expressed seemed unwarranted” (1994, 124). Unfortunately, any possibility that Michaels might have developed a more dynamic account of Warlpiri mediations of the local and global, the traditional and the modern, Warlpiri and non-Warlpiri was tragically precluded by his death at the age of forty in 1988.14

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 The Kayapo Video Project

At about the same time as the establishment of Warlpiri Media, Kayapo from the central Amazonian community of Gorotire began making video with training and equipment provided by Brazilian researchers. The anthropologist Terence Turner’s involvement began two years later, in 1987, when he assisted Kayapo to use video in their struggles to defend their land, rights, and environment. Like Michaels, Turner focuses on the social processes and practices that inform the ways that Kayapo use video. As he writes, this focus distinguishes the study of indigenous media from ethnographic film, by showing “the way the production of the medium ‘mediates’ the indigenous categories and cultural forms that constitute its subject matter as well” (1992, 8). To this end, Turner’s accounts emphasize the ways in which Kayapo experiences both behind and in front of the camera not only produced a sense that they possessed culture but also that cultural difference —as it could be objectified and displayed—was a powerful political resource. As he shows, access to camera technologies and an international audience —possibly more interested in the sight of the lip -plugged Kayapo cameraman than either the culture on display or the video of it—fostered particular kinds of self-awareness in Kayapo to the extent that “the uses of audiovisual media have played an important part in the transformation of Kayapo political, historical, and ethnic consciousness —in sum, of Kayapo culture” (1991b, 68). Documenting the project’s progression from “the initial stage of conceiving of video as a means of recording events to conceiving of video as the event to be recorded and, more broadly, conceiving events and actions as subjects for video,” he describes how Kayapo learned not only to use media to record themselves for educational and archival purposes but to stage-manage cultural events with which to entice the attention and sympathies of the Brazilian and international media (1991a, 36). As he also acknowledges, the prestige and perks associated with this work have had consequences for those individuals involved, leading, at times, to social and political conflicts (1992, 2002b). In close analyses of particular productions, Turner is able to clearly show how video can be imbued with local values that are not necessarily the same as those privileged by the anthropologist studying the culture. He notes how material he thought to be “fascinating” was sometimes cut by Kayapo editors, “in which case it stays cut” (1992, 7). He explains how a Kayapo editing of a meeting can allow for polyvocality, and that the structure of the edit, together with the camerawork, can mimic spatial

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hierarchies as reflected in the layout of village spaces. And, most compelling of all (at least to me), he describes how Kayapo understand “representation as an act that contributes to the material social reality of the thing represented rather than merely reflecting a pre -existing objective reality separate from the act of representation” (2002, 247). This suggests that Kayapo understand that making videos has effects that exceed the representational logics of the West. This intriguing possibility is not elaborated. Rather, throughout his discussions of these self-conscious and strategic media forays into the politicized and aestheticized zones of the intercultural, Turner asserts that local mimetic modes of representation found a natural form of expression through video technologies. As he puts it, representation is a preexisting cultural practice that is “as Kayapo as manioc meat pie” (1992, 10). Thus, Turner frames Kayapo use of video as a relatively straightforward, opportunistic conjunction of traditional Kayapo practices and contemporary political concerns and strategies.15 His work attracted criticism on this count. James Faris has made accusations of theoretical naiveté, arguing that Turner does not adequately acknowledge the degree to which international audiences influence Kayapo video productions. Because these video events are produced to capture the attention of audiences in Western nations, he dismisses as spurious the claim that indigenous media can serve to empower indigenous people: “The Kayapo . . . do not join the global village as equal participants, as just more folks with their video cameras. They enter it already situated by the West, which gives them little room to be anything more than what the West will allow” (1992, 176). Certainly Faris is correct in asserting that global power relations profoundly prefigure Kayapo video productions. How could it be otherwise? The premise (or is it the promise?) of authentic or traditional Culture as the grounds for empowerment makes indigenous media a particularly powerful and problematic political project. Clearly Kayapo themselves, in staging their video events, grasped the nature of a (fleeting) historical moment in which the combination of body paint, lip plugs, and video cameras captivated the imaginations of the Western media and enabled the mobilization of support for their claims against the state. As Faris argues, these kinds of media projects must be read within the contexts of national and international power relations. However, dismissing these videos as either inauthentic or ineffective is surely to miss the point, as Turner himself argues. It is the way in which these projects highlight issues of power, representation, and imagination, the local and the global, and the traditional and the cultural that makes indigenous media production an important contemporary

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phenomenon that demonstrates the ways in which culture is produced through international circuits that actively connect the furthest corners of the planet to metropolitan centers —and back again. From this perspective, the indigenous media project highlights the need for a political/ethical/ conceptual shift of focus for anthropology as the old categories of the authentic, the bounded, and the traditional are no longer seen as providing effective models of culture. Simultaneously these very notions are being taken up with an enhanced, politicized meaning by indigenes themselves. Turner (2002a, 2002b) explicitly prefaces his more recent discussions of Kayapo videomaking and empowerment in such terms, arguing that anthropological investment in Kayapo videomaking should not be fixated on ideas about cultural authenticity or claims to tradition but on the ways in which these productions empower local people to produce culture and identity. This repudiation of what he calls “an uncritical cultural essentialism” (2002a, 77) seeks to situate both the Kayapo and himself within a recognizable analytic framework: engaged in an identity politics played out through contesting representations, produced by a range of individuals, in a number of conflicting social contexts. Indeed, Turner explicitly defines and defends his own involvement as both activist and academic, arguing that “participation in those struggles in some activist capacity becomes both ethically and methodologically the most powerful way of gaining ethnographic access and theoretical understanding of their reality” (2006, 16). Yet while Turner is understandably anxious to avoid imposing a hierarchy of authenticity on these new kinds of cultural production and those who produce them, I am left wanting to know more about how the Kayapo themselves view these intercultural, technologically mediated engagements, and the new kinds of understandings that (surely inevitably?) arise as a result. Would Kayapo producers and audiences claim these videos as hybrid or as something “authentically” Kayapo, and, if so, what would that mean? Or, to leave aside these fraught categories altogether, might not it be that the ongoing relationship between the camera and Kayapo is in itself constitutive of culture? Inspired by the work on visual culture emerging from art history and critical and cultural studies, I can’t help but wonder if there is there a more culturally and historically specific sense of vision and visuality that inflects how these new technologies are appreciated —and thence appropriated—by Kayapo. While Turner makes it clear that Kayapo are manifestly capable of using the technology in ways that produce recognizable effects well beyond the borders of Brazil, might there not be something more culturally specific about the Kayapo experience of what is at stake in the very act of becoming visible to themselves and others? And, if

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so, is this shifting, changing, or otherwise developing as a result of the new practices, politics, pleasures, and connections that the camera mediates?  Cultural Activism and Representational Struggle

An observer of, and advocate for, indigenous media in Australia, and elsewhere, for more than a decade, Faye Ginsburg explicitly positions her work as part of an effort to produce what she refers to as a “discursive space” for both Aboriginal media makers and those who study their work (1994b, 367). Unlike Michaels and Turner, Ginsburg has not undertaken extensive fieldwork in one location. Instead her multi-sited research (with a special focus on the Australian scene) has provided the basis for an analytic overview of indigenous media as an emerging global political form. Ginsburg has been highly influential not only because she has promoted media as a legitimate site of ethnographic inquiry but because her work explicitly acknowledges the inherently complex, and often highly charged, intercultural dynamics that produce indigenous media. Over the years, her analysis has shifted from an early concern with the “impact of media” (1991) and discussions located with the specificities of an emerging Aboriginal media sector to a sustained focus on the role of media within the broader social and political struggles of indigenous peoples. Thinking media as a form of social practice has brought an analytic emphasis to the political and empirical imperatives that inform indigenous media production. Conceptualizing these diverse projects under the rubric “cultural activism” (1999), she highlights the self-conscious politics of representation that tends to inform indigenous media makers’ own understandings of their project. Using Marcus’s (1996) concept of the “activist imaginary,” Ginsburg conceptually links indigenous media makers from diverse locations with other subaltern and disenfranchised struggles, locating them within a wider context of “counter-hegemonic cultural production” (1999, 301). This characterization of indigenous media as a form of cultural activism allows Ginsburg to point to the ways that these kinds of projects simultaneously express and produce contemporary indigenous subjectivities. Incorporating analyses of the work of urban media producers alongside that of remote producers, and demonstrating the shared representational ambitions that link otherwise diverse media makers, Ginsburg shows that indigenous peoples who have long been cast as the quintessential anthropological other should no longer be assumed to be occupying a position of radical difference in relation to Western culture.

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Indeed, the strength of her work lies in the way she has described the complex and inherently intercultural terrain in which indigenous media operate. To this end, Ginsburg explicitly addresses the representational demands of camera technologies to question how they might determine the nature of indigenous media project in terms of both form and content. Taking on contemporary critiques of the camera as a technology of objectification that is thoroughly implicated in a history of colonial representational imperialism, she has explored the possibility that indigenous media makers are caught in what she calls a “Faustian dilemma” whereby, in the act of objectifying their own culture as part of political and social strategies, they may be forced to compromise or adapt their own cultural values.16 Accordingly she argues that such projects may give rise to a “hybrid” form of cultural production that is potentially empowering and increasingly relevant to contemporary contexts and concerns. Taking up the ideas of Stuart Hall, she characterizes the indigenous media project as an attempt to “reverse and resignify the history of colonial looking relations in which photography became the visible evidence of an indigenous world which was expected to disappear” (2002, 50). As Ginsburg’s writing on Australian indigenous video also attests, there is much to be understood about the significance of these productions beyond on-screen content. For example, her concept of “embedded aesthetics” is an extremely useful encapsulation of the way that, in many Aboriginal videos, the “extratextual objectives” of the production can override concerns with narrative or visual form. As she emphasizes (and as Michaels also described), in this cultural milieu social relations are constituted often through production and reception rather than simply via the images themselves.17 Ginsburg’s unique perspective provides a historically situated and ethnographically aware account of the new global trajectories of culture. As she clearly demonstrates, this kind of film and video work requires an analytic perspective that encompasses more than simply the local or traditional. In her account, indigenous cultures and subjectivities are emergent, processual, and responsive; these “cultural activists” are engaging with a world in which social relations are produced through particular kinds of technologically mediated visual practices and strategies. Although Ginsburg is always careful to defer the ultimate meanings of the productions to local producers and viewers, her work has been criticized at exactly this level by scholars who claim that taking up these new media technologies is actually destructive of indigenous lifeworlds (Weiner 1997). While a lack of long-term specifically situated studies of emergent media forms in highly contested environments has certainly limited any

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in-depth analysis of these issues, the necessity of an integrative overview is clearly an indispensable priority, and this Ginsburg has been able to provide. Accordingly, even as her work opens up and defines a new terrain of culture making, Ginsburg’s multisited purview simultaneously highlights the need for more ethnographically grounded projects that might, in turn, allow us to consider the ways that these new practices of making media and “shooting back” matter locally, and in potentially different ways, to those figured through established discourses of representational politics, resignfication, and resistance.  The Politics of Positioning

Largely through the work of the scholars mentioned above, indigenous media have become recognized within academia as a specific kind of representational project.18 Outside anthropology, the defiant tone that infuses these accounts of indigenous empowerment through technology has proven to have a widespread and, I would suggest, a somewhat romantic appeal.19 Yet not everyone is unreservedly enthusiastic about the camera-wielding indigenes and their anthropological collaborators. The film scholar Rachel Moore brings a different perspective to the nature of the politics embedded within the literature by arguing that anthropologists have embraced these kinds of projects precisely because they provide a solution to the increasingly difficult problems of representation faced in the discipline. Moore argues that, in handing the camera to the indigene, anthropologists sidestep difficult questions regarding the power relations inherent in the ethnographic project while simultaneously repositioning themselves in relation to an “authentic” indigenous perspective on culture. In this way indigenous media present a “fast theoretical and moral fix” for a discipline in disarray (1994, 129). Moore goes further, arguing that turning indigenous media into an anthropological project is especially problematic because, while it apparently solves “our problem,” the making of video is potentially of dubious value for the indigenous peoples themselves. 20 Demanding a closer investigation of the implicit and unexamined assertion of a cultural authenticity in Turner’s early accounts of Kayapo videomaking (so necessary for this representational repositioning), Moore questions whether the camera is privileging only certain aspects of Kayapo cultural life, which means that “the real (and hence, that which may be redeemed), in turn, becomes limited to that which can be represented in reified visual form” (134). Thus Moore insists that ethnographers interrogate their own cultural (and disciplinary) assumptions about the camera: the way it engenders a

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positivist kind of grasping at the visible, and the forms and styles it imposes in the name of an authentic cultural vision. She proposes that taking indigenous media seriously would necessitate a critical reevaluation of the expectations that “our politics of theory, our politics of style” impose (137), implying that for indigenous peoples media making might raise issues relating to cultural difference that can’t be anticipated by a Western imaginary. Thus she suggests that “we take the encounter with radical difference that ethnography, that film, can produce seriously, seriously enough not only to change our own methods of representation, but seriously enough to shatter our own otherwise stable logic and routine customs which very much include film form” (127). Moore is not the only film scholar to perceive indigenous media as lacking difference, especially when compared to experimental and avantgarde films. Catherine Russell, for instance, expresses disappointment at what she see as “realist aesthetics” within indigenous media. For Russell, the appearance of apparently mainstream documentary conventions is a sign of Western culture, evidence of a perpetuation of the hegemonic and objectifying kinds of visual regimes that typify colonialism. Underpinning critiques such as this is an expectation that resistance or cultural struggle via video necessarily entails a rejection of the forms and conventions of the dominant culture and an embracing of innovative style and cinematic form. The problem with this kind of postcolonial film theory is that the analysis is conceptually bound to the very categories that these scholars are attempting to deconstruct. When Russell makes such assessments, she is operating within a disciplinary context where visible difference is the central and structuring concern. Innovations are approached as a reworking of styles, format, and structure; indigenous media are understood as constructed in response to experiences of being framed by the colonialist, male, or primitivist gaze. In other words, indigenous film/video may experiment with form and style, but it nonetheless remains deeply informed by what has come before in a seemingly indelible history of Western filmography. Fatima Tobing Rony, who describes herself as a “post-ethnographic” film theorist, recognizes this dilemma in her own work. She points to the inherent limitations of a project premised on resisting the dominant culture (in her case the ethnographic/colonial) on its own terms and within its own logics. She worries this may lead her into becoming “the unwitting propagator of a new postcolonial form of fascinating cannibalism, a reification that further entrenches the categories of Same and Other, Western and Indigenous” (1996, 13). Disquieted by the realization that her imagination predisposes her to certain ways of seeing, she acknowledges (unlike

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Russell) that she may not be able to recognize the difference she seeks in these kinds of production, because of what she is accustomed to look for.  Film, Technology, Culture

The ethnographic filmmaker and theorist David MacDougall has encountered some of these very issues in his own filmmaking, leading him to question the fundamental compatibility between the camera and Aboriginal epistemologies. Reflecting on ethnographic films made about Aboriginal peoples —by both himself and others (including Aboriginal people) — MacDougall describes these films as sharing a quality of “strangeness.” He writes, “They give-off a characteristic cultural tone, like a tuning fork, but it is like a sound heard at a great distance, or the spectral signature of a star” (1998, 142). Although acknowledging that the filmmakers’ unfamiliarity with their subjects could give rise to the lack he is trying to locate, MacDougall concludes that there is something more than that, something about Aboriginal culture itself that renders the camera “inadequate and inarticulate” (142). Quoting the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, MacDougall identifies the problem as the result of a mismatch between cultural styles and camera technologies, which can be located in a broader history of intercultural relations characterized by a failure of perception: “[The] fundamental cast [of Aboriginal thought], seems to be analogical and a fortiori metaphorical . . . I am suggesting that the association of European and aboriginal has been a struggle of partial blindness, often darkened to sightlessness on our part by the continuity of the aborigines’ implicit depiction” (143, my emphasis). 21 MacDougall suggests that, in the filmic context, the problem arises because Aboriginal people do not offer the drama, conflicts, and local exegesis that make for good filmmaking. Comparing Aboriginal culture to certain East African cultures, which in his experience “positively lend themselves” to the camera and codes of filmmaking with “openness and eloquence,” MacDougall argues that films about Aborigines —whether made by Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal people —end up “mute and off balance” (143) because “[c]complexities in the subject and styles of cultural expression [are] unmatched by a comparable cinematic style” (142). In other words, he wonders whether there is a fundamental cultural incompatibility embedded in the representational system itself, including the technology, between Western film culture and Aboriginal culture. Clearly, in light of the wide range of indigenous contemporary film, television, and video production in Australia—both from the cities and

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the bush —this statement requires a good deal of qualification these days. Nonetheless, MacDougall’s identification of the less than straightforward relationships between perception, culture, and technology proved to be extremely apt in the context of my work in Gapuwiyak. As his reflections strongly indicate, there may be far more complex processes entailed in conveying culture (let alone communicating interculturally) than simply giving a camera to an “oral culture” and letting it “speak for itself.”  Film, Difference, and Sensual Knowledges

More than any other visual anthropologist, MacDougall has been responsible for the beginning of a shift of focus within the discipline. Although he acknowledges the significance of the development of indigenous media, like Moore, he sees a need to push the question of the relationship of the visual technologies and culture beyond the obvious domain of a politics of representation that the topic has thus far enabled. He wants a more thorough investigation of the nature of the camera and the kinds of knowledges it might be capable of mediating. He writes: “The more substantive challenge to anthropological thought comes not simply from broadening its purview but from entering into communicative systems different from the ‘anthropology of words.’ In this, it revives the historical question of what to do with the visual” (1997, 285). Exploring these issues in his filmmaking and theorizing, MacDougall has cultivated a phenomenological attentiveness, developing an appreciation of the visceral nature of the “knowledges” produced by the camera that had been lacking in earlier visual anthropology. As he encapsulates it: “The visual media make use of principles of implication, visual resonance, identification and shifting perspective that differ radically from the principles of anthropological writing . . . Above all, the visual media allow us to construct knowledge not by ‘description’ (to borrow Bertrand Russell’s terms) but by a form of ‘acquaintance’” (1997, 286). In his more recent efforts to move closer to apprehending and describing the nature of such “acquaintances,” MacDougall (2005) has come to focus on the sensuous, embodied dimensions of filmic meaning-making. Coming to these questions from a film-theory perspective, Laura Marks also brings her senses into play to make a significant contribution to new theories of film, identity, and intercultural communication. Marks explores the sensual relationships between knowledge, film, and culture in an analysis of what she has dubbed “intercultural cinema”: an international phenomenon in which film and video are used to represent the

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experiences of living between cultures and under different regimes of power, or living as a subaltern group within a predominantly white society (2000, 1). Marks moves beyond a conception of film as a visual medium concerned primarily with forms of signification, instead focusing on what she calls the “unrepresentable senses” (xvi), most particularly touch. Through her exploration of the sensual dimensions of film production and spectatorship she shows how filmmakers use the materiality of film to reproduce these kinds of knowledges, not only on the screen but between “the perceiver and the object represented” (xi). In her approach to intercultural cinema as a representational strategy resisting dominant, linear, and univocal histories, her analysis makes possible an appreciation of how the spaces of the “intercultural” are being actively (re)constituted in ways that differ from the representational tropes and practices that are characteristic of Western filmmaking. By attending to the “haptic” qualities of cultural representation and filmic experience, emphasizing the sensual dimensions of culture, and placing the perceptual audience within the analytic frame, Marks offers an important development in thinking through the kinds of cultural knowledges and resistances that film and video engender. Her approach to film moves across many disciplinary borders, taking film theory into places that visual anthropologists would do well to explore. It is the combination of her sophisticated phenomenological film theory and her interest in cultural forms of knowledge —in particular her interest in Inuit videomaking—that position her work as a provocative contribution to the literature. 22  Theory, Culture, Blind Spots

Marks and MacDougall are at the forefront of an important shift in film theory. They are developing, in different ways, a more complex, sensuous, and culturally nuanced appreciation of the relationship between the camera and the production of knowledge. Their work lays the foundation for new, phenomenologically inflected ways of considering the political and experiential dimensions of making films about culture and difference. Both are concerned to expand their ideas about what and how camera technologies communicate; both are committed to a project of appreciating, and somehow conveying, a different cultural point of view, with due regard for the political and poetic complexities inherent in such a difficult task. However, for all of its suggestive resonances (the significance of which will become clearer in the ethnography proper), this kind of film theory

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does not take me everywhere I need to go. Even as film scholars bring a new sensibility to filmic knowledges, there are inherent limits to the insights about culture that can be gleaned in a darkened room far removed from the site of production and the lifeworlds of the subjects portrayed on the screen. In her book, The Skin of the Film, Marks does not account for the differences in histories and lifeworlds that might distinguish some so-called intercultural subjects from others. In particular, her discussion of Inuit videomaking sits uncomfortably with her work on the sophisticated, urban, and diasporic cultural theorists/filmmakers of intercultural cinema. Subsuming Inuit producers in an overarching category of intercultural, she makes certain assumptions about the nature of their work— and the culture that they are representing—derived from the self-conscious political theories that have informed other intercultural filmmakers. Although Marks provides an intriguing commentary, it is nevertheless unsourced. How does she know and from whom? I want to know more about these productions from the perspective of the Inuit producers and Inuit audiences. For, according to her own argument, she is unavoidably constrained by the cultural specificities of her own embodied imagination as she views these images from afar. Ultimately the problem with this film-based theory is that by focusing on filmic language as the means by which cultural difference is asserted and contested (even if resignified or sensually evoked through a “native” filmmaker’s lens), it potentially ignores other levels at which culture might be represented, reproduced, or even revisioned. Sophisticated and self-conscious films of the “intercultural” are celebrated for the ways in which they “speak unabashedly about difference” (Moore 1994, 137), but this difference is of a particular kind —located and recognizable on screen as not the same as the “West” (or the “male” or the “colonial”). That is, this is a difference of alterity only, one that gains its strength from and against the dominant discourses of the West (male, colonial, white), one that doesn’t consider adequately the cultural contexts and meanings from which those works derive.  Shooting Culture?

James Weiner has produced the most provocative criticism of the indigenous media project. He specifically asks what the above theorists have failed to address, namely, could it be that our culture actually obscures our capacity to recognize other kinds of culture and other forms of difference? For Weiner, indigenous media beg philosophical questions with profound ontological implications about the nature of knowing produced

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by cameras in relation to existing local representational practice. He argues that the assumptions about representation, difference, and resistance that inform existing analyses are situated “one epistemological step too late” (1997, 205). He wants to think about the transformations that the very act of thinking and acting in representational terms produces within a culture. For Weiner, the most important questions about the relationship between indigenous peoples, media technologies, and culture arise from the very act of indigenous peoples taking up media technologies. Drawing on Heidegger, he argues that camera technologies frame the world —not only literally but ontologically. He foresees indigenous ways of seeing, knowing, and relating-in-the -world becoming irrevocably transformed as modern, Western technologies refract and distort local worldviews. For Weiner, the production of indigenous media is a cause for alarm (to put it rather mildly). Rather than celebrating technology as a means of enabling local participation in representational struggles, he understands indigenous media to be hastening the loss of a “pre-cinematic” relationship to the world. He argues that the camera threatens to obscure and even erase traditional modes of being and forms of knowledge because these do not fit in with the modes of audiovisual representation privileged by these technologies. In a tone echoing Heidegger’s (1977b) lament for the lost “pre-modern” and “pre-technological,” Weiner seems to criticize both the indigenous media makers and their anthropological colleagues for inflicting a type of cultural violence via Western scopic technologies and regimes. Privileging the “pre-cinematic” as the locus of authentic cultural difference in indigenous cultural contexts, he finds indigenous media to be actually hastening the destruction of the traditional cultures it purports to represent and revitalize, concluding that the inevitable result of indigenous media production “is the replacement of genuine historical, linguistic, social, and cultural difference with an ersatz difference among electronic images” (1997, 208). Using examples from his own research in Papua New Guinea, Weiner stresses the importance of strategies of concealment and display that underpin Foi epistemological systems. He explains that in this culture, the strategy of public discourse is “precisely not to reveal things” (199). In such a context, he argues, the camera’s demand for the visible is at odds with traditional forms of managing the exchange of information and, more profoundly, the nature of an indigenous being-in-the-world. Drawing analytic inspiration from both Heidegger and the Foi, Weiner thus opens up a way of considering indigenous media (and by extension Marks’s version of “intercultural cinema”) from a different perspective. By

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locating indigenous media production within a very particular historical/ cultural moment, that is, in the meeting of “traditional” cultures and “modern” technology, he brings to the fore questions about the nexus of technology and culture that have not been previously explored. By posing the question of technology in terms of its effects on ontology he challenges the kinds of assumptions about representation, subjectivity, and the production of culture and difference that all of the above analyses rest on. Weiner is suggesting that these technologies impact on indigenous lifeworlds in ways that cannot be seen by outside audiences, or even, he implies, by the indigenous peoples themselves. The technologies are productive of profound shifts in perception that move cultures from, to use his categories, “pre-cinematic” to “modern.” Citing the work of Guy Debord and Martin Jay, Weiner argues that late-twentieth-century Westerners inhabit a thoroughly “specularized as well as spectacularized society” in which vision operates as a privileged sense (199). In the complicated discussion that follows, he draws on Heidegger (1977b) to show how camera technologies have played a central role in the production of a cultural emphasis on the spectacle. He asserts that a particular kind of looking is embedded in, and reproduced through, the technology itself. The outcomes of technology are not determined by the intentions of the subject but rather by the nature of technology itself. Humans become “the subject,” and the world becomes “an object” because technology mediates a relationship of this kind; this ontological relationship is a consequence of technology’s inherent nature establishing itself within everyday lived experience. According to this argument, the camera creates an objectifying representational frame that at once both derives from, and is constitutive of, a particularly modern and Western worldview. 23 In other words, for Weiner it is in the use of the technology itself— the act of representing culture via video —that the crucial “mediation of culture” occurs.  The Worldings of Modernity and an Ontological Media Imperialism

Weiner’s argument is premised on the idea that indigenous media production occurs in places where so -called modern subjectivity has not yet taken hold. Consequently, he argues, to take up video production is already to relinquish something critical about a local, non-Western perspective. From his perspective, if indigenous people are actively engaging in representation and resignification, it is already too late. Any concern with

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issues of identity and representation signals that the “world as picture” perspective has already taken hold and indigenous cultures have already been reduced to, and by, Western, representational modes of communication. In turn, this representational project will hasten the loss of other more authentically traditional ways of being-in-the-world, other kinds of cultural gestalts. As a result, he argues that the indigenous culture that is being represented, and thus ostensibly empowered, will in fact cease to exist on the terms that it did before the advent of these kinds of technological engagements. He implies that taking up these technologies in such contexts is a kind of perverse, self-inflicted form of media imperialism, whereby the act of using the technology—ostensibly for the cause of strengthening culture —produces instead an ontologically debased relationship with the world. As will become clear in the chapters that follow, Weiner’s Heideggerian concerns about the specificities of local indigenous ontological and epistemological priorities are immensely suggestive in relation to my own project. Nonetheless, his argument in relation to indigenous media —as a project and a topic of ethnographic study—is flawed by unexamined assumptions. As several respondents, including Ginsburg and Turner, have noted, Weiner’s polemic is the result of a number of seemingly willful oversights and an outdated ethnographic myopia. Annette Hamilton (1997) argues that Weiner fails to recognize the changing cultural and technological contexts that indigenous peoples live in today, contexts that provide the grounds from which indigenous media projects arise. As she points out, although the colonial experiences of indigenous peoples have been uneven (some groups being far more intensely pressured than others), there are very few remaining corners of the world where people exist in a “pre-cinematic” state. Many contemporary indigenous people, especially those like Yolngu, Warlpiri, or Inuit who live within the borders of first world nations, have been watching film and video for several generations. For decades, these peoples have also been figured as the subjects of visual representation by visiting anthropologists, filmmakers, and tourists. They are already involved with visual technologies as subjects and viewers, experiences that inevitably inform the motivations for, and expectations of, making media. As Hamilton puts it, “indigenous productions exist in a dialogical relation with other already existing visual products in contexts in which visual technologies have been long established in the cultural environment” (1997, 217). Given such circumstances, any clear distinction between the local and the global, the traditional and the modern, is impossible to sustain. Weiner’s judgments about what he calls “genuine” and “ersatz” culture

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reflect old-fashioned anthropological values —not to mention a patronizing attitude toward the indigenous media makers who, he implies, are taking up these projects with a reckless disregard for the violence of ontological consequences. The value-laden terms that he uses tend to overshadow the profoundly significant conceptual insights of his work, and although I do not concur with many of the assumptions that direct his analysis, I am nonetheless indebted to him. While Ginsburg (1997) is certainly correct that Weiner fails to address the ways in which indigenous media emerged at a time in which there were new imperatives to self-represent, in contexts of struggles for self-determination, there remains an as yet unexplored potential in his Heideggerian approach with its emphasis on cultural ontologies. Weiner is making a crucial point when he suggests that existing arguments presuppose “the role and function of the picture as self-representation and as a document of subjectivity, and it is this relational eidos of Western visualist culture which [ . . . ] itself both impelled and was enabled by the development of visual image technology” (1997, 205). From Ginsburg’s perspective the world —including that of the indigenous peoples —is already “worlded” in a Heideggerian sense. The world has already been remade by the mediations of Western cultural media. 24 Thus she proceeds with the assumption that the kind of resistances that media offer indigenous peoples are based on technological processes that inevitably, if perhaps regrettably, involve the objectification and circulation of culture via representation (even if it is self-produced objectification). And, clearly, this is very often the case. On the other hand, in Weiner’s account there continue to exist different possible “worldings” that are crucial, determinative even, in how media will be taken up. To unveil these worldings requires an ethnography that does more than simply document how these technologies might be fitted into structures of kinship, how specifically the camera is assigned to a particular relationship in story telling, as Neil Turner (personal communication) describes in Ernabella, or how it is made to follow tracks in which history and the Dreamtime converge (Michaels 1994, 115) at Yuendumu. Despite his dismissal of the “ersatz” difference of indigenous media, Weiner nevertheless allows for the possibility that the indigenous audience might see/know/experience something other than what is apparent to him, as a Western viewer. In this regard, his complaining that “I want Ginsburg to tell me what I can’t know about the film just by inspecting it” (1997, 206) echoes something of my own response to Marks. That is, what might an indigenous worlding look like? Is it possible to convey this via film? And, if so, can we be enabled to see it?

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 Culture, Technology, and “Ways of Seeing”

Weiner’s argument is also flawed by presumptions. It seems to me that, as Jadran Mimica (1993) argues in a different context, Heidegger’s (and thence Weiner’s) vision is limited by exactly the historical specificities of Western culture that so concern him. 25 In other words, Weiner fails to interrogate the cultural and historical embeddedness of Heidegger’s arguments. Both Heidegger and Weiner presume that modern technology determines culture in a particular way. Weiner’s conclusions about indigenous media are also based on assumptions about the nature of media (albeit from a different perspective than that of the scholars he critiques). He presumes that the technological nature of the project produces certain outcomes, namely, objectification and representation, and here he drops the very phenomenological project that otherwise infuses his research. Weiner fails to take into account the ways in which Heidegger’s vision of modernity and his perception of the role of technologies have been surpassed by other theorists who are concerned with ways that technologies actually disturb and even undo the strictly subject-object “representational” relationship to the world. As I have indicated, thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and film theorists such as Marks and MacDougall are actively exploring the kinds of sensuous, mimetically and mnemonically entangled relationships that occur between the image, the imaged, and the audience that a straightforward Heideggerian representational theory of “world as picture” does not account for. The supposed distinction between “subject” and “object” is itself challenged—collapsed—by these recent film theorists. Weiner’s interpretation of Heidegger poses questions that perhaps can only be raised in the “last remote corners of the world.” In such cultural contexts there is a likelihood that media producers and local audiences may operate within the world on the basis of ontological priorities and representational expectations different from those of media makers (including urban indigenous producers) in other places. Indeed, the terminology by which this topic is defined and discussed poses something of a conceptual problem when considered in light of Weiner’s critique. Not only does his use of the term “indigenous” elide critical differences that exist between so-called fourth world cultures; it also obscures the fact that groups of people categorized in this way, such as Australian Aborigines, live within widely divergent cultural and social circumstances as a result of the uneven effects of colonialism and assimilationist policies. 26 Weiner appears to leave no room for the possibility that the complex and constitutive dynamic between culture and technology might, in indigenous contexts, produce

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something other than a modern (i.e., Western) subjectivity. (For an anthropologist, he seems to have very little faith in the resources and imaginations of indigenous peoples.) In comparison to Weiner’s limited position, the film theorist Vivian Sobchack uses Heidegger to consider the nature of modern technologically mediated perception with an emphasis on the rich and complex intersubjective relations that these technologies enable (rather than restrict). She also acknowledges the significance of the specific cultural and historical circumstances of these relations, arriving at a less determinist view of imaging technologies. As she states, technology never comes to its particular material specificity and function in a neutral context for neutral effect. Rather, it is always historically informed not only by its materiality but also by its political, economic, and social context, and thus always both co -constitutes and expresses cultural values. Correlatively, technology is never merely “used,” never merely instrumental. It is always also “incorporated” and “lived” by the human beings who engage it within a structure of meanings and metaphors in which subjectobject relations are cooperative, co -constitutive, dynamic, and reversible. (2000, 68)

The dynamics of incorporation and living with media technologies, and the sounds and images that they produce —the technologically textured, sensuous mediation of culture —are of central concern in my ethnography. Following Sobchack’s rendering of Heidegger, and my own rereading of his work, my analytic position presumes that there is a complex and constitutive relationship between media technologies and the production of knowledge and subjectivity within the specificities of historical and cultural contexts. I seek to take a closer look at how Yolngu engagements with media—as viewers of mainstream television, as subjects of photography and collectors of photographs, as television makers, and as audience —are part of a lively process of “making sense” of the contemporary world and of their place in it. In the chapters to follow I will show how Heideggerian questions about the constitutive affect of technology on culture and subjectivity open up a new and highly productive approach to understanding and conceptualizing indigenous media. 27 I will show how the historical, social, spatial, and cultural differences between various indigenous media makers (and the subaltern, diasporic, and “intercultural” filmmakers they are often compared with) matter deeply when it comes to apprehending the local significance of indigenous media. I will demonstrate that while it is essential to position indigenous media making in such a way as to take into account the global flows of imagining facilitated by media technologies, it is also crucial to acknowledge and explore the differences that exist at

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the level of local culture if we are to more fully apprehend the ways that culture informs local encounters with, and strategies for, the production and reception of media—differences that may disappear under the generic gloss of “indigenous” and “indigenous media.” By placing the specific cultural and historical context—and thereby any use of these technologies to “make sense” of the world —at the center of my analytic framework, a different range of questions (and possible conclusions) about indigenous media projects emerges. How might indigenous epistemological and ontological imperatives be accommodated in the production of video and other kinds of media? Can the kinds of “differences” implied by Weiner (which, as he argues, depend for their continuing existence on an isolation from technologies such as these) actually exist and even assert themselves in these new media productions? If this is the case, how might so-called traditional modes of producing subjectivity be incorporated and/or refigured by new technologically mediated projects of identity (re)production? Further, might local modes of being/knowing/becoming inform the ways in which indigenous peoples seek to represent themselves beyond the local? How might the possibilities arising in these new intercultural spaces for cultural production and reception be figured from a Yolngu point of view? In other words, despite the apparently dialogic nature of indigenous media’s strategic and self-conscious responses to the representational imperatives of the West, might Yolngu and other indigenous media makers be “shooting back,” as Ginsburg (1999) puts it, in ways that a postcolonial/ cultural studies –inflected theory of representation cannot, at least not yet, imagine, let alone recognize? Taking up these questions in following chapters, I will show that indigenous media offer much more to anthropology than a solution to the dilemmas raised by postcolonial politics. I will demonstrate how taking on such a project can both enrich anthropological understandings of indigenous cultures and provide opportunities to rethink the epistemological foundations of visual anthropology (and, indeed, other Western models of media). As will become apparent, Yolngu media not only provide different ways of apprehending the contemporary dynamics of an indigenous culture; they provide a different kind of theoretical/ethnographic place from which to “speak back” to current theories about media, technologies, culture, and “resistance.”

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Tuning In: Mediated Imaginaries and Problems of Deafness and Forgetting

Surrounded by stacks of CDs, his headphones cranked up to full volume, Gambali enjoys himself. Leaning back in his chair, he plays air guitar along with Mark Knopfler. “Sultans of Swing,” he’s told me often, is a favorite song from his time at the Aboriginal boarding college on the outskirts of the mining town of Nhulunbuy. This song was played incessantly during a period of my own adolescence, and so, listening together, we’re both reminded of high school and good times. At the end of the track, he fades up, in a smooth transition, to a Yolngu clan manikay (song) about a floating leaf, “Mantjarr,” sung by his classificatory brother Bangana. The sixty-five-second recording is a tiny section of a clan song cycle and refers to a section of Dhalwangu clan country southeast of the community, down toward the settlement of Numbulwar. Gambali is sending this song as a request via satellite to another BRACS operator and classificatory brother, Nipper Wilfred, at Ngukurr, several hundred kilometers away. As his brother sings about the leaves floating in their clan waters, Gambali playfully sings along; keeping time with the bilma (clapsticks), his right hand slices the air with a rhythmical wrist action, while he watches the beat peak repeatedly into the red on the broadcast console’s audio level meter. Gambali has danced “Mantjarr” many times; he knows the songs that would precede and follow this one in a ceremonial performance; he knows many of the inside or restricted aspects of the stories from the places and events to which the song refers. This recording, made for BRACS, is very popular with local audiences who enjoy the metaphorical play that allows the ancient clan song to refer to a more recent event in which two cousins, while learning to drive in the first vehicle ever owned by the clan, accidentally became bogged on a beach. In the song, images of the hapless cousins watching the fast-rising, tropical tide as it swirled

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around and lifted up the car, produce a poetics that transforms the moticar (motor car) into Mantjarr (Ancestral floating leaf). This song is one from a collection recorded by Bangana to represent the clan groups of the community. Compiled onto several minidiscs, they sit on a shelf along with Gambali’s eclectic selection of Western popular music. The studio is in a small room, furnished with an office desk and chairs that had been delivered from Darwin by barge. It’s always cool in there because of the air-conditioning that is necessary to keep the satellite receivers, television, and radio transmitters functioning—a stark contrast to the outside temperatures that linger in the high twenties or thirties (eighties, Fahrenheit) throughout the year. (I often arrive at work to find the air-con grinding away while the screened and louvered windows are opened, allowing the cold air to escape and a fine red dust to settle on every exposed surface.) A switching unit beside the radio console allows for local programs to be substituted for the mainstream services received from the satellite dish. This means the community has two TV channels: the commercial Aboriginal-owned station, Imparja, from central Australia and the government-funded ABC. When Gambali plays a video (usually a Hollywood movie, sometimes an educational video sent by government departments, and occasionally footage he has shot around the community), regular programming from ABC is cut off without warning, as it is replaced with the local video selection. The local radio has a similar override system. There are two radio stations, ABC Regional and TEABBA (Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association) Radio. Gambali can choose to broadcast locally or, by connecting to the TEABBA studio in Darwin via telephone line, he can broadcast live via satellite to twenty-nine other remote Aboriginal communities across the Top End of the Northern Territory. Outside on the veranda, small speakers compete with the noise of coin-operated washing machines, a legacy of the building’s previous incarnation as a women’s center. A group of Yolngu women sit on the lawn, nursing babies, eating fried chicken, sharing soft drinks, and waiting for their washing. Talking and laughing among themselves, at times they catch the sound of the broadcast and sing along to familiar tunes. Across the newly bituminized road at the takeaway, the radio blares in the background as the Yolngu staff, dressed in blue zip-front uniforms, endure the heat of the day as it is intensified by the steam rising from the bain-marie. Parking his battered Toyota four-wheel drive outside the shop, the council chairman purchases a can of Coke and a hamburger. With his lunch balanced on the dashboard he drives to the mechanical workshop at the edge of the settlement, the sound of bilma from the broadcast drifting in the

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windows. His sons and daughters are djunggayarr (managers) for that song; as they grow up they will take responsibility for overseeing ceremonies and countries associated with that particular clan and their sacra. At this moment, however, Yangipuy is thinking about his own country. He’s hoping to get his moticar fixed up for a weekend hunting trip to his outstation. He has a new shotgun and is, as he says, “starving for emu.” The FM radio signal easily reaches the forty or so houses in the community, which, at a glance, appears much the same as neighboring Yolngu communities: a straggly kind of suburbia in the middle of the bush. Council plans are underway for the construction of fifteen new houses to relieve the overcrowding that sometimes results in core members of a family sharing one room in a three-bedroom dwelling. Despite the extended nature of most households, and the extensive use of the spaces around the houses for everyday living, houses are planned out on a grid designed by town planners; community maps show the allocation of future subdivisions with lot sizes determined by Balanda regulations and the cost of providing power and sewerage. Inadequately constructed, poorly maintained, and badly repaired, the older homes on their elevated platforms sag with age, glass louvers missing, fly screens torn. Much of the living is done outside the houses on the raked earth, in the shade of trees. Some days, if the truck is working and if the workers are at work and not attending to ceremonial duties or surrendering to the inertia of kava, the council crews might collect the rubbish from the fuel-drum bins outside houses.1 On other days, plastic bags, dirty disposable nappies, and other mess spread by scavenging dogs, pet pigs, and the wind, make the place appear more neglected than I actually experienced it to be. Once every few months the town goes into temporary overdrive, sprucing up for a visiting politician, or celebrity, or Tidy Town judge. In the wet season the country is lush and the grass grows thick and deep around the houses, softening the look of dusty dilapidation familiar in the dry months. Since the settlement was first established as a timber mill in 1969, the community has grown to an estimated population of around nine hundred people. 2 There are a council administration center, a general store and takeaway, a health clinic, a school, a garage and mechanical workshop, and a church. The lake, once a favorite place for swimming and boating, is poisoned with toxic residue from the overflow of the sewerage system. At the edges of the community, beside the lake, is the men’s ceremony ground, a prohibited place for women and all Balanda (who are warned when they arrive to stay clear). During my first nights in town I would lie awake listening to the sound of women calling into the darkness toward the ceremony ground, communicating with the dangerous and powerful

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Figure 14. A straggly suburbia in the scrub: airstrip top left, football field center, Lake Evella bottom right. Aerial photograph courtesy Maps NT. Copyright NT of Australia.

Ancestral serpent. Later, as I got to know people, I was warned of other dangers: galka, feared sorcerers who are said to lurk on the outskirts of the community, venturing into the community under the cover of darkness. “Don’t answer your door at night,” I was told at times. But even at home one cannot be completely safe, as galka have been known to use the telephone, and more recently mobile phones, to make frightening or threatening calls to their victims. A short stroll past the top of town lies the airstrip. Cut out of the bush and cleared by hand during the early days of settlement, it flanks the eastern side of the community and provides the main point of departure for trips to nearby outstations, other communities, Nhulunbuy, and the more distant Darwin. From a window seat on a low-flying single-engine aircraft, the few tracks that traverse this country are visible as they wind through forest and scrub, past pockets of rainforest and water holes down

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to fishing and hunting spots on expansive mud flats where the wide channels of fresh water mingle with the turquoise sea. Strikingly beautiful, menacing, or even mundane as the colors flatten into dullness by the glare of the midday sun, to the visitor peering down through double panes of smudged glass it appears as wilderness, unknown and unmarked. Yet Yolngu do not see wilderness but country: land that has been lived, known and cared for, through hunting, burning, ceremony, and song, for countless generations. During the evening cool of the dry season, campfires burn and dampers cook in the coals. Inside the houses, furniture is sparse or nonexistent. A TV and a ghetto blaster–style radio/cassette player are among the most highly valued and most common possessions, along with washing machines and refrigerators. Televisions are switched on day and night; soaps, movies, and sports being the favorite viewing. On weekend afternoons, during the broadcast of Australian Rules football, Yolngu fans cheer in synchrony with other footy fans across the nation. 3 During the week when he’s at work in the BRACS, Gambali turns the TV on as soon as he arrives; it stays on with the sound turned down throughout the day. At that time of the morning, Oz Aerobics bounces in off the satellite transmitting from the Aboriginal-owned TV station in Alice Springs. The shiny lycra outfits seem especially provocative in a place where women’s thighs are always covered by long, mission-style dresses or brightly colored skirts imported from Indonesia. By midday, men who sang at the ceremony grounds until late into the night settle in for the midday movie with a pie from the takeaway. Those who speak the best English translate bits of dialogue for others. Meanwhile, back at the BRACS, disregarding the “on air” light, Gambali’s gathu (brother’s son) Donovan opens the door of the studio and silently motions with a video he has brought over. Taking the video, Gambali switches the television control panel to override the satellite broadcast. As he slips the tape into the VCR and fast forwards past the previews and piracy warnings, it becomes apparent that a movie starring Jean Claude Van Damme, better known locally as “Frankie” from one of his earliest roles, has replaced Playschool as the afternoon viewing on the ABC television channel. I raise an eyebrow; we’ve had complaints from the MAF (Missionary Aviation Fellowship) mothers before. Gambali shrugs and grins; Donovan disappears home to watch. During the rest of his radio show Gambali will keep one eye on the action on the monitor that sits above the BRACS switching panel.4 “Mantjarr” ends, so Gambali hits the play button on the mini disc player and a community announcement is played. Speaking in his clan

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dialect, Roy Wuygumbi Wanapingu appeals to the audience with a raypirri, a traditional style of speechmaking more usually invoked in ceremonial circumstances. Come back to where you belong. Come back to the bilma. Come back to where you belong . . . Back to the foundations of the Yolngu culture, back to the old people. So when you want to understand both worlds, at least you have your rom [law], your culture and law and bilma. Cause we don’t want you to miss what our fathers and our grandfathers and our great, great, great, grandfather, we don’t want you to miss what they had and what they passed on to us.

At the end of the message, Gambali fades open the microphone, glances at the clock on the wall as he announces the time, and reminds his audience that they are listening to the TEABBA afternoon show with Frank Gambali from Gapuwiyak BRACS. He invites everyone to “sit back ga [and] relax with Yolngu Radio in Yolngu country,” and, as the sound of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” surges, he removes his headphones, pushes back his chair, and steps outside for a quick cigarette.  Northeast Arnhem Land and the Ethnographic Imagination

In describing this remote Arnhem Land settlement in the ways I have, I have taken a certain pleasure in writing against ethnographic convention. By following a Yolngu lead and playfully placing “Dancing Queen” and “Mantjarr” side by side, I directly challenge the anthropological orthodoxies that have consistently defined, figured, and celebrated this region in terms that proclaim it a bastion of traditional Aboriginal Culture. In trying to write a deliberately filmic introduction (see Marcus 1994), I want to evoke scenes from a warm afternoon in a small Aboriginal community in remote Northern Australia, drawing from memory and imagination to present a particular type of rendering of place, people, and practices. I’ve attempted to give a feel for the sensual pleasures, the crosscutting and multiple rhythms to be found amid the tangled cultural complexities of contemporary Yolngu community life. My mind’s eye is like a camera as I skim the surfaces of life in Gapuwiyak, gently playing appearances off against each other, foregrounding moments that starkly contrast the modern and the traditional, the Balanda and the Yolngu, the local and the global, the primitive and the technological. The description is meant to tease the Western imaginary that uses such binaries to distinguish cultural domains, demarcate difference, and impose implicit evolutionist hierarchies. I want to insist that

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simple separations and categories are impossible. And so my reconstructed gaze reproduces the double disorientation I recall from my early days in Gapuwiyak the way certain incongruities —like ceremonial leaders watching Oz Aerobics and eating meat pies, or tales of galka on the telephone — impressed themselves upon my senses. I want to communicate to my readers the way that these images appeared even more striking because of the takenfor-grantedness of these features of everyday life by Yolngu themselves. Or at least, so it seemed. I remain uncertain how to refer to the contemporary circumstances of life in Gapuwiyak. Postcolonial, postmodern, late capitalism, late modernity—these terms all capture aspects of contemporary cultural moments in various parts of the globe yet are themselves terms coined in response to historical specificities that do not quite capture the particular intersections and permutations of the Yolngu present. The term “postcolonial” is not quite an adequate descriptor in a settler colony where the colonialists have never properly departed, transmuting from protectors to administrators, and now community coordinators or advisors. Although policies have officially changed from assimilation to “self-determination,” the implementation of this policy remains complex and enormously problematic at the level of Yolngu exerting control over their lives. In other words, the Aboriginalization of bureaucracy does not a postcolonial situation make. This is not to say that postcolonial critiques do not have their resonances in Australia (see Wolfe 1999, 1–7), and specifically Yolngu Australia, but as I will argue, Yolngu cultural imaginations are able to respond to and/or resist the effects of colonial domination in ways that are not entirely prefigured by the terms of the dominant society. So how to proceed with an analysis of something called Yolngu Culture? Gambali’s program broadcasts the polycultural rhythms of Australia and beyond, moving Yolngu bodies in new ways, opening up the range of cultural styles available to local subjects and extending the sites of culture production from ceremony ground to boarding school. The meanings and beats are received, known, made sense of by embodied, encultured, and emplaced subjects, who are intimately enmeshed in lifeworlds with practices and horizons that exceed the traditional. Gambali has a broad cultural repertoire, not only at his fingertips in the form of videos, CDs, and mini-disc recordings but also in his body, his memories, and imagination. Yet at the same time I could not help wondering if the flow of the programming, the very ease with which Gambali mixed the beats, should serve as a warning, counteracting the urge to dissect and inspect through the synaesthetic surveillances that media technologies facilitate. Surely, I thought, his relaxed approach to programming should preclude the

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assumption that his playlist produces a tension between cultural worlds? Indeed, surely this kind of cultural production challenges any notion of separate or locally containable cultural worlds? Tuning into Gapuwiyak BRACS with an ear particularly tuned to Culture raises certain questions: How might Yolngu hear manikay and Yolngu popular music when they’re inserted into a playlist that includes Dire Straits and ABBA? How do Yolngu make sense of the new knowledges and identifications that come from Hollywood and Alice Springs? How do Yolngu think about locality and identity in light of these new transnational spaces of culture? How might they make sense of the extended possibilities for being that confront local ontologies? Indeed, how might one talk at all about ontologies without reifying a traditional way of being-in-the-world? How might one understand these new identifications as Yolngu ones? In what ways are they made meaningful? What, if any, tensions are generated as Gambali invites his audience to sit back and relax amid the easy rhythms of reggae, pop, and manikay? Neither the existing ethnographic literature nor the anthropology of media provides an adequate framework within which to address such questions.  The Two -World Schism of Traditionalist Paradigms

Since the 1937 publication of W. Lloyd Warner’s A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe, anthropologists have produced a detailed body of work on the peoples of northeast Arnhem Land, now known to themselves and the world as Yolngu. Subsequent accounts of Yolngu social organization, myth, and ritual produced during the 1940s and 1950s by prominent ethnographers such as Donald Thomson and Ronald and Catherine Berndt put Yolngu on the ethnographic map where they remain today, known to anthropologists around the world for their elaborate ceremonies, complex kinship structures, and striking visual art. During the 1960s and 1970s anthropological attention shifted away from a concern with the functions of institutions toward a concern with the dynamics of social processes. More recent studies variously debate the significance of ethnographic descriptions of kinship systems and subsections, the politics and economies of sacred knowledge; Yolngu relationships to the land and concepts of land tenure, sorcery, and healing; the production and circulation of bark paintings; clan song, music, and dance; and material culture such as fiber weaving. The region has also attracted sustained attention from linguists, historians, natural and environmental scientists,

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medical researchers, and educationalists. Yet somehow, while it seems that every other Balanda in the remote settlements of the region is engaged in some form of state -sponsored project of modernization and development at the schools, councils, clinics, stores, and workshops, Arnhem Land anthropologists have consistently ignored these contemporary dimensions of Yolngu life. With a few notable exceptions, modernity and the dynamic processes of the intercultural are left out of the ethnographic picture. 5 There is little or no mention in the literature of the bureaucracies, communications and transportation technologies, missionaries, filmmakers, anthropologists, nurses, teachers, pilots, or politicians. Football, the cash economy, and the welfare system also remain conspicuously absent.6 Even the now agreed-on term—“Yolngu”—to refer to the related clans of the region has come into currency, among both Balanda and Yolngu, as a result of decades of intercultural interactions. Yet, still, anthropological discussions regarding identity have tended to focus on debates over the relative methods of forms of ethnographic classification in relational to traditional linguistic and social groupings.7 While I appreciate the emphasis on the ongoing relevance of these complex, multistranded levels of identity in determining local social dynamics, the fact is that the term “Yolngu” is becoming meaningful in new contexts. Gambali explicitly identifies himself as Yolngu and his BRACS show as Yolngu Radio (as opposed to “Dhalwangu mala [clan] Radio,” or “Radio Wunungmurra”—to use the surname that has been adopted by the subgroup of the Dhalwangu clan that is more closely affiliated with the country surrounding Gangan outstation). The existing literature offers few clues regarding the ways in which the term “Yolngu” is being used in new ways by Yolngu themselves: to refer collectively to the communities and clans of northeast Arnhem Land; or, in other contexts, to other indigenous Australians; or, to blackskinned people from other countries. In short, the overwhelming emphasis in these ethnographies has remained on the rich and complex traditional cultures of the region. Discussions remain located within the realm of Culture (in the reified sense described in chapter 1). It is not my intention to dismiss these ethnographies as unimportant or irrelevant. On the contrary, the insights and perspectives proved invaluable to my own research. However, there are not only limitations but certain consequences of taking such approaches. Making the wangarr (Ancestral Beings) ever-present has meant that modernity, with its historicizing and self-reflexive imperatives, remains invisible. Although a focus on these Cultural practices is likely to be informed by the anthropologist’s own hyperawareness of the passing of time, one result is a writing out of, and therefore an implicit devaluing of, cultural transformations in the

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pursuit of an account of authentic, or at least resilient, culture. As Fabian (1983) insists, a denial of coevality of “our world” and “their world” is not only a writing of the other that denies him/her a history; it works as a discursive strategy to deny people like the Yolngu a future, apart from one defined by Culture as impossibly bound to a past defined by tradition. Writing in the early 1960s, Catherine Berndt expressed concerns about the encroachment of the modern world into Arnhem Land. She concluded, like many others of that time, that “[b]y the time they [Yolngu] have acquired more than a sketchy outline of what it involves they are already caught up in it beyond retreat; they have moved away from their own particular world and cannot return to it” (1961, 17). All these years later, reading more recent ethnographic literature, I still find a lingering and unresolved anxiety about the future of the peoples and practices, sometimes explicit, and sometimes resonating implicitly between the lines. By continuing to seek cultural practice in traditional ritual, song, and dance, ethnographers seem to have arrived at an impasse, with no model that is able to frame a nontraditional account of Yolngu culture without evoking a teleology based on assumptions that equate “change” with the loss of culture. The critique of such forms of traditionalist anthropology has been well made in the Australian context, notably by Cowlishaw (1986, 1992), Beckett (1988), and Povinelli (1993), and also Merlan (1998), who argues that anthropologists who continue to seek evidence of traditional culture beneath everyday appearances participate in an economy of values that privileges continuity over “discontinuities and problematizations” (168). This, as she says, reproduces compartmentalizing and discursive practices that set the changing modern against the unchanging traditional. I was intent on taking heed of such warnings in my own research. Yet this did not prevent me from experiencing for myself the difficulty of thinking past these binarisms in a place like Gapuwiyak. As a consequence of Bangana’s involvement in BRACS, clan manikay and raypirri had been inserted into the playlist, making the culture in Gambali’s program even more complex than it had been before. Even as I wanted to move beyond the traditional, I felt my anthropological imagination pressing down in particular and structuring ways as I struggled to define what might be identified as Yolngu in the practices and productions of the local BRACS.  Adopting Rambo

At this point, my best way forward seemed to lie in a radical shift of theoretical focus. By taking a lead from the range of contemporary theories

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of media, imagination, and spectatorship, I could follow Gambali’s injunction to “sit back and relax.” Or at least I could dispense with a concern to demarcate identity or culture strictly in terms of either tradition or locality. Media theory offered me an opportunity to consider these self-conscious moments of identification along with the more casual moments of relating to the world via so-called Balanda media. Such an approach allowed me to claim “Dancing Queen” and other Western media for Gambali and his audience, thereby enabling me to manage what I understood to be the theoretical and ethical responsibility of contemporary ethnography—that is, to actively avoid typecasting the Yolngu of Gapuwiyak as traditional peoples in the terms that Balanda have come to expect. From my earliest days in Gapuwiyak it had been clear to me that Yolngu, like other audiences, in other places, are interested in actively finding narrative resonances and identifications that film, television, and Balanda music offer. The increasingly sophisticated engagement with genre and the development of English-language skills, combined with a growing experience of the “Balanda world” via trips to towns and cities, enable Yolngu to seek out new information and subject positions, allowing imagined connections with stories, peoples, and places far beyond the local.8 Having grown up with a fairly constant exposure to Western media, most Yolngu, especially those younger than forty-five or so, are experienced television viewers, and since the FM services were introduced with the BRACS, they are also radio listeners. Of course the level of viewing sophistication varies widely, but for viewers such as Bangana, who benefited from a better grasp of English and the experiences of life beyond Arnhem Land, the texts enabled a kind of cultural lingua franca through which we communicated and shared jokes and other points of reference (see Shohat and Stam 1996, 149). Similarly, Balanda music —and other non local musical styles — provides a backing track to the rhythms of daily life, just as it does for any other Australian. Kids swap compilation tapes purchased in Darwin. They know the latest pop songs from TV music video shows. Old ladies weave pandanus baskets to the sounds of country music playing on their Walkmans. The songs that brought enjoyment and associative meanings enabled me to find my own spaces of identification with Yolngu; in music I encountered an easy place of shared pleasures. I would often sit with my Yolngu sisters in a shady patch of bush just out of town where we played our selections of our favorite songs, singing along and telling our own stories of love gone wrong, to the tunes of Mariah Carey or the Australian country music star Gina Jeffreys. Similarly, when we watched video movies

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or television together, I noticed their explicit identifications with characters and events. Picking up on the narrative, we found ourselves and each other in these stories. We’d give the characters our names, claiming kin relationships to suit our fantasies and desires. In fun, the men adopted the heroes as brothers, which meant that when we women watched together with our brothers we could not imagine marrying the hero ourselves —he would be our brother. Viewing on our own, or at least without brothers present, where it is possible to raise the possibility of love and sexual desire (social restrictions demand that if a brother heard a sister speaking in this way he should berate and strike her), we would claim the same heroes in a kin relationship that made them available to us as lovers and husbands. At other times, with other movies, we’d laugh and tease one another as the girl on screen made the wrong love choice, yet again: just like so and so.9 At the end of the tape, we would hold our breath for the final, redeeming kiss. Or cheer madly as the kids of Soweto led by Whoopi Goldberg defied the authorities in a preMandela, apartheid South Africa; nodding with a grim knowingness as the white cops beat the innocent and defenseless Africans, exhibiting a violence, and imposing a form of terror, that many Yolngu have experienced firsthand yet which has no place in the official discourses of citizenry that circulate in this once-mission settlement.10 There was, however, a problem with pursuing this line of thinking: these theories did not fit with Bangana’s own culturalist agenda. I found I could no longer maintain this form of theorizing once he entered the scene. This was made clear to me later when one day, strolling past an old lady who was making baskets and listening to her Walkman, I made a comment to Bangana about the significance of “Balanda music” in Yolngu lives. Knowing something of this woman’s musical tastes, I suggested that the popularity of the African American country music singer Charley Pride might, for instance, enable Yolngu to think about and experience identity in new ways. I wondered if she found resonances in the lyrics with her own life; or if she identified with him on the basis of race; or if it was simply that his music provided a sentimental sound track for her memories. Thinking that I was offering up a possibility for the mutual recognition of the complex dimensions of Yolngu modernity, I was nonplussed when Bangana —a pot-smoking, Bob Marley–T-shirted, self-identified reggae man—bristled at the mention of Yolngu, identity, and Charley Pride in the same sentence. He insisted that while this woman might enjoy her country music, it had nothing to do with her Yolngu identity. “Yolngu music, Yolngu dance, Yolngu Culture, make her who she is,” he told me. So began a discussion that was to last until the end of my fieldwork.

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Bangana insisted that as long as he “knew who he was,” he could watch television and enjoy music without it “influencing” him. He argued that Yolngu songs and videos would enable Yolngu viewers to remember who they were in ways that could not be matched or replaced by programming from elsewhere. Most emphatically, he denied the constitutive power of identification with reggae music, Aboriginal rock and roll, Rambo or “Frankie” van Damme. These, he said, were manymak everydaygu (fine for everyday life) but ultimately have nothing to do with Yolngu culture or identity. He asserted that in fact it was bilma, madayin (sacra), and gamununggu (sacred clan designs and paintings) that make Yolngu who they are.  From the Everyday to the Ancestral: Relocating the Grounds of Culture

Bangana’s comments made me realize that the disciplinary paradigm shift from a focus on the local to a model of culture and difference arising out of global entanglements challenges not only traditionalist anthropological orthodoxies but contemporary Yolngu ones as well. Theories of transnational media identifications were impossible to reconcile with a cultural schema that privileges Ancestral events as the fundamental basis for identity and meaning.11 Yet how to proceed? How was I to solve my own problem of culture? What kind of ethnography could I write that would do justice to the complexities of this situation? By distinguishing between everyday pleasures and specifically Yolngu domains of culture, Bangana explicitly, if unwittingly, challenged contemporary models that locate the production of culture within the practices and textures of what might variously be referred to as everyday life, habitus, or lifeworld. Bangana’s culturalist framework appeared to be unable to conceptually cope with untraditional behavior; he seemed to reject the emancipation from tradition and from locality that theories of media were offering. Instead, he apparently sought to apply an impossibly abstract and seemingly static hierarchy on what Merleau-Ponty (1962, 454) calls the “inextricable tangle” of everyday life, thereby imposing the conceptual schisms of an earlier ethnography that divided life into separate and irreconcilable cultural domains. For a long time I floundered as I tried to gain some critical theoretical distance between Bangana’s project and mine. My critique of classical anthropology’s privileging of Ancestral culture as its true concern seemed impossible to sustain if I acknowledged that my informant also seemed to discount other non-Ancestral dimensions of life as irrelevant and not ef-

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ficacious in the production of “Yolnguness.” In order to seriously consider Yolngu media and Yolngu culture on Bangana’s terms, I have had to acknowledge, and account for, a local insistence on the crucial and particular significances of the grounded, the bounded, and even the traditional. Thus I realized that a politics of research premised on a commitment to documenting a Yolngu point of view was not necessarily a straightforward proposition. The theories and assumptions with which I had framed my research had made Bangana’s version of Culture a problem for me in very particular ways. For all the complicities that bound Bangana and me, we were not operating within the same frameworks. We were, moreover, answerable to different “elders” in regard to our respective culture projects. I was deeply concerned at this point that, in seeking to be faithful to Bangana’s project, I had unwittingly committed myself to producing yet another version of traditionalism —albeit one that was hyperreflexive and indigenously authorized. Unlike my Yolngu brother, I did not want to deny or downplay the significance of Yolngu identifications with, and via, mainstream and other Aboriginal media. For me, there is no question that non local media do have a place in Gapuwiyak and Yolngu culture and are worthy of closer analysis. To make matters worse, I realized that my own role in the production of this formulation was, and is, determinative. My presence, my questions, and my encouragement had fostered the very circumstances in which such distinctions were being made. Hence, my disquiet was further amplified by the knowledge that Bangana expected my ethnography to faithfully record and promote his point of view. Indeed, I had already promised as much. Yet slowly it became clear that giving analytic space to such apparently old-fashioned concerns did not necessarily entail a retreating to the realm of a more classical anthropology. Nor was the solution to my own problem of culture to be found by explaining Bangana’s claims about Yolngu identity as a strategic discourse derived from an essentializing politics of identity. There was something else, something rather more complex, going on. As time passed, I came to realize that while undoubtedly influenced by nonlocal concerns, Bangana’s theory of Culture was so much more than simple reproduction of Balanda discourses. I began to see how his project of identifying and promoting a certain kind of difference was premised on the possibility of producing conjunctions, connections, and continuations. I began to appreciate that a mimetic kind of imagining informed and shaped his thinking. I recognized that perhaps his greatest talent was an ability to use local cultural logics to think through nonlocal discourses and concepts. As we worked together I came to understand that, despite appearances, the distinctions that he insisted upon were not compelled by a desire to

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divide the world into two separate and incompatible domains. On the contrary, he was explicitly concerned with mediating against the schisms and disorientations produced by such distinctions. The discourses of tradition and modernity, as they inflect local ideas about identity and culture, allow for a different kind of appreciation of the issues faced by contemporary Yolngu. Our discussions led me toward a more complex understanding of how Yolngu themselves identify and conceptualize how “identity” is generated. Like contemporary academic theories of identity, Yolngu understand identification as a process of becoming, rather than simply a matter of assuming a fixed and pre-given identity. Yet the basis for these identifications—the ontological position that informs the practices and experiences that Yolngu deliberately use to generate moments of becoming-in-relation—is quite different from normative positions on identity within contemporary Western cultural theory. Although his media project was, at one level, undoubtedly a response to the global conditions in which questions of identity have become central to the emergence of a particular style of cultural politics, ultimately, the processes that give rise to the practices and experiences that Bangana privileged as the basis for generating “Yolnguness” are premised on a different kind of difference and an alternative kind of dynamic of becoming—and a different notion of intercultural politics—from those explored in the established theoretical frameworks of representation and resistance. As a consequence, the ways in which Bangana approached the question of identity necessitated that my analysis of the dynamics of “becoming Yolngu” move beyond the realm of discourse or representation and, in the process, take seriously a sense of being and belonging that is conceptualized in terms of an Ancestral authority as the source of a lived authenticity. As I will demonstrate further in later chapters, understanding Bangana’s project as a mediation of the Ancestral, as opposed to a reification of the traditional, enables a very different sense of what is at stake in struggles over the modern, the technological, and the dynamics of becoming Yolngu. Further, I will suggest that nondualistic cultural logic that underpins Yolngu cultural imaginary enabled Bangana to see beyond the schizoid quality of the old-fashioned, two-worlds model conceived by Western imaginations and to envisage a different kind of basis for a contemporary Yolngu identity.  Going Blind from Watching Videos

I’ve already portrayed Yolngu as enthusiastic consumers of Western media and media technologies, with no interest in using the BRACS to either reduce or control local viewing of mainstream satellite programming. Yet

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a taste for television need not preclude feeling ambivalent about its effects. (As someone utterly dependent on television after a day at the computer screen, I know for myself the possibility of shifting from pleasure-seekingcouch-potato mode to a more critical position.) When Bangana began to discuss his ideas within the community and collect messages from the clan elders for BRACS, I heard, for the first time, an explicit articulation of Yolngu concerns about the continuity of tradition, rom, and culture in relation to media consumption. People complained that watching too many Balanda videos was making the youth “blind to culture,” unable to “see with their own eyes.” I was told that listening to too much Western music was “blocking ears,” producing a kind of cultural deafness. These perceptual blocks, I was told, were making Yolngu “forget who they are,” resulting in a lack of respect for rom and the breakdown of tradition. These concerns over blindness, deafness, and forgetting have profound resonances with Heidegger’s descriptions of modern subjectivity as a reduced mode of being-in-the-world. Like Heidegger, “who felt that the West had forgotten the meaning of being” (Weiner 2001, 2), Bangana and other Yolngu clan leaders worried about the role of Balanda media in contributing to Yolngu developing a different kind of somatic, relational being-in-the-world, and in the process forgetting who they are. Just as Heidegger blames technology for generating a form of cultural blindness in modern subjects to the revelatory truth of Being, Yolngu see their children in danger of becoming disconnected from the Yolngu world because Western media are blocking their senses. The problem of culture is not that the Ancestral is disappearing but rather that cultural subjects are becoming unable to perceive it. The issue is one of a cultural sensibility—an ability to tune into the invisible presence of Ancestral. Without such a sensibility the creative and constitutive force of the Ancestral remains invisible and therefore devoid of its constitutive power, imperceptible to cultural subjects whose senses are distracted and distorted by the influx of new images and sounds. Here are the words of the Djapu clan elder Johnny Barrarra Munungurr recorded in 1995 for broadcast on radio: We are encouraging ourselves as Yolngu people because of the involvement of the Western world. And that’s why we are encouraging ourselves to be aware so that we will continue our manikay, our culture. Starting from the eldest of our people and to the new generation. So when this generation now today start passing away, that tradition, that manikay will be carried on by the new generation. Yo. People should start respecting and really accepting this rom as their culture. Discos, guitars, Balanda music is not to be taken

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as our number one priority. That’s the white man’s way of living. Sometimes Balanda music can be good. Depends on people. Sometimes, Balanda music can rule you. And that’s how today we see kids, people losing their law, their culture because of committing themself to Balanda music. So guitars, drums, Balanda instrument is something that we can use. But to carry on that rom, that culture, we should carry on the yidaki [didgeridoo], and the bilma.

At first glance this raypirri appears to be a familiar and even predictable lament about change, loss, and cultural difference. However, through messages such as this, the elders actually compel their audience at multiple levels. In one sense, such recorded messages stress the importance of Yolngu song, dance, bilma, and yidaki as internationally recognized signs of Aboriginality. Metonymically these iconic features are Culture for Yolngu too. But there is more to this call to culture than this. Apart from their iconic value, the bilma and yidaki are invoked for the powerful effects that they constitute in the world as they are played and heard. From Ancestral times, Yolngu have used these instruments in ritual to make the world, to call into being aspects of clan country, and to signal each other and constitute relationships between clans and their ancestors. For contemporary audiences, metonymic resonances reverberate in the sounds produced by the instruments and into the remembering bodies of the Yolngu who have danced and sung to the ritual sound. The iconic elements of clan language, Ancestral story, bilma and yidaki that make up clan songs do not simply represent Yolngu Culture; they produce effects. Culture is perceived and accumulated in the bodies of the audience. In light of this it is easy to see why Yolngu are concerned about the cumulative, embodied effects of constant exposure to radio, cassette tape, video, and television. This is a processual view of culture; identity arises out of a becomingin-relation that is mediated by the senses. For Bangana, the technology itself is not necessarily the root of the problem; just as media can produce perceptual blockages leading to blindness or forgetting, so too it can be used to open eyes, ears, hearts, and minds. What the clan leaders are requesting is a collective social remembering; their concern is for a reproduction of a cultural sensibility that is under threat from the new beats and undisciplined dancing of rock ’n’ roll. Fearful that guitar music will eventually drown out the Ancestral call of the yidaki, Bangana sought to move with the times, by using a modern medium to reach the youth “in a Yolngu way.” Rather than understanding technology as a necessary evil—a mode of contemporary communication that demands a certain compliance with the representational imperatives embedded in the technology itself, as well

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as the productions of the dominant culture (as in Ginsburg’s Faustian contract model) —the elders and Bangana were concerned with the imaginative, perceptual relationships generated between the audience and the sounds and images.12 In figuring culture and identity as something that is produced in the chiasmic conjunction between the Ancestral and the perceptual subject, Bangana offered an understanding of subjectivity that was neither fixed or given but that had to be cultivated. In this formulation, Yolngu bodies are pervious to images and sounds since subjects are constituted in the world through perception. Moreover, different sights and sounds have different effects: audiences become different kinds of subjects depending on what they see and listen to. Thus Bangana is operating from an ontological position that understands that his audience will be actively (re)constituted as Yolngu as a result of exposure to the Ancestral via technology. In other words, the problems of media and culture are seen in terms of a somatically constituted subjectivity. Or, more precisely, they are understood as a matter of technologically mediated intersubjective somatic relations.  A Struggle of Sensoria

The phenomenologist and film theorist Vivian Sobchack describes her project as “a turn towards articulating not only another kind of bodily being, but also a healthy adult polymorphousness, a freedom of becoming” (1992, xv). In her analysis of film spectatorship, Sobchack is attentive to the “embodied experience of labor, alienation, engagement, and transformation I have every time I go to the movies —or elsewhere” (xv). This emphasis on the perceptual processes entailed in becoming-via-the-screen presents a different sense of the “active” media spectator and the imaginative processes that viewing entails. This expanded sense of the knowledges mediated by the screen (and, I would add, other kinds of media technologies) highlights the dynamic, sensuous, experiential dimensions of cinematic experience that neither psychoanalytic approaches to spectatorship nor models of media consumption that posit it as textual, as a form of reading, account for. However, where Sobchack embraces media’s potential to offer “a freedom of becoming,” Bangana was concerned with distinguishing and prioritizing different types of becoming. For Bangana, the production of culture and difference is located in moments of perception. In other words, he took up media making with the understanding that different kinds of media will produce different kinds of subjects.

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 Back to the Bilma

The “Yolnguness” that Bangana valued and privileged as the basis of identity was a particular sensibility; it is an orientation to the world produced by an exposure to Culture.13 What is at stake is perception as it matters ontologically, in a Heideggerian sense. For Bangana, the Ancestral provides the practical and conceptual basis of a foundational ontological relationship, premised on a constitutive intersubjective relation between subject, media, and the “alwaysness” of the Ancestral. Because, as I will describe in more detail in the following chapter, this mimetic becomingin-relation to the Ancestral is incremental and cumulative, these experiences lay down a foundation for being and relating that becomes stronger over time.14 Old people are far more closely identified with the Ancestral than children are because they have accumulated not only a discursive knowledge of the sacra and their stories but also a viscerally charged knowledge and identity that arises from a lifetime of active and embodied mimetic labor directed toward a becoming-in-relation to the Ancestral.15 The crucial difference between Heidegger’s understanding of technology, as explained in chapter 2, and Bangana’s own position is that Bangana understood that these Balanda technologies could be put to use to produce Yolngu experiences. Because he didn’t see the blindness and deafness as resulting from the nature of technology itself, he sought to make media that would reassert the primacy of the Ancestral by putting Yolngu sights and sounds on the airwaves. He envisaged forms of programming that wouldn’t only highlight and prioritize the relationship between the subject and the Ancestral—they would (re)produce it. Nor did Bangana see Balanda and Yolngu perspectives as necessarily mutually exclusive. He did not think in monoculturalist terms that would seek to separate or protect Yolngu from the impact of media. Rather, he confidently asserted that it was possible —and desirable —to be both modern and Yolngu. He claimed that as long as he knew “who I am and how I am connected to others,” he could be Yolngu, in the ways that he valued while also enjoying Western media. Drawing from his own lived experience, he asserted that it is possible to take up other forms of knowledge —and, in the process, other ways of being-in-the-world—without losing the primacy of the Ancestral as a source of a foundational orientation in the world. Yet there was an apparent contradiction at the heart of Bangana’s theory of Culture and becoming. On the one hand, he asserted that watching television and listening to the radio didn’t affect his Yolngu identity. Yet on the other, he seemed to have been suggesting that styles of being

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are determined by what one perceives. In order to “be” Yolngu one must have certain kinds of sensual exposure. Moreover, the assertion that media produce deafness and forgetting in the youth suggests that something quite profound is happening to Yolngu when they participate in this “everyday” kind of mediated experience. One could conclude that media then entail a becoming modern in the very terms that Heidegger describes, and hence that “being modern” is antithetical to “being Yolngu” in the terms described above. As I have said, from Bangana’s point of view, this was not necessarily the case. He claimed an ability to “see” the world in both a Balanda way and a Yolngu way. To stick with visual metaphors (even though it is critical to acknowledge that other senses also produce the same kinds of intersubjective, intercorporeal mediations), although Bangana talked specifically about the importance of looking at the world from a Yolngu perspective, his vision for culture was not bifurcated; rather it was bifocal. As I understood him, being modern for Bangana meant a kind of dual competency in the world—although he always insisted that it was the “Yolngu” experiences that provided his identity. It seems to me that he existed as a modern Yolngu by shifting between different ontological relationships to the world according to the circumstances; he seemed not only reconciled but relaxed about the idea of living in a world where two different kinds of ontological positions are available to subjects. The way he spoke about ways of seeing indicated that he could shift focus according to the circumstances. Although the everyday of today is undoubtedly more complex and even ontologically problematic than it was a hundred years ago, Bangana did not position the everyday in opposition to the Ancestral. Rather than denying or refusing a Balanda point of view, he knew that it was important to be able to look at certain things such as council work or Balanda television from within the cultural logics that shape them. Accordingly, Bangana did not seek to censor Yolngu viewing habits by enjoining Yolngu to turn off their TVs and VCRs, or to stop listening to Western music. Although compelled by a sense of impending loss, he did not rush around recording stories and songs before they were forgotten and gone. He did not plan to produce didactic teachings about an objectified culture. To him, “strengthening culture” was not a straightforward matter of making recordings of old peoples’ stories, ritual, or sacred objects to be kept in safe storage, tucked away for posterity. He did not seek to teach Yolngu culture by putting together instructional videos on dance or music. Rather, by taking up his media project Bangana sought to put this technology to an alternative cultural purpose. He sought to use these technologies to produce the kinds of effects and relations-in-the -world that

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had previously been generated through traditional cultural practices such as ritual: to promote and reinforce the Ancestral as the foundational orientation for being-in-the-world. In other words, it was the experience of Culture —the effects of sacred objects, places, songs, performances, and narratives —that he sought to reproduce in this new modality for communication and connection. As his work demonstrates, there is still more than one way of seeing available to Yolngu, despite being subject to more than three decades of exposure to film, video, and television. The Yolngu imagination has not been colonized to the extent that it only recognizes the media in the ways they are used by Balanda. Neither Balanda representations of Yolngu nor the more general Balanda understandings of media technologies have set the terms of Bangana’s engagement with struggles over culture. In Gapuwiyak, the chiasmic link between perception and culture that Merleau-Ponty (1968) and Heidegger demonstrated in their philosophical reflection is part of a cultural common sense. Yolngu Cultural praxis is premised on exactly this nexus. As I will describe, this cultural sensibility meant that Bangana recognized in the technologies a way of maintaining the primacy of the Ancestral and keeping the youth connected to Culture in a new “modern” way. The kind of modernity he envisaged was not doomed to the ontological reductions described by Heidegger. Instead he envisaged a technologically textured relationship with and through the Ancestral that provided a renewed and enlivened sense of being Yolngu as a lived relation-in-the-world. Thus Bangana and other Yolngu leaders confidently anticipated that the act of (re)exposing the youth to the sights and sounds of Culture (bilma, yidaki, wanga, and so forth) via the airwaves would produce powerful and even transformative effects, effects that would lead the audience, in Roy Wanapingu’s words, back to where they belong. Bangana often told me, “When people tune into my Culture shows they’ll connect straight away.”16 With comments such as these expressing a profound confidence in his plan to call the youth back to Culture, he was demonstrating an unqualified optimism that the sounds of the bilma and yidaki would unblock the ears of the youth and images of country and clans would reopen and reenchant their eyes to the constitutive place of the Ancestral in Yolngu life.  The Invisible Connections of Sight and Sound

Played and replayed throughout Gambali’s BRACS broadcasts, the sounds and images that Bangana recorded invisibly filled the airwaves of Gapuwiyak,

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emerging from speakers and screens, infusing the somatically receptive audience even as they sat back, relaxed, and enjoyed the shows. In the chapters to follow, I will describe how the choices that Yolngu make (when, indeed, they are given a choice) about the circumstances of recording, viewing, and circulation of technologically produced images and sounds reveal much about local cultural concerns and practices that, in turn, further challenge Western assumptions about what the camera and the tape recorder actually produce. As I develop my account of the role of perception, mimesis, and imagination in Yolngu cultural production, it will become clearer how the senses provide a crucial modality for mediating between inside and outside, subject and object, Ancestor and living kin. As I will describe, the senses are the source of a crucial receptivity to the world; they are the means by which we take in information from the outside and make it ours. Yet the senses are also the means by which subjects move beyond themselves, connecting with objects outside the body. In other words, the senses enable an invisible traversing of the space between subject and object; the senses let things into the body, even as they extend the corporeal field beyond the bounds of the skin. Vision links two otherwise separate things —the seer and the seen. Sound fills the spaces between something or someone making a sound and the ears of those who hear it, enveloping both in a perceptual field. Indeed, as I describe further in the final three chapters, the gentle insistence and cumulative impact of repeated broadcasts of the cultural material Bangana produced effected a form of a mimetic labor similar to that invoked in ritual practices where repetition simultaneously sediments embodied knowledge and reenlivens the mimetic spaces of the Ancestral Always.17 Perception, though, is also a matter of imagination and memory. These aspects also deeply inform Bangana’s Yolngu media project. Not only did he anticipate that Yolngu media recordings would reach, touch, connect, and infuse viewers with Culture in a somatic sense; Bangana also understood that his productions would stimulate Yolngu as active perceivers of Culture. He worked with the notion that once connected via the initial mimetic and somatic impact of the perceptual, the audience would undertake their own active processes of looking for the Ancestral— seeking further insight and connection through the imaginative processes stimulated by these powerful and constitutive mimetic encounters. As I will elaborate later, while Yolngu privilege the unmediated knowledge that comes through experience and exposure to country, sacra, and story, there is a corresponding imperative that requires subjects to actively undertake the cognitive work of understanding for themselves. What interests me most about this is the ways in which these experiences are made sense

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of by embodied and encultured subjects who use their imaginations and memory to sort, and synthesize, actively seeking deeper meanings in an aesthetically sensitive kind of meaning making that emphasizes the recognition of patterns and connections between seemingly disparate events and places. Again, such imagining and remembering are far more than mentalistic functions —they are embodied and social processes, generating a culturally specific experience of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality.

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On the “Mimetic Faculty” and the Refractions of Culture

In this chapter I take time out from my ethnographic narrative to establish what I mean by mimesis —the complex, elusive, and multivalent concept that propels my analysis. The mimetic imperatives that I encountered in Gapuwiyak have a cultural particularity that is crucial and defining. Consequently, rather than simply applying the ideas of Walter Benjamin and Michael Taussig—two seminal theorists of what has been called an “anthropological mimesis” (Gebauer and Wulf 1995, 269)—I take up their work and add my own emphasis. This enables me to develop and extend a sense of mimesis and its effects appropriate to my ethnographic context.  Between “Copy” and “Original”: Locating Mimesis

Derived from the Greek mimeisthai, to imitate (Marks 2000, 138), mimesis has been a central concept—and something of an enduring problem — in the history of Western theorizations of representation. Of course, the definition in the OED presents mimesis in a deceptively straightforward manner: (1) imitation of another person’s words or actions; (2) the representation of the real world in art, poetry, etc.; (3) the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change. The first two definitions nevertheless do convey one of the most essential facts, namely, that mimesis is concerned with the generation of likeness. The mimetic occurs when something is produced out of a direct, imitative reference to something else. It can take various forms, finding expression through visual art, writing and literature, and the body. For example, mimesis is at work when the artist uses the conjunction of eye, hand, paint, and brush to reproduce a landscape on canvas. The mimetic

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is manifest when a Yolngu woman ritually performs as the Ancestral white cockatoo, with a tight bend in her elbows and a rhythmic flapping movement from her shoulders. In each case, mimetic labor produces visible, material effects: a painting, a dance deliberately representing something else. Such an empirical grasp of mimesis, however, falls well short of apprehending the full significance of the concept. For the problem —and the potency—at the heart of the mimetic lies in the relationship that it generates between copy and original. What matters most about mimesis concerns how it is that the “copy” borrows from, usurps, and even exudes the potency of the “original.” These invisible effects of mimesis —the constitutive links between two (or more) things created by the act of generating a likeness —make it a much more complex issue than the words “imitation” or “copy” generally imply. In pre-Platonic Greece, mimesis was understood to have a magical efficacy: imitative actions produced a direct relationship between the performer and the animals or people they sought to recreate. However, since Plato, the thrall of this kind of “primitive mimesis” has been devalued by Western culture as cultish delusion. Although the nature of the relation between subject and copy has continued to inform discussions of representation, art, and aesthetics, these are generally premised on severing the ontological link produced by the mimetic relationship. As the philosopher Edward S. Casey summarizes, according to Platonic conceptions, “to be an image of something is to be some lesser thing, diminished both epistemologically and metaphysically in comparison with the original, of which it is a mere reflection” (1991, 208). In other words, according to logic that continues to underpin the rationalist attitude of contemporary Western culture, the copy is both distinct from and yet somewhat less real or true than the original. Representational practices, including painting and photography, are understood to be shadowy, if beguiling, imitations of the real world. No matter how precise or evocative the representation, the copy has been assigned an inferior status when considered in relation to the original or the real.1 However, while this reductive sense of mimesis remains the official epistemological position within Western cultural logics, the questions that mimesis raises regarding the nature of relationship between the copy and the original—and, more generally, the effects of mimicry, doubling, imitation, and representation —have continued to captivate philosophers, artists, literary theorists, and others over the centuries. As Gebauer and Wulf (1995) demonstrate in their comprehensive historical overview, mimesis is a concept with capricious tendencies. The mimetic has been manifest in varying guises within different eras and traditions of the dramatic, literary,

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and visual arts and has given rise to a number of discourses ranging across Western aesthetic, philosophical, and social thought.2 To try to pin mimesis down to a definitive definition is to miss the point—and the utility—of the concept.  Walter Benjamin and the “Mimetic Faculty”

In his brilliant and succinct essay “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1978), Benjamin describes humanity as sharing a propensity to produce and recognize similarities. The mimetic faculty, he argues, is a foundational mode of knowing and experiencing the world with a particular history. He writes, “[the] gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else” (333). In Benjamin’s view, although this faculty has been diminished throughout Western history, it nonetheless remains central to human experience, particularly, he argues, in the workings of language and writing, which represent a development of civilization that can be traced back to more archaic forms of imitative practice (334). This comparison between the perceptual world of the primitive and that of the modern provided a critical dynamic for the development of Benjamin’s thinking. 3 In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1968), Benjamin recast the issue of mimesis within the context of a technological modernity by focusing on the effects of mass reproduction of images in terms of the relationship between the “original” image and its photographic copies. Here the issue of mimesis is directly related to the questions regarding the nature of modernity. Identifying the “modern” as a historical moment in which a particular new kind of technology—namely, the camera— actually reconnects subjects and objects in age-old but nevertheless new kinds of sensual relationships, Benjamin sought to explore his own era in terms of a resurgence of the mimetic, identifying the ways that film technologies produced “a new schooling for our mimetic powers” (Buck-Morss 1991, 267).4 Benjamin’s work provides the basis for a sensual social philosophy of camera technologies and their effects —a way of exploring the uniquely powerful qualities of film, video, and television as a modality for knowing and connecting to the world. More generally, he apprehends the mimetic as a combination of sensuous and cognitive acuity that is foundational to the production of knowledge and relationships with others and the world. His work expands an appreciation of mimesis beyond the empirical and

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material aspects involved in producing a likeness of something, pointing to far more complex—and socially significant—mimetic effects. Although his discussion of the development of this “faculty” is based upon certain primitivist assumptions, I have found it enormously useful and take up his work for the purpose of developing an appreciation of a mimetic faculty with an alternative history and cultural basis.  Anthropology and Michael Taussig’s “Magic” of Mimesis

Early anthropologists often found themselves in sites where the mimetic held a central place in cultural production, as evidenced by magical effigies and rituals that derived power from their apparent mimicry of the natural world. Accounts by anthropologists such as E. B. Tylor (1871) and J. G. Frazer (1890), written with widened eyes and arched eyebrows, ultimately render this so -called primitive mimesis as a fascinating yet deluded form of functionalism. Beliefs in the magical efficacy of the mimetic proved difficult for anthropologists to adequately translate, no matter how sympathetic the ethnographic portraits. To the modern eye, a propensity to interpret the world in terms of what Benjamin (1978, 334) called “nonsensuous similarity”—finding correspondences and meaning in the shape of a cloud or the configurations of the stars —appear as evidence of a critical lack of acuity; a way of thinking that impedes a “modern,” rational relationship to the world and its objects. Taussig’s seminal work Mimesis and Alterity (1993) represents a radical shift in the anthropology of mimesis. Drawing extensively from Benjamin, Taussig reenlivens the concept for the discipline, producing a highly original account of the intercultural dynamics of power, perception, imitation, and imagination. Taussig’s idiosyncratic take on mimesis insists that there is a certain magic to mimesis; and, as his analysis demonstrates, this is a magic that appeals to a poststructural imagination. Taussig takes off from Benjamin’s observation that, as he puts it, “[t]he ability to mime, and mime well [ . . . ] is the capacity to Other” (1993, 19). This sense of the primacy of alterity in the mimetic encounter is central to Taussig’s project. Alterity provides the crucial counterweight in the mimetic encounters he describes: likeness needs difference to push against and recoil from; the self becomes through the encounter with an other; difference arises via the production of the similar. Applied as a social theory, this sense of mimesis as a backward and forward movement driven by the desire to become close by copying simultaneously undoes and reconfigures the distinc-

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tion between self and other, colonizer and colonized, modern and primitive by emphasizing the relationships mediated through a mimetic dynamics of sameness and difference. Ultimately, though, in Taussig’s terms, mimesis maintains a separation or distinction between subject and object, no matter how close they become. This last point is perhaps the central, driving theme in Taussig’s mimetic project. While he identifies the act of copying as a means of getting close to the original (driven by the urge to become like, to become other), the distance between the original and the copy nevertheless remains intact (21). As he insists, mimesis produces difference because of the inevitable failures of likeness inherent in the act of copying. Mimesis does not efface alterity; it reveals it. 5 Taussig’s mimesis is a model of movement, possibility, and subversion. Released from a classical hierarchy of authenticity derived from the privileging of the original or the real, the copy assumes a power and a position derived by virtue of not being like the original. The gaps and slippages that open up between the copy and the original become the source of a certain freedom and instability. The endless versions of disjuncture, dissonance, and not-quite-likeness that the mimetic encounter produces bring a new dynamic to questions of power, oppression, and resistance. The bi-directional and transformative spaces of mimesis ensure an ever-shifting social space constituted through the embodied, aestheticized, and sensual play of sameness and difference through which alternative identities and new forms of knowledge emerge.6  Shifting Mimetic Focus: From Alterity to Similitude

My readings of Benjamin and Taussig have generated further processes of difference and differentiation. Their ideas enabled me to recognize —and name —something central to imperatives at the heart of Bangana’s project. Yet as much as these scholars have inspired my own work, neither offers a theory of mimesis that is completely applicable to my purposes. My work in Gapuwiyak indicates that there is more than one kind of mimetic effect, and there is more than one kind of possibility for a mimetic relationship between cultures. As I will describe, Yolngu use mimesis to generate kinds of understandings, experiences, and identifications that differ markedly from those described by Taussig. To put it somewhat crudely, Yolngu seem to do mimesis differently from Taussig’s Cuna. Where both Benjamin and Taussig bring a particular emphasis to the role of otherness or alterity in the mimetic encounter, Yolngu are more interested in the transformations and connections enabled by the (re)production of similitude and sameness.

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But how to think about a Yolngu mimetics without falling back into the realm of the “primitive” and the “magical”?7 What if mimesis can — does —produce sameness (but without obliterating difference)? What would it take to understand what Yolngu mean when they tell me that certain kinds of practices make something, or someone, not simply like but the same as something else?  An Ontological Mimesis

Mimetic propensities —and the “magical” beliefs associated with them — have been extensively reported in the literature on Aboriginal cultures. Indeed, Yolngu seem to exhibit exactly the kinds of aptitudes that Benjamin said epitomized the “archaic origins” of the mimetic faculty. That Yolngu cultural life is deeply attuned to the constitutive power of similarities is made obvious by ritual forms in which dancers reenact Ancestral events and creative Beings. This performative and easy to identify mimesis is only one aspect of a cultural concern with the production and recognition of similarities that extends, often less obviously, into many aspects of life. The starting point for thinking through this form of mimesis and its privileging of similitude and sameness requires acknowledging that for Yolngu the essence of the social lies in intersubjectivity, not within the self. Theirs is a culture intensely concerned with relatedness. 8 Yolngu use mimesis to bind together diverse subjects in webs of relationships laid down by the Ancestral. The production and recognition of visible similitude is used by Yolngu to efface the everyday differences that separate them from the Ancestral and each other, thereby affirming an essential connectedness.9 In other words, in this cultural context mimesis is ontological. It produces a kind of intersubjective glue that binds individuals, clans, and even cultures in inclusionary and incorporative relationships of mutuality that mediate across the divisions and distinctions of difference. As the important Yolngu term dhudak’thun (translated by Zorc [1986] as “to act, pretend, imitate, follow, learn”) indicates, there is certainly a profound sense in which by acting like something or someone else, Yolngu understand themselves to become like the thing or person. Yet I would argue that this kind of mimetic action concerns far more than mere imitation. As Keen and many other ethnographers attest, for Yolngu, ritual performance produces effects that exceed the representational (1994, 135). Tamisari (1998, 260–66), for instance, describes how walking in “the footsteps of the ancestors” is more than a metaphor for continuity across

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the generations. There is a powerful significance attributed to the productivity of embodied action in reproducing, making visible, and reaffirming relations between people and place across time and space. Equally, there is a keen sense of the perceptual processes that inform the ways in which one comes to see, know, and affirm connectedness by recognizing the marks or djalkari (footprints) left behind by Ancestral Beings from their journeys across country. Yolngu do not perceive likeness as a guise. Nor is the copy inherently less than the original. Rather, mimesis works to diminish and eventually dispense with any ontological distinction between the original (the Ancestral) and the copy (the dancer imitating an original act). In other words, rather than apprehending mimesis as “the art of becoming someone else, becoming Other” (Taussig 1993, 36), Yolngu ontological priorities accord to mimesis an effect of a sensuously mediated becoming-in-relation that makes them more like who they understand themselves to really be: a subject integral to and integrated in and by the Ancestral Always. Crucially, this mimetic production of sameness does not entail the obliteration of difference; difference matters in terms of levels of differentiation between groups as a crucial aspect of cultural life and ritual participation, even as groups work together to reinforce their unity. From a Yolngu point of view, sameness not only tolerates the copresence of difference; it is intrinsic to it—as the seemingly oxymoronic Yolngu expression “same but different” insists. The matter of factness with which Yolngu express this apparently contradictory statement clearly announces that difference matters here too, but in a distinctively different way than it does for theorists like Taussig. In short, Yolngu cultural logics are not oppositional; the dynamic between self and other is not hinged on a binary, either/or dialectic of sameness and alterity. Like yin and yang, sameness and difference coexist and are corollaries not oppositions. Hence, just as sameness does not reduce everyone to an indivisible, amorphous mob, an assertion of difference does not entail a complete and irrevocable separateness between individuals, groups, or even cultures.  A Transformative Space of Betweenness

Another way to think about the effects of mimesis is in terms of “betweenness.” Yolngu explicitly conceptualize ritual production in terms of hinges and linkages that forge connections between the participants in ceremonies and the Ancestral. (The term likan literally means “elbow,” but also refers

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to a fork in a tree where branch joins trunk or a bay between two promontories. It is also the word for the “power names” for sacred sites and clan groups used in ritual to bring an Ancestral authority and charge to proceedings.10 Similarly, likan designs and paintings are used to produce a connectedness with other groups and the Ancestral.)11 The double movement provided by the dynamic backward and forward referencing between the visible, evident, and outside and the invisible, inside realm of the Ancestral opens up a mimetically charged space between subject and Ancestral. Although she does not refer to this as mimesis, in “The Meaning of the Steps Is in Between” (2000), Tamisari explicitly points to the primacy and productivity of such spaces in Yolngu ritual. Emphasizing the role of performance in opening up an intersubjective, intercorporeal space between dancers, audience, and the Ancestral, she describes how dance produces particular kinds of embodied affectively and politically positioned knowledges. This notion of actively creating linkages that forge connections across a dynamic and transformative space of betweenness provides a means by which to conceptualize the Ancestral as in an invisible state of relatedness that is infused and empowered by the transformative potency of mimetic production. Biddle (2001) has also identified this kind of space of betweenness and the centrality of a bidirectional relationship in the context of Warlpiri body painting. In her analysis of the actions of painting the ancestral signs on Warlpiri women’s bodies, Biddle develops a Derridean, phenomenologically inspired notion of trace, reinscription, and corporeality. Although in this instance she does not use mimesis as an overt conceptual tool, she puts her finger (via Warlpiri fingers dipped in ochre) on what seems to me to be the crux of the matter in relation to Yolngu (and Warlpiri?) mimetic concerns. Taking up the notion of the trace, she gives a sense of the constant and productive movement of referencing and reinscribing the Ancestral. In comparison to most analyses of Aboriginal art, which approach paintings as static representational objects from which meanings can simply be decoded, Biddle attends to the actions of the brush or finger in creating them and thus highlights the ways that these actions are complex transformative practices for Warlpiri. To paraphrase Biddle, painting produces effects that open up the spaces of the intersubjective and intercorporeal. In other words, Warlpiri women’s body painting is premised on “a certain bridging possibility” (2001, 186). While she concentrates on the corporeal boundaries of culture, her analysis is suggestive of the broader cultural imperatives and practices that effect a closing of the gap between Aboriginal subject and Ancestral.12

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 Toward a Yolngu Sensibility

Many ethnographers have discussed the Aboriginal tendency to seek out knowledge that is invisible, using visible evidence located in the landscape or in ritual performance to discern deeper and more important meanings.13 And, as I discuss above, anthropologists are increasingly exploring the complex and culturally crucial phenomenological effects of ritual performance in terms of generating experiences of intersubjective identification. My contention is that both the performative aspects of mimetic ritual and the tendency to seek out visible signs of the Ancestral are evidence of an overarching and structuring cultural sensibility that turns on the production and recognition of similitude as an ontological imperative. Yolngu seek out and (re)produce similitude as means of affirming the existence of an underlying and preexisting state of being-in-relation to and through the Ancestral. This kind of mimesis is part of an active process of production and recognition; effective mimesis —both for the producer and the viewer —requires skills that must be learned and practiced, rather than being an innate and universal human capacity (as suggested by Benjamin). The implications of conceptualizing Yolngu cultural production in such terms are far-reaching. A theory of mimesis attuned to the specificities of contemporary Yolngu imaginations can reveal much about many facets of life in Gapuwiyak, not only the use of media. In the chapters that follow, the dense and abstracted arguments of this chapter will be made concrete. I will describe the ways that mimetic sensibilities infuse Yolngu cultural practices beyond the ceremony grounds and explore the kinds of sensuous, perceptual, and bidirectional connections generated by making videos, watching television, and taking photographs. In the process I will reveal how the complex and intertwined issues surrounding mimesis, technology, culture, and modernity have taken on a particular urgency in northeast Arnhem Land in recent years. For, as I will describe, the technological possibilities of a mimetically mediated modernity make a particular kind of sense —and create particular kinds of demands —for Yolngu in Gapuwiyak.

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Taking Pictures: Media Technologies and a Yolngu Politics of Presencing

Taking photographs or shooting video often produces conflict and misunderstanding in remote Aboriginal communities. Despite requirements that film crews and photographers consult with local representatives before gaining permission to film, the enforcement of restrictions regarding the photography of sacred objects or sites, and an increasing willingness on the part of most Balanda to respect Yolngu cultural policies in regard to such matters, tensions may still arise. Underlying these conflicts —which, as I will describe, may often go unrecognized by the crews themselves —are very different assumptions about the efficacies of the camera and the imagery produced.1 In this chapter I explore the ways in which Yolngu have come to understand the camera, and other mimetic recording devices, as a potentially problematic and powerfully productive means of generating intercultural relations. 2 I also want to show that the issues raised when Balanda photograph Yolngu or their country cannot be grasped, at least not in any straightforward way, through a postcolonial politics of representation. Yolngu have their own reasons for posing for the camera, or for refusing to allow themselves to be photographed.  Taking Pictures

Bangana’s grandmother sits on a cotton sheet spread across the ground. Legs tucked under her body, hands folded in her lap, she squints into the distance, attempting to ignore the leering presence of the camera pointing toward her. The glare of the midafternoon sun casts a hot sheen on her dark skin, highlighting her features for the lens. A bead of sweat finds its path down her neck and under the sleeveless shift before she wipes it

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away with the back of her hand. Several meters away, oblivious to the old woman’s discomfort—head down, eye to the viewfinder, pale knees resting in the dirt—the man from Sydney adjusts the tripod and checks the video equipment. Here to record Aboriginal Dreaming stories, 3 this non-Aboriginal film producer was working with indigenous animators to produce a series of five -minute animations for national broadcast on ABC television. These videos were also to be sold to schools, with supporting documentation about the storytellers, packaged as educational kits. Promoting his project as one concerned with preserving indigenous cultures and advancing intercultural understandings, the filmmaker had traveled extensively across the continent in pursuit of suitable stories, already into a third series.4 This was the man from Sydney’s first trip to Arnhem Land, a place with a particular allure in the national imaginary as “remote” and “cultural.” He had flown the several thousand kilometers to Gapuwiyak after Bangana had located a handful of people interested in having their stories animated for television. (Although it seemed to me that the payment of $500 had more appeal for them than any notion of strengthening culture, there was nonetheless considerable interest in the project and its outcomes.) Enthusiastic and energetic, he became visibly delighted upon meeting Bangana’s grandmother, Shirley Gunumungu. She was, in his words, “the most traditional person yet” to be involved with the series. A slight woman with a formidable temper, Shirley looks older than her sixty-some years. She speaks rudimentary English and relies on Bangana and other younger relatives to mediate in situations involving Balanda. This lack of English (she speaks five local languages) marks her as part of a generation who grew up in the bush living the life of hunter gatherers, prior to the arrival of the missionaries and their settlements. Shirley is widely known for the depth of her knowledge of her Ancestral sites and their associated sacred stories. She’d lived for many years in Gapuwiyak, caring for various great-grandchildren in a rusting steelpaneled house next to Bangana’s place. It was at Bangana’s suggestion that Shirley provided her story for the project. The story, set in her clan country to the southeast of Gapuwiyak, concerns a boy whose greedy refusal to share his fishing catch results in his transformation into a sea eagle. Shirley can recall being told the story in her childhood and has often told it to her grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. Hence, as Bangana announced proudly, this story came “straight from the horse’s mouth,” using a Balanda expression to emphasize the authority and oral traditions that Shirley embodied from his own increasingly reflexive point of view.

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At the time of videoing, the producer from Sydney already had a version of the story written in English because Bangana and I had transcribed and translated it prior to his arrival. There was no need to have flown all the way from Sydney just for that; the real point of the trip was to collect visual material for promotion purposes. For this, Shirley had to tell her story again, this time for the camera. And then she was to be interviewed for the educational video. Overall, it seemed to me that other participants did not perceive the producer’s requests as unduly demanding. And although I saw the interview process sometimes irritate some of the other Yolngu storytellers, they mostly went along with his requests with patience and graciousness. (I found the questions he put to Yolngu to be leading and patronizing, revealing of unexamined preconceptions and marketing agendas: “Tell me how this animation process will help to strengthen your culture. Why will it be good for your children to see this story on television?” And so forth.) But Shirley was worried, and for different reasons. Initially willing to cooperate, even enthusiastic about the idea of her story being broadcast across the country, she began to complain that she’d had enough. As the producer set up his equipment, she spoke quietly and insistently to Bangana, asking repeatedly why this filming was necessary. Shirley’s reluctance placed Bangana in an awkward position. As a paid cultural advisor to the project, he had undertaken to provide the visitor with the necessary materials for his productions. Bangana could see why he wanted the footage: he understood how the visuals of an old woman, sitting on the ground and speaking a local language, would present a vision of cultural authenticity to the Balanda imagination. Yet he also knew that for Shirley, as a woman of knowledge, it was actually culturally appropriate for her not to push herself forward in these ways. 5 Attempting to explain how the images would be used to promote her story in new ways, he told her, as he later told me, that the video footage was “for Ngapaki (Balanda) reasons only. When your story or documentary is put out, your photo must be there so they know who you are.” With Shirley less than convinced, they continued to discuss the matter. Bangana specifically warned the producer not to turn on the camera. Head down, looking through the lens, he replied with an easy, “Yeah, mate. No worries.” Yet, only seconds later, Bangana looked toward the camera again, repeating his instruction to refrain from shooting until they were ready. I reconstruct the exchange that followed for its telling detail: producer: I’m not filming; I’m just setting up. bangana: Then what’s the bloody red light on for? Turn it off.

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producer: Sorry mate. Just testing the camera. bangana: Turn it off. I asked you not to shoot yet. You think I’m just some stupid Blackfella? Shrugging off the accusation, the visitor said that he was just trying to get some footage of Shirley before she became self-conscious. (He could not have anticipated the striking self-confidence that I noted every time I had witnessed Yolngu telling their “traditional” stories for the camera.) Yet despite Bangana’s stern injunction, only minutes later the camera was again turned on. And, once again, Bangana caught him out. As Shirley’s suspicions and bad mood were amplified by Bangana’s growing hostility, I sat silent and guilty for my part in organizing the visit and taking advantage of the situation for its research potential. Soon the old woman’s expression had set into a snarl. Although the interview eventually went ahead, it was largely unusable —Shirley’s lack of enthusiasm for this “culture project” all too evident when the footage was replayed.6 Afterward, over a cup of tea in the BRACS, Bangana expressed his frustrations to me. He felt that the visitor’s lack of respect had exacerbated existing, underlying tensions. Shirley, as he told me, didn’t like to be photographed. But her disinclination to be videoed, he said, was not a straightforward matter of being camera-shy. She was “suspicious of cameras,” and in situations such as these, where she did agree to be filmed, one photograph (or, in this case, one video take) should be enough. When I pressed for further explanation, he spoke with a measure of reluctance: “She feels sometimes that dhurrwara [lots of ] photos is losing her, [taking away] who she is.”  “Soul Stealing” and Other Technological Appropriations

This comment puts a spin on what might otherwise be a disturbingly familiar tale of the camera and representational imperialisms. Shirley’s concerns about the camera “taking something of herself” ups the ante in any consideration of what is at stake in a struggle to control technological images and image taking. There’s something going on here that cannot be adequately explained in terms of a politics of representation, at least not in the way this concept is usually applied. Clearly, Shirley experiences the camera as an imposition and intrusion in ways that exceed now-familiar postcolonial critiques of what is at stake in taking a photographic image in such circumstances. As Shirley’s remarks indicate, she is worried about something other than the impositions of Balanda representational frames

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and determining logics (although, certainly, there is an element of this going on in the way she is being set up as an authentic example of Indigenous Culture). Indeed, at one level, this is a clear-cut instance of the camera as a technology of appropriation. When Balanda take their images, Yolngu lose control of their likenesses and the circumstances in which they are displayed and distributed. The subject’s visage is transformed into spectacle —a potential commodity in a Balanda economy of imagery and objects in which markers of tradition, authenticity, and Culture have a particular currency, as James Clifford (1988) has so eloquently argued in relation to the collecting of so-called primitive art.7 Yet the terms in which Shirley expressed her misgivings require a rethinking of the tropes of photographic capture as they might apply in Gapuwiyak. The question that arises now is how to attend to her concerns without catapulting Shirley back into yet another all too familiar narrative of the camera and the indigene. It is difficult to ignore the way in which Shirley’s comment appears as another rendition of that foundational trope of modernity: a good old-fashioned case of “soul stealing” by technology. And, as such, it has profoundly primitivist resonances. Bangana’s explanation of Shirley’s concerns brings to mind movie scenes where the natives flee in terror when exposed to the magic of the camera or audio recorder— a scene reenacted in countless Hollywood renditions.8 A mythic moment for the West, such scenes confirm the culture’s status as modern through its possession of these “magical” technologies while simultaneously demonstrating its superior, that is, nonmagical grasp of the “real.” From this perspective, Shirley’s statement becomes evidence of her technological ignorance; it identifies her as a “primitive.” However, this was the late twentieth century. Shirley was hardly unfamiliar with these technologies. She seemed neither dazzled nor overwhelmed by this form of Balanda “magic.” Indeed, she had been photographed and videoed many times in the past; she watched videos and television regularly, although she had difficulty following the narratives —at least in the terms intended by the screenwriter. (She had a tendency to berate the good guys or heroes of movies because she perceived them as being the most irresponsibly violent figures in the action genres she watched with her grandchildren.) Yet a familiarity with various aspects of video and photographic technologies does not necessarily lead to a more comfortable relationship with the camera or give rise to any desire to pose for it. Having given reluctant permission to be videoed, Shirley still, obviously, felt exposed—overexposed—by the ordeal. As I will argue, the cause of Shirley’s discomfort cannot be adequately understood without considering the intertwined political and ontological

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issues raised by the mimetic aspects of camera technologies. Closer attention needs to be paid to the nature of the filmic encounter—what is given and what is taken in such transactions —and to the magical efficacies of the camera that the primitivist story of native misrecognitions belittles and obscures.  Eric Michaels’s Photographic Protocols

Eric Michaels’s essay “A Primer of Restrictions on Picture -Taking in Traditional Areas of Aboriginal Australia” (1994, 1–17) almost provides a precursor to my argument. Although he alludes to historical references to Central Australian Aboriginal people encountering photography with reactions ranging from suspicion to pleasure, he chooses to avoid the “magical thinking” evident in some of these reports and to instead analyze the issues of photography in terms that are recognizable cross-culturally.9 He states: “One could pursue at length the ethnographic significance of people’s fear of cameras and accusations of spirit theft. Or one might simply admit that there is a certain sense to the proposition that using someone else’s image, property, or life as a subject to be recorded, reproduced, and distributed is a kind of appropriation” (2). While explicitly avoiding laying down any hard and fast rules about Aboriginal media, Michaels nonetheless emphasizes that the camera and other recording technologies present challenges to Aboriginal traditional culture. He recognizes that these challenges are being negotiated, avoided, and resolved in various ways according to the situations and the perspectives of the Aboriginal peoples involved. Concerned to protect Warlpiri from unwelcome photographic intrusions, Michaels (3) identified various scenarios likely to cause them distress: • • • •

secret or restricted materials such as song, dance, objects reference by name or image to a deceased person fights and ceremonies (this constitutes an invasion of privacy) negative or exoticizing representations and narratives

Although Michaels goes on to explain in some detail why such transgressions are of particular concern to Warlpiri, his analysis basically offers one overarching explanation: an unwanted act of photography is a moral offense. This argument is then given a cultural dimension with the explanation that the right to control the circumstances and contexts of image making is of central importance in Aboriginal cultural contexts.

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As Michaels describes, Aboriginal people seek to carefully control the circulation of images and information in all kinds of circumstances. The act of asking and receiving permission is an integral part of complex cultural protocols that govern many aspects of Aboriginal cultural life, including access to country and resources.10 These permissions are granted between groups with specific and preexisting ties, within a wider context of the production and maintenance of precise and profound local relationships. In short, Michaels refigures what might have been a recounting of native superstitions into an argument about the politics and ethics of representation. As he summarizes, “what is being protected here is the right and authority of particular people, usually elders, to uphold the culture and its values, their right to make the determinations regarding new situations cannot be undermined” (262, my emphasis). However, by sidestepping the potentially primitivistic issue of “soul stealing,” Michaels misses a critical point. From his analysis one might reasonably conclude that in the context of both Warlpiri and Yolngu societies, photographs must be given rather than taken.11 But leaving the analysis at this level is to miss the fact that something else, something more is produced and transacted—“given” and “taken”—through the act of photography, videoing, or audio recording. In short, Michaels fails to register the technological and mimetic dimensions of the encounter.12  Photographic Presencing

As I have discussed in the introduction, it is the camera’s capacity to render exact likenesses of its subject that marks photography as a unique — and modern —form of representational practice. In his history of Western responses to the camera, Visions of Modernity, Scott McQuire asserts that “whether the image is photographic, cinematic, or televisual, belief in a mimetic power beyond all previous jurisdiction constitutes the camera’s codex” (1998, 13). This ability to produce images of mimetic exactitude unparalleled by previous representational practice had profound and somewhat unexpected effects on Western culture. As McQuire shows, the camera’s celebrated capacity as an “empirical eye” played a crucial role in the epiphany of positivism at the end of the nineteenth century. Yet little more than a century later it is deeply implicated in the breakdown of Western culture’s epistemological and ontological certainties. Any history of the relationship between the camera and the Western cultural imaginary must take into account a vast, complex, and theoretically diverse literature. The use of the camera has evolved into a number

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of different forms such as photography, film, video, television —each of these forms having distinct phenomenological qualities and each generating its own history of philosophical and theoretical discussion. For my purposes, however, I am interested in drawing on McQuire’s most general yet crucial point, namely, that the source of the camera’s unique powers lies in its mimetic capacity. As I will show, a notion of technological mimesis provides an essential conceptual framework with which to explore the ways that the Yolngu imaginary has incorporated photography, video, film, and even audio recordings into local cultural logics. As modern subjects living in a media-saturated lifeworld, we have all experienced how these technologies can blur the boundaries between the real and the represented; we know the range of emotions, thoughts, and memories that are stirred as we identify with the world and others via images made of celluloid and magnetic tape.13 As McQuire describes, the camera generates a compelling sense that there is an “invisible umbilicus joining image and referent, the link which commands, often beyond reason” (15). Thus, although according to official Western epistemologies the photograph or filmic image is not the same as what it images, the mimetic power of these representational forms has nonetheless led to a contradictory and vacillating quality in Western accounts of the camera and its productivities. In order to recognize Shirley’s concerns as indicative of something more significant than primitive misrecognition, I want to move beyond everyday cultural orthodoxies that define and delimit the photographic as a mode of representation and to discuss phenomenological appreciations of the effects that these technologies generate. This phenomenological literature explores the photographic in terms of a presencing. As phenomenologically inclined film theorists and philosophers have described, these technologies “represence” their subjects in ways that challenge Western representational theory. André Bazin writes, “The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space.”(1967, 13–14). Contemporary theorists of film such as Casey, Marks, and Sobchack explore the experiential dimensions of the filmic. These thinkers understand that media technologies have effected a change in cultural sensibilities and seek to account for the sensual, productive, and mimetic knowledges that these technologies can generate. They demonstrate the ways such technologies, particularly film, have produced a new kind of subjective relationship with the world, transforming subject-object distinctions that

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have long underpinned Western cultural logics. They describe how, by producing an exact, technological reproduction of likeness, mimetic technologies capture an essence of what is imaged that produces a different sense of the relationship between image and imaged. It is this that I mean by “presencing”—the sense in which so- called representation re-presents in material, tangible terms what it purports to simply copy. As Benjamin (1968, 234) describes, film technologies mediate an encounter with the world that has profound ontological and cognitive implications for modern subjects. They allow a new mimetically mediated relation between the world and the self, which opens up new grounds for modern subjectivity (and, for Benjamin, the possibility of a new kind of political awakening for the mass audiences of these representational forms). Perhaps this is one reason why those clichéd “soul stealing” Hollywood scenes play back so pleasurably to Western audiences in that they refer to a relationship between image and referent that is rationally impossible, yet nonetheless recognizable. Marks writes: “Ultimately I argue that our experience of cinema is mimetic, or an experience of bodily similarity to the audiovisual images we take in. Cinema is not merely a transmitter of signs; it bears witness to an object and transfers the presence of that object to viewers” (2000, xvii). In this approach there is an analytic emphasis on the way that cinema enframes and reproduces a knowledge of the world that undoes the strict subjectobject distinctions that characterize modern life. The mimetic powers of these technologies produce a relationship between the subject, image, and referent that some theorists have sought to claim as, quite simply, modern magic.14  Photography, Mimesis, and the Dangers of Excess

In this literature, I find recognition of the kinds of ontological issues that compel traditional Yolngu cultural production and ritual practice. As I describe in the introduction, the invisible relationship between the subject and object generated by mimesis provides a crucial and defining dynamic for the Yolngu cultural imaginary. Mimesis produces a constitutive relationship between objects, people, and places the effects of which extend beyond copying, beyond the mere production of likeness, to something more akin to an ontological sameness. As such, Yolngu understand mimesis to produce particularly powerful kinds of effects, dangers, and difficulties. In light of the central place of mimesis in the Yolngu imagination, it is not surprising that Yolngu have recognized the camera as a potent, even

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dangerous, mimetic technology. The words used for “photograph” in Yolngu dialects indicate how the technology has been incorporated with a particular ontological charge: wungili translates as “visible projection of oneself; shadow; reflections, image, picture; replacement, photo; movie, cinema; soul, spirit, ghost” (Zorc 1996, 269); mali as a “shadow; photo; soul” (168). These definitions and synonyms suggest that for Yolngu, the invisible connection between a subject and his or her photograph is accorded an ontological primacy that results in photography being incorporated into Yolngu understandings as producing an extracorporeal extension of the subject. In other words, in the clicking of the camera shutter, or the whirling of the video recorder, mimetic labor is being undertaken. When Bangana explained that “from a Yolngu point of view” any recording of Shirley’s image or voice was really the same as her, he was indicating that, from her perspective, just as in ritual the mimetic labor of dance or song enables the subject to become the “same as” the Ancestor, the mimetic labor of the camera produces the effect of ontologically linking subject and image. Thus, when Shirley complained that she was losing something of herself through photography, she was referring to her presence being literally depleted by the camera. Yet her concerns were not simply for herself in this regard. The effects of this ontological depletion extend beyond the original subject and the visible image. Just as in ritual where the mimetic labor opens the subject out into a web of relatedness with the Ancestral, the mimetic labor of the camera also presences more than simply Shirley’s visage. As Bangana explained it, “I can take a photo of mari [grandmother] and then I can take a photo of her gamununggu [secret/sacred clan designs], side by side . . . And I can tell you, ‘If you want to take a photo of mari, you take a photo of this. That is her. It’s a painting but it is still mari.’” In other words, the production of sameness between subject and image is not the end point in the mimetic equation. Where the camera has raised questions about the relationship between the “real” and the “represented” in Western culture, for Yolngu the ontological issues raised by the camera are even more profound. In Gapuwiyak the mimetic effects of photography extend beyond a represencing of Shirley’s face: taking her picture is to take something from her clan and country. These issues are particularly crucial in this case because, as an old woman who has undertaken the mimetic labor of a lifetime through ritual participation (with the concomitant acquisition of inside or restricted knowledge about the meanings of these rites), Shirley is acknowledged to be closer to the Ancestral realm than younger Yolngu. The cumulative effects of ritual knowledge and experience make these ontological relationships stronger; she is seen to

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be more powerfully the “same” as her sacra and country than a younger clan member. Hence her photographs carry a particularly potent mimetic charge making them more significant and potentially more dangerous. Thus for Shirley the camera is significant not only for its “power to lay bare the realities,” as Bazin (1967, 15) would have it, but for its ability to produce an image that mimetically both represents and represences an Ancestrally charged relationship. Or, as Gadamer would say, the image “shares in the being” of what it presents to the viewer, and in the process, being is “augmented.” In his view, the being of an image is “not absolutely different from what it presents, but shares in the being of the latter. . . . The difference between an image and a sign has an ontological basis. The image does not disappear behind its pointing function but, in its own being, shares in what it presents.”15 For Shirley there is no question that the camera produces something: something new, something more, something constitutive. Like the mimetic labor of painting, dance, and song (I return to these issues of mimetic production in the final three chapters), the camera generates a mimetic charge that amplifies the relationship between the subject and the image that moves both closer toward a state of being-in-relation to the Ancestral. There is a sense in which life spirit is somehow concentrated by the mimetic act, resulting in something more potent and potentially dangerous.16 The kind of material sharing in the “original” that Taussig (1993, 36) claims occurs in mimetic production of a “copy” is here profoundly appreciated. By producing an invisible umbilicus that stretches out into a web of connections, this technological mimesis reproduces and represences connections laid down by Ancestral Beings. Yolngu understand these connections as an immanent and invisible web that holds together the Yolngu world; it is these connections that must be made visible and brought to the surface through the work of mimesis. In recognizing Shirley’s image as ontologically the same as her sacra, her country, and her Ancestors, the implications of the uncontrollable circumstances of reproduction and circulation of photographic images can be grasped more fully. It is the way in which mimesis produces relationships of sameness between things, people, and places —things that are otherwise not sensuously similar —that makes the mimetic charge of the camera particularly potent for Yolngu. It is because the mimetic labor of photography has been understood and conceptually incorporated by Yolngu such as Shirley as something akin to Yolngu painting, dance, and song that it produces ontological uncertainties and difficulties as well as powerful efficacies. Returning to Michaels, who described the sacra as “the most im-

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portant personal property owned by Aborigines,” we can now see how the appropriation of these by unauthorized people is a form of theft and “compromises not only the individual owner but the sacred realm as a whole” (1994, 5, my emphasis). A single snapshot, especially of an old person or a deceased person, presents ambiguous if not dangerous outcomes for its subject(s) and others connected to it/them through kinship, ritual, and country. And even if a photograph or video is authorized, this does not make for a bounded or unproblematic transaction. The consequences are long lasting because the presence inheres in the recording, leaving room for potential mishap or abuse in the future. Each photo session is thus open to various interpretations according to the context, the relationships between the photographer and the photographed, and the eventual possessor of the photograph. Permission to photograph will depend on the circumstances of the filming, what is filmed, and how the country itself is supported in other ways, for instance, by ceremonial life or through regular visits by landowners. Shirley’s anxieties arise from an understanding of the productive potentialities and trajectories of photographic images, and the issues of control, responsibility, and mimetic excess that occur in relation to them. Unlike painting (which in traditional circumstances was either controlled by restricted access to viewing or was smudged before public viewing to diminish its power) and ritual dance or song, photographs and video have a clarity (i.e., cannot be smudged or obscured), longevity, and portability that potentially make them more difficult to manage. Yolngu like Shirley are placed in a difficult position because, although they must act in ways that preserve and protect the sacra and country that these seemingly innocent snapshots mimetically presence, they cannot always control who sees, owns, and disseminates those same images.17 As Shirley herself was aware, in this instance these images would be taken to Sydney and then reproduced, distributed, displayed, and viewed through circuits and in contexts that extend far beyond her control. I have heard Yolngu make complaints similar to those made by Shirley about filmmakers and photographers in other contexts. In 1998 the chairman of the Northern Land Council, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, successfully avoided prosecution for assault and criminal damage in a Darwin court after he seized a camera and destroyed the film when a Balanda photographer took images of children at the Yolngu community of Ski Beach, near Yirrkala. In his defense, Galarrwuy argued that the camera had seized the spirits of the children and he had acted to ensure that the spirits were not taken from the land (Sydney Morning Herald, February 21, 1998). Bangana commented on the reasons and contexts for Galarrwuy’s actions,

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placing the assault within a wider context of the depletion of country caused by colonialism. He told me: When you take a video of the wanga [country] and take it away somewhere else, the wanga, the madayin [sacra], the gapu (the water), the history of the story—is gone too. From outside the area, from their wanga . . . if anthropologists from other part of the world would take a picture away that’s outside rom [law], outside the boundary of the Yolngu. Those capital names that we use [i.e., sacred names that presence country and Ancestors], they’ve gone right out of country.

Thus, for Bangana, this incident was another moment in an ongoing history of colonial intrusions and appropriations. His interpretation of Galarrwuy’s actions was informed by his knowledge of a history of intercultural representation extending back to the late 1960s and the production of what has become known as the Bark Petition: a written submission from a number of clan leaders (including Galarrwuy’s father), mounted on two sheets of bark, adorned with borders painted with clan designs. This petition, which was sent to Canberra to the House of Representatives in 1963, was an attempt by clan leaders to demonstrate ownership of the land to government and other officials at a time when their Ancestral clan lands were threatened by the development of the Nabalco bauxite mine on the Gove peninsula (Morphy 1983b, 115). As Bangana said: Galarrwuy was more into politics, talking from a political point of view. That’s where he was coming from. But it’s the same story [as Shirley’s]. That’s because of the painting involved, Gumatjgu [Gumatj clan paintings], moving away from country to Canberra. And that’s part of the land, it comes with the dharpa [trees], it comes with mulmu [grass], it comes with the gapu [water], it comes with the people. Because that Bark Petition was more specific for the Gumatj people. And the Rirratjingu people and the Djapu people. The people affected by the mining company.

In other words, from a Yolngu perspective, this instance of taking photographs without permission not only represents another failure to respect Yolngu country and its clans; it actually further depletes places and people already suffering from an overexposure to the relentless demands of Balanda culture.  Once Is Enough

In light of this understanding, ethnographic films shot and archived in the name of cultural salvage can be seen, ironically, as acts of appropriation that actively deplete the power and authority of rom.

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However, we should be careful about concluding that all photography is a form of appropriation. If this were the case, then surely no request would ever be considered favorably. I want to now turn to the other side of the equation—to what is given in photographic transactions. For, rather than refusing to participate, Yolngu allowed the visitor to take pictures, understanding that there was something in it for them. What is this something? And why does it matter? When Bangana described how he talked his grandmother into cooperating with the animation project, I got the sense that there was something other than exploitation going on. Yo [yeah], she gets a little bit suspicious. But I had to explain to her. This is for Ngapaki [white person/Balanda] reasons only. Like when your story or documentary is put out, your photo must be there so they marngi [know] who you are. And this kind of explanation helps the worungu [old people].

This explanation once again emphasizes a relationship between being and being seen, between showing and knowing, that is more complex than it may initially appear. At one level, Bangana’s assertion that the photographic project is for “Balanda reasons only” suggests that the image would be circulated in an economy where images were devoid of sacred significances. At another level, I got the sense that Bangana was also appealing to Shirley for cooperation because of the very mimetic presencing that these technologies produce; he seemed to be implying that there might be advantages in putting one’s picture “out there” and thereby presencing oneself in the “Balanda world.” By allowing the producer to take Shirley’s picture, images replete with Ancestral resonance will be circulated beyond Gapuwiyak, creating effects that exceed the simply representational. Through the mimetic processes of reproduction and circulation of the images, Shirley, and by extension her sacra, are emplaced in the world—an extended “modern” world—in new and technologically mediated ways. Such a presencing-in-the-world offers something in terms of redressing the exclusions, misapprehensions, and appropriations that have characterized so many Yolngu experiences of colonialism and postcolonialism. Crucially, although her sacra is presenced, it is not entirely exposed. Such photos of an old woman effect a presencing in a cultural context that (as I will describe in later chapters) requires the maintenance of a cloak of invisibility across the sacra. Nonetheless, for Yolngu, the sacra are made present. There is both a showing and presencing of Yolngu Culture and a measure of containment. For although Shirley’s image is the “same” as the sacra, it is also not the same in that it does not expose the actual objects to an unappreciative, unauthorized, and uncontrolled public gaze.

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The issue is thus one of achieving a balance between what is “given” and “taken,” between the presencing and the depleting effects of these technologies. A clue as to how Yolngu have come to terms with this can be found in Shirley’s assertion that “once is enough,” and in Bangana’s response to a visiting film crew demanding that local dancers perform a bungul (public ceremonial dance) over and over again to allow for different camera angles: “Wanggany only. Once is enough.” At the heart of the matter lies a concern over mimetic excess. I want to suggest that demands for multiple takes (how aptly named!) make Yolngu feel like victims of, or rather, perhaps, unwilling participants in, exchanges that have been distorted by impropriety and greed. Shirley’s upset stems, I believe, not only from a filming without her permission but also from a sense of dismay at the producer’s reckless production of the mimetic.18  To Show Who I Am

In the course of our conversations about the old peoples’ attitudes to things like photography, I got the sense that Bangana didn’t exactly share his grandmother’s notion that photographs were the “same” as the person. The phrase Bangana used to describe the local magical practices of burrpuy, in which Yolngu use photos or recordings to harm an enemy, was that they act as “a sort of voodoo.” This implies a double register of understanding: while drawing on a shared knowledge of Hollywood versions of voodoo to explain local practices, his comment also indicated an awareness that Balanda see these practices as mere superstition. As he and others of his generation well knew, these so -called Balanda technologies have arrived with an official epistemology that renders Shirley’s concerns about the camera as evidence of magical and muddled thinking. Thus, it seems to me that Bangana’s initial reticence regarding these matters, and his emphasis that this was “her point of view” when describing Shirley’s understanding of the “magical” effects of photography, revealed something of the ways in which the camera not only mediates the modern but also marks it. I understand his hesitation about speaking to me about these mimetic beliefs in this light: his more modern, less overtly “magical” view of the camera distinguished him as a member of the “new generation.” We had already been working together for several months at this point; however, it was not until this incident that I started to understand that there was something profoundly different about Yolngu perspectives on the camera.

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It is likely that because I showed a (perhaps unexpected) level of respect and serious interest in these kinds of beliefs, in subsequent conversations Bangana gradually became more forthcoming about his own beliefs about these things and admitted to a certain ambivalence when it came to posing for photographs. As he explained, the mimetic resonances that imbue photographs become even more ambiguous and potentially dangerous when Yolngu take and keep hold of pictures of each other. Photographs are magically efficacious: they can be used for sorcery in the same ways that hair, fingernails, and items of clothing also stand in for the victim being cursed.19 Similarly, audio recordings contain the ontological trace of the person recorded. Bangana was a popular and talented clan singer, and his voice was recorded many, many times by other Yolngu in informal singing sessions. Most of the time he enjoyed the prestige, recognition, and represencing that this brings. But on occasions when his voice gave him trouble during a ceremony, he would consider the possibility that someone was magically tampering with a tape to cause him harm. When I asked him about how he felt about the fact that our work generated so many recordings of him, and the possibility that people might copy tapes and even record him singing on the radio, he replied: bw: I feel suspicious sometimes. I worry sometimes. Sometimes I try not to worry. I think yaka, biydi [never mind], it’s for this kind of reason. jd: What kind of reason? bw: To show who I am and what my work is. In other words, for Bangana, the imperative to show and to be seen via these new mimetic technologies overrode tensions over the dangers of mimetic excess. As Peter Sutton has noted, filmmaking processes are often actively used by Aboriginal people as a means of demonstrating and thereby gaining recognition of their clan territories. He writes of his experiences in Cape York, where, “when filming is ‘permitted’ it is a mistake to see this permission as a passive acquiescence out of mere politeness, cooperativeness or desire for money” (1978, 6). Instead Sutton argues that the act of filming itself (and, I would add, the presencing that is produced) is appropriated to particularly cultural imperatives. Similarly, I would suggest that Bangana understood that these technologies could be harnessed to enhance his own status along with that of his clan, his country, and, in intercultural contexts, his Culture, through the technological demonstration of his particular prowess. The increasing

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opportunities he encountered in the last years of his life to be photographed and recorded—by Yolngu and Balanda—represented sources of empowerment rather than depletion: the circulation of his visage and voice produced a presencing that enhanced his stature as a man of Culture, both within the “Yolngu world” and beyond it. 20 As photographs and recordings provide moments of represencing, his status is affirmed and enhanced in the camps and the campuses where the tapes of his singing now circulate and play back. Indeed, the kinds of work that he undertook actively undid the possibility of imposing distinctions between the local and nonlocal, or the Yolngu and Balanda worlds, or demarcating domains and types of power as either Ancestral, political, or personal. His work fuses all three dimensions. I am certain that he understood the value of promotion in Balanda contexts as contributing to the potential for greater opportunities and influence in Arnhem Land, actively using the possibilities produced by our work to generate a kind of mimetic luster by showing Culture that would enable him to capitalize on an anticipated fame by international travel and television appearances, thereby contributing to his attempts to restore his tarnished reputation at home.

Figure 15. “To show who I am”: Bangana and his wife Susan demonstrate how to make a yidaki for a German travel program.

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 A Presence in the Modern World

These days, decisions about photography are made on a case-by-case basis. Individuals, families, and clans make decisions according to the context, weighing the difficulties and dangers against the possibilities and potencies offered by these new modes of self-representation and presencing. Different clans and individuals are making different kinds of decisions; each situation is considered individually as to whether it is better to show and presence, or conceal and contain (see Sutton 1978, 5). If there is one rule here for Balanda, it is this: always ask before you take a photo. In many instances, this kind of overt recognition of rights and responsibilities can be enough to show respect and appease concerns. Having said that, however, there are still many older people, mainly women, who prefer not to be photographed at all. To return to Shirley. My understanding is that if “only one” video had been taken, as, and when, requested, while she may still have been suspicious, Shirley could have seen reason to cooperate. Although, as I have mentioned, from a Yolngu point of view, it was arguably inappropriate for her, as an older woman, to participate in such a context at all, in the end her participation and public “revelation” of knowledge on camera was confined to the telling of a well-known and public version of what she described as a “children’s story.” The deeper and more sacred levels of her knowledge remain implicit, the extent of her power only glimpsed. As for the advantages from a Yolngu point of view: this exchange of imagery holds the promise of mimetically generating a relationship between Balanda and Yolngu. Whereas for Balanda, Shirley and her story represent and affirm the fact that Yolngu (or at least old “traditional” Yolngu like Shirley) have Culture, for Yolngu there was an understanding that when the video and animation were seen by Balanda audiences they would produce an effect on those who see them —whether or not they have any cultural background or inside knowledge. It was anticipated that the mimetic force of seeing and hearing Yolngu Culture in such a form, literally being touched by the mimetically charged presence, would generate relationships of reciprocity and regard. I know that both Shirley and Bangana were motivated by an expectation that cooperating with this project would produce a level of recognition and respect from Balanda. As I will explain further in later chapters, all of Bangana’s media work was deeply informed by a belief in the constitutive dynamics of presencing, showing, and seeing in generating a form of intersubjective regard. From his perspective, the powerful mimetic effects

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of cultural production —whether song, dance, or video —would reach and touch the audience, who in turn would be drawn into a relationship of regard, mutuality, and reciprocity.  Giving Photos

By explaining the ambiguities, discomforts, and pleasures that these technologies can generate, I want to preempt any tendency toward freezeframing the above analysis into a fixed or definitive account and instead stress that the use of the camera, and its epistemological and ontological productivities, is a matter for ongoing consideration. Both in Gapuwiyak and elsewhere, the camera continues to enable ways of seeing and knowing that cannot be adequately expressed or understood through prevailing discourses or “official” culturally sanctioned explanations. Knowledge of this complex, dynamic, mutually informing exchange between what the philosopher Don Ihde (1993) calls the macroperception of cultural hermeneutics and the microperception of embodied sense making is borne out by our own “mediated” (technological, cultural, and intersubjective) experiences, which are, in turn, mediated back through the technologies we use. As I have indicated, in places like Gapuwiyak, these issues become even more complex as media technologies invite engagements and exchanges across cultures, even though the significance of these encounters may be understood quite differently by those who are involved in producing, circulating, and distributing images and other forms of mimetic recording. Nonetheless, there are certain implications in the above discussion that I would suggest have bearings on other events in the history of intercultural relations in Arnhem Land. I am thinking here particularly of what has been called the “Adjustment Movement” of the late 1950s on Elcho Island. Anthropologists such as R. M. Berndt, Maddock, Morphy, and McIntosh have variously discussed how this event—a spectacular revelation of clan sacra to permanent public view—was (at least partially) motivated by Yolngu concerns to engage with Balanda in a relationship of mutuality and respect. Traditionally, these powerful, even dangerous, carved objects and barks, painted with elaborate, crosshatched designs, are kept well out of sight of women and the uninitiated, only to be revealed at the climax of ceremonies. To put these most precious clan possessions on permanent display was a radical, and apparently unprecedented, act. Berndt describes it as an attempt by Yolngu elders to generate a rapprochement with Balanda; in his analysis he figured the Movement as an attempt at exchange between cultures. However, failing to see any possibility

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that such an exchange could be effective, Berndt and subsequent anthropologists have somewhat ruefully concluded that Yolngu had been misguided in their actions. He writes, they do not realize that economically such rangga [restricted, sacred objects normally only seen by men] have little or no value cross-culturally, and even if they did could by no means compensate for what is demanded. . . . [T]he rangga of the Memorial represent an expression of their goodwill, suggesting the wealth-potential that they have to offer. In fact, one might go as far as to say that the rangga as publicly exhibited express the “soul” of these eastern Arnhem Landers, the quintessence of their culture. (1962, 86–87)21

Somewhat buried in Berndt’s analysis is a story that suggests to me another way to understand the nature of the exchange. Berndt quotes Buramara, a primary informant and leader of the Movement, who explains that these events had been precipitated by encounters with anthropologists and their cameras. As Buramara tells it, the decision to publicly and permanently expose their most valuable ritual objects came as a result of a local viewing of films made by the 1948 American-Australian Expedition to Arnhem Land. They took pictures of our sacred ceremonies and rangga, and we got excited. Why do they do this? We understood this when [the anthropologists] Warner, Thomson and the Berndts were here. But why do they come again and again to study us? They take photographs of sacred things and show them to all the people throughout Australia and other places. . . . We got a shock. We’re not supposed to show these mareiin, these rangga to just anybody. . . . All this made us think. . . . Then we saw a film at the Elcho church. It was from the American-Australian Expedition, and it showed the sacred ceremonies and emblems. And everybody saw it. . . . We’ve got no power to hide (these rangga): they are taking away our possessions. Are we to lose all this? Our most precious possessions —our rangga! We have nothing else: this is really our only wealth. (1962, 40)

This explanation, when considered in relation to the above arguments, begins to cast a very different light on how Yolngu envisaged the exchange — and indeed the economy—that they were engaging in when showing the rangga first to the anthropologists and, later, revealing them in public. It seems to me that Yolngu motivations regarding the Adjustment Movement (and the Bark Petition from Yolngu on the Gove Peninsula described earlier) could be reinterpreted through an exploration of the crucial conjunction of concerns about presencing, depletion and appropriation, showing and seeing, recognition and respect of Culture that I understand to be operant here. 22 What was taken away was not only the elders’ power to hide the rangga but the rangga (and by extension the entire clan estate) themselves.

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For many Yolngu the Adjustment Movement was —and remains—a profoundly shocking act. A Yolngu man who witnessed the event described the scene to Berndt a year afterward: “As soon as the mareiin (sacred objects) were shown the people went mad. They became silly with mareiin. . . . As soon as we heard this word, this new custom, all of us at Yirrkala were very worried—and we still are” (Berndt 1962, 24). Although Berndt downplays this statement as unrepresentative of Yolngu reactions, in my own fieldwork, some forty years later, I encountered a lingering suspicion and disapproval of this event among Yolngu in Gapuwiyak who view this extreme and radical revelation as highly inappropriate. 23  A Politics of Presencing

Morphy has argued that the Adjustment Movement and the Bark Petition are examples of Yolngu self-consciously engaging in an exchange of Culture.24 Locating these events within a wider intercultural history of Yolngu art and advocacy, he argues that by the time of the Adjustment Movement (and the later Bark Petition), Yolngu had come to perceive their art and rangga as a potent, cross-culturally recognizable symbol of Yolngu Culture, even though Balanda and Yolngu actually valued the art for different reasons (1983b, 111). He describes how by the 1950s Yolngu had begun to become aware of the value of their art “as a means of both asserting cultural identity and attempting to get Europeans to negotiate with them on their own terms” (1991, 17, my emphasis). Thus Yolngu began to organize ceremonies for departing missionaries, visiting politicians, and anthropologists that involved the presentation of paintings and other objects of material culture as departure gifts. In a later extension of this argument Morphy describes the history of Aboriginal art as an Aboriginal “dialogue with colonial history” (1998, 4). He suggests that art enables Aboriginal people to assert their presence and become “visible” within the broader contexts of Australian society. Morphy’s work is crucial to recognizing the role of art in a process of social and cultural transformation and political struggle. 25 However, it is possible to take his analysis of the importance of art (and I would add video, film, and photography) in mediating intercultural relations further. Much of Morphy’s argument is premised on the fact that Yolngu understood that their clan designs and rangga represented difference to the Balanda imagination. Ultimately, an appreciation of Culture by Balanda was premised on the recognition and valuing of something other than Western culture. As he writes, “The bark petition emphasised the dif-

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ference between ‘Aborigines’ and other petitioners, and it did so in such a way that the issue was likely to be taken up by the media” (1983b, 115). I believe that Morphy is correct to identify the nature of the exchange as deriving from an increasingly sophisticated appreciation among Yolngu that their Culture holds a special appeal for Balanda (despite Balanda’s lack of knowledge of the intricate designs and the meanings of the carved figures). However, taking into account what I’ve said would suggest that, from a Yolngu point of view, these exchanges aren’t simply about a symbolic exchange of Culture at the level of representation. An appreciation of mimetic potencies and what might be called an associated politics of presencing allows for another register of understanding of the ways in which, as Morphy suggests (1991), Yolngu use the movement of paintings out into the Balanda world as a means of producing relationships and inclusions. For Yolngu there is a mimetic potency—in the paintings, in the sacra, and in the images of the sacra, in the early ethnographic film and in the footage of Shirley— that is understood to produce a form of relationship generated by a sensuous mimetic encounter between the viewer and the Ancestral presence that is imbued in each of these “representations.” In other words, Yolngu are offering up Ancestrally charged images in the understanding that an exposure to Ancestral presence, in combination with constitutive acts of showing, presencing, giving, receiving, and seeing, produces a relationship. Such a relationship cannot be adequately grasped through a straightforward economic model of exchange; this is not a matter of swapping one thing for another thing. Rather, there is a sense that in the give and take of photography (or the gift of art), Yolngu are mediating a relationship between Yolngu and Balanda that derives its power from the Ancestral. Even as these images demonstrate difference, they produce the possibility of drawing the viewer into reciprocal relationships derived from the experience of being touched and transformed by the mimetic power of Ancestral presence. Ultimately, for Yolngu, there is an expectation that when a recording is seen or heard (or when art is viewed), it will produce an effect on those who hear or see it— whether or not they have any cultural background or inside knowledge with which to interpret or read these objects. Thus while photos (and indeed other forms of permanent and publicly visible mimetic representation such as bark paintings or the display of rangga of the Adjustment Movement) are potentially depleting, they also allow for the generation of a relationship that is understood to give rise to a mutuality and respect. In other words, the showing, making visible, and presencing is expected to produce an intercultural regard. 26 The above analysis allows me to make more sense of some of my

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own experiences in Gapuwiyak, experiences that seemed to mean more to Yolngu than I could understand at the time. Thus, to conclude the chapter, I relate two more stories of photographic exchange: moments that demonstrate, once again, the ways in which these technologies pose challenges for Yolngu systems of knowledge while simultaneously encouraging and enabling an ongoing mediation across any clear boundaries between home and the field, outside and inside, and anthropologist and informant. Most anthropologists I know working within Aboriginal Australia bring home paintings from their fieldwork. Given as presents, or bought from artists who come knocking looking for private sales at times when the art coordinator isn’t buying, these works are infused with meanings for the buyer that exceed anything that could be purchased from a gallery. But early on in my fieldwork, Bangana told me that Yolngu in Gapuwiyak don’t make paintings to sell to Balanda. Along with the ban on discos, the clan leaders who founded Gapuwiyak frowned on the production and sale of clan designs as “art.” According to Bangana, Yolngu in Gapuwiyak disapproved of the reproduction of this kind of imagery, seeing it as a highly inappropriate public revelation of sacra that should be retained for ceremonial use only. He said that the fact that Yolngu from other places chose to paint and sell barks demonstrated a lack of respect for associated clans who share rights, responsibilities, and sacred connections to this Ancestral material. Whereas Yolngu in neighboring Yirrkala—a community with a long and celebrated history of bark painting production —used bark paintings to demonstrate Culture to Balanda, Yolngu in Gapuwiyak demonstrated their Culture to other Yolngu by refusing to make and sell paintings. The work of painting clan designs on the bodies of initiates and sacred objects remains an active part of cultural life, but always within the controlled and containable contexts of the ceremony ground. Clearly the fact that there was no art production was not a simple matter of a lack of skill but rather evidence of an active resistance to the demands of an art market—as well as (at least, as I see it) a strategic attempt to position Gapuwiyak Yolngu as Culturally superior to the famous artists of Yolngu of Yirrkala.27 And so, although I worked in a region internationally known for its intricate designs and finely painted crosshatched style, I have baskets, rather than barks, adorning my home. In Gapuwiyak, women weave pandanus bags and baskets —without the clan markings and other decorative features that are used in sacred bathi (dilly bags) —to provide the Cultural material for the kind of selling and/or giving described by Morphy. (Balanda know that Sunday afternoons, when money is short and cigarettes are sold at

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premium prices by profiteering young pilots, are a particularly good time to strike a deal.) I was never offered a painting. Nor did I ever see one being made, except at a distance during circumcision ceremonies when men painted the chests and bellies of young boys in the seclusion of a purpose -built shade. As a result, my visual knowledge of the distinctive style of painting for which the region has become famous is almost entirely derived from the impressive reproductions in catalogs and books devoted to this striking form. Equally, my understanding of the meaning of such material has been gained mostly from reading ethnographies. 28 I brought a book featuring color plates of Yolngu bark paintings with me to Gapuwiyak when I first moved there. Cautious about brandishing this kind of knowledge in public, I kept it discreetly out of sight, waiting for the right time to talk to someone about the designs, hoping that I would find a moment when they might provide the stimulus for a discussion about stories and ceremony. After I had been working with Bangana for some time, I tentatively mentioned the book to him. He immediately asked to see it. Looking closely and deeply at the images, he shook his head and made a tut-tutting sound. “They shouldn’t be painting these,” he said as he turned the pages carefully, stopping to look at certain images. “They shouldn’t let these be put in books. Anyone can see. They’re not thinking about the other clans.”29 After he had looked for some time, he asked to borrow it for a while. Later that afternoon he returned it without comment. On his way out the door, Bangana suggested that it would be best not to show the book to anyone else. He told me that while his level of ceremonial experience and knowledge meant that he was not seeing anything that he did not—or could not—see, it would upset other people to see these images. (I now, of course, suspect he also meant that not only were the form and context reproduction highly inappropriate but it was certainly not for me to show anyone anything like this.) This incident compounded a growing sense of my own strange position in a postcolonial circulation of culture and imagery—not to mention the awkward situations that Yolngu must constantly confront and negotiate as a result of the uneven access to decision-making processes regarding the intercultural circuits of technological reproduction. With no further understanding of the stories or meanings of the paintings, I placed the book back in the suitcase under my bed and left it there, untouched, for the rest of my fieldwork. Bangana met my father only once. At my parents’ apartment overlooking Sydney harbor, he took the lead as my father shuffled to the door, frail

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from long-term illness. “Hello, Dad,” he said, hand outstretched. “I’m your black son from Arnhem Land.” A little more than a year later, my father died. My sister in Los Angeles made each member of the family a badge to wear at the funeral. She used a photograph of our father, wearing a lei and a lopsided smile, taken at my twenty-first birthday party. Bangana had wanted to attend the funeral but, for complicated reasons, he couldn’t make it. The next time I returned to Gapuwiyak I took the badge to show him. “Bapa (father),” he said, holding the photograph tenderly. The photo seemed to mean a lot to him, more than I had expected. And so I gave it to him, surprised at my own willingness to part with such an important memento. I didn’t know what would become of it. I had simply been moved by Bangana’s emotional response. On another visit, a year later, he showed me the photograph. Amid the seeming chaos of his life as it was lived in a broken-down house filled with kids, visiting relatives, and few possessions other than a number of mattresses, blankets, and a TV set, Bangana had kept the photo badge safely hidden away with his most precious belongings. In recounting this story, I gesture toward the ways in which photographs provide many layers for contact and memory as they mimetically represence the past in the present. I am not necessarily claiming that Bangana understood the photograph to be my father in the same way that his grandmother might have. Nor would I attempt to reduce the meanings that the photograph holds for me to mere representation. Nonetheless, I got the impression from my worldly brother that he held the photograph in a different kind of regard from that of my other siblings. He didn’t have the lifelong memories and knowledge for it to be meaningful to him in exactly the same sense as it touched me. And although our bonds of fictive kinship had become increasingly real over time, what strikes me about the way he looked at—and looked after —the photograph suggests something other than a redirection of the affection he felt for me. There was something about the photograph itself, something in its materiality, that he found meaningful and important. He said it connected him to our father. And I find that strangely comforting.

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[

6

]

Flowers and Photographs: Death, Memory, and Techno Mimetics

Fieldwork can be overwhelming. So, too, can its aftermath (although this is far less talked about). Back home in Sydney, it took many months of frustration and false starts for me to learn an essential lesson: writing is a process of omission. Only by leaving things out can one clear a space in which to unravel and then follow a strand of thought, to wherever it might lead. In the previous chapter, as I sought to explore Shirley’s perspective on mimetic technologies, I chose to ignore some obvious and insistent questions that threatened to impede the flow of my argument. Although I gave hints that Bangana and others might figure these mimetic processes and their outcomes somewhat differently than Shirley, I implicitly followed Yolngu (and certain anthropological) orthodoxies that refer back to the old people as the bearers and arbiters of culture. Or, at least, the culture that counts; the difference that is really different. Having thus contained my subject, I was able to formulate a theory of mimesis, presence, sameness, and a politics of presencing. However strategic, it did not alleviate my anxiety that my argument covered only one dimension of what was in fact a more complex situation. I felt the analysis straining under the pressure and contradictions arising from other sources. For, if I were to widen my frame to include Shirley’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren’s engagements with visual technologies, then things would become trickier, less straightforward. As I have illustrated in the prologue and elsewhere, Yolngu do pose for cameras —often and enthusiastically. They use cameras and tape recorders to record ceremonies and mark occasions. People exchange images and recordings; these are played and replayed. What grasp of the efficacies of these technologies and their products (made variously from light, sound, chemicals, celluloid, and magnetic tape) might this “new generation” Yolngu possess? What of wungili (visible projection of oneself), mali (shadow,

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replacement, spirit, soul), and the dangers of mimetic excess? What is going on? There is, of course, no simple or single response. As Michaels so clearly demonstrated, Aboriginal people in the Central Desert were interpreting the camera and its efficacies in a variety of ways during the 1980s. In the course of my own research, I witnessed many ambiguous and seemingly contradictory Yolngu attitudes and responses toward such matters, leading me to conclude that there are great variations between generations, clans, individuals, and communities. There are no hard and fast rules concerning what it is permissible to film or record, no absolute decisions regarding what it might or might not be appropriate to film/record/broadcast. Everything depends on the context and the people involved. Moreover, contexts change and multiply, as the possibilities of filming, photographing, recording, and videoing multiply themselves as Yolngu gain increasing access to, and familiarity with, these technologies. Usage, in turn, creates new contexts and new issues. All of which contributes to the problem of how to handle, both conceptually and physically, the growing number of recordings that now exist and circulate in these places. Whereas in the previous chapter I considered a politics of presencing in relation to Balanda “taking pictures,” in this chapter I explore Yolngu relationships to images and to audio and visual recordings of specific people —people they know and, very often, love. As Sobchack (1999, 243) points out, photos and film have a specific impact on the viewer when they represence something already known through other modes or from other situations. She argues that in family photographs and home movies the photographic/cinematic image is potent because the imaged is not a phantasmagoria of Hollywood special effects but rather something or someone recognizable as “real” to those familiar with the subjects within the frame. This relationship between affect, memory, and mimetic presencing has particular resonances in Gapuwiyak. Previously, I argued that it is a concern with sameness rather than likeness that informs Yolngu engagements with media technologies. I described how a Yolngu mimetic sensibility had incorporated these technologies and their products ontologically. For instance, a photograph of Shirley was understood to have (almost) the same ontological resonances as a restricted clan design. The camera was incorporated into a cultural schema in which likenesses were produced as part of a wider system of meaning, characterized by what Benjamin (1978, 334) has called “nonsensuous similarities.” What interests me here is how the mimetic exactitudes these technologies produce —the ways that these modern machines produce “representations” that are so very like their subject—are a factor

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behind changing practices and attitudes. In particular, I want to focus on the ways in which Yolngu are managing images and audio recordings of the deceased. Up until very recently there had been strict restrictions regarding the viewing of such sounds and images. These days such restrictions are being reconsidered as the self-identified new generation of Yolngu seeks to use these recordings in different ways. This chapter explores these apparent breaks with tradition. In the first section, I argue that the powerful combination of mnemonics and mimetics produced by media technologies is prompting Yolngu to change their practices with regard to the handling of recordings and images of the deceased; in the second half I attempt to make sense of this shift by thinking about memory as cultural practice.1  Mortuary Rites, Loss, Love, and Understanding

That I am able to take up these questions in any detail is the result of the most unexpected and devastating of events: the death of Bangana in February 2002, and my return to Gapuwiyak in order to participate in the funeral preparations and ceremonies. During this period several hundred Yolngu arrived by air and road from neighboring communities to participate in the ceremony. Before the funeral could commence with the return of the body on a charter flight from Darwin, where it had been held by the coroner for a postmortem, it had been necessary for various family members to negotiate the site for the funeral. Not unusually, this aspect of funeral arrangements proved to be a source of bitter contestation among different clan groups with competing kinship -based rights to claim the body and hold the funeral. Only once this highly emotional and politically charged dispute was resolved with the final decision to go ahead with the funeral in Gapuwiyak rather than Bangana’s mari wanga (mother’s mother’s brothers’ country) could preparations on the shelter to house the body and the sacred objects placed with it begin. This shade structure would become the focus of ceremonial action until the day of the burial and the subsequent cleansing ceremonies to remove any lingering trace of the deceased’s presence on participants who had been in close proximity to him. During the funeral itself, the long days, punctuated by brief torrents of tropical rain, would stretch into evening as dancers from clans from across the region contributed to the ceremony with elaborate, stylized enactments of Ancestral events, places, and stories presented through series of songs and dances. The precision, grace, and gusto that infuse such performances

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provide a cumulative layering of meaning and presence, building to the climactic moment on the night before the burial in which the spirit of the deceased finally departs his body and returns to his Ancestral source. Then on the final day, following the now-established ceremonial forms adapted from earlier, pre-mission practices, the coffin would be ritually taken out of the shelter to be lowered into a deep grave, amid a final outpouring of grief. I stayed in close contact with the immediate family during this period, assisting with the organization, ordering material from town for the shelter, cooking, drinking tea, and reminiscing. Despite my initial expectations that on this trip back to the field I would be present as a mourner, not as an ethnographer, I found that I could not sustain a clear separation between these two selves. Every day there would be a comment or event arising from a photograph, video, or audio recording that rendered my ethnographic project not only inescapable but somehow comfortingly relevant. So at times I took notes and even asked questions. At other times I wept. As my bereaved sister self struggled with my ethnographic self, I came to see that my investments, my involvements, and my understandings arose because of the mutuality of these selves. Bangana’s death and my close involvement with his funeral, along with the still-chafing pain of my mother’s death less than a year earlier and my father’s less than two years before that, positioned me in very particular ways. Not only was I now, after all these years, far more of an insider in terms of access to events and information, I also experienced the funeral as something of an emotional insider, connected with his family through a shared sense of loss. I want to stress that by acknowledging the complex layers of affect and identification that have increasingly informed my research and relationships in Gapuwiyak, I do not seek an ethnographic authority derived from some notion of a universal pathos. In other words, I do not claim that a shared experience of grief necessarily unlocks ethnographic truths. Rather, the depth of my emotional connections to the funeral and Bangana’s family opened up a different dimension of doing fieldwork; I experienced a new realm in which the play of sameness and difference in attitudes, practices, and expectations became the subject for analysis. I drew on the flux of my own affective identifications and disorientations in order to gather and present clues as to the nature of the cultural. More often than not, it was in the moments of disjunction and confusion, which so often characterize the unfolding intersubjective relationships and (mis)understandings of the field, that I was compelled to recognize that Yolngu saw/felt/experienced/conceptualized things very differently from me. This was especially brought home at moments during the funeral when I was forced to reconsider and reevaluate my ideas about what

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it meant for Yolngu to view images and other recordings of deceased people. 2 During the years following my field research, as I lived through the deaths of my parents, I felt I had come to a measure of understanding regarding this issue as I too had experienced an acute unwillingness to view their photographs. It took almost a year before I was able to overcome my reluctance and could tolerate looking at my mother’s image or could keep a photograph of her on display. During these difficult times, I sometimes thought back to my fieldwork, shuddering at the emotional naiveté of my questions. From the vantage point of my own experience, I understood the potency of “representations” in such emotionally charged situations; Yolngu restrictions regarding the deceased now made a particular kind of sense. However, as I will explain, these understandings were to be confounded at the funeral when I witnessed emergent Yolngu practices for dealing with media technologies, death, and remembrance. And so this unexpected bout of “fieldwork” provided ethnographic grit for yet another chapter. The three weeks of preparation for the ceremony, and the ten days of the actual funeral, brought to the fore the familiar themes of loss and remembrance, representing and connecting, showing and seeing, concealing and revealing, in new ways. With perceptions honed by my own accumulated knowledge of loss, I observed events and reactions, including my own, in order to (re)consider my ideas about mimesis and the use of media technologies in Gapuwiyak. 3 As I did so I began to suspect that the generational shifts in behavior and practice regarding photography were not as profoundly disjunctive as I had originally imagined.4  Flowers and Photographs

News of Bangana’s death, in the form of a phone call with sketchy information about a heart attack on a lonely bush road, reached me only weeks after I had completed a draft of chapter 5 of this book. I made plans to leave for Gapuwiyak immediately. Speaking on the telephone to his wife, Susan, as she sat beside his body at the community clinic, I asked what I should bring. “Bring flowers. And bring photos,” she said. Her request took me by surprise. I’d anticipated the need to bring flowers; it was Susan’s request for photographs that caught me unawares. 5 I didn’t know why she wanted photos and video recordings. Perhaps, I thought, they would be buried with him. Or maybe she was asking those of us who had images to return them to the family, in order that they might impose a period of restriction on their viewing and circulation.

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I remembered Bangana telling me that when his own father died in the early 1970s, any audio recordings or photographs had been destroyed as a matter of course. As he had explained to me, photographs, videos, and audiotape become restricted or dhuyu (secret/sacred) after a death, being dangerously charged as they were with the presence of the deceased and his or her associated sacra. Yet Bangana had also expressed to me a regret about the destruction of recordings and photographs. In retrospect it was clear that he had come to consider that the destruction of these recordings was not only unwarranted but had compounded his loss. With these thoughts in mind, I followed Susan’s instructions and put together a collection of images of Bangana. In transit through Darwin, I picked up a wreath of silk flowers along with a selection of shiny, branded sports shirts for his four children. Shopping for clothes and other presents always preceded a visit, but on my arrival it quickly became apparent that the photos and video mattered much more —and in different ways —than anything else I had brought. Sitting in a circle on the floor in the semiprivacy of the house with his wife and children, I watched as they examined the pictures, one by one, and it seemed as if it had been much longer than a few days since they had seen him alive. While I tried to keep my eyes averted, attempting to shield myself from the confronting absence that the images so emphasized, the family looked deeply and repeatedly at the photographs. I could not imagine why they would either need or want to view them, especially now, so soon after Bangana’s death. But the photographs seemed to give them comfort; in fact they helped “to remember, to feel him close,” as many people told me. Holding the photos face down, they turned them over, one by one, revealing Bangana in a variety of circumstances: the long-sleeved, shirtcollared cultural broker chairing a meeting in Darwin; the traveling filmmaker brandishing a half-full beer mug in Alice Springs; the Bob Marley singleted hunter on a bush track, holding a long goanna by the tail. They had seen most of these photographs before, as I always made copies for the family, but this did not diminish the interest. The photographs created a focus for their grief; they allowed for a shared, but contained, space for familial comfort and support. They talked about the circumstances surrounding the photographs, who had been there, who had taken them. And then they looked some more. After a while, Bangana’s youngest daughter, Lai’pu, grabbed the pile for herself. “Daddy, daddy,” she whispered in English, kissing the images and hugging them to her body, rocking back and forth. Though she was quiet and contained, especially in comparison to the extreme outbursts

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brought forth during the weeping and flailing of women’s mortification rites, her grief was nonetheless palpable. Visible. Recognizable. Felt and known. Moments later Shirley entered the room and the photographs were discreetly pushed under a blanket and out of sight.  Ambiguous Dangers

As I have said, it is well documented in the literature that when Yolngu die their image and voice and name become restricted or dhuyu (secret/sacred). When explaining these restrictions to Balanda, Yolngu often simply state that it is too “upsetting” to be exposed to recordings soon after someone has died. While this gloss potentially provides the basis for a cross-cultural empathy—despite the fact that the restrictions are markedly contrary to Balanda practices of memorializing the dead—it does not convey anything about the culturally specific motivations behind this custom. At one level the potential for “upset”—a term I heard frequently during the funeral when Yolngu discussed the problems involved with easing restrictions around the viewing of recordings —can be attributed to the politics of presencing discussed in the previous chapter. When someone fails to adhere to restrictions that are enforced by kin, there is immediate cause for anger and upset. However, this issue also involves something about presence that is being managed or restricted. As I have come to understand it, these restrictions are concerned with the heightened, and somewhat dangerous, mimetic relationships produced by death. 6 David Biernoff describes how Yolngu believe that in the period immediately after death, the spirit of the deceased remains among the living in the form of an ambiguously threatening presence: It would seem reasonable to conceptualize dangerous power as uncontrolled, undirected and massive concentrations of life force or spirit . . . even after leaving the body the spirit may find it difficult to return to its origin place without the aid of men. It is highly ambivalent and its presence endangers the living. On one hand the spirit wants to remain with its human family, on the other it is drawn back to its origin place. . . . Ceremonies create a barrier between the spirit of the dead and those persons, places and things known during life. Ceremonies force the spirit to leave these and return to the origin place to merge with and lose its identity in the concentration of life spirit which exists therein. (1974, 97–100)

Consequently, these recordings must be disposed of along with the body itself, or, alternatively, put away out of view for months, sometimes years, until the presence of the deceased is deemed to have dispersed. These

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photos must be only of the deceased; it is considered equally dangerous to destroy a photograph of a living person. Not surprisingly, given her strong views on such matters, her age, and her authority in this ritual as Bangana’s mother’s mother, Shirley kept to these “traditional” practices during the funeral.7 When I pressed for information about the nature of her fears or concerns regarding the consequences of seeing images or hearing recordings of Bangana, I found, like Biernoff (1974, 95), that I could not elicit a clear definition of the kinds of dangers posed. The sense of danger was imminent yet unspecific. When I pushed for an explanation, other people told me that Shirley worried that she would become ill if she saw those photographs or heard Bangana’s voice. The younger members of the family were extremely careful regarding these beliefs, keeping all images and recordings out of her view and making no reference to their existence in her presence. Yet even Shirley proved amenable to a measure of change in protocol. Somewhat surprisingly (at least to me) she agreed to a suggestion by a wellmeaning Balanda resident that the funeral ceremony should be videoed. This concession was only made once Shirley had been convinced by Susan’s and others’ arguments that a video would provide an invaluable and irreplaceable memento for his children. Again, being attentive to the dangers of mimetic excess, permission was granted on the proviso that there would be only one copy made specifically for the children. At times when Shirley was not present, in the privacy of the family house and later within the restricted confines of the funeral shelter, I observed a variety of practices and attitudes toward photographic images.8 Younger members of the family, including Susan and other Yolngu involved in the organization of the ceremony, spent a considerable amount of time looking at photos and listening to audio recordings of Bangana singing clan manikay (songs). Having sorted through her own collection of photographs and having requested extra copies from Darwin and Sydney, Susan and the children discreetly distributed images or videos to Yolngu who had been particularly close to Bangana, including kin who took on major ritual roles during the funeral.9 (They refused the requests of others for photographs, for reasons I am not privy to.) When mourners came to the house (outside the context of public ritual mourning practices), they were often discreetly shown photographs of the deceased. Later, when Balanda came into the funeral shelter to pay their respects, Susan would prop an enlarged, laminated photograph of Bangana at the head of the coffin among the silk flowers and sacred dilly bags. After these visits the photograph would be removed and once again hidden out of sight. Many people, who stood in varying relationships with Bangana, also

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pressed me for copies of photographs or video. Not fully understanding the factors involved in her decision making, I deferred to Susan. Clearly, the moments of giving and/or showing photos were informed by a discretionary knowledge of who would want to see, to listen, to have, to hold images and recordings. And who would not. I saw no evidence that Susan, or any other member of the family who was forty-some or younger, was worried about getting sick or experiencing any adverse effect from exposure to these mementos. Certainly, some members of the new generation had put away their photographs in accordance with the established custom, yet many others, in equally close kin relationships, actively sought out the experiences of looking and listening. Recordings were duplicated and then passed on to individuals and to families. While the tapes of Bangana singing clan manikay proved to be somewhat problematic—as they constituted a more clear-cut case of clan property, they were “officially” subject to the control and restrictions of clan leaders —this did not inhibit the children or Susan from listening to the recordings. Nor did Susan allow these decisions to prevent her from seeking to arrange for multiple copies to be provided by another anthropologist. The recordings she was able to access were then distributed to appropriate family members and ritual participants in the funeral. The actions and decisions regarding images and recordings clearly fit into established Yolngu modes of controlling or managing information in “glimpses.” At one level, it was clear that access to images and recordings, along with an ability to arrange for their reproduction and circulation, gave Susan and her children a sense of control and importance during this immensely difficult period. Lai’pu, as the youngest daughter, especially asserted her right to control who could view the recordings, seeking to limit access to all but a handful of close kin. Susan, on the other hand, took into consideration the kinds of relationships that Bangana had with individuals during the course of his life and used the possibility of distributing mementos to reinforce these relationships. This kind of access to, and control over, the circumstances governing the showing, circulating, and containing of this material gave Susan and her children a central and influential role in aspects of these less formal, but perhaps no less meaningful, mourning rites. (They had less direct control over the funeral proper, which, in accordance with tradition, was largely organized and controlled by leaders of other clans.)10 Whenever possible, Susan considered what the image might represent for the recipient in terms of both the actual image and the embedded aesthetics, that is, who was in the photograph with Bangana, who had taken the shot, who else had been there, what the circumstances of the photography

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had been, and so forth. However, this representational dimension seemed secondary to the significance of the recording itself. It seemed that, in lieu of a choice, any image or recording would do. As one sister confided, “My kids will be all right. They’ve got photos and tapes.” Based on my experiences of other funerals and on discussions with long-term Balanda residents of Gapuwiyak, this funeral seemed something of a critical juncture in the history of grieving practices and mourning rites in Gapuwiyak. It wasn’t just that the photos weren’t buried or otherwise destroyed by the family, for, as previously stated, this shift toward conserving such increasingly valued records of the past had been underway for many years.11 What was so striking about this particular funeral was the intensive viewing of photographs and listening to recordings by mourners, the production and distribution of large numbers of videotapes and photographs, the display of photographs within the funeral shelter (if only for Balanda mourners), and the lifting of restrictions on videoing the ceremony. These things —together with Susan’s plan to place a photograph (but not his name) on the headstone —marked Bangana’s funeral as distinctly contemporary.  Not the “Same”: An Ontological Shift?

What to make of these new practices and priorities? Given the extent to which Bangana himself had emphasized the importance of maintaining “Yolngu ways of seeing the world,” these differences seemed critical. Despite misgivings about being an anthropologist at a time like this, I asked Susan about these changes. Her explanation pointed toward an ontological/perceptual shift among members of the new generation. She told me that the younger generations do not see these recordings as being the same as the person, country, and sacra: “We see these photos in a different way to your mari [Shirley]. She thinks that if she saw them they might make her sick. But for me, as a modern Yolngu, these pictures bring my beloved closer . . . they help me to remember. To feel him here with me.” In Susan’s eyes (at least in regard to these images and this situation), the mimetic labor of technology is not conceptualized as the equivalent of the ritualized labor of ceremonial performances or paintings in which an invisible umbilicus links image to imaged extending into an Ancestrally charged “sameness” with sacra, country, and the Ancestral realm. What Biddle (2000, 177) describes as the dangerous trace of the deceased seems to have been rendered, if not inert, then at least not so threatening. When I asked about these recordings in terms of mali and wungili, questioning

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whether a photograph of Bangana was the same as him, her response was less certain. “It is him . . . in some ways,” Susan replied. “But not really wungili. Not like that.” But before I develop a discussion of what I have increasingly come to recognize as the cultural work involved in the remembering and connecting that Susan refers to, I want to briefly reflect on the kinds of issues that are likely to have had a bearing on this apparent ontological shift. This move could be seen as something of a practical response to an increasingly untenable ontological dilemma produced by the adoption of mimetic technologies into everyday Yolngu life. Over the past ten or fifteen years, it has become increasingly apparent that visual technologies are no longer exclusive to Balanda. Yolngu increasingly own their own cameras and tape recorders; the local school has a growing collection of images and videos, as well as computer equipment with a capacity for digital media production. Teachers often take a special interest in these technologies, working with pupils to produce CD -ROMs, videos, and other forms of digital recordings. In recent years, the local store started selling disposable cameras and introduced a photographic development service. Recordings can be difficult to look after and to control. The desire to show and present may be problematic if exposed to many dubbings or recordings (as discussed in chapter 5). Unlike the performance of a song or dance, photos and videos can be endlessly reproduced by almost anyone. It is possible to make multiple copies of tapes on a twin-tape ghetto blaster, to dub copies of videos in the BRACS, or to contact an anthropologist, or other accommodating Balanda, to ask them to send copies held in archives or personal collections. On the other hand, in purely practical terms, many Yolngu find it difficult to keep these recordings secure because of the nature of everyday community life: the heat, the dirt, the mobility, the freedoms afforded to children, the crowded houses, and the lack of secure, private places means that photographs are often destroyed, damaged, or lost (although many families are increasingly collecting and safeguarding their images in photo albums stored in suitcases with other valued possessions). These circumstances would seem to make it almost impossible to continue to regard recordings as the same as their referents, and hence, the same as their most sacred places and objects. Although paradoxically, it also makes them similar in being looked after and kept sacred. Nonetheless, I am wary that in describing this as an ontological shift I might be overstating matters, implying that self-identified modern Yolngu see these images as mere representations. To make such a pronouncement may suggest that attitudes are more conceptually precise, or reflexively

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positioned, than they actually are (or perhaps even need to be) for the subjects involved. So I must stress that these matters are far from clear-cut. Different people see these images in different ways; individuals change their perspectives from time to time. For instance, in the midst of an argument with Shirley during the funeral, Susan threatened to cut up photos of her: a threat that was taken seriously by those around her at the time. (Although how much this threat was aimed at Shirley’s belief system, I cannot be sure.) Another time, when I unthinkingly suggested that we trim a photograph of Bangana down to fit into a frame, his daughter Samantha refused to allow any cutting, overriding her mother’s agreement. And in earlier days, Susan had been decidedly uncomfortable when Bangana had authorized the excess videotapes produced in the course of editing the Gularri video to be thrown into the rubbish, from where they would be taken to the tip and eventually burned and or buried.  “To Remember and Feel Him Close”: Yolngu Modes of Remembering

In many ways this incorporation of photographs into funerals can be seen as a contemporary adaptation of long-standing practices for representing or presencing the deceased via more traditional means such as paintings or song. Arguably, though, Yolngu use these images and recordings to enable a different kind of relationship with the deceased. Having discussed the practical reasons for a decline in what might (reluctantly) be described as a more magical view of media technologies, I want to reorientate the discussion in order to appreciate other dimensions of culture operant in these situations. Despite the differences between generations, Yolngu cultural priorities continue to inform not only the ways in which these images and recordings are handled, circulated, and contained but also, critically, how they are viewed. My point here is that the constitutive power of perception —available in, and through, images and recordings —offers the possibility for a remembrance and a connection that contributes to the desire to downplay the dangers posed by visual material and audio recordings.12 Many Western scholars have observed the link between the development of media technologies and the emergence of distinctly modern modes of remembering and forgetting. McQuire, for instance, writes that “the status given to photographs as a material form of memory, and the deference to photography, film and videotape over other forms of record and recall, signals an important threshold of modernity” (1998, 110). Media technologies capture and represent nondiscursive forms of

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information about an individual that are particular and precise —a characteristic expression, the specificities of a gait, the timbre of a voice —a multitude of unique features. Such “naturalistic” modes of representation make them distinctly unlike more traditional Yolngu representational forms in which the individual is represented through an array of Ancestral designs, narratives, and ritual performance. This makes for a particular kind of potency when it comes to practices of remembering.  Technologies of Remembrance

In the West, commentators have observed the way photography in particular presents and preserves the past. Roland Barthes (2000, 79) famously describes the ways a photograph of someone loved but now deceased holds a special kind of melancholic potency. Sobchack also describes the photographic in this way: “Paradoxically, as it objectifies and preserves in its acts of possession, the photographic has something to do with loss, with pastness, and with death, its meaning and value intimately bound within the structure and investments of nostalgia” (2000, 73). The conjunctions of memory, melancholy, and pastness that both Barthes and Sobchack describe take on a particular resonance when considering Yolngu relationships to photography (and other mimetic recordings). In Gapuwiyak, the remembrance of past actions and events —from the Ancestral through to more recent, “historical” events —underpins cultural life. The connections between past actions and contemporary life require ongoing acts of memory through which these connections are recognized and relationships constituted. Activating remembrance is a crucial dimension of ritual in which performance recreates a constellation of details about Ancestral action and associated country in order that participants might know and remember them. A number of scholars have discussed the significance of social practices of memory in Aboriginal societies. Michael Jackson describes the act of remembering for Aboriginal people as inherently social and active: “For Warlpiri, memory is never merely a cognitive process, the past recollected in tranquility. Remembering is social. It entails concerted, concentrated, embodied interaction with kinsmen, affines, and countrymen to recreate modes of intersubjectivity that encompasses both the living and the dead” (1998, 129). Jackson describes situations where Aboriginal people act out remembrance when visiting a sacred site by calling out names, using terms of endearment toward country, and expressing feelings of bereavement and

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loss. He emphasizes the physical and outwardly visible labor of remembering. His description brings to mind the image of Lai’pu with her father’s photos. Her reactions to the photographs —her caresses, her endearments, and her calling out for her father, as well as the corporeal connections sought through kissing and hugging—were clearly an outward display of grief and remembrance. The photos allowed for a different kind of emotional expression than that displayed in the violently demonstrative self-mortification and wailing that accompanied her grieving during the ceremonies. But although a public demonstration of grief and remembrance is undoubtedly a critical dimension of social practices of commemoration and memorializing, there is more involved than simply an outward show. The more quiet moments of remembering provide a key to the significance of internal, or interiorized, cognitive and affective processes that are generated and experienced by the subject through the act of remembering. This constitutes a self-conscious process of mimetic and mnemonic labor that is also “concerted, concentrated and embodied” (Jackson 1998, 129, my emphasis). It is in the subdued and sorrowful looking at photos or listening to tapes on the Walkman (necessary to contain the sounds from others) that a process of active and constitutive remembrance is at work.13 As a result of the funeral, I came to understand that for Yolngu remembrance is a form of mimetic labor; it is a complex process involving the active and intentional recollection, evocation, and recognition of the links between the past and present. As distinct from the uncomfortable relationship that I had around memories of my mother that photographs gave rise to, younger Yolngu actually pursue these difficult feelings, deliberately provoking their own memories because an active anamnesis —the re-calling and the bringing forth of images and memories, feelings and knowledge —has ontological outcomes. Anamnesis enables the viewer to connect with the subject of the image in such a way that the rupture between the living and the deceased is, at some level, overcome. The deceased is not laid to rest in the past but brought into the present, brought close by looking, feeling, touching, listening, and remembering. Many scholars have noted the ways in which Aboriginal ritual song and dance have a mnemonic function. The same is true of visits to country, where seeing certain features of the landscape triggers a process of remembering as evidenced by the retelling of narratives of past visits and emotional recollections of those who were there at that time. To take one example, the aim of singers is to draw on a selection of poetically evocative descriptions of place as they sing stanza after stanza about, for instance, a kind of leaf, the way it floats, the water it floats on, the fish swimming in the

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water underneath the leaves. This layering of description enables listeners to build their own synesthetic picture: to see the place in their mind’s eye. Susan’s emphasis on cementing images in her mind presents remembering as an active and constitutive social process, a form of mimetic labor that is both cognitive and affective, undertaken by subjects who understand that their efforts at remembering produce certain effects and connections that then enable an ongoing relationship with those who have passed away. But the Yolngu appreciation of photography (and other mimetic recordings) as a receptacle for memory is not only a safeguard against a forgetting; mementos are used for a remembering that produces a connection between past and present that, like ritual practices, actively reconfigures relationships across time and space. Remembering has effects that exceed what might be imagined if one only thinks of remembering as a process of thinking back or dwelling on the past. Certain Western philosophers have pointed to these kinds of productive dimensions of remembrance. As Tim O’Brien writes, “The remembering makes it now” (1990, 40, cited in Jackson 1998, 176). And Casey observes, “In remembering, there is a tenuous but consistently felt ‘selfpresence’ of the rememberer that inheres in what is remembered” (2000, x). These phenomenological observations help me to understand the ways in which Yolngu use remembering to produce certain effects. While I imagine there are many non-Yolngu who can identify with the power of photographs to infuse meaning and connection into rites of remembrance, I suggest that what makes Yolngu forms of remembrance distinctive is the degree to which they consciously approach remembrance as an active, intentional form of mimetic labor. Yolngu acknowledge remembering as productive, a form of mimetic labor that, like ritual, actively seeks to (re)produce relationships by mediating across the spaces that divide subjects from each other; the “pastness” apparently represented by these recordings is exactly mediated against by an active, remembering subject who seeks to merge past and present into an experience of alwaysness and connectedness that is constitutive of the Ancestral realm.14 A socially recognized and endorsed activity, this public performance produces visible signs of affect and connection, reaffirming and reconstituting the relationships that form the bedrock of the social. These practices might be appreciated as a kind of thinking/feeling that moves back and forth between past and present in a dynamic way. This movement mimetically mediates relationships, actively placing subjects in intersubjective relationships and presencing the deceased through a layering of meaning and image in the mind’s eye. There is a danger that the phrase “mind’s eye” renders remembering a distinctly cognitive pro-

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cess, whereas, in Gapuwiyak, remembrance is at once necessarily active, cognitive, embodied, affective, and synaesthetic. It is undertaken in order to emphasize and strengthen the possibility for an ongoing relationship with both the deceased and the Ancestral. Through a repeated layering of mimetically charged similitudes, a rupturing is effected in the surface of the apparent and everyday, hence reconstituting and recharging relationships across time and space.15 Taking this further, it seems to me that the nostalgia and melancholy that provide the dominant tone of so much Yolngu ritual and cultural production are an effect of this back and forward movement.16 The constellation of emotions produced by such active processes of remembering requires that the subjects hold in their being a complex experience of both presence and absence, love and loss. As this dynamic process of recollecting past times and relationships in the present gains momentum, it gives form and depth to the painful experience of loss. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, this experience of loss and absence is not empty but finds expression in an affective response overflowing with emotion. Given the immense significance of the experiential dimensions of knowing and becoming for Yolngu, this profound effect of affect is exactly what is required. In knowing and feeling the gaps of absence with and against the joys of a remembered past, and hence in opening up the emotional dimensions of the rupture, the subject is filled with complex, affective experience that encompasses past and present, living and dead. It is in feeling, and through remembering, that the subject is connected within the invisible matrix that is the alwaysness of the Ancestral. Once again, the Yolngu world is constituted: replete in relationship. The Ancestral realm is the source of life and identity: it is where all Yolngu come from and where they return to upon death. Hence it is also the Ancestral realm that is presenced through this remembering. At this juncture of profound transition —for the living as they come to terms with their loss, and for the dead as they recede from the world of humans to reintegrate into the Ancestral realm —photographs are surely particularly evocative, in every sense. The image acts as a focus for the living to integrate the facts of loss and begin to forge a different kind of connection with the deceased, even as the image itself is a material manifestation of a shifted ontological status from living individual to an immanent Ancestral presence. Thus when Susan listens and looks with determination and emotional fortitude while asserting that the images and sounds will keep Bangana close, I get the sense that she is at some level refusing to let him go, that her mimetic labor works to ensure an enduring sense of the enduring individualized presence of him for herself, thereby not

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relinquishing him to an undifferentiated and ultimately depersonalized Ancestral realm.17 More than anything, my unexpected return to the field brought home to me the significance of media technologies in enabling active processes of remembrance. (Indeed, such practices resonate with acts of remembrance undertaken throughout many Western communities and subcultures in which photography and other mimetic recordings are actively used for similar purposes, albeit in different ways and, arguably, with lesser expectations about the ontological outcomes). Recalling Bangana’s enthusiastic predictions that BRACS could “remind Yolngu of who they are,” I felt I’d finally grasped what he was getting at. I came to appreciate the labor of remembering as an invisible form of mimetic practice, crucial to the process of a becoming-in-relationship that Bangana privileged as being constitutive of Yolnguness. I realized the extent to which remembering identity—as opposed to imagining identity— matters in the cultural lifeworld and in the afterlifeworld that he sought to maintain. It made me see how contemporary concerns about “culture loss” and the dangers of forgetting must add a sense of urgency to the nostalgic imperatives that underpin these practices. In combination, these factors provide an explanation for the ontological shifting involved in the apparent downgrading of the dangers associated with photographs of the dead. Observing the ways that Susan and the children sought to control the circumstances of viewing and circulation of these recordings, it was quite apparent that they did not have a sense that their actions were untraditional and therefore somehow improper. If, as I am suggesting here (following Bangana himself), culture is a matter of sensibility—producing a tendency to use these technologies to generate relationships, especially through the prism of the Ancestral—then the fact that Susan treated these images differently from Shirley need not detract from the “Yolnguness” of either practice or perspective. (This scrutinizing for Culture, I emphasize, is my own fetishization, not hers.) The kinds of ontological movements and developing practices I witnessed during this period offer a more complex and less reductive sense of the kinds of impacts wrought by Western technologies than those predicted by Weiner (1997) with his Heideggerian-inflected anxieties about the representational eidos imposed by the camera.18 Although the funeral may have provided an impetus for the emergence of new practices and attitudes that had been evolving for some time, it seems to me that Bangana’s vision for a technologically mediated relation to culture and modernity informed the very practices and attitudes I

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observed at his own funeral. In particular I suspect that his immediate family—Susan and her four children —felt emboldened and authorized when taking and showing photographs (although always mindful of who was present) because these actions reflected and reproduced the kinds of practices and innovations that Bangana had become known for during his lifetime. The use of these modern representations by so many members of his family adds a performative dimension: they were showing or making visible who he was through their use of media technologies as they commemorated his life.19  Coda

Rather than foreclose my discussion, I offer one last image from the funeral. This photograph shows me sitting in front of Bangana’s coffin, with his wife and children posing behind. Propped up in the background is a barely recognizable photograph of Bangana, somewhat overshadowed by a picture of Jesus, a gift from mourners, whose striking visage of suffering (and light-catching whiteness) places an undue emphasis on Christianity, a theme that was not a particularly predominant part of the funeral for those of us in the picture. The photograph invites closer inspection for many reasons: the expressions on the faces, the details of the construction of the funeral shade, the arrangement of fans and flowers —all these are eye-catching. However, as remarkable as this image is, it is not enough to simply reproduce it here and so authorize my insider’s account of the funeral. While this picture presents itself as a curious and slightly disturbing memento of my relationship with an extraordinary man, there is more to it than meets the eye. In contrast to Yolngu epistemological principles, if this photograph is to contribute to a deeper appreciation of Yolngu, it requires not only a showing, but a telling. As Susan knows, I have many recordings and photos of Bangana. Nonetheless, during the funeral she still worried about my going home to Sydney, as it is so far from Gapuwiyak. As we sat together beside the coffin, in the muffled quiet of the corrugated iron funeral shelter, she suggested that we should take a family photograph. “It would,” she said, “be the same as that other one, the one we took in Darwin. All of us together. Another one, so you can remember.” She was of course referring to the studio portrait taken during our trip in 1997, the photo I had kept all these years on my office wall. Finding myself simultaneously moved by the gesture yet startled by the idea of sameness when all I could think of were the jarring contrasts between these two moments —the absence, the loss, the inescapable and appalling

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difference between now and then —I drew a breath and agreed that we should pose together again. These were the last hours of the funeral, the air hot and heavy. The body had lain in the purpose-built iron shelter for the ten days that it took to complete the ritual; it was almost time to put Bangana in the ground. We had to take the photo there and then. The kids were already smeared with a fresh layer of red clay for the burial ceremony; I wore my best skirt and a black top; Susan wore the outfit I had bought her in Darwin. As a widow, she had been in seclusion, prohibited from washing, changing her clothes, or being seen outside the funeral shelter. 20 The coffin was draped with a large Aboriginal flag and adorned with the flowers that had arrived during the week. Outside the shelter, hundreds of Yolngu were gathering, singing and dancing in clan groups, building up for the final stage of what had been an emotional and politically charged ceremony. Taking charge, Susan propped up the enlarged, laminated photo of Bangana at the head of his coffin. She arranged the children and myself around the body, making certain that the sacred bathi remained out of the range of the viewfinder (a condition laid down by the djunggayarr [ritual managers] from whom Susan had sought permission for the photograph). In a flash we were rerecorded in our family pose. Mum, Dad, the four kids, and their adopted anthropologist. Like the artificial flowers that still adorn Bangana’s grave, this photograph provides a lasting focus for memory and memorializing beyond

Figure 16. Another family portrait.

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the ceremony itself. (How bewildered Susan looked when she discovered that Balanda preferred to bring fresh flowers.) As I look now at this photo I cannot help but recall our time in Darwin. The second image evokes the first, and vice versa. The doubly referential backward and forward relationship between them is, of course, intentional: these photographs are all about evoking the constitutive powers of relationship. They demonstrate that in Yolngu hands —in this case Susan controls the act of photography and the circulation of the image —the camera can be put to a focused mimetic purpose. By posing we are making visible a set of relations; this photograph works to repeat, reaffirm, reproduce, and represence the relationships already framed in the first photograph. A sense of continuity is produced by the reconfiguration of this pattern of our relationship: them and me, Yolngu and Balanda. (Or, as Susan sometimes comments, Marrawangu and Wunungmurra—using clan surnames to distinguish her relationship as a Dhuwa moiety woman from the rest of us who are all from a Yirritja clan). When thought of together, the photographs effect a layering of reference and meaningfulness that is characteristic of the mimetic intentionality of Yolngu ritual practice: through repetition comes an intensification of mimetic force necessary to make relationships enduring and enlivened. Seen through Yolngu eyes (and I am becoming accustomed to seeing in this way), the family photograph produces a presence, even as it marks an absence. Like the mimetic labor of ritual that brings forth and makes visible particular sets of relationships between clans, taking photos —the posing, the act of photography, and the gift of the image —makes relationships stronger. These actions actively mediate and assert continuity; they reinforce a sense of the sameness and connection over the gaps and ruptures of everyday time and space. These images produce the possibility for these relationships to be reconstituted, that is, known, felt, and reaffirmed, again and again, via the productive work of memory. As time passes, the mimetic exactitudes of modern technologies will help to keep memories sharp; the materiality of the images, combined with the possibility of reproduction, distribution, and replacement, provides an enduring, potent, and practical focus for the affective work of remembering. Unlike Susan and the rest of the family, I mostly find this kind of active mimetic remembering of the recently dead almost too painful to bear. As I look, the photographs give rise to other images, memories, and feelings. I remember how Bangana had phoned asking for photographs when his younger brother had died the previous year, within days of my mother’s death, and I feel a surge of regret at not sending them. I remember his elation at the video we produced together and the happy gratitude I had

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felt at the surprise party he had thrown for me at the BRACS —the very last time I had seen him alive. I remember the bush trip we took with my mother years earlier, how she drove the four-wheel drive while he leaned out the window, rifle poised, ready for a shot at kangaroo and buluki (cattle); I remember the way he had to shout “Slow down Ngama (Mum)” because of her deafness; I remember our mosquito -filled camp that evening, my mother’s polite refusal of the slabs of half-cooked meat, and her furtive trips to the back of the car to her stash of crackers. And, as I feel my tears, I remember the many times Bangana and I had discussed the ambiguous potencies of mimetic technologies and his plans for our future work together. Susan had told me the photographs help her “to keep him close.” I think I now understand—if only to the limits of my own, inevitably culturebound mimetic faculty. If I allow Yolngu imperatives to direct my viewing, I experience something that I have come to know as profoundly and importantly Yolngu. In the process of my remembering and imagining, in the active and intentional feelingful merging of my self-presence with the images that presence him, the distances between past and present—the distances that divide Gapuwiyak from Sydney—become, momentarily, indistinct. We are connected again: “In a Yolngu way,” as my brother from Arnhem Land would have said.

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[

7

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Technology, Techne, and Yolngu Videomaking

There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name techne. Once that revealing which brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearance was also called techne. Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. The poiesis of the fine arts was also called techne. ::

Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings

I now wish to return to my original thematic focus, indigenous media production, with an extended analysis of the first—and now, tragically, the only—Yolngu video project directed by Bangana. In 1997, with the assistance of an indigenous television production company from central Australia, Bangana and I completed a major video project entitled Gularri: That Brings Unity. The video tells the story of Gularri, the sacred fresh waters that flow through the waterholes, rivers, and seas of Yirritja clan countries across northeast Arnhem Land. Infused with Ancestral potency, replete with layers of story and significances, Gularri, and the sacred sites associated with it, is an important source of Yolngu identity. For Yolngu of the Yirritja moiety, these waters are a foundational source: not only do they and their rangga come from Gularri: they are Gularri. Gularri does not simply represent them, it is them.1 In former days, knowledge of this Ancestral creative source and the connections between clans and countries generated by its flow across the region would be imparted to initiates in the restricted, inside domain of regional ceremonies known as ngarra. These ceremonies can be held by either moiety. They focus on clan identity and the shared Ancestral legacy that makes certain clans the same as each other and thereby linked into relationships of reciprocity and mutuality. Both men and women participate

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in the dancing throughout the rites, but only men are allowed into the restricted, inside spaces of the ceremony ground where the revelation of the clan’s most secret objects takes place. The ceremony also serves as a forum for disciplining youths and an arena in which political disputes between clans can be settled, but also a means by which certain versions of Ancestral events may be asserted over others in the name of setting the story straight. 2 In making his video, Bangana sought to reach a wider audience beyond restrictions of clan or gender; he intended to generate the transformative, connective, and disciplinary effects of ngarra via television; he wanted to show them what he called the “big picture of Yolngu culture” so that the new generation might be drawn back to country, back to rom, and thence, as he said, back to “where they belong.”3 Early in the preproduction process, Bangana announced to me that the project would be called Gularri: That Brings Unity. As well as indicating the central theme, the English-language subtitle (appended for the benefit of a non-Yolngu television audience who, as a result of our co production deal, were to view the program on Imparja, the regional television station) was my first indication of Bangana’s expectation of the effects the video would produce. The video would, he told me, enable Yolngu to recognize themselves and their identity; it would allow them to connect with Culture; it would unite Yolngu across northeast Arnhem Land. Recognition. Connection. Unity. These themes will be explored in this and the following two chapters. Everything that I have come to understand about Yolngu media production —most particularly, the complex ways in which a Yolngu mimetic sensibility pervades and informs the production and its reception —is embedded in, and demonstrated by, this project. As I have already described, Bangana perceived the issues of media production and consumption as fundamentally ontological, and thus as intrinsically inseparable processes. Gularri enables me to explore this notion further, to demonstrate how Yolngu use these technologies to produce a bidirectional and constitutive relationship between subject, image, and audience that far exceeds the interpretive models of “active audiences” and the representational production of meaning and identity that underpin conventional Western theories of media.4 In this chapter I introduce the video and the direction of my analysis. Describing Bangana’s motivations for making Gularri, and his expectations of its effects, I will explain the Heideggerian-inflected approach that I have adopted as a means of apprehending the ontological dynamics that I will argue underpin the project. As I have come to realize, although ostensibly a recording of a traditional story of Ancestral creation, Gularri

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is better appreciated as a specific response to the contemporary circumstances of Yolngu life —an explicit and self-conscious engagement with modernity figured through the structures and authority of the Ancestral and the mimetic power of technology. But I get ahead of myself. Let me begin by outlining what Gularri is not.  Moving the Ancestral beyond Tradition

Complete with ceremonial leaders and clapsticks, featuring sacred sites in remote bush settings, Gularri exhibits elements that signify traditional Yolngu Culture (to both Yolngu and Balanda audiences). It was exactly these attributes that Bangana and I duly emphasized when applying for funding for the project from ATSIC’s cultural maintenance budget. We used the promise of diverse and scenic locations together with a local interest in recording traditional song and story to secure professional expertise and equipment from CAAMA Productions. 5 While a certain brandishing of Culture made this project possible — financially, technically, and discursively—there is more to Gularri than what might generally be understood by reference to established notions about tradition. To suggest that this is a film about a traditional Aboriginal Culture would be to imply that Yolngu culture can be preserved by recording traditional practices, and such a suggestion makes the assumption that the work of strengthening culture is a form of archiving: a form of cultural salvage undertaken by recording narratives and music before they are forgotten and, thereby, lost forever. Such a view also assumes that media technologies capture, in audiovisual form, an objective reality that enables a lasting record of a culture and its knowledges. Yet Bangana was interested not in preserving culture but rather in producing it. So although inspired and authorized by ritual, Gularri is not a video about ritual. It is a video that produces the effects of ritual. Viewing Gularri and its production through the prism of tradition can also obscure its complex, innovative, dynamic, and distinctly modern dimensions. As I will describe, the making of the film was by no means a straightforward matter of turning on the camera and letting clan elders from an oral culture speak for themselves in some kind of time -honored tradition. Bangana had to radically adapt existing narrative styles and structures in order to make a version of this story suitable for unrestricted public broadcast. The senior men and women who appear on-screen had to be gently coached and coaxed into a new style of storytelling. Significant details —both narrative and visual—had to be left out.6

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Yet the very things that make Gularri an experimental moment in contemporary Yolngu cultural production —and a distinctive form of filmmaking—are not easily apparent to a Balanda audience. Even with the benefit of subtitles, it is difficult for non-Yolngu to discern just what it is that makes Gularri a compelling piece of television in Gapuwiyak and surrounding Yolngu communities. A deceptively simple -looking video, produced in the seemingly straightforward style of television documentary, Gularri tends to disappoint Balanda because of what it isn’t. Apart from the captivating opening sequence, it is almost impossible for them —whether they are film scholars scrutinizing the images for signs of difference and/or resistances, or schoolteachers living in Gapuwiyak with a general interest in Yolngu Culture —to sustain their interest for the seventy-minute duration. Largely devoid of spectacle, narrative explanation, or elaborate filmic and editing technique and effects, and shot in a style that might best be described as “documentary realism,” the video is made up of a combination of static shots of talking (and singing) heads, intercut with close-ups of water and pans across the surrounding country. The final edit demonstrates a number of conventions of mainstream documentary television production: the narrative is carried in voice-over (importantly, this comes in the form of the insistent and repetitive voice of the primary storyteller, Charlie Ngalambirra Ngurruwuthun, and not a “voice of God” exegesis delivered by a Balanda expert or celebrity); the use of establishment shots in wide frame to set the scene of a location; the use of overlay to layer on details of a particular place while the narrative or song continues on the sound track. Yet despite these apparent conventions of mainstream documentary and the addition of subtitles, Gularri is not intended to be either a representation or a translation of culture. Although it is a production directly arising out of, and circulating within, discourses of Culture, it appears to fail to deliver in this regard—at least in any way that can be discerned by a non-Yolngu viewer. In comparison to the shaky camera pans across country of early Warlpiri Media Association videos described by Michaels, or the community of Borroloola insisting on wide-angle shots and full-body shots in the collaborative project Two Laws (Cavadini and Strachan 1981), there is no apparent attempt to stylistically represent an Aboriginal point of view. In comparison to the kinds of footage of Yolngu that have found their way into the Western imagination via the earnest observations of ethnographic film and the playful exoticism of Yothu Yindi music videos, the visuals quickly become uninteresting and repetitious. For all the song and story on which the program is based, there is very little in the way of either explanation or the kind of cultural spectacle that Yolngu have

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become adept at performing for visiting television crews, and that Balanda audiences have come to expect. This film is, arguably, unique in both form and content in comparison to the many other film and video productions that Bangana had been involved with. (I saw Bangana provide Culture on demand countless times: searching for a hollowed branch to make a yidaki, roasting bush tucker in a ground oven, singing his clan songs while his brothers danced bungul [public ceremony]. He would knowingly trade in these forms of cultural capital, all too aware of the kind of limited understandings and hunger for visual spectacle that drive these encounters.) But, as I’ve said, this film was not a film about Culture. At one level the video is deeply informed by the kinds of self-conscious and reflexive notions associated with modernity, culture, visuality, and identity politics that inspire the intercultural filmmaking project described by film theorists such as Marks (2000), though this is not readily apparent. Rather than appearing familiarly exotic (in the ways ethnographic film has tended to frame ritual) or disconcertingly strange (as in experimental/avant-garde filmmaking), Gularri can come across as strangely and disappointingly familiar. For these reasons I understood, although I was still appalled, when the non-Aboriginal executive producer at CAAMA, whose eye for Culture was honed in the international commercial television marketplace (and who did not last too long in that job), reportedly pronounced the program “abysmal.”  A Metanarrative of Connectedness

As a director concerned primarily with communicating with a Yolngu audience, Bangana brought a very different range of expectations and understandings to bear on the production. For Gularri holds a special and structuring place in the Yolngu imagination. In the 1920s when W. Lloyd Warner conducted the first comprehensive ethnographic study in the region that was to become known as northeast Arnhem Land, he observed the central place of sacred clan wells and waterways in ceremonial life. Describing water as the most “unifying concept” in clan ideology, he writes: [It is] the sacred clan water hole in which reposes the spiritual unity of clan life. It is the fundamental symbol of clan solidarity. From it come all the eternal qualities, and to it those qualities return when they have been lived or used by members of the clan. Water . . . is one of the most important symbols of spiritual life. (1969, 19)

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Both Yirritja and Dhuwa moieties have their own separate sacred waters, yet for reasons of relationship through the matriline and the clan patriline, an individual will have close connections with both. In the course of a lifetime all Yolngu will accrue knowledge about Gularri through close association with their own, or their mother’s, Gularri ringgitj (important and powerful sites that connect a number of different clans of the same moiety). They will spend time in the country surrounding these sacred waters, hunting, fishing, and camping. During such times they will have been told about the significance of certain features in the landscape and told the stories relating to their creation (at least to a certain nonrestricted level of meaning). And, at other times in their lives, most Yolngu will have performed Gularri in rituals such as Yirritja mortuary ceremonies, asserting their heritage and enlivening their connections with the Ancestral Gularri. Indeed, the imaginations of both moieties are steeped in a watery poetics: images of flow and confluence, reflection and depth, bubbling and gushing, fresh and salty are variously taken up and elaborated to specific cultural effect.7 In ceremonial performances the objects carried and deposited by Gularri’s seasonal floods are evoked along with the animals and fish that swim in the waterholes and rivers and the colors and patterns within the water itself. Dreams also provide an important source of knowledge and experiences of connection. Yolngu often report receiving information, or “finding” a song or painting relating to these Ancestral sources during sleep. Such images cumulatively build an image of Gularri sites in the mind’s eye of participants. These evocations produce powerful and affectladen experiences in participants that affirm and enliven the underlying Ancestral connections that link Yolngu across the everyday bounds of time and space. Thus Yolngu come to know of their own clan’s version of the Gularri story as it relates to their own country and clan-based ritual practices in accumulated knowledge —both conceptual and embodied —that builds and deepens with experience and age. Yet there is also another level of knowledge relating to these sacred clan wells and watercourses.8 As Bangana explained to me, even though the younger generation knew about their Gularri, even though they could sing and dance their identity in relation to these waters, they did not fully understand how it “connects everyone up.” Traditionally, ngarra ceremonies would have provided the contexts in which elders impart information that explains the Ancestral basis for relationships between clans, revealing what Bangana called the “big picture” of the underlying Ancestral order to the assembled, participating clans. For Yirritja clans, Gularri provides an important motif and structure of connectedness through which this unity is revealed

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and regenerated in these revelatory rites. Ngarra thus provides an important context for knowledge and responsibility for clan sacra passed on between the generations. The ceremony is seen as a forum for disciplining the youth who will then assume their own role in the maintenance of the underlying Ancestral order.9 Warner’s ethnography (1969, 19–26) provides details about ngarra ceremonies that I am unable to reproduce here because of Yolngu concerns to restrict the revelation of these inside practices from Balanda. Morphy (1991) and Keen (1994) also describe aspects of these rituals based on their research in the 1970s and 1980s.10 Although each of these anthropologists brings a slightly different analytic emphasis to his discussions, what is striking about these accounts is the consistency with which they report Yolngu explanations of the role of ngarra.11 As Warner puts it: “The old men say, ‘This makes one people’” (1969, 346). Seventy years after Warner’s work in Arnhem Land, Bangana made Gularri (as a public, technological version of ngarra) in response to what he, and other Yolngu clan leaders, perceived as an overarching crisis of cohesiveness. Issues surrounding identity and the maintenance of the Ancestral order have now taken on a particular urgency. For, as Bangana told me, because Yolngu are no longer regularly participating in ngarra, the “Yolngu world” is in danger of, quite literally, disintegrating.12 He explained, “Stories are falling into bits and pieces. People are forgetting the true stories. They don’t know how we are come together . . . [Because of this] clans are not properly respecting their connections with each other any more.” Bangana explained that this “forgetting [of] true stories” is being exacerbated by a proliferation of “lie stories,” referring to certain individuals who he claimed were deliberately skewing stories for personal gain, to the detriment of other clans or, indeed, other members of the same clan. (This accusation of the fabrication of stories is distinctly different from the processes of discovering new information about these stories through dreams or other revelatory processes.) He blamed certain Yolngu for using their knowledge of English to pursue their own interests in nontraditional contexts, for instance, by making claims for themselves on royalties or other rights to country through bureaucracies that were difficult for older people to negotiate. He also directed accusations toward particular individuals who were perceived to be providing Aboriginal administrative organizations such as the Northern Land Council or ATSIC with information that would benefit their own position without fully representing the complexity of ownership and rights regarding certain tracts of land.13 As Bangana explained to me, “made-up” stories have consequences that extend beyond certain individuals profiteering from brokering

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Culture in these new contexts. He saw this generational shift of power — and indeed the emergence of a different domain of power altogether —as producing a quite literal breakdown of culture. He saw these “new,” “made-up” stories producing a fragmentation of knowledge and authority that threatened the Yolngu world. The declining authority of the elders was producing a lack of cohesion —as these individuals made up stories, the Ancestral narratives, which place each individual and clan within a meta framework of interconnectedness and responsibility, were being eroded. The emergence of different versions of stories produced a fragmentation of truth, a breakdown in the Ancestral order of things. In other words, what was perceived to be under threat was the viability of the Ancestral template. Switching metaphors in order to express the necessity of an ongoing coherence between clans manifest through a commitment to Culture, he described the Yolngu world as “a big ball”: “Everybody in this ball is related. Wanggany (one) strong here, wanggany loose here, wanggany not interested here —this Yolngu ball you might as well forget about it.” Beyond the specifics of made-up stories, Bangana wanted his production to provide his audience with the basis for a reflexive and invigorated sense of being Yolngu. His comment indicates his intention not only that viewers will see and re-appreciate their individual connection to rom but also that they will undertake a process of seeing, knowing, connecting, and thence envisaging that will give rise to a self-confidence in the face of the political struggles and challenges of contemporary life. In other words, Gularri was made with a conviction that once the wayward Yolngu who had been making up stories had been exposed to the truths that Gularri confirms, they would be firmly, and quite literally, put back in their place. As Morphy (1991, 70–72) describes, when Yolngu choose to show their sacred paintings to another clan they are engaging in a transferral of knowledge and rights that produces a political/ritual relationship between groups. Revealing the sacra is understood to generate not only a relationship but reciprocities and responsibilities. Similarly, Bangana understood that viewing Gularri would generate a deeper sense of responsibility for Culture within its Yolngu audience. This, he told me, was his ultimate aim as a videomaker. In short, Gularri was produced within a contemporary cultural lifeworld in which issues surrounding the production of group identity and the maintenance of the Ancestral order have taken on a particular urgency. There was an explicit and self-conscious dimension to Bangana’s project that reflects a response to the emergence of a new question about identity, namely, what it means to be Yolngu. This term, meaning “the people,”

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has become an encompassing definition for the clans of northeast Arnhem Land, introduced by anthropologists and linguists but now increasingly used by the locals themselves. As I will show, the video works to produce a collective and politicized identity among the clans of the region, enabling the audience to make a new sense of what it might mean to be Yolngu in ways that are derived from locality as a lived experience of the underlying truths of the Ancestral. Bangana drew his own inspiration from the ancient Greeks (although in terms somewhat different from Heidegger’s). As he told me, Somewhere in the jurra [books], couple of years back, I read . . . that in the Greek . . . days, the more they were together, the bigger voice they had, and when they were separated, doing their own little councils, they had less power. And that’s how I see it now. [So that’s what this video is for.] Bring back the people. To their country, their bilma, their rom, who they are. And when they get that feeling, they’ll feel more responsible for the wanga (country), and they’ll think, we’ve got this strong history here with this wanga, and we’ve got all this involvement with other clans, they’re involved with this too. So let’s do something about it. They might think about going back to the wanga. Reclaiming it. Saying we want this wanga because it’s got the truth. . . . ’cause when you hear the truth, see the truth, you get this feeling for your wanga, for your country, for your clan. And the more spiritual feelings you get, the more involved you get with your wanga. And it makes you feel like you’ve got responsibility for that wanga. That’s you. That’s your country. That’s your clan, that’s your grandmother, that’s your father’s clan they are talking about. Do something about it.

 Technology, Techne, and Revelation

Seeing. Knowing. Feeling. Connecting. Truth. Bangana’s claims about the efficacy and impacts of his Yolngu video compel my analysis toward a consideration of the relationship between vision, culture, and technology; they demand that I explore the ways that Bangana used television technologies to produce certain modes and moments of knowing and becoming that he identified and privileged as constitutive of Yolngu culture and identity. Although clearly motivated by a self-conscious, and deeply political, concern with the issues of identity that arise in the broader contexts of contemporary Yolngu lives, Bangana’s project required that I come to a different kind of understanding of representational politics from that offered in the literature I was reading at the time. This is a production aimed primarily at a Yolngu audience (although it was also expected to have effects on Balanda, as I will discuss in the conclusion). It was made

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from within local cultural logics and aimed at an audience with a level of preexisting knowledge of both the subject matter and the ritual connotations that the video invokes. In short, Gularri was made to connect with and reenliven Yolngu imaginations in very particular ways. Just as certain regional rituals produce regenerative effects on country (Morphy 1991, 85), this production aimed at stimulating, recharging, and reconnecting Yolngu individuals who —at least according to Bangana—are in danger of “forgetting who they are” and becoming impervious to the Ancestral as a result of the cumulative effects of a neglect of Cultural responsibilities and Balanda distractions. The following analysis is deeply informed by my reading of Heidegger’s later work on technology and poetics, drawing particularly on the highly influential essays in the volumes The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (1977b) and Poetry, Language, Thought (2001). As I have already mentioned in chapter 2, in his discussions on modernity, Heidegger’s concern with technology has less to do with devices per se than with the relationship that devices produce between subjects and nature, objects and other human beings. Heidegger argues that technology reduces and refracts Being into that which can be represented, objectified, and thus mastered. Modern subjects are no longer embedded in the world; we are only capable of a subject-object relationship with the things around us. In this manner, Being is reduced. Humanity is now only able to know the “world as picture” (1977b, 129). In “The Age of the World Picture” (1977b) he defines representation as productive of a particular kind of relationship-in-the world in which, [one acts] to set out before oneself and to set forth in relation to oneself. Through this, whatever is comes to stand as object and in that way alone receives the seal of Being. That the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man’s becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is. (132)

In short, the effects of seeing and knowing the world through the various prisms that culture and history generate for subjects —what Heidegger calls “enframing”—are ontological. Heidegger explores the ways in which the apprehension of Being is contingent on a subject’s culturally, technologically, and/or poetically mediated relationships with the world. He situates the production of knowledge within the context of a culturally prescribed foreknowledge or sensibility. In other words, he argues that the lifeworld predisposes subjects to see the world in particular ways. In the process, other kinds of knowledges or insights in relation to Being are, inevitably, concealed.

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Heidegger’s discussions on technology proceed from his assertion that through technology something critical about the way the world is is revealed—and simultaneously other aspects are concealed. This revelation/ concealing of the world manifest by technology provides the basis for what becomes the normative experience of cultural subjects whose knowledges and experiences are shaped by the kinds of relations that technology enables and produces. In short, for Heidegger the increasing prevalence of a technological enframing of the world is cause for alarm; he argues that “modern technology” is instrumental in producing a diminished relation to Being.14 Heidegger’s critique of technology cannot be fully understood without considering the alternative he proposed to the alienations and reductions of modern life. In order to provide an example of what he considered a more authentic being-in-the-world (a subject position able to more fully glimpse the usually invisible, hidden nature of Being), Heidegger turned to ancient Greece. He uses the ancient Greek term techne (the term from which the word “technology” derives) to provide a contrast to the effects of modernday technology. Techne refers to the skill and activities of the craftsman, the poet, and practitioners of the fine arts in ancient Greece. Equating the work of techne with aletheia (the ancient Greek word for “truth”) or “unconcealment,” Heidegger describes how it enables nonobjectifying and nonsubjectifying ways of relating to nature, objects, and other human beings; techne enables a “bringing forth” or poiesis. As he writes: “Thus what is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making and manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the . . . revealing. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth” (13). In other words, techne does not produce a resource or a representation; it is a mode of presencing; it produces the possibilities of a revelation of Being. Techne enables subjects to experience themselves and the world with the sense of a constitutive mutuality and interconnectedness rather than the modern alienations produced by the technological endgame of objectification and mastery. Thus, as Heidegger himself suggests, there is an alternative to the modernity he so eschews. Technology can be used as a way of revealing. He writes, “If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth” (12). Despite this insight, in general Heidegger tended to distinguish “modern technology” from techne, characterizing the effects of twentieth-century machinery as undesirable and alienating. The kind of revelation made possible by modern technology, he argued, did not constitute poiesis. Rather,

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modern technology discloses a world that is objectified: nature is revealed as a resource to be mastered and exploited (14). By contrast, in Poetry, Language, Thought (2001) Heidegger expands his ideas regarding enframing, worlding, and the revelation of truth in relation to art and poetry, thereby allowing for contexts in which modern subjects might know for themselves the power of poiesis. For Heidegger, certain “great” art and poetry effects a transcending of the creative intentionality of the artist or author, enabling the revelation of an essential truth of Being. He writes that art “is the becoming and happening of truth” (69): the vision of the individual artist is exceeded by the work of art that discloses something salient about the way that the world is. Arguing that the arts enable a culture (or as he puts it, “a people”) to see and recognize a quintessential truth about themselves, he suggests that they are crucial in clarifying a culture’s vision of itself. In the process of viewing and listening to art, the “world”—a people, a culture —are drawn together, constituted in a shared, encompassing sphere of meaningfulness. In this way, as Heidegger puts it, the world is “worlded.” In short, it is Heidegger’s writing on art and poetics, rather than on modern technology per se, that I find the most inspiring.15 In the following analysis I’ll demonstrate that in a “same but different” manner, Bangana used video production and television broadcast to “world the world” through technological “art.” Consequently, the argument advanced in the following chapters reflects a somewhat unorthodox application of Heideggerian philosophy with regard to modernity and technology: this will be no lament about the ontologically diminishing and culturally destructive effects of Western technology on an indigenous people. Instead, my arguments effectively turn Heidegger back on himself by applying his writing on techne and poiesis to offer an alternative accounting of the effects of video/film and television.  A Yolngu Worlding

As previously indicated, Bangana, at least from my perspective, articulated a Heideggerian-like appreciation of the profoundly constitutive nature of media technologies.16 He located the question regarding media technology at the level of the perceptual subject, understood that culture and technology mediate perception, and suggested that the effects of these mediations are determinative of ways of being-in, and relating-to, the world. Heidegger, as I have explained, not only understands difference to be an ontological problem; the opposition he sets up between the Greek and

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modern modalities of being-in-the-world is explicitly visual. In his work, as Jay describes, the modern subject position is “abstracted, monocular, inflexible, unmoving, rigid, egological and exclusionary”; whereas the ancient Greek way of seeing was “multiple, aware of its context, inclusionary, horizontal and caring,” thus allowing a more “authentic” relation with Being (1994, 275).17 In these ways, Heidegger foregrounds perception as profoundly cultural: vision is a modality of relating-in-the-world through which ontological difference can be identified and explored. He demands an appreciation of technology in terms of what it hides as much as in what it shows; he is concerned with how the vital play between revelation and concealment acts, as he phrases it, to “world the world.”18 However, unlike Heidegger, Bangana saw no necessary tension between traditional Yolngu ways of being-in-the -world and the highly technologically mediated modes of seeing, knowing, and identifying enabled by media. Whereas Heidegger understood such technologies to sever the possibility of a connectedness between the subject and nature, objects and other human beings —to ontologically sever the constitutive primacy of the intersubjective —Bangana sought to use these technologies for precisely the opposite effect, namely, to diminish distance and bring people, country, and sacra closer together. Hence, as I will show, the technological and the self-consciously “modern” nature of the production does not detract from the video’s being put to use in a Yolngu way. Rather than diminishing or distorting the relationship between the viewer and nature, objects and other subjects, Bangana made video to evoke ways of being-in-the-world that reproduced and reconnected the viewing subject to the intersubjective truths of the Ancestral. For all his talk of having a “vision for culture,” Bangana was not concerned with reproducing his own point of view; he did not use the screen as a retina for his personal perspective. Instead, he saw in television technologies —in the video camera, the transmitters, and TV screens —the possibilities for producing the kinds of intersubjective connections, knowledges, and identifications more usually engendered in the highly charged “inside” contexts of revelatory ceremonies.  The Sensual Circuits of Television

In the next two chapters I will develop my somewhat refracted Heideggerian point of view in order to explain the reasons why the depth, scope, and inherently Yolngu dimensions of Gularri are far from self-evident to a Balanda viewer. I will argue that the kinds of “blindness” that inhibit a Balanda

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appreciation of the video arise out of something deeper than not knowing the story and thereby not having the information with which to read the text. The issues are more complex than that—they concern perspective and perception as a matter of culture. Hence my analysis will demonstrate the impossibility—and undesirability—of analytically separating production and consumption in any accounting of this project and its efficacies. Whereas Michaels’s analysis separately explored the significance of the off-screen relationships that informed and authorized Warlpiri video production, and the importance of the Warlpiri eye as it informs viewing practices, I want to push these insights further to consider the technologically mediated relationship between the production, the image, and the viewer as a circuit through which culture is constituted. Describing how Bangana used television as a technology of showing, rather than representing, and of seeing, rather than reading, I will demonstrate how Gularri both enacts and enables a cultural imperative that is ontological rather than strictly semantic, poetic and associative rather than expository or explanatory. Yirritja moiety people sometimes use the word “Gularri” to refer to their mulkurr (head or mind). This way of speaking gives another indication of the depth of Gularri’s significance and potency. It suggests that in a Yolngu point of view, clan members not only share rights to country, sacred objects, and designs; they share a certain sensibility derived from Ancestral sources. As Michael Christie and John Greatorex describe, to see one’s mulkurr is “both perceptive and productive —it gives you a particular way of seeing as well as a particular way of acting upon the world. Through the knowledge of their own mulkurr, other people know how to understand you, to act towards you, and to respect you” (2004, 42). Although admittedly requiring a degree of retrofitting—not to mention leading me to a very different conclusion about the nature of technology and perception —Heidegger’s philosophical project provides me with a way to approach imaginative challenges that such a claim presents. His ontological concerns with how one relates —and therefore becomes — in and through the world, enables me to investigate this cultural orientation that posits a more complex, active, and bidirectional sensual engagement between the “seer” and the “seen” than usually ascribed to processes of watching television. The key to understanding Gularri is that it was produced with a visual sensibility that derives from ritual revelation. Ritual, as I have previously described, provides a modality of relating-in-the -world through which Yolngu identify with the Ancestral, mimetically accessing forms of spiritual potency and generating the intersubjective, intercorporeal identifications

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that provide the cohesion for what Bangana called the “Yolngu world.” In making Gularri, he sought to produce these kinds of experiences, and the knowledges that they give rise to, in the extremely public—and seemingly everyday—context of watching television. Enthused and confident, he claimed that watching his video would have a more profound impact on its viewers than actually spending “real” time in country. As he told me in his characteristically pragmatic way: “In the old days if you walked through country, if you wanted to know about Culture you still had to come back and do ceremony.” For a long time I struggled to understand his claim that these technologies provided a relationship with the clan countries that was in many ways better than literally being there. Such an idea seemed to undervalue the array of knowledge and experiences that an unmediated being in country could offer. To my mind there were very real and significant differences between the two types of connection with, and knowledge of, country. The video seemed only a second-best option, a means of reaching an audience who may not have the time, the resources, or even the inclination to spend time in the locations they were most closely related to. In retrospect I realize these assumptions are the product of my own cultural ontological position. My own way of viewing the issues of the “real” and the “represented” meant that I understood television to provide an approximation of being there that was necessarily a lesser experience than visiting somewhere or someone in the flesh. Yet this is not necessarily the case for Yolngu. In the following chapters I will explain how under Bangana’s direction, videomaking enables a different kind of direct connection to Gularri from that privileged by a traditional Western ontology.  More Than an Empirical “Real”

As I will show, Gularri does not produce the kind of being-in-the-world that Heidegger understood to be an outcome of the technological. The video does not function as a didactic lecture; it is not about its “star”—a clan elder and ceremonial leader —exerting his power or delineating the truth in the sense that a Balanda viewer might expect. Bangana did not seek a totalizing, rationalizing approach to documenting culture: culture is not treated as a resource to be objectified. It is not being salvaged or preserved by the archiving of every detail of story or song. Nor are the terms of the engagement a form of reappropriation of the power to represent: this is not a struggle over the signifiers of culture. Culture and identity are not produced through representation; rather, like ritualized forms of identification

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(but also, as I suggested in the previous chapter, in other less spectacular or “official” moments), layers of identification and understanding are being built up in the witnessing, knowing, feeling, somatic subject. Over and over again, throughout a lifetime, Yolngu subjects are actively relocated in an intersubjective web of relationship that provides the foundations of meaning and meaningfulness. In this way, viewing Gularri provides another layer in an embodied experience, a layer of perspective and connection that (especially with the cumulative effects of constant replay) becomes part not only of how Yolngu see the world but part of who they are. However, although there is an important sense in which production is premised on the notion that the images do “speak for themselves,” it is important to grasp that Bangana does not use the camera in a straightforwardly empirical sense —as if what appears on-screen shows things exactly as they are or suggests that this is all there is. In comparison to the observational-style video that Gambali and I had recorded at football matches and even ceremony, this video deliberately invited a more complex kind of visual engagement with the camera, the images, and the audience. Bangana brought to his videomaking a sensibility honed by a culture that uses ritual revelation as the crucible of power, knowledge, and truth. As I will describe, this impacted on both the form and content of the video. Central to the planning and production process was an acute awareness of the unrestricted public access to the video that would provide audiences extending into the future, beyond the control and eventually the lifespan of all the participants.19  A Certain Receptivity

Intended as the first of many productions, as things turned out Gularri was Bangana’s only full-scale cultural production. Its completion not only marked the culmination of my “official” fieldwork (as opposed to the ongoing visits and phone calls with Yolngu in the ensuing years); it provided me with an invaluable, enduring, and now irreplaceable manifestation of Bangana’s skills and vision. However, as I was to discover, while making the video may have been the endpoint of fieldwork, it marked only the beginning stage in my understanding of Bangana’s culture project. Even after all these years, I feel I am still only just coming to a proper appreciation of what we were doing—what we were producing—during those hot, busy weeks in 1997. Most of the ideas I explore in the following chapters occurred to me only in hindsight. My perception has developed through a

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rereading of the work of other ethnographers and of philosophers, as well as the exegeses provided by Bangana and other Yolngu. The work of anthropologists specializing in more traditional forms of Yolngu cultural production provides an ethnographic context for an analysis of Gularri in relation to ritual, painting, and dance (aspects of Yolngu life I had not had time to sufficiently explore because of my commitments to, and focus on, BRACS). 20 From there, as I have indicated, I turned to Heidegger and other phenomenological philosophers, and then paid a renewed attention to my taped discussions with Bangana and, of course, the video itself. In short, Gularri has provided me with a source of ongoing stimulus and revelatory potential, its shimmering waters giving rise to a kind of cumulative embodied insight and understanding, long after its initial broadcast. Indeed, the very nature of the filmic—and the particularities of this video project—meant that certain kinds of insights became available to me that may have eluded me had I been focusing on ritual itself. I came to develop quite a different kind of appreciation of the nature of the truth that Gularri conveys to its audience, exactly because I was not distracted by the layers of meanings embedded in the elaborate geometric clan designs, or the rich play of metaphor and metonymy elaborated in performances of clan song. What is most crucial about Gularri is that it allows its audience to see what is not visible on-screen. The production is not about a documentation of data but about providing a context through which a certain kind of Ancestrally authorized knowledge can be (re)produced, (re)affirmed, recognized, and, ultimately, revealed. In the course of my own imaginative engagement—in the full sense of an embodied, perceptual, and cognitive mimetic making sense of—I began to perceive something of the Yolngu cultural dynamics embedded within —and generated by—the production process, the reception, and the images themselves. I realized that the motivation behind Bangana’s videomaking—what he understood to be in danger of being “lost” and what he saw video as capable of reasserting—was not the Ancestral realm itself but, rather, an ability to see it. Or, to put it another way, the video was made to entice and to build a certain kind of receptivity in the audience to the enduring truth of the Ancestral. From a Yolngu point of view, this kind of “seeing”—a coming to knowledge that is at once conceptual and aesthetic, derived from individual interpretation and the exegesis of one’s elders —is entirely proper. Rather than seeking to represent embodied cultural experience on-screen, Bangana undertook to produce imagery that would generate the (re)production and

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reenforcement of particular kinds of experiences and understandings by his audience. Instead of making cultural experience visible, he drew on the power of the Ancestral itself to engage a particular kind of sensual predisposition in his audience through the interplay between showing, seeing, and knowing that I have come to regard as the fundamental and constitutive dynamic of the Yolngu Culture that Bangana sought to “strengthen.” In this way, as I will explain, Bangana took up videomaking with the intention of producing a poiesis of Culture; he made television in order to bring forth and broadcast a vision that would distinctively and decisively “world the world” as a place in which rom continues to belong.

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Shimmering Verisimilitudes: Making Video, Managing Images, Manifesting Truths

It was mid-1995, in the early days of our collaboration, when Bangana first raised the prospect of making a video for broadcast through the BRACS. Up until that time local videomaking had been limited to the recording of significant community events such as the public ceremonies of dhapi (male circumcision rituals), the local football grand final, and, most popular of all, the visit of celebrity television gardener Don Burke.1 Unlike these other recordings, Gularri was specifically planned and produced as a “Cultural video.” Ambitious in scope and subject matter, it involved many months of consultation, ten days of filming in nine remote locations that variously required access by four-wheel drive, helicopter, and chartered airplane and boat, and weeks of careful editing under the supervision of senior Yolngu men, before its broadcast on local BRACS and the regional television station, Imparja TV. Early on in the planning stages, Bangana told me: “Video is manymak [good]. But you have to be careful because you can see almost everything.” This suggestively oxymoronic statement captures something of the play between showing and seeing, concealing, containing, and presencing that informed his understanding of what was involved in directing video. Whereas much of Western thinking about film has adopted a semiotic view of the camera as an encoding or representational device and, more generally, has accepted the notion that as a technology it directs the gaze and imposes a particular modality of seeing, Bangana, as I will describe, used the camera to very different effect. In earlier chapters, I mentioned that both Sutton (1978) and MacDougall have argued that Aboriginal people use film technologies for showing. MacDougall, describing a tendency toward inscription rather than elaboration in films made with or by Aboriginal people, identifies what he calls a “heraldic cultural style.” Observing that, in Aboriginal

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cultures, the act of showing is “in and of itself a sufficient act and can constitute a transmission of rights” (1998, 148), MacDougall argues that instead of using film for narrative elaboration, dramatic effect, or even exegesis, this visual technology is put to use as a means of demonstrating certain rights. 2 In this chapter I will extend this observation by arguing that in Aboriginal cultures (or, at least, in certain Aboriginal cultures), “showing” entails something more than inscription or demonstration: it is a crucial dimension of an epistemology premised on revelatory dynamics.  Gularri: That Brings Unity

Close up: water flowing through the frame. Light refracts through a clear shallow stream, patches of darkness and light highlighting the rippling patterns that form and disappear across the surface. The subtle, soothing sound of water trickles across the audio track. For several long seconds, there is nothing else to see or hear. Only water. Then, cutting across the quiet, comes the slow rhythm of resonant cracks of bilma (clapsticks) over which a dhalkara (Yirritja moiety ritual specialist) begins to sing. As shots of flowing water dissolve from one to another, the singing voice names and locates the source of the water: Mulularrgalarrnga, Yuduryuduryudur, Yirrgirinydjingur, Gamadalalanguriya.3 These are yindi (big, important) names, more usually sung in ritual context: all refer to the one place, the source of the sacred creative waters of Gularri in the rocky outcrops of the Mitchell Plateau. Gradually the singing quiets, almost to a growl, the voice vibrating on the audio track merges with the bubbling water as it spills through the rocky shallows of Arnhem Land streams. Then the beat changes; it is now fast, insistent, driving. On an intake of breath, the dhalkara’s voice swells and lifts to intone the power words of the madak (a form of ceremonial singing with clap sticks). Another voice enters the soundscape with a whooshing yell. At the same time the visuals cut away to reveal the source of the calling: a group of clay- covered dancers hop rhythmically from one foot to the other, following the beat in a performance of gakal (a form of ritual dance associated with ngarra revelatory rites). The identity of these dancers is deliberately obscured, the blurred figures distorted in the filming and the postproduction, in order that they might only be recognizable (because of their clay markings and style of dancing) as Yirritja Yolngu. As the figures dance the water continues to flow, superimposed over their bodies. Moving together, the men and women call out. Making the sounds of the Gularri —deep throaty

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reverberating sounds —they onomatopoeically conjure the sounds of water, the sounds of the Gularri flowing, churning, gurgling, and bubbling with the force of creation: Gaaaa . . . mmm . . . mmm . . . Gaaa . . . whao . . . gaa . . . whoa . . . Ssss . . . whoa . . . Sss . . . whoa.

Throughout this opening sequence, the dhalkara himself remains offscreen, leaving only the force of his words to resonate across the images. For a Yolngu audience, the combination of liya (tune), the beat of the bilma, the bouncing figures of the gakal, the balaya (the clay on their foreheads), and yindi names of the county identify and locate the images in relation to the sacred creative waters known as Gularri belonging to the Yirritja moiety. Together the sounds and images announce that this is no ordinary video: this type of dance is more usually seen in the context of the most sacred of ceremonies, marking the movement of the rite from the inside of the men’s ceremony ground into the public camp. Similarly, the words that the dhalkara sings are “inside” words, powerful forms of reference reserved for moments of ceremonial significance. As the high-pitched, tremulous incantation charges the images with ritual significance, layering meaning and Ancestral authority into the performance and, by extension, into the video production and its broad-

Figure 17. The gakal: jumping and calling, the dancers evoke the flowing, surging waters of Gularri with the water superimposed over their bodies.

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cast, the rippling water, clear and sparkling, maintains a depth. Even in the shallows, all is not revealed. It is the surface on which the light plays and ripples form that catches the eye, yet, to a Yolngu audience, there is a tremendous significance in what cannot be seen, in what remains hidden under the water. After several minutes of this ritually charged introductory sequence, the screen fades to black. A moment later, special effects bring the word “Bungirrinydji” swirling out of a frame that shows only water, as it identifies the video’s first location. The dhalkara appears on-screen for the first time: an older man with gray hair and beard, wearing a blue bandana tied around his head and a long-sleeved shirt over a T-shirt with a fading slogan. Introducing himself in terms of his relationship to the water, he begins to recount in Yolngu matha (literally “tongue,” “language”) how the Gularri first came from Bungirrinydji and the places it subsequently flowed to. Manymak. [All right]. This is my grandfather country. We call this country Nuga Gamadala, Bungirrinydji, Yirrgirinydji This is where the fish jumped called Gunbarrwirrr, Dhulungu, Malwarwar It jumped And the water started to flow The water called Gularri Flowing, making noises But still my grandfather For those who have this Gularri it has all come from my grandfather For each tribe there is just one water from here From Gurrumala, Barmalyu itself Nobody else This place is the giver and it is my grandfather country And the name of the country again is Nuga Gamadala Bungirrinydji.

The dhalkara, Charlie Ngalambirra, is a Munuyku elder who often resides in Gapuwiyak. Sitting cross -legged on a rocky ledge next to a large pool of water, Ngalambirra recounts the names of the places, clans, and relationships that come from this source. With the beat of his bilma providing both tempo and Ancestral authority, Ngalambirra sings in the Madarrpa liya—the tune and language belonging to the country he is sitting in. If one looks carefully it is possible to make out Ngalambirra’s prosthetic leg, resting in front of him, unattached, on the rock. In the song he repeats the information of the story, adding layers of emphasis and meaning as he sings the names of the country, describing the flowing

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Figure 18. Charlie Ngalambirra at Bungirrinydji, the source of Gularri.

waters of creation. The lyrics refer to what might be described as sacred flotsam and jetsam: the bits of tree branches, weeds, and rocks carried by Gularri and washed up in the clan countries created by its flow. Aerial shots overlaying the singing add another perspective. As the camera zooms out into a wide shot, the dhalkara becomes a small speck in the landscape and the shadow of the helicopter becomes visible tracking across the rocky ranges toward the turquoise waters of the Arafura Sea. For the next hour and a half the video follows the flow of the sacred Ancestral waters of Gularri across northeast Arnhem Land from the Mitchell Ranges to the northernmost tip of the Wessel Island archipelago. The images progress through a series of locations belonging to various Yirritja moiety clans, traversing several hundred kilometers, as the dhalkara relates the names of the places and tells of the relationships connecting clan groups. At each location, Ngalambirra sings manikay about the Gularri in the language and tune of the landowners. The footage shows these various locations through long and slow pans intercut with shots of the water. In many places, representatives of the landowners join Ngalambirra on camera, authorizing and endorsing the veracity of the story with their on-screen presence. Ngalambirra emphasizes, looking directly at the camera with a calm authority, that this is the “true story of Gularri,” the “real story” as it was told to him by his

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father and grandfather: the story of where Gularri came from and where it flows. So begins Gularri: That Brings Unity.  Preproduction: Choosing a Story, Finding the “Star,” Locating a Crew

Bangana’s choice of subject matter for his first Cultural video was strategic. As Gularri flows from its source to its final location, these Ancestral waters create a network of connections and relationships between the clans and country left in their wake. This journey of creation produces a shared Ancestral legacy: the clans connected by Gularri hold sacra and stories in common and, as a consequence, they are understood to be, as Yolngu say, “same but different,” that is, related and responsible to each other, if differentiated still, because of their common source of identity. The unity that Gularri brings means that freshwater Yolngu living in the easternmost parts of the region are connected to saltwater Yolngu living several hundred kilometers away. Although there are many different Ancestral Beings that generate networks of relatedness in their journeys across the region, Gularri is a particularly important story for Yolngu because (unlike most stories, which link only certain groups of clans) it provides a source of identity shared by all Yirritja moiety clans. Each Yirritja clan has its own Gularri, a riverine or oceanic location that is the source of clan identity and knowledge.4 During a Yirritja funeral, Gularri may provide a motif for moving the deceased to a burial site. Dancers with the coffin move in a flowing motion, their foreheads marked with the white clay stripes that connote Gularri, as they return the spirit to their country, their ringgitj (important Ancestral sites within clan estates), their waters. Such performances contain multiple layers of meaning and reference, which participants understand according to their particular level of knowledge and the perspective of their clan. The performances evoke the features of the country, its animals, plants, and birds, offering participants and observers oblique access to inside meanings and significances that are not for public discussion, and are —at least according to official discourse —only revealed to initiates through revelatory rites. Together mimetic movement, the evocations, and the presencing power of these performances enact and enliven connections with Gularri as a lived and embodied source of knowledge and identity.5 Yolngu from the opposite moiety, Dhuwa, are also connected to Gularri through their Yirritja mothers.6 All Yolngu are related to, and through,

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Gularri; therefore, Gularri provides a narrative of Ancestral creation that Yolngu from across the entire region can, quite literally, relate to.7 The scope of subject matter that those of us working on the project were dealing with presented certain difficulties. Our plan to involve four different clans —following the flow of the Gularri itself—raised an array of politico -logistical issues. In theory we could have made a video in which any number of landowners or djunggayarr (ritual managers of the opposite moiety) could have told their version of the story in their own country.8 In practice (as we had learned in an earlier attempt to film a different story), various versions of stories were not always completely in harmony in terms of certain kinds of detail and emphasis. Our concern was not so much about narrative consistency as with appearing to contradict, and thereby implicitly challenge, the authority of another clan. These same issues also came into play at the interclan level. Because each site was the “same” as the other sites, any information revealed about one ringgitj would have implications for the others. Hence each telling of the story in each site would be subject to scrutiny by other Yirritja clans and their djunggayarr. The high level of concern regarding the management of information and the likelihood of such a production generating a dispute about the inclusion or exclusion of certain information made it extremely difficult, logistically and politically, to reach the necessary consensus to broadcast the story. Even if all the relevant individuals had been consulted, there could be no guarantee that the video would not provoke disputes among future audiences. These were the problems of producing a text in a cultural context in which every story, every ritual event, every revelation is managed and adjusted according to the context. Who is present, what they know, what connections and rights they have over the story and associated objects —all these things are taken into account as renditions of Ancestral events are produced within and for the particularities of time and place. However, as all Yolngu participants were well aware, this project could not be bound in this way. This version of the Gularri story would be available to the broadest conceivable audience: it was made to be viewed by contemporary Yolngu living in settlements across the region and also to reach audiences extending indefinitely into the future. For these reasons, Gularri had to operate as a self-authorizing text, able to exhibit a self-evident and unassailable authority to audiences who may not be aware of the circumstances of production and whether the essential permissions to film had been granted by those individuals who remained offscreen.9 Bangana himself had neither the ritual seniority nor, as I will explain, the correct kinship relationship to the waters themselves to be the narrator

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of this story. Although, like all Yirritja moiety Yolngu, he was related to other clans through the Gularri waters from his own clan country, this fact alone was not enough to make him suitable for the highly political and ritually charged role of narrating the story from this regional perspective. Indeed, as Bangana put it, we needed to “find a star”: a Yolngu with an immediately recognizable and unassailable status to tell the story on behalf of all the clans and so carry the production from beginning to end. This was not a straightforward matter. Seniority and ritual knowledge were only one part of what was required; it was also crucial that the star hold a particular kind of kinship relation to the Gularri in order to justify the selection of this individual over all others. Our problem was solved when Charlie Ngalambirra, a dhalkara from the Munuyku clan, agreed to participate. Not only was Ngalambirra a senior Yirritja man; he was mariwartangu (an extremely important relationship derived from being in the position of mother’s mother to another clan, hence, in the same relation to their country and sacra) to the source of Gularri at Bungirrinydji. Because of this relationship, Ngalambirra could claim special ownership rights and responsibilities in relation to the Gularri as a whole.10 As both dhalkara and mari-wartangu, not only did he know the inside story of the Gularri (the restricted or secret version of events that would normally have been passed on to male initiates in ngarra revelatory rites) —he had the right to impart it. His knowledge and status as dhalkara, in combination with his relationship to the waters of Gularri, positioned him as a storyteller beyond reproach; his involvement authorized this telling of the Gularri story from beginning to end. In other words, the combination of his relationship to the country and the ritual seniority he displays in the performance of the madak meant that even if viewers didn’t recognize Ngalambirra personally, they would be able to recognize, from the madak in combination with his announcement of a mari-wartangu relationship, that he was a dhalkara and therefore that the production was properly authorized.11 Whenever possible Ngalambirra was joined on location by members of the landowning clan. At several sites senior clan leaders contributed their story and song for the camera. In other locations more junior landowners participated by simply sitting alongside Ngalambirra in their country, adding to and confirming Ngalambirra’s narrative by serving as witnesses, participating in the production of truth through their ears and eyes with a silent yet active listening and looking on that would be visible to the viewing audience and would confirm both the authority of the storyteller and the veracity of the story.12 Because each clan manages its own version of the story slightly differently, there is no consensus between them regarding what features of

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Figure 19. And the Gularri flowed on through Guyamirrilil clan country.

Figure 20. Toward the final destination —Bulumiri in the Wessel Islands.

Figure 21. Ngalambirra (center) with two senior Warramiri men, Liwukan (left) and Barripang (right), at Bulumiri, Cotton Island.

country it might be permissible to show and what has to be concealed from the camera and excluded from the narrative. When we were determining locations, landowners decided where and what would be shot, and certain tracts of country were to be opened up to photography for the first time. Generally, clans decided to use locations slightly upstream or downstream from the most important and powerful sites —locations that were less dhuyu sacred but still “the same” and thus more than adequate to represent and represence the Gularri in relation to that particular clan ringgitj, without actually exposing it directly to the potential depletions of the camera. As always, these decisions varied according to the determinations of clan leaders and their djunggayarr. Mostly these decisions were made as a result of extensive on-site discussions conducted by Bangana with the appropriate clan authorities during a reconnaissance trip made the month before filming began. Another issue we faced was deciding who would actually do the work of videoing and editing. Originally we’d planned to make the video entirely through the BRACS, using the SVHS camera and newly purchased editing equipment, but although we had the technology, we did not have the crew. Early in the planning stages, Gambali made it known that he didn’t want the job.13 For his part, Bangana wanted to direct the making of the video

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but never planned to be hands-on in terms of the technical side of production. His grasp of the technology was imaginative and managerial, not practical in that sense. He planned to take charge of the Yolngu side of things, for instance, liaising with landowners and djunggayarr and then, during the production, overseeing the kinds of visual and spoken information that went into the video. I too wanted to avoid the job of cameraperson and/or editor. Already deeply implicated in so many aspects of this production of Culture, I was anxious to observe this project from a less central and all-consuming position. In the end, we organized an experienced team (director, crew, and an editor from CAAMA Productions) from Alice Springs to come up and produce the video.14 I was surprised that Bangana seemed so unconcerned by the fact that it would be shot by nonlocals; the fact that the cameraman and sound recordist were Aboriginal while the director and editor were Balanda was apparently inconsequential to him. What mattered most in our choice of CAAMA was the assurance that this crew would comply with Bangana’s directives and respect local protocols and that Yolngu from Gapuwiyak would own the finished video.  The Shoot

In September 1997, after more than eighteen months of preproduction, including consultations and site visits —punctuated by Bangana’s ceremonial commitments and other community obligations, and delays caused by my own ill health —we finally set out to make the video. It quickly became apparent that the CAAMA crew were sensitive to the context of filming with Yolngu and glad to work under Bangana’s direction. They went about setting up their equipment and arranging shots with a relaxed yet respectful attitude, bringing a mixture of humor, professionalism, and deference that made Yolngu feel comfortable and in control. They exhibited concern and politeness, in particular with the older men and women; they did not ask too many questions; and they were responsive to the advice and direction provided by Bangana, who remained confident and assertive despite a lack of experience in video production. We didn’t need to tell them to refrain from shooting until they had permission. They knew not to ask for multiple takes of story or song. At each site, shots were set up and filmed in a collaborative process involving the crew, Bangana, and Ngalambirra. When it came to videoing the segments of story at each location, Bangana would check the framing on the monitor and then silently direct cast and crew with a deft blending

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Figure 22. Checking the audio playback of the madak: sound recordist David Tranter (center front), CAAMA director Shane Mulcahy (left), Bangana (second from left), Yirritja moiety dancers, and Ngalambirra (far right).

of the crew’s hand signals for “action” and “cut” along with his existing repertoire of Yolngu sign language. After we had filmed the story telling and singing sequences, the crew would shoot more general footage of each location. Even given the little I knew about these places, I could see that Bangana was deliberately not telling them what was significant within the landscape. I knew, for instance, that at one site there were markings on a certain rock that were seen as evidence of the Ancestral events relating to Gularri and as such were enormously important to the site and the story. Yet Bangana’s directions remained nonspecific. With no direct input regarding the style of most shots (Bangana was as happy with a close-up as a mid-shot when videoing Ngalambirra singing), the CAAMA director assumed a deliberately straightforward or naturalistic style of camerawork. This meant producing what might in other contexts be regarded as fairly dull static shots and long slow pans across the landscape. Certainly, in comparison to experimental films that deliberately play against these “naturalized” Western ways of representing culture and difference, the final production appears downright transparent.15 In fact, the CAAMA director explicitly chose not to intrude on the visuals with elaborate techniques or stylistics; he sought to allow the pictures and the elders to speak for themselves.

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Figure 23. On location at Marchinbar at the tip of Cape Wessel.

The crew spent several hours in every site. As professional filmmakers, they took seriously their responsibility to provide as much visual coverage as possible. In addition to the footage of Ngalambirra speaking and singing, and the shots of the Gularri and surrounding landscape, they sought out overlay material —images that could be used in the editing process to provide visual interest at points during Ngalambirra’s song or story. It became clear that “sticking to the water” wasn’t enough. Exhibiting a preference for images of the wildlife and scenic beauty, they filmed flocks of birds, herds of buffalo —picturesque features that were eventually edited out. In the Wessel Islands, they spent almost an hour setting up and filming Bangana and others digging up turtle eggs on the beach. Although Bangana and other Yolngu landowners indulged the crew by posing and performing on the sand, everyone but the crew realized that this stage managed Cultural moment was never going to make it into the edited video. “That’s too confusing, that’s not the story. We’ll have to edit that bit out,” Bangana told me as he balanced his share of the eggs in his lap for the flight back to the mainland. What the crew didn’t—couldn’t—know was which features within the landscape belonged to different stories, different clans, or a different moiety. To Yolngu audiences the images of digging up turtle eggs would relate to particular clans with totemic connections to the sea turtle, thereby evoking a different—and distracting—set of stories, sacra, and connec-

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Figure 24. The crew poses with turtle eggs: good tucker but semantically confusing.

tions between clans. Thus Bangana’s seemingly casual instructions such as “film those trees” or “don’t worry about anything over that way” or “try not to record the sound of crows —they are Dhuwa” reflected a concern to reduce extratextual references. The injunction to stick to the water was a means of distilling the story—keeping the focus, often quite literally, on the water, thereby preventing any potential confusion for the audience. Similarly, the narrative supplied by Ngalambirra excluded virtually all reference to events or objects of significance. These exclusions were also a matter of narrative expediency. For although, following Bangana’s example, I have referred to Gularri as a “story,” in practice, the narrative elements connected to the Gularri are not singular. More usually the telling of Gularri includes narrative elements and details that relate to other Ancestral Beings, journeys, and activities. Whether delivered in spoken or musical form, stories about ringgitj usually make reference to a number of intertwined narratives and Ancestral significances that layer meaning onto these sacred sites. Information about Ancestral events is thus usually imparted in a circular or repetitious narrative that builds layers of geocentric detail.16 As Tamisari notes, usually a narrative relating to a ringgitj would never only refer to one Ancestral event or Ancestral Being (1998, 261). This new form of storytelling did not come naturally to Ngalambirra. He was experienced in a cultural narrative style in which poetic elaborations and interreferencing enabled an audience to build up a mental picture of the

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site. But in this case, the camera superseded the role of the audience’s imagination in terms of envisioning the particularities of place. Ngalambirra’s role was to tell the story of the connections between these various sites, with limited narrative detail. So during the initial days of the shoot, Bangana coached the dhalkara, gently reminding him to leave out all the associated references to other stories, to features in the landscape: “Just stick to the gapu (water).” Otherwise, Bangana reminded him, we would end up filling ten hours of tape at one location. After only a couple of days, Ngalambirra got the hang of this new narrative style. Thereafter he proceeded to deliver his story to camera with a confidence and authority borne of his position as a dhalkara and mari -wartangu to the sacred waters that flowed behind him in the shot.  Postproduction

During the postproduction editing in Gapuwiyak, Bangana made further decisions regarding what was appropriate to include, often instructing the visiting Balanda editor from CAAMA to delete certain sentences or shots (for instance, we had to cut out the name of a man who had died in the weeks after the shoot and take out certain specific references that had slipped into Ngalambirra’s otherwise lean and careful narrative). I cannot overemphasize the importance of these omissions in terms of avoiding interclan tension. And if Gularri had generated disputes over meaning or authority between clans, it would have produced the opposite effect to the unity that Bangana sought to produce and promote. The final editing and mix took place at CAAMA in Alice Springs. The finished production was then sent back several times for checking and final approval. To CAAMA’s credit, every concern and request was fully and respectfully attended to.17 The final step was for ritual leaders from the opposite moiety to approve the program as ready for broadcast (in the same way that the djunggayarr would check a sacred painting produced by others before it is displayed in ngarra ceremonies). In the end, we produced a stripped-down and straightened-out version of the Gularri story that traversed the breadth of northeast Arnhem Land, encompassing kin and country from throughout the region in a metanarrative of relatedness. With the benefit of the subtitling, it became clear to me how much had been explicitly excluded in the telling of this story. The lengthy pieces to camera that Ngalambirra had delivered at each site proved to be little more than a list of names of landowners and important names for the site and associated Ancestral events, interspersed

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with descriptions of the movement of the water itself—flowing, gurgling, swirling across the landscape. Nonetheless, as the edit came together, and various landowners visited the BRACS and commented approvingly, Bangana became increasingly excited by what we had made. In his more exuberant moments, he talked of broadcasting the video on a daily basis. “This is going to be a yindi [big] thing, yapa,” he predicted. As I noted in chapter 5, Bangana had been ambivalent about the actual ontological productivities of the camera. (Susan, who often kept him company in the BRACS during the editing, equivocated about the effects of disposing of the many dubbed copies the video generated by the transcribing and editing process.) Yet when I quizzed him about the issue of excess tape and wungili, he told me that, from his point of view, the “power” of Gularri did not inhere within the actual tape but in the replay. As I will discuss further in chapter 9, he understood the broadcast to produce the crucial and constitutive moment—the point at which, he told me, the power of rom would be released.18 As he said, on many occasions, “Once they see, they’ll connect straightaway.” During the last months of 1997 through early 1998, Gularri was broadcast regularly. It was also shown many times in private screenings in the BRACS, or in people’s homes, and distributed throughout the region on copies made and sold through the BRACS. A slightly abbreviated version was shown in three half-hour segments on Imparja Television as per the co -production deal with CAAMA. In 1998, after the death of a Madarrpa woman who was featured in the video, the program became restricted and, to my knowledge, it has not been shown publicly in Yolngu communities since.19  Managing Images

Although Bangana produced a version of an Ancestral story that was not only unprecedented but innovative in both form and content, Gularri was proclaimed profoundly and recognizably Yolngu by Bangana and others.20 Despite the fact that his vision for the project was necessarily refracted through CAAMA’s cameras and editor, there seemed to be no question that this audience saw Gularri as a Yolngu video. At one level the Yolngu dimension could be claimed and attributed because it had been made with the proper permissions and authorities. 21 However, this provides only a partial explanation of the reasons why Gularri can be “recognized as Yolngu,” as many people put it. As I have suggested, the video not only pays due respect to Ancestrally authorized relationships: it reinforces and enlivens them.

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Such cultural imperatives make for different kinds of filmmaking priorities from those we are familiar with in the West. Rather than using the camera to represent his view of the world, Bangana’s primary concern as a videomaker related to anticipating the scrutiny of leaders of the numerous clans (and the associated djunggayarr). His role was prominently preemptive: he anticipated the consequences of showing and the possibilities of seeing and worked to exclude any material likely to be at all problematic.22 Yet, as I will describe further in the next chapter, he also worked to open up the possibilities of seeing and knowing, so that what I initially perceived as a stripped down narrative and a conventional television documentary in fact provided what Bangana referred to as a “foundation” on which each clan member could “see” their own sacra and associated stories.  Layers of Seeing

While, from Bangana’s perspective, it was clear from the outset that the turtle egg sequence was never going to make it into the finished program, there were other instances in which he used the crew’s lack of local knowledge for specific visual effect. As I argued in chapter 5, what is at stake in these instances of mimetic image making is achieving a balance between

Figure 25. In Guyamirrilil country close to Elcho Island.

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Figure 26. Gularri meets the Ritharrngu clan waters at Gali. Landowner Christine Birkinbirkin (left) with Ngalambirra.

showing and concealing, presencing and containing. As I will now explain, Bangana saw an opportunity in the circumstances of production to exploit the gaps between the “unseeing” eye of the cameraman and the knowing eyes of Yolngu viewers. In the process he produced a video that allowed for different layers of looking and seeing. Given that the crew was working with directions that were very general, the cameraman often overlooked or failed to focus on certain features in the landscape that were in fact highly significant to Yolngu viewers, especially those with connections and knowledge of the particular site. The effect for a knowledgeable viewer is such that the camera lens effectively slips across the surfaces of things, showing everything without fixing onto anything in particular. In this way, although many important features of a site were included in the final video, they were done so literally in passing. Yet as Bangana was later to confirm to me, this proved something of an advantage and actually served to empower Yolngu viewers. His apparent nondirection worked to restrict the kind of looking generated by the camera to something more akin to a glance than a gaze, achieving his goal of managing the subtle balance between showing “everything” without letting everyone “see.” In these ways Bangana made a video in which the eye of the camera is

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not defining; vision is not monocular, and the viewer is not identified with the camera. 23 Rather, the audience is expected to draw on memory and imagination in order to see for themselves. Against the slow pans and static shots of the water and country that form the overlay to Ngalambirra’s story and song, each viewer is able to imaginatively zoom in to a particular rock or tree and thereby “see” the stories that are embedded in the landscape. The camera therefore provides only one axis of the “seeing” involved in this production: it is neither the camera nor the director who does the most important work of constituting meaning through vision, but the audience themselves. In this way, the camera works to conceal and contain, even as it shows and presences. On the surface of things, the camera appears to show everything; in the wide, generous pans there is no sense of anything being hidden. Yet to a knowing audience, there are “underneath” or “inside” meanings, connections, and references embedded within the frame, to be seen and appreciated. This kind of footage could withstand the subsequent scrutiny of Yolngu clan leaders: it could alleviate their concerns that too much would be revealed about certain locations, all the while enabling the knowing viewer to have a possibility of recognizing something of immense significance, if only momentarily in the corner of a shot. As Bangana explained to me later, from a Yolngu point of view, to even point out that something is significant—to say, for instance, that this rock is too important to be included in the film —would be to give away too much. Such a strategy of non revelation reflects a form of culturally sanctioned avarice whereby to not show is a deliberate act of conservation of power and knowledge. For instance, if in the course of public conversation a senior Yolngu man inadvertently refers to something that properly belongs to the realm of inside knowledge, for instance, a significant name or detail of a story, he —together with any others in the know—casually carries on as if nothing has happened. Because the others remain unaware that they have heard something of significance, the information effectively remains “inside.” In other words, what matters is that multiple levels of knowledge coexist without it being obvious that this is what is going on. In this instance, Bangana’s nondirect directing enabled him to produce a video that facilitated the landowners’ desire to keep their country—and their sacra—more sacred by presencing their Gularri ringgitj without visibly disclosing too much detail. In this way, Bangana not only operated with a kind of postcolonial defiance by withholding information from the potentially prying gaze of non-Yolngu crews and audiences, he adhered to the demands of local politics enacted by ensuring

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that the Ancestral presence that inheres within country was contained, conserved, and even enhanced by the production.  A Play of Surfaces

Unlike most filmmakers, Bangana understood his role as director to be more managerial than artistic. The issues of vision and visuality that informed his directorial decisions were not a matter of stylistics but came from a concern about the kinds of relationships manifest by and through the production and broadcast of mimetic imagery. 24 He took on an overarching kind of relationship to the project and the clans involved that, because of the involvement of technology and new kinds of cultural contexts, exceeded the specific, culturally prescribed role that he would have taken if this had been the organization of a ngarra ceremony. As he explained to me, it was because he was “recognized by everyone” to have a specific expertise in “the modern world” that the senior clan leaders, once he had communicated his vision for the video, gave their permission for the filming and entrusted the directing process to him. Although, I stress again, it was Ngalambirra who imbued the production with the required credibility and Ancestral authority to overcome the potential interclan frictions, this project could never —would never —have been made by Ngalambirra without Bangana. Even though it was essential that it was Ngalambirra as dhalkara and mari-wartangu who officially gave his approval to the final edit, it was also clear to all involved that it was Bangana who was the mastermind behind the project and who oversaw every detail of the production from preproduction meetings through to the broadcast itself. The genius of Bangana’s direction lies in the ways that he was able to produce a version of Gularri that was suitable for broadcast—to be seen by anyone, Yolngu or Balanda, initiated or otherwise —while catering to the specific and differentiated perspectives of various viewers. So much more than an archival catalog of sites and names, the production allows for multiple perspectives from people of different clans, and thence a multiplicity of meaning and evocations. Not only is the story told by someone to someone (as opposed to a story told by “no one” to “everyone”): it was told by a dhalkara in such a way that it made allowance for each member of the audience’s predetermined relationship to the story. With its lack of specific information, the production enacts the possibility of alternative viewings —and alternative knowledges are thereby seen, known, and thence affirmed. By excluding virtually all explicit references —spoken or visual —both the power to look and the experience of seeing (and as I

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describe in the next chapter, these can be quite different things) are divested to the audience. At the same time, the exclusion of verbal and visual information demonstrates a deferral to the authority of specific landowning groups. 25 The presence of individual landowners, who appear together with Ngalambirra in their ringgitj, demonstrates a cooperation, solidarity, and “sameness” with respect to the other Gularri clans, even though, as viewers, they are likely to interpret the story in somewhat different ways. As far as Bangana was concerned, for him to even point to something in the landscape as sacred, and therefore not for filming, would have revealed too much. In these instances, what is concealed by the camerawork is not only the relevant feature of the landscape but the act of concealment itself. By not directly showing, the camera cannot disclose what is important, so it is only “visible” as something significant to those who know. The information remains restricted because there is no hint that there is anything especially important to see, while a knowing viewer will be able to see it immediately (or scrutinize the images in video playback). As Bangana explained: Even though he [Ngalambirra] doesn’t mention them [those stories], really they are still there. And Yolngu watching will know that, they’ll see those stories, those places. If people see it they’ll be connected straight away . . . That’s even stronger connection.

Thus, just as ngarra revelatory ceremonies allow for diverse perspectives, as well as for the commonalities between participating groups, Gularri deliberately leaves the particularities of meaning open and unspecified in order to accommodate all viewers. Gularri works as a Yolngu cultural production because it is concerned with acknowledging, representing, and mediating relationships. For all Bangana’s innovation in form and content, Gularri is quintessentially Yolngu because it acknowledges and accentuates the relationships of the audience to the places, people, and stories conveyed in the video. Each clan (and within the clan, each individual) is accommodated as not only knowledgeable but responsible for their own specific part of Gularri, their country, and their knowledge.  Vision and Verisimilitude: The Camera and an Ontological Charge of Truth

In his descriptions of Yolngu ritual practice and knowledge production, Keen describes a cultural system premised on a relativity of truth. As he describes, different versions of events are not necessarily seen as contradictory: People appeared tolerant of the differences among close consociates, but less tolerant of more distantly related people. More contentious, perhaps, were

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the differences in Ancestral journeys and Ancestral identity apparently propagated to legitimate claims in another group’s land. But Yolngu did not appear to seek a unitary vision of the world. (1994, 61, my emphasis)

What is remarkable about Gularri is that it avoids presenting a unitary vision of the world —different clans can maintain their own perspectives on significances and meanings of action —but it is nevertheless (as the subtitle makes explicit) a view of the world that is unified by and through rom. It remains semantically open at the level of narrative detail, while reinforcing an overriding—or, perhaps better, an underlying—truth of the Ancestral. Although explicit visual and narrative reference has been left out of the telling of the story, from Bangana’s perspective “everything” that matters is still there. For as he explained, the rangga [sacred objects], the dhulang [paintings, clan designs], the gamununggu [clay used for painting] all lie within the frame, invisible yet present: “In a Yolngu mind, those things are included. . . . So really we’re not getting rid of anything here. It’s still there . . . it’s all there.” In one sense, this comment can be taken literally. For Yolngu, the Gularri is not only the sacred source of these objects; it is where they continue to belong, hidden and secure beneath the surface of the water. 26 At another level, this statement refers to the potency of the image itself and to the ability of the Yolngu imagination to see and recognize these invisible presences. Bangana’s disinterest in the look of the imagery in terms of style can be recognized as a deliberate strategy in order not to distract or diminish the use of the camera as a technology for showing that defers the work of seeing to the audience. From this point of view, the apparently conventional or traditional style of documentary realism can be seen to be the result of a convergence of cultural values about the production of visible evidence and verisimilitudes that are quite out of favor in contemporary film theory. Like the realist traditions of documentary filmmaking, beginning with Bazin and Kracauer, Bangana uses the camera to offer his audience visible “evidence” of the world. As I have already discussed, and as many other observers have noted, the Yolngu imaginary pivots on a connection between visibility and truth. The traces of Ancestral activities embedded in the landscape —an indentation in the ground where two sisters sat down, a particular pattern occurring on the surface of a rock, and so on —may be viewed as irrefutable evidence of Ancestral activities. The production and reception of Gularri is informed by an epistemological disposition where, at a profound level, seeing is believing. In this cultural context, not only does the camera bring

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a mimetic power that presences the Ancestral; it provides an ontological charge of truth. As Tamisari (1998, 251) describes, the work of ritual is to make the social, political, and emotional dimensions of the relationships laid down by the Ancestral visible and thence recognizable. 27 In the introductory sequence, which Bangana referred to as the “opening up,” the production works to dispel any ambivalence regarding the ontological status of the camera. The sound of the dhalkara calling the yindi names of Bungirrinydji, the madak style of singing, and the partially obscured, painted figures dancing on-screen with the close-ups of water superimposed across their bodies charge the airwaves with Ancestral power and authority, announcing from the start that this is no everyday television. As Bangana said, “When they hear that they know we are not mucking around.” The camera itself, by simply showing country, makes the Ancestral visible to a dispersed audience and in the process demonstrates that the truths of Gularri are self-evident. The imagery of the waters and surrounding clan country of which Ngalambirra speaks and sings is presented as tangible proof of the truths he offers and, indeed, asserts in his singing and storytelling. Thus the video production is ultimately an act of showing that is, in itself, a constitutive act of knowledge transmission. The video does the work of ritual by opening up the spaces of the Ancestral and using the camera to presence the invisible umbilicus between country, screen, and viewer. As mimetic ripples extend out of the television screen to connect a Yolngu audience with the flowing depths and currents of Gularri, the camera makes visible the truths of the Ancestral so that Yolngu viewers might see and know for themselves, in the process participating (at every screening) in the ongoing confirmation of the truth of the story.  Inside/Outside Knowledge

Yolngu tropes of inside and outside provide a central and structuring dynamic for the Yolngu imagination. 28 The metaphors of inside/outside, public/private, visible/concealed inform the way in which Yolngu conceptualize and manage levels of knowledge regarding the Ancestral or sacred. This inside or underneath knowledge is at some level also taken quite literally. Gularri sacred objects are said to lie inside the water, beneath the surface. The relationship between the inside and the outside is manifest spatially when the men undertake their revelatory rites within the inside of the ceremony grounds, while non initiates and women participate in these rites in the outside or public camp. At another level, the inside is

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metaphysical: it is the source of the Ancestral. Inside knowledge is more restricted, closer to the truth of the Ancestral. As both Morphy (1991, 83) and Keen (1994, 252) describe, the inside is closest to Ancestral creation; it is the source of an underlying truth and identity. Morphy rightly warns of the danger of oversimplification when attempting to understand the layers of meaning associated with Ancestral knowledge: there is no simple distinction between secret and public knowledge (1991, 76–77). As he notes, over time information can change from inside to outside. 29 What matters most in this cultural system —more than secrecy per se —is what is achieved by concealment. The dynamic manifest in the movement between the outward form and inner content is the basis of Yolngu sacred knowledge (Keen 1994, 164), producing a system of knowledge in which meaning is hidden or obscured as well as revealed (Morphy 1999, 135) in a dynamic, bidirectional process in which information, imagery, names, and places move along the continuum from dhuyu (restricted) to public. As Morphy (1991, 91) describes, the “veil of secrecy” surrounding inside knowledge is often thin: women and noninitiates generally are often more knowledgeable about the inside meanings of ritual and what goes on in the men’s ceremony ground than the public ideology surrounding secrecy allows. What matters most, he argues, is that there is a sense in which access to information remains controlled, while enabling all participants to glean a measure of understanding and insight based on prior knowledge and processes of deduction. In a sense, everything that is not made explicit in the video becomes “inside”—even information that might otherwise be freely imparted to noninitiates or Balanda. Under Bangana’s direction, the video camera proved an ideal technology for a culture concerned with managing the relationship between the inside and outside of things. Drawing on this constitutive interplay between showing and concealing within the field of vision produced by the “blind” eye of the cameraman, Bangana used the camera to open up the spaces between appearances and nonappearances, the visible and the invisible, the everyday and the Ancestral. The dynamic of showing and not showing entices viewers to not only scrutinize the video for potential transgression or inappropriate revelation but to actively see for themselves what is not explicitly shown. As I will describe further in the next chapter, it is the dynamic of showing, presencing, looking, recognizing, and connecting that is constitutive of Culture itself. The play of showing and concealing generated between the imagery, the viewer, and country itself produces the backward and forward, inside and outside mimetic potency through which Gularri

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affirms the truth of Gularri, and by extension, the enduring truth of the Ancestral. 30 For these reasons Gularri offers its audience far more than a window onto the “real.” The production’s failure to signify culture in terms of style or technique (a lack that might appear to a Balanda critic as an example of what Moore [1994, 137] refers to as “savage empiricism”) can be better understood as a result of an ontological function of the camera. The camera in this context mimetically presences and makes visible Ancestral truths while containing the potency of country through not revealing too much. The close-ups of water —the shots favored by Bangana that feature throughout the video —not only function as a means of semantic containment; they also operate as a mimetic distillation of all the aspects of the story and associated narratives that serve the function of rangga in this new, public format that, unlike ritual, is replayable and reproducible, unbound from its context of production. 31 The sensual interaction between country and viewer facilitated by the camera produces a connection. Technology performs a crucial function of ritual by mimetically facilitating what von Sturmer (1987, 72) argues is the point of ritual performance, namely, the “obliteration” of distance between subject and country/sacra. The camera, acting as a “transparent” conduit for country, connects the viewer to country via screen, thereby producing the embodied, material effects of mimetic connection as described by Taussig (1993, 21) and discussed in the introduction and chapter 3. The chiasmic conjunctions of eye and country enabled by the camera create a mimetic surge that viscerally links the viewer with country in a palpable, sensuous connection between perceiver and perceived. Country thereby enters the viewers’ bodies through eyes and ears: unblocking their senses, reconnecting them to Culture. (This “seeing” also critically involves a hearing, the audio track contributing an amplification of authority and Ancestral potency in the imagery.) Such foundational kinds of connection do not require viewers to have a specific knowledge of country, or ritual information in order to “read” it. It is expected that they will be touched and moved by the experience of seeing country, most especially their own, and then by the wider sense of relatedness that the video emphasizes and brings to the fore. The images, their mimetic potency heightened and focused by the incantations of yindi words and madak of the introduction, are charged up to produce certain effects. Thus the watery images of Gularri do not represent, nor even simply demonstrate; rather, they evoke culture and produce identifications by offering the possibility for everyone to see for themselves. In combination with the dhalkara’s ritual invocations, the camera works the spaces be-

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tween the visible and the invisible, presencing the more dhuyu aspects while nonetheless keeping them concealed and securely contained within the opaque depths of the sparkling waters. It can be recognized that in this cultural context “showing” is a more complex process than simply demonstrating or setting out the empirical evidence of Ancestral truths (as in “seeing is believing”). Rather, showing is commensurate with disclosure: it effects a bringing out into full public gaze, with the attendant risks and productivities of such an exposure. The act of showing something to someone acts as a form of revelation. In this way, the camera produces a mimetically enhanced naturalistic vision that enables the viewer to have a kind of direct connection to Gularri that is, as Bangana claims, more powerful than seeing it firsthand, in the flesh, as it were. Opening the spaces in which the Ancestral can be seen, known, and experienced, the production is premised on the possibility of a conjunction of showing and looking that permeates the surface of the “real”—or everyday perception of reality—thereby opening up possibilities for knowing and connecting that one would not necessarily have access to if one went and saw those places for oneself. Yet at the same time it maintains a level of concealment and containment as a result of the apparent everydayness of the imagery of country that does not give away its Ancestral secrets and powers. Made to accommodate all these perspectives in processes of an active perception that are both sensual and cognitive, the video entices its audiences to penetrate the image. It asks them to see “inside” the water into the depths where the sacra lie. 32 In this way it does much more than making visible; it animates the connections between the visible and the invisible, activating ways of seeing for viewers with imaginations attuned to the recognition of patterning and the layering of meaning and associative resonances. Memory and shared knowledge of country allow Yolngu to “see” both outside the frame and beneath the surface to the “inside” meanings. In this kind of viewing “everything” becomes visible, but safely within the confines of the mind’s eye. 33 It is this heightened visceral, cognitive, and immensely feeling engagement with the video that Bangana understands to be constitutive of what he privileged and prioritized about being Yolngu. As Yolngu sit watching the broadcast in their kin-groupings (just as in ritual), they are drawn into a shared space of relatedness through the act of simultaneous seeing. Participating by looking, and, in some cases, singing and crying, they engage with the Ancestral flow, drawn into a shared space of intersubjectivity, time and space traversed and reconfigured by a combination of technology and the potency of the Ancestral Always.

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Just as ritual evokes memory and identifications that have been accumulated in participants over years of cultural practice, the watery images and the accompanying sound track work to stir its audience toward particular kinds of emotional reactions, reproducing the social in a unity borne of shared sentiment. As Tamisari (2000, 276) describes, Yolngu ritual opens up “an empathetic space” of “co-presence and co-presencing”: an affective dimension of the intersubjective imperatives that works to open the subject toward an encounter with others, both human and Ancestral. Indeed, in discussions following the broadcast, many Yolngu emphasized to me the importance of their feeling-full reactions of relating to and via the screen. They made explicit comments about the power of the program to touch and move its viewers (in both senses of these words). For these viewers, the video produced an emotional as well as a visceral connection with the imagery, which brought forth an undercurrent of emotion more usually felt and expressed in ritual. In this way, Gularri generates for its Yolngu viewers an experience of a “collective effervescence,” to borrow a particularly apt Durkheimian expression. Indeed, Bangana looked for a strong emotional reaction in his audience as a means of measuring the success of the program, a demonstration that they did indeed “recognize the video in a Yolngu way.”  The Broadcast

When the Gularri video went to air for the first time on the local channel, an almost eerie stillness descended on the community. The bitumen and dirt roads linking the houses, usually trafficked in the evening by gangs of strolling teenagers and kava drinkers on their way to join a circle, were empty. The open-air basketball courts with their off-kilter hoops and fading court markings lay abandoned. There was no sign of family groups walking between camps, shining torches, and brandishing sticks for the cheeky dogs; no sign of the toddlers, their siblings, and cousins who play within shouting distance of the card games, nor their parents gambling under the streetlights. No headlights or sound of diesel motors, no ghetto blasted reggae or Christian gospel tapes broke the night’s subtle solemnity. Everyone, it seemed, had tuned in. With televisions balanced on upturned flour tins and power cords pushed inside through broken louvers and torn fly screens, family groups sat outside on sheets and blankets spread across the raked ground. At other camps, people stayed inside to watch under the ceiling fan, silhouetted in the darkness by the glow from the screen. This was not the usual noisy,

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semi-distracted way of watching bitcha (television). Usually TVs blared day and night in the houses that had them. Life rarely stopped completely for any show (except, perhaps, the AFL football grand finals). But this was different; this was new. As Ngalambirra’s madak reverberated on the warm night breeze, the Gularri waters flowed from BRACS to televisions across the community. As the conjunction of camera and microphone, screen and speaker mimetically amplified Ancestral presence, Yolngu settled down to watch: respectful, attentive, and engaged. For the many who had never attended a ngarra, the production was immediately recognizable on many levels: an oblique rebuke to certain “Yolngu politicians” operating with a disregard for traditional structures and hierarchies; a form of encouragement for others rendered vulnerable and despairing with the cumulative inertia of drugs and disappointment; a Yolngu video. For many if not most of the viewers, this was the first time they had seen certain locations. Bungirrinydji, as the site of the starting point for Gularri, holds enormous significance for all Yirritja clans. Yet so many people, even those with close clan ties, have never visited it, given the difficult terrain and its inaccessibility by air or road. Similarly, a visit to Bulumiri, the final location on Cotton Island, requires expensive air charters or motorboats to access from communities and so the site remains uninhabited and rarely visited by anyone from Gapuwiyak (with the exception of the handful of landowners who spend time at the outstations established on the Wessel chain of islands). 34 Nevertheless, people visit Gularri ringgitj in other ways. Depending on their age, their ritual experience, and their relationship to the countries and clans featured, they would have built up a picture of these places in their mind’s eye. They would be able to envisage these ringgitj with imagery assembled from the poetic details of song, enhanced by layers of associated imagery from the rangga and wangarr connected to these places. Indeed, many would have expressed their connections to this and other locations in funerals and other ritual performances, generating an embodied, affective constellation of memories and knowledges of places that, until this moment, they had never directly laid eyes on. As the broadcast continued, I heard the sound of women’s weeping songs arise from several directions. Taking up Ngalambirra’s tunes with their own clan songs, the women sang their country. Crying for family, for the Ancestors, and for the Gularri, their voices overlapped and merged in the darkness. In another camp I caught sight of a man tapping his cigarette lighter on the floor, keeping time with the bilma—listening, looking,

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seeing, and participating—while his other hand cradled the child that lay across his lap. Taking in these extraordinary scenes, I wandered between the houses until I came to Bangana’s place. He wasn’t watching television either. Sitting on his veranda with Susan, he listened from the shadows. Seeing me approach, he caught my eye and smiled.

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[

9

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Worlding a Yolngu World: Radiant Visions and the Flash of Recognition

To search for meaning is to bring to light a resemblance. ::

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

The world is not the mere collection of the countable or the uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are just there. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. . . . Truth happens . . . [when] self-concealing being is illuminated. ::

Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought

During the months of preproduction and weeks of filming and editing Gularri, I had eagerly anticipated the data that the video would provide. I expected it, needed it, in fact, not only to provide a foundation for my ethnography but to give me something to show my supervisors back at university as some kind of justification for my unusually lengthy stay in the field. During the course of the shoot itself, consumed by the practicalities of production and the logistics of filming in locations accessible only by chartered helicopters and planes or borrowed boats and four-wheel drives, I had not been in a position to properly appreciate what it was that we were recording. My limited language skills and my relative unfamiliarity with most of the sites and landowners, in combination with the cultural impropriety of asking questions at such times, meant that while I was able to gauge that things were progressing well in terms of getting the songs and narrative onto tape to the apparent satisfaction of all involved, I really

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had little idea of the details or wider significances of story that we were recording. Exhausted at the end of those long, busy days of travel and work, I looked forward to the understandings that would emerge afterward, when Bangana and I had the time and space to discuss more fully the meanings in the video. It was only weeks later, when we began working on the subtitles for the CAAMA version, that I began to comprehend how little narrative there was to translate. Even though I had been told only very basic details about these places, when I compared what I knew about the sites with the transcription of Ngalambirra’s narrative, the degree to which information had been deliberately omitted became clear to me. It also became apparent at this point that Bangana, acting in his position as cultural advisor/gatekeeper, was not going to elaborate on Ngalambirra’s narrative for my benefit. Although we worked together on the subtitling, his explanations were cursory and cautious. What he did tell me about the inside meanings of the video (and almost all information had become inside in this context), he made sure to insist was off the record. Even though, as a member of a Yirritja clan, he had his own Gularri story, he was still unwilling to provide details that might enable me to read between the sparse lines of subtitling. It ended up that I learned far more about Gularri and its significances through subsequent informal viewings with different Yolngu than I ever did from my main informant and co-producer. In the privacy of people’s homes or in the BRACS room, people would point out features in the landscape and tell me about the associated stories that connected them to the Gularri. Quite properly, this information always related to their own ringgitj and was deemed to be at a level of outside knowledge that they were authorized to impart. Bangana’s reticence was about more than not being culturally positioned to explain other people’s stories. His not telling reflected an explicit concern about the circulation of this information beyond the context of our conversations. More than most Yolngu I worked with, he had an awareness that my research would involve the circulation of information in a public arena that increasingly included Arnhem Land. As he told me, Yeah. I think there were times when people tried to explain [details of the inside knowledge]. That was a problem in the past. A lot of Yolngu didn’t speak English, didn’t understand about this Balanda world. Now you find arseholes like me. [Laughs].

Clearly, if I am to remain faithful to the ethical, political, and cultural constraints of contemporary research in Gapuwiyak—as insisted upon by Bangana and performed by the video itself—I cannot thicken my description

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by drawing on local knowledge in the form of exegesis. I can’t reveal what I have come to know about the deeper significances and qualities of the waters, nor can I describe the features of country that I recognize as Ancestrally significant.1 Moreover, had Bangana filled in details from his perspective (or, indeed, from that of any other particular clan), and had I gone on to publish this as the official “explanation” of the video for Balanda, my version of Ancestral events would have undone his careful work to produce something that operated within an epistemological system in which there is no one right or objective validity but, rather, manifold possible interpretations (Keen 1994, 217). At the time, I considered that these strict restrictions on the circulation of knowledge would severely limit the possibilities for analysis. Now, in hindsight, I would suggest that the opposite is true. Paradoxically, it is exactly because of the deliberate concealments and containments — because the knowledges they imparted initially evaded my Western eye —that Gularri ultimately enhanced my understanding of the nature of the looking and seeing that Bangana so valued. This lack of inside information resulted in my investigation turning elsewhere. It made me reflect on what Bangana insisted was more important than the restricted stories themselves. Ultimately, he said, what mattered was the powerful experiences that would be generated through viewing the water itself—rather than any particular exegesis. Thus the challenge to understand was of a different order than I had expected. As Bangana put it, I needed to understand “how things become sacred” and why rom is “powerful.” Gradually, I began to understand that even though the video actively avoids inscribing particular meanings, it generates and make visible an encompassing space of meaningfulness. As I abandoned any idea that my analysis would involve a decoding of Gularri and turned to exploring the nature of the engagement that Gularri offers its audience, I came to appreciate that despite the insistent, authoritative tone that inflects Ngalambirra’s telling of the story, this video is concerned with something other than providing a lecture or lesson for its audience. As I will now explain, Gularri requires an analysis that provides a sense of the mutually informing and interdependent relationship between viewer, image, and the Ancestral. Gularri is effective exactly because it entices, evokes, and engages the senses rather than exhorting or explaining. The visual dynamics generated by these enticements and evocations —the revelatory aesthetics and the powerfully constitutive processes of envisaging and identifying that they facilitate for the viewer—are the focus of this chapter.

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 Enframing Gularri

Before I begin my elaboration of the relationships between Yolngu eyes, the Ancestral, and television screens, I want to take a moment to extend my argument regarding the degree to which the CAAMA crew were blinkered to the significances of what they were filming. The disjunctions in worldviews became completely clear only in the editing process, when we discovered that although the cameraman had spent hours in each location shooting the water, as per Bangana’s instructions, there were barely any satisfactory shots of water. In telling them to “stick to the water” Bangana had intended the camera operator to film close-ups: full frames of water only. Instead, most shots of the water also included other aspects of country, such as a rock or an overhanging tree branch, serving to frame the water. Inadvertently, in setting up the shots in the way he did, the cameraman made cultural difference manifestly visible. These shots reveal a tendency to use the camera to frame (both literally and in the sense of enframing) the “world as picture.” They impose a picturesque aesthetic: a way of looking that has become the standard way of packaging nature in Western culture —tropical beaches are palm-fringed, herds of animals bring perspective to the vast savannah grasslands of a wild Africa, willows drape and frame the babbling brook of the rural idyll. Such ways of seeing have become so naturalized in Western representational practices, especially television, that the work of culture —the processes of enframing that render nature into landscape, which in turn mimetically reference countless prior images reproduced in paintings and photographic images —generally goes unrecognized.2 By contrast, to an eye trained in a Western aesthetic, a full frame consisting only of water makes no visual sense. This kind of shot appears unknown and seemingly unknowable: semantically empty and aesthetically challenging. 3 This kind of image is not a representation; it does not depend on a built-in aesthetic that renders a particular cultural view of nature and meaning—at least not one that is immediately recognizable to a Western imagination. Yet as Bangana insisted, these were the most important images of all. He told me that those who know what they are seeing could see “everything”—that is, wanga, gamununggu, dhulang, and rangga—in a single close-up shot of water. What did he mean by this? How might one see everything in a shot made deliberately devoid of explicit semantic meaning? What is this everything?

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Figure 27. Enframing the world through the representational aesthetic of the picturesque.

As I have described, Gularri enabled viewers to see beyond the camera’s direct line of sight, and even beyond the frame; indeed, it is precisely the invisible significances and connections that Gularri mimetically evokes that give it depth and resonance. It is the process by which one sees the invisible Ancestral, the ways in which the act of perception makes the Ancestral visible, that I will now investigate. I see Bangana’s use of video technologies effecting an enframing that, rather than reducing the waters of Gularri to a representation or cultural resource, opens up the world via screen and speakers, thereby encompassing the images, the imaged, and the viewer in a relationship of mutuality. There is something crucial about the close -up shots of water —the shots that so challenge the conventional Western aesthetic —that makes sense (literally) for a Yolngu audience. Such images have a particular kind of potency in the Yolngu imaginary. While it is certainly impossible for me to claim —or ever completely convey—a Yolngu point of view (not to mention the fact that, as I have already emphasized, the importance of seeing for oneself within this epistemological system means that no two Yolngu will “see” Gularri in exactly the same way), I will nevertheless attempt to give the reader a sense of the imaginative and perceptual processes at work and the potential role of media technologies for facilitating experiences of revelation and recognition.

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Recalling Bangana’s claim that a knowledgeable Yolngu could see everything in a single shot of water and in the process connect in a powerful way, I want to suggest that there is something about these shots that produces a particular kind of effect, which in turn enables types of knowledges, identifications, and truths of a different order to the kinds of expository, textual elaborations that I had been hoping for. As Annette Hamilton (personal communication) has suggested, such a framing renders the water as an abstraction in the moving image. These shots of water shimmer, deriving a power from something beyond representation. They are, and effect, a brilliance of surface and depth, reflection and illumination.  Shimmering, Bir’yun, and Ancestral Power

In his important and highly influential article on Yolngu aesthetics, Morphy (1989) identifies the transformation of a Yolngu painting from “dull” to “brilliant” as a vital and culturally specific aesthetic effect. He describes (in this and subsequent publications) Yolngu artists’ aim to produce an effect of shimmering brilliance in their work by the application of fine lines in white pigment over the top of the figurative and geometric designs (1998, 188).4 The resulting cross-hatching, for which the region is well known in the international art market, produces a visual brilliance, what Morphy refers to in Yolngu language as bir’yun—a mesmerizing quality of light and movement. Identifying this stylistic aspect of Yolngu art as contributing something crucial, yet of a different order from the figurative elements he analyzes elsewhere, Morphy develops an analysis of the shimmering as a culturally specific aesthetic phenomenon. He describes the way that Yolngu accord this effect (and other more abstract or design elements such as the geometric shapes) a multivalency (1991, 187–88), enabling bir’yun to represent particular qualities of Ancestral Beings, according to context and design. He explains, for instance, that it can reproduce the menacing glint in the eye of the shark or the glimmer of sun on the water. More generally, Morphy characterizes bir’yun as an effect that creates a sense of “Ancestral power” (1989, 30) that produces powerful affective qualities in Yolngu, particularly feelings of joyfulness (although, as he notes, there can be negative emotional resonances as well).5 For obvious reasons Morphy’s article was on my mind during the production of Gularri. The lack of narrative or visual specificity, the priority that Bangana gave to the shots of the glistening surface of the water, in combination with the emotive response of Yolngu audiences, made me wonder if I was witnessing a deliberate evocation of bir’yun.

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However, when I spoke to various Yolngu about the video, my questions about bir’yun elicited what seemed to be confusion rather than the evasive “I don’t know” that I had come to recognize as an indicator that I had asked the wrong question of the wrong person. When I directly questioned Bangana about Gularri in terms of aesthetics and bir’yun, he intimated that the term bir’yun meant nothing, at least not in connection with the video or clan painting or Ancestral power. Bir’yun, he said, describes the final moment of the setting sun, or alternatively, it is a word that kids might shout out if someone unintentionally reveals his or her underwear or genitals in public. A flash, certainly, but not of Ancestral power. Disappointed but determined to understand more, I pushed on with my questioning until, in a slightly awkward moment (one revealing of my world of anthropological agendas, ambitions, and hierarchies), I showed him my copy of Morphy’s article.6 Flipping through the photocopy (stopping to look closely and a little disapprovingly at the paintings reproduced in the article), Bangana repeated that he had only heard the term used in much more mundane or “secular” contexts. Nevertheless, after asking for a photocopy of the article for himself (yet another manifestation of the widening mimetic circuits through which Yolngu Culture now passes), he called together an informal meeting of his brothers and a couple of his djunggayarr who had closer ties to the eastern clans with whom Morphy worked. After this consultation Bangana concluded that bir’yun was a Rirratjingu clan term and hence might be used by clans over Yirrkala way. However, he declared that the clans with which he had close ritual ties did not talk about or conceptualize their paintings in those terms. I quote our subsequent conversation at length, because Bangana’s attempt to tease out a difference between his understanding of bir’yun, and what mattered to him about aesthetics and Ancestral power, has proven extremely important to my own grasp of how and why Yolngu value Gularri and, indeed, other forms of Yolngu cultural production. bw: With us mob, Dhalwangu [Yirritja moiety clan group], when we are painting our sacred painting, when that painting is yaka [not] yet right, we say, buduk, buduk [wait, wait], and when the cross-hatches are finished and the painting is starting to finish the right way, we then say, “Yo malng’thun martji dhan dhulang-gamununggu.” [Yes, the sacred clan design is now appearing]. That painting is showing now. In a way it is bir’yun. But I’d say showing. Malng’thun [appearing, coming to light]. That painting is now showing, glowing. . . . Now that painting is starting to show on you. On your body, or bark painting.

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jd: And is that idea only for painting? bw: Manikay [clan songs] too. Like if we, Dhalwangu people, decide, OK we do a Gupapuyngu song [a different Yirritja clan], we might start singing a Gupapuyngu song, but we wouldn’t find the right liya, the right tune. jd: Even if you knew the tune? bw: Yo [yes]. We’ll keep looking for that tune and when we find it [we’d say], malngurrandu nayi manikay liya [the tune of the clan song is now coming through]. We got it now, we got the tune. jd: So that idea is that you are not only finding the tune but that you are finding the . . . bw: The whole, yo. jd: It’s not just coming through your mind? bw: It’s coming from everywhere, from the wanga [country]. Yo . . . Then [whoever hears or sees that] their marr [spirit, soul] goes back.7 He’s connected cause he or she’s got that marr for that wanga [country], for that dharpa [tree], for that mulmul [weeds], for those people. Feeling stronger, encouraged, connected, being part of that family, wanga, everything. It’s really powerful.8 Later, warming to this new dimension in his ethnographic authority, Bangana put it another way: “What Howard Morphy would call bir’yun, I’d call dharangan [recognition, understanding].”  “The Uplift of Looking”

In retrospect, the above conversation was perhaps the most important that Bangana and I were ever to have, at least in terms of my own understanding of his project. My questions elicited a response that opened up an entirely different slant on my appreciation of our work. Realizing the extent to which Bangana’s ontological ambitions for the production challenged my understanding of the efficacies of video and, indeed, the nature of aesthetics, I returned to the literature to try to rethink the significance of shimmering on his terms.9 In the anthropologist Donald Thomson’s 1937 field notes, which Morphy attributes as a primary source for his own analysis, there is a strong sense of the pivotal role of seeing in relation to bir’yun. Thomson writes: “It’s the sensation of light, the uplift of looking at this carefully carried out work. They [Yolngu] see in it the likeness to the wangarr (Ancestral past).”10

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In this brief statement, Thomson conveys a sense of bir’yun that is in keeping with Bangana’s accounting of this phenomenon, despite his refusal of the term itself. Yet clearly this statement poses a particular challenge for a Balanda imagination. As I have described, this cross-hatching technique is itself devoid of figurative connotations —it is pure abstraction. There are no particular shapes or forms to be seen in this kind of painting (as opposed to the recognizable figurative images that are also part of a Yolngu painting style). How, then, does this form of painting give rise to an experience of seeing the likeness of the wangarr? Bangana’s explanation of his own aesthetic imperatives provides a way of apprehending the processes involved for Yolngu in making the Ancestral not only visible but palpable. His emphasis on the way that the mimetic labor of song or painting gives rise to the possibilities of malng’thun (appearing, coming to light) and dharangan (recognition, understanding) provides a much more active sense of the mutually informing and interdependent relationship between artist, viewer, image, and the Ancestral. These terms demand that any consideration of the “shimmering” qualities of painting or the video moves beyond the two-dimensional surface of things (whether bark or screen) to include the active roles of both the Ancestral and the viewer. Following Bangana, it seems that if non-Yolngu viewers are indeed to recognize the power of the Ancestral, then there is a need to understand the experience of viewing these abstract images as something central to the meaning, power, and efficacies of Yolngu visual productions. We need to move beyond explanations that figure Ancestral power as the product of technique or style, something that can be represented or evoked by abstract forms. Indeed, we need to recognize that trying to apprehend, and then to explain, this Ancestral power through representational analytic paradigms can in fact keep the Ancestral at bay, reducing the shimmering quality of illumination and presence to an objective and objectifiable (and hence ontologically distinct and somehow abstract) “thing” on the surface of a painting (or water). Instead we need to focus on the dynamic flows and expressive potentialities that these kinds of optical effects generate. For, as Bangana’s description of the “glowing,” “showing,” “coming through” indicates, Yolngu undertake the cultural work of painting or singing to actively open up and re configure spaces between the subject, image, and imaged.11 This, I want to suggest, leads to a richer and more complex apprehension of what we anthropologists call “Ancestral power.”12

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 A Visible Ontology

To a large extent, the trajectory of my analysis has been foreshadowed by Biddle (2001), who develops and deepens a perspective on shimmering—also a feature of the painting produced on bodies and canvases in the Central and Western Desert—in her discussion of the production of Warlpiri kuruwarri designs. Highlighting the somatic practices involved in body painting, Biddle argues that the phenomenological qualities of the marks reproduced on body and canvas are themselves indicative of the bidirectional, intersubjective, and intercorporeal dynamics that underpin Warlpiri cultural practice. She sees the quivering oscillations that become evident when these Ancestral markings are made as a manifestation of the effects of painting. Biddle argues that the tracing of lines by finger on skin produces a penetrative effect that allows for the Ancestral to emerge from the underneath or inside things. The repetitious application of kuruwarri effects a reiterative tracing that produces a visible manifestation of the Ancestral that renders body “commensurate with country,” in turn, animating both body and country (2001, 185). She identifies the pulsating, 3-D optical quality of the painting as one aspect of the processes of becoming-inrelation with the Ancestral: the perceptible dimension of a constitutive movement “between one thing and another” (183). Bangana’s comments enable me to push Biddle’s analysis of the practices that produce and reconfigure this movement of “betweenness” into a broader context—both conceptually and practically. While most analysis of Aboriginal cultural production focuses on the mimetic labor of the artist, singer, or dancer, Bangana’s formulation places an emphasis on the sensual and cognitive practices of the audience. His comments indicate that Yolngu do not understand themselves as passive observers of Ancestral truths but rather active participants in their production and affirmation. His use of the word “recognition” emphasizes the active role for Yolngu in ritual contexts beyond the performative. Even artists and singers are described in terms that render them as an audience to their own work, actively seeking the moment in which the Ancestral shows itself. As artists, their act of painting is a form of looking for the design, rather than representing or even producing Ancestral power per se. In short, Bangana locates the audience as active participants in the mimetic labor of ceremony. Indeed, he seems to privilege perception as crucial to the success of a cultural production or performance. At the same time, he brings to the discussion the profound sense in

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which the Ancestral itself has an active place in cultural production. As Bangana puts it, using the verb malng’thun (to appear, come to light), the painting shows itself as a result of the mimetic labor of painting. From Bangana’s description, it seems that Yolngu perceive the luminous effect of “brilliance” as evidence of the Ancestral revealing itself. As the painting or the tune “comes through.” everyday reality is reconfigured through this movement from the inside to the outside, from the invisible to the visible. And, as the “brilliance” visibly surges out from the painting, the viewer is immediately connected to the Ancestral through the very act of seeing. Casting a Heideggerian light on this analysis, I want to suggest that for Yolngu the production of something that is successful or powerful has less to do with representation or even aesthetics and more to do with techne. The work of the artist is to produce a “bringing forth.” Seen from this perspective, bir’yun (or what Bangana calls the showing, glowing of the work of art) is the manifestation of a Heideggerian effect in which mimetic labor of the artist (or, as I will argue, the camera) enables the Ancestral to emerge. In fact, Bangana’s description of the moment of showing and glowing through bears an uncanny resemblance to Heidegger’s formulation of the moment of unconcealment. The shining, shimmering features of cross-hatching—or the close-ups of water —can be recognized as offering an ontological revealing, what Heidegger would call the moment when “the bright open-space of world lights up [and] the truth of Being flashes” (1977b, 47).

Figure 28. A full frame of water: the light of the Ancestral shining, glowing, coming through.

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 The Flash of Revelation

The imperative to seek out and retrieve knowledge concealed beneath the surface of things has often been commented upon in the Aboriginal literature. Fred Myers, for instance, describes how the “concern of the Pintubi is to gain knowledge about that which is invisible, which is important and powerful” (1986, 67). As he goes on to say, this knowledge is not always communicated in language. It is found in dreams or discovered in signs located in country. As Keen describes, Yolngu also must collect and collate information relating to stories, country, and sacra, actively piecing together fragments of information with the glimpses and gleanings acquired through ritual and time spent in country, in order to collate their own perspective and become properly knowledgeable about country and its Ancestral associations (1994, 229). However, as Keen acknowledges, ultimately this is an epistemological system premised on knowledge being acquired through revelation. He writes: An individual gained authentic knowledge from close kin and through revelation. Indeed, the primary senses of Yolngu concepts of thought and knowledge were passive. The word marnggi, “to know” or “to be knowledgeable,” meant to have experienced something even by accident, as well as to understand or know by personal cognitive effort. (1994, 136)

Although the significance of these revelatory dynamics is widely acknowledged, there is not much in the literature that examines the nature of these revelations or the processes by which the Ancestral is revealed or known. Most analyses of Aboriginal art suggest that the visual dimension of the process is about, as Christine Watson says, “using their eyes to pick out symbols and their minds to process their interpretations” (1999, 191). Thus revelations are usually characterized as a form of information that is read or decoded. Yet, as I have indicated, the kind of revelatory looking Bangana describes is not strictly a reading of signs. As discussed in the previous chapter, the “inside” is understood as closest to Ancestral creation; it is the underlying source of a truth and identity. In this sense, the revelatory coming through of the Ancestral—its emergence from the inside out effected by the mimetically produced transformation from invisible to visible —is the constitutive moment in which what is real and true can be glimpsed and known. Truth is not simply a matter that can be settled by recourse to facticity or determinations of right or wrong. Neither is it simply that truth is relative. (Although, as I have

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described, there are differing versions of Ancestral stories that can be explained as a matter of clan perspective, this is not the level of truth that I understand Bangana to be concerned with.) Rather, truth is to be apprehended in a Heideggerian sense. Truths become evident; they come to light as part of an ongoing process of unconcealment of the essential nature of Being.13 Truth invisibly inheres as a reservoir of hidden possibilities, emerging in moments of radiant illumination in which the usually invisible essence of an entity’s presence or Being is unconcealed.14 In this flash of revelation, the invisible spaces of betweenness —the temporal and spatial distances that separate the image, the imaged, and the viewer —are traversed and refigured by the pulsations of Ancestral force. And, as Taussig’s description of this kind of sensuous strike of comprehension so clearly illustrates (1993, 39–40)—in this flash of recognition truth is known because it is experienced. In the case of Yolngu painting, this moment of radiance —the showing through —is a kind of quickening in the work that both invites and reconfirms a reconstitution of the Ancestral world. As Bangana put it, when a painting is seen to show and glow, not only does the painting become complete but there is a sense of a greater coming together in the form of “the whole . . . coming from everywhere.” For Heidegger, the flash of revelation that “worlds the world” occurs through the work of art itself. But the video imagery—in all its apparently mundane or everyday detail—is hardly a van Gogh, the high art figure whom Heidegger employs as an exemplar of this “worlding.” Furthermore, as Bangana indicates, the processes involved in Yolngu revelatory work are not only located in the substance of the art itself. The work of revelation is seen to be crucially dependent on the audience; someone who knows what he or she is seeing will see “everything” in a single frame of water. In short, according to Bangana’s formulation, the potency of the work is derived from the engagement of the viewer and the Ancestral. Ancestral power is not an objective or objectifiable entity that exists separately from the subject: it is a lived experience of relatedness and connection derived from the fundamental ground of existence. The Ancestral becomes present as it is manifest, lived, and known, as the immanent invisible presence becomes visible (or audible in the case of song) and then recognized. That is to say, “shimmering” does not simply represent Ancestral power or presence. Rather, it is visible evidence of a presencing: the active and intentional bringing of the Ancestral Always into an embrace of the present that enlivens the subject being painted as well as the country and kin and the viewers who see it.15 While these philosophical claims may provide a certain fillip to Balanda

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imaginations, questions and confusion surely remain. How does the Ancestral emerge? How might one actually see the wangarr? How might Gularri enable recognition and what are the processes involved? Of course it impossible for me to adequately answer these questions — I cannot see like a Yolngu. Nonetheless, the term “recognition” provides a clue as to the kinds of imaginative processes involved in this form of seeing.  Recognition as Gestalt

As the film theorist Bill Nichols (1991, 161) observes, documentary film has a particular power because it directs viewers back to the specificities of their own lives for points of reference. Familiarity with what is on-screen invites a certain kind of looking—viewers look more specifically and with different kinds of associative processes when they view something that they already know from everyday life. Films that show images of people and places that are already familiar (home movies are an especially good example of this) generate for the audience the possibility of recognition.16 But there is more to recognition than merely seeing the familiar in an unfamiliar context or via a different medium. The way in which Yolngu position audiences as witnesses to the production of truth, described in the previous chapter, entails a participation that is more complex than merely a looking on and bearing witness to something already known. As Nichols writes: “Recognition involves a sudden click or shift of levels as information, sensory impressions, arrange themselves into a larger gestalt” (1991, 161). Recognition is a mode of understanding in which the perceptual subject draws on layers of memory and imagination to “see” more than what is literally in front of his or her eyes. Recognition entails the production of knowledge in a kind of revelatory dynamic between that which is shown and that which is seen by the viewer. In other words, as Gadamer describes, recognition brings to light something more than that which is previously known. But we do not know what recognition is in its profoundest nature if we only regard it as knowing something again that we know already—i.e., what is familiar is recognised again. The joy of recognition is rather the joy of knowing more than is already familiar. In recognition what we know emerges, as if illuminated, from all the contingent and variable circumstances that condition it; it is grasped in its essence. (1998, 114 )

Thus recognition —re -cognition —is a mimetic form of knowledge production. It involves a combination of sensual and cognitive processes

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that, by drawing on connections generated by a perception of similitude, produces an understanding exceeding what is literally perceived. In other words, recognition occurs at the moment in which perception, memory, and imagination merge to re-cognize something new, something more than that which is already known. To recognize is to know the world anew; the act of recognition is the final and constitutive step in the mimetic equation. In Gapuwiyak, this dynamic equation plays out in a variety of cultural forms including song, painting, and, as I argue here, videomaking. The flash of revelation or recognition is the mimetic moment in which the Yolngu world is (re)rendered in relationship. This is the moment in which the Ancestral is seen and known, experienced and actively participated in, by the knowing audience. Hence, the act of recognition simultaneously generates and affirms a relationship between the Ancestral and the perceptual subject. Perceiving matters here in its fullest sense. At once sensual and cognitive, perception sensuously uncovers information. The power of recognition —the moment of insight when one sees beyond what is already known —arises from the way it allows us to glimpse something more, something new, yet nonetheless somehow known or true. As a technology of showing, the camera thus brings an ontological charge of truth, far exceeding the verisimilitude of the “realistic” likeness and mimetic presencing that I described in the previous chapter.  Seeing Similitude

As I discussed in chapter 4, Benjamin’s interest in the mimetic led him to the observation that the gift for producing similarities is necessarily accompanied by a gift for recognizing them (1978, 333). I want to now explore how a cultural imagination with a predilection for producing and seeking out similitudes in the form of correspondences and pattern might use mimesis to reproduce particular kinds of knowledge. I want to show how Gapuwiyak video’s mimetic power to convey an exact likeness is stimulus to an imagination that, as I have argued, seeks out similitude as evidence of underlying connections. As I will now explain, because it was produced for, and by, cultural subjects with a highly developed and culturally specific mimetic sensibility, Gularri pushes the potential of documentary filmmaking to engender moments of recognition much further than that anticipated by Nichols in his discussions of Western documentary practice. The pleasures that Yolngu take in recognizing similarities is evident in many aspects of their lives.17 They are particularly alert for visible evidence of similitude between kin, especially across generations. Relatives

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inspect babies for signs of relatedness in the form of looks, behavior, and disposition. Although this tendency is certainly also commonplace among Balanda, in my experience this active looking out for visible likenesses (taken as evidence of an underlying sameness) is more focused in Gapuwiyak than, for instance, within my family in Sydney. Yolngu exhibit a keenness of observation in this regard that was considerably sharper than I had encountered elsewhere. They seem to derive a certain satisfaction from both the fact of the similitude and the recognition of it. I often felt obtuse in the extreme when, looking at the baby thrust into my arms, I failed to notice the feature that had caused much comment from others. My failure of recognition felt like a failure of “Yolnguness.” At other times I was able to perceive the connections that others were alert for, which I came to realize extended far beyond facial or bodily features to mimetic links between, for example, a certain hairstyle and a certain Ancestral Being, which in turn evoked links to a particular bird or cloud or place or person. The points at which I could (hesitantly) make the connection between a ceremonial event and a seemingly random bird call, were the (rare) moments when I was able to offer up evidence to my Yolngu mob that I was starting to “see” things properly. Benjamin (1978, 334) refers to these kinds of mimetic connections as “nonsensuous similarities.” He argues that these forms of mimesis that link phenomena with no apparent sensuous correspondence are the “primitive” antecedents of language. He suggests that making these kinds of mimetic connections entails a perceptual switch from the sensual to an act of decoding (although, he argues, this is nevertheless a fundamentally mimetic process). Without detouring into Benjamin’s theory of language, I want to suggest that to use language -based cognitive models such as decoding to explain the ways that these apparently “nonsensuous similarities” are recognized is to overlook the inherently sensuous perceptual processes that are involved in seeing these apparently imperceptible similitudes.  Recognizing Connections

When I spoke to Bangana about these matters I quickly gained the impression that he viewed the kind of seeing I describe above —the recognition of sensuous and, by extension, “nonsensuous” similitude —as a particularly significant aspect of being Yolngu. He told me that old people were especially practiced at “seeing connections.” An older person looking out across the camp would actively seek to recognize a passerby not only in terms of his or her individual identity but in terms of the visible features

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that would mark that individual in relationship with his or her father, mother, grandparents, and so on. Of special significance is an individual’s gait, especially the way he or she moves from the knee and elbow—parts of the body that, as I have described in chapter 4, also refer to the kinds of joining generated in ritual. This cultural predisposition to seek out and take pleasure in the discovery of similitudes adds another crucial dimension to the significance and potential revelatory power of media technologies for Yolngu. Sameness is also manifest in a more material and visible form when images and recordings reveal evidence of similitude across the generations. Photography and film enable a scrutiny and confirmation of relationships and relatedness across time and space. Likenesses between individuals can be identified in mannerisms, voice, or facial features. These similitudes, as made visible by technology, captured and brought to light in a pose or “punctum” (Barthes 2000)—the element in the photo that “clicks,” lifting the image with a special meaning—produce moments of recognition that reaffirm these relationships. For Yolngu these similitudes are seen as visible evidence of the ontological samenesses privileged and described in earlier chapters. The active seeking and recognition of sameness over difference acts to reconfirm the place of these individuals within a wider world of meaning and ongoing connections. One example of this seeing sameness occurred during my visit for the funeral. We received from town copies of photographs taken earlier inside the coffin shelter. One shot in particular caused much comment. It was a photograph of the family (but this time excluding me) posed with the photo of Bangana resting at the head of his coffin. What caught the eye of the Yolngu viewers was the way in which the image highlighted a similarity between Bangana and his daughter Yawulwuy. “Look,” people told me, smiling and pointing at the girl and the photo within the photo: “Same nose.” Although they had to point this out to me, many others picked up on this feature of the photo without being prompted. The punctum was, in this case, especially pleasurable —and culturally specific —because of the sense in which technology captured, re-rendered, and reconfirmed an enduring relationship in a “snap.” For subjects who exist in a world constituted through the bidirectional processes of showing and recognizing—like the pattern coming through in ritual singing or painting—a shot like this provides a particular pleasure in its provision of the possibility of looking for and finding visible evidence not only of genetic relatedness but of a continuingly meaningful relationship between father and daughter. Sameness is manifest and made visible by a particular likeness captured in a particular image (or in this instance,

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between an image and the image within it). The photo provides the possibility for Yawulwuy and others to glimpse for themselves —and thereby affirm —evidence of a relationship that endures postmortem (and of the underlying immanence of the Ancestral realm that such a manifestation of similitude confirms). Thus the photo (like Gularri) enacts a presencing and a showing, enticing a looking and a recognizing that, as I have argued, is the fundamental dynamic underlying Yolngu cultural production. The moment of recognition completes the mimetic movement of showing and concealing as the Ancestral shows itself for Yolngu to see, know, and affirm. During my research, I encountered other instances in which Yolngu heard or saw evidence of the Ancestral “coming through” via media technologies. For instance, the first time Bangana’s singing was recorded on tape, listeners heard his deceased father’s voice in the playback. It was not simply that Bangana sounded like his father but rather that his father’s voice had replaced, or perhaps merged, with his own. In his telling of the story, this was a constitutive moment in Bangana’s transition into adulthood and the beginnings of taking on ritual responsibility as a clan singer. The fact that he and others heard his father’s voice singing in playback acted as an authorizing and endorsement of his own endeavors as a singer. The recognitions enabled by this recording empowered him in his ambitions to become a leading clan singer, as well as provided comforting evidence of an enduring connection with his father.  “Coming from Everywhere”

There is one final dimension to this “seeing of everything.” I have the sense that these moments of recognition entail an active imagining on the part of the viewer. The seeing of “everything” requires an active layering or combining of images within an individual’s imagination: a kind of participatory visual process by which the individual collates a “big picture” of both depth (as it moves to inside knowledge) and breadth (as it makes connections between individuals, groups, or clans) of the Ancestral. In this way the cultural work of envisaging connects the sensuously similar to that which is ontologically the same. In other words, recognition of similitude is a kind of encompassing, eidetic seeing. Because recognition means more than merely recollecting, the “coming from everywhere” that Bangana describes as indicative of the moment of dharangan is understood by Yolngu as an experience of the conjunctions of the work of perception, memory, imagination, and the power of Ancestral revelation. Yolngu often describe the way in which they actively bring country to

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mind in ceremony. Bangana used to talk about the importance of the work of picturing the “whole thing in your mind.” Just as in ritual song when the various poetic images are evoked so that listeners will be able to see the place in their mind’s eye, so too does visual imagery (in conjunction with the song and story) stimulate what Bangana called “seeing” story. Draw ing on the reservoirs of memory and embodied experience from ritual and spending time in country, viewers bring together the kinds of connections and imagery associated with the Ancestral. In Gularri, then, not only are viewers looking for correspondences on the screen; they bring their visual memory into play, layering on imagery in a kind of active seeing that means that everything becomes available in their mind’s eye in a flood of associations. Yet, I stress again, despite the crucial significance of the audience in bringing meaning to the screen, the video itself was produced in a cultural context in which the ultimate source of knowledge is understood not to be the individual subject but country itself. From a Yolngu point of view, it is not the images that speak for themselves. Rather the images provide a new kind of process whereby country communicates—the Ancestral reveals itself. For Yolngu viewers the close-ups of water provide an explicit visual trigger for this kind of revelatory seeing. Moving across the screen, the sparkling surface of the water generates diamond shapes that constantly form and disappear within the flow itself. These shots thus not only function as a kind of mimetic distillation of Ancestral presence; they operate at the level of a visual poetics: the flowing, the play of depth and shallows, the surging revelation and concealments of patterns and shapes, enacted by the very materiality of Gularri, work to stimulate certain styles of associative thinking that potentially enable new insights in the mulkurr of viewers.18 For, as I have said, the water is not only the source of the sacra: it is the source of a sensibility that enables certain kinds of knowledge and identifications. Gularri’s shimmering frames of water do not simply (invisibly) presence the sacra; rather, they enable certain processes of seeing and recognition. Viewing Gularri “like a Yolngu” involves processes of perception and apperception: a conjunction of imagination and memory in combination with a visceral openness to the revelatory power of the Ancestral enables an experience of an extrasensuous similitude (as opposed to Benjamin’s notion of decoding “nonsensuous similarity”). The Ancestral becomes visible to the viewer in the moment of recognition when the mimetic surge effects a revelation of the sacra that triggers an eidetic “seeing of—and connecting to —everything.” As attentive viewers attend to the patterns on the

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screen, those patterns bring layers of affect-laden imagery to minds even as the pulsating brilliance of the Ancestral pushes outward toward them, infusing their mulkurr (minds), their bodies, and their nayangu (heart, the seat of emotions) with renewed meaning and connection. The shimmering waters, the mimetic presencing, and the mimetic processes of looking and remembering, seeing and recognizing, are such that, as Bangana said, an elder is able to see everything in a single frame of water. The mimetic imperative to see similitude rather than merely similarities (as described in chapter 4) means that this moment of recognition has a flow-on effect whereby, in the mind of the viewer who makes this recognition, what is seen is more than the literally visible. The gestalt that occurs with recognition provides a surge of experiential knowledge. It enables a recognition that makes afresh the kinds of knowledges that might otherwise be rendered as mere memory and/or imagination. In recognizing—in the rush of seeing the Ancestral emerging, showing, glowing—the viewer sees not only what is known, but in the excess of the known, “everything” becomes apparent.19 The dynamic movement of the shimmering effect is a manifestation of the play between concealment and containment whereby the surface of everyday appearances and correspondences is broken up as the Ancestral shows through, allowing for the possibility for the recognition of the immanent similarities that usually lie inside or underneath the surface. The mimetic rippling of the camera’s presencing combined with the suggestively abstract images and the sensuous/imaginative connections generated in the act of looking and recognizing produces a modality of vision that contributes to the constitution of the Ancestral itself. The play of showing and concealing enacted by the camera and the water itself produces a culturally specific dynamic that enables the Ancestral to show itself to the attentive viewer, surging forth from beneath the surface of everyday appearances to make its presence visible, self-evident, and therefore both irrefutable and enduring in its potency and relevance. Not only do watery images presence the Ancestral in a contained manner; they also provide the possibility of the Ancestral showing itself, manifesting in a flash from beneath the surface of everyday appearances. The dappled surfaces and hidden depths embody a poetic materiality that triggers sensuous processes of identification that (re)connect the viewer to the source of their identity. As Bangana put it: Even though they are not there, they are really. Yolngu know those patterns are there, and when they watch they can see their dhulang, their gamununggu, and it will make them feel closer to their country, and all the other clans with similar paintings. Bring them all together. . . .

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Yolngu, dharpa [trees] gapu [water], wanga [country], madayin [sacra] everything . . . That’s what makes this powerful yapa [sister]. Everything is connected.

To return, now, to the shimmering effect. In light of the above discussion, I would argue that qualities of brilliance evident in Yolngu painting and the Gularri video are an aesthetic dimension of a constitutive ontological process. The combination of the presencing produced by mimetic labor considered with the perceptual work of the audience produces the crucial, constitutive, and incorporative movement from inside to outside. The “power” that arises is produced through mimetic labor and known and experienced through recognition (as a crucial dimension of the subject’s active participation in the mimetic reconstitution of the Yolngu world). The painting and/or video does not merely represent, or contain, Ancestral power. What matters most is the constitutive potency of the interdependent and intersubjective relationships that showing, looking, and recognizing reconstitutes. It is in this moment—in the flash of recognition where the Ancestral shows itself, and the audience can see, recognize, and connect—that the work of cultural production is successful. To draw on Taussig’s evocative description of the “flashing moment” of mimetic fusion, the subject is reconnected to the world, through a sacred “illumination” that is “no less embodied than it is mindful, no less individual than it is social” (1993, 23).  Envisaging a Yolngu Modernity: A Flow of Culture and Connectedness

Up to this point I’ve concentrated on the constitutive nature of the processes of seeing, connecting, and recognizing that inform the production and reception of Gularri for a Yolngu audience. In this final section, I want to extend my analysis beyond the specifics of “seeing” as such, to develop a broader appreciation of what Bangana intended to show his audience through the particular rendering of the Ancestral that Gularri produces. This entails a return to the wider context of Bangana’s vision for Culture and a consideration of the social, cultural, and historical dynamics that the video specifically, if obliquely, addresses. 20 As I have said, Bangana was motivated to make media out of a concern for what he referred to as the “big picture.” This is a video, as the subtitle clearly announces, about the way that the Ancestral “brings unity” to the Yirritja clans (and, by extension, ultimately all Yolngu) that Gularri creates and connects. The recognitions that Bangana sought to produce extended beyond individual Yolngu seeing their own sacra in their clan

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waters and thereby relating to the video and their relationship with Gularri— he wanted viewers to extend their perspective beyond the clan ringgitj; he wanted them to recognize rom as the basis for an overarching relatedness that gave them certain rights, roles, and responsibilities. In short, he wanted to harness the kinds of connections that ritual has traditionally provided to enable his audience to recognize an underlying unity that would provide a meaningful basis for contemporary circumstances and most particularly, as I will argue, provide the literal and ontological grounds for a panYolngu identity. In mimicking the revelatory dynamics of ngarra and other cultural forms, Gularri worked to make visible the underlying unity that draws together the diverse and dispersed clans of northeast Arnhem Land. He used Gularri to reveal the big picture of an Ancestral structure of relatedness that would normally be imparted only to male initiates in the closed contexts of ceremony. In focusing on the relationships between clans —by laying them out in their Ancestral order —Gularri reveals an encompassing schema of relatedness and an overarching truth of the Ancestral. Yet Gularri does not simply assert the enduring presence of the Ancestral in its shimmering waters. This is not simply a story about why Yolngu are “one people”: it is a production that sets out to actively generate this unity and to enable Yolngu to know their own place in the Yolngu world. Gularri is particularly significant because it provides a visual stimulus that enables knowledgeable viewers to not only see their own wangarr but to recognize —and to affirm by the act of viewing—their connections with others. The video provides a way of envisaging—or, as Yolngu would say, recognizing—collectivity in a new way, by making the underlying unity of the clans, and, ultimately, of all Yolngu, manifestly evident: visible and irrefutable. As Bangana explained, With that video the Warramiri elder might say, yo, I can see my gamununggu, my dhulang coming through. He can see that it is showing that old history, that linkup between Ritharrngu and Warramiri. . . . Because they’ve got similar paintings and he can recognize that in the video. See? So videos like that do show that linkup. And that video or that bark becomes really powerful because all that connections between people and those sacred elements become powerful. That’s what makes it powerful.

In this way, Gularri communicates Ancestral truths and produces constitutive effects more usually generated in ritual by the use of sacred objects and designs. Unlike the extremely provocative revelations of the Adjustment Movement, which R. M. Berndt (1962) describes as an attempt to create unity between clans in the face of the Balanda world, the video generates connectedness without resorting to revealing the rangga.

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The shots of water evoke “everything” in relation to specific clans and demonstrate a breadth of connectedness that encompasses the entirety of the Yolngu world in and through rom. Driven by a concern for the Ancestral as an enduring source of identity and identification, Bangana has identified Culture as a foundational source of a way of relating-in-the-world. In this way the unity that Gularri generates is not only intended to link together disparate clans but to reenforce a lived sense of a cultural world as both vital and viable. At this level, then, I understand Gularri to be a self-conscious, technological poiesis of Culture. A quite literal manifestation of culture flow, Gularri directly addresses concerns about locality—as a source of specific and literally grounded identities —in a contemporary Yolngu lifeworld. 21 The production serves to clarify and consolidate a vision of a social collectivity that is relevant to the contemporary emergence of a Yolngu politics of identity. Yet whereas most theory of identity politics apprehends identity as a construction that is generated through and by discourse (see Hall 1996, 4), the identificational processes generated by Gularri are borne of perception. Moreover, identification is neither arbitrary nor optional: a sense of givenness and belonging is generated as each viewer locates his or her own place within the Ancestral Always. Thus Gularri can be seen to represent exactly what Heidegger might have celebrated as a “homely flow” of television and culture. 22 Drawing on the material poetics of the water and the cultural imaginary attuned to the invisible surges of the Ancestral as it collects clans in its wake, Gularri reveals the Ancestral as both relevant to, and revitalized by, the modern and the technological. As Ihde argues, for Heidegger “[a] ‘good’ technology is one which ‘gathers’ a world in a certain way and ‘lets be’ the nature and community which is so gathered” (1993, 109). I understand Gularri to be gathering the world in exactly this same way. Gularri (re)produces a flow of Culture, local and grounded in rom, drawing viewers into a sense of belonging, as the Ancestral world surges into presence in an otherwise everyday context, the inside flowing into the outside in an encompassing and inclusive movement. As the edited-together footage from various sites unfolds in a primordial sequence laid down by the Ancestral, country and clans are shown to have a specific and predefined place within an Ancestral order. Each new segment, introduced by the name of the place emerging from a screen of water, brings another clan into the flow. Momentum builds as the ontologically crucial “same but different” is enacted by the structure of the production, as the format repeats itself in each location, gathering up clans in a

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relationship that ultimately includes all Yolngu and thus offers evidence of the underlying relations that provide the basis of what Bangana called “the Yolngu world.” In the process, the wayward youth are literally pulled back into their place. By shifting the narrative from the usual clan-centric focus to encompass the “big picture,” Bangana reproduced an Ancestral order of relatedness that offers a response to the social/cultural and historical dynamics of contemporary Yolngu lifeworlds. By providing the ontological ground for perceiving what it might mean to be Yolngu in the modern world without needing to deny or diminish the significance and ongoing autonomy of clans (and other categories of kin-based grouping), Gularri provides the basis for generating an “imagined community” of Yolngu in ways that are quite different from those imagined by Benedict Anderson (1983) and those who have subsequently applied his ideas to the study of emerging social formations. The “big picture” that Bangana framed (and enframed) by bringing the inside knowledge about the connections between clans into the outside, brings into focus the practical and conceptual basis for an emergent identity politics —an identity that is pregiven, known, experienced, and recognized through the Ancestral. The production provides a vision for how Ancestral truths can be used to locate an emergent pan-Yolngu identity that takes its authority and self-confidence from these Ancestrally generated connections. Crucially, these relationships arise from preexisting and located identities. The intersubjective relationship of “sameness” generated among the various clans and their countries constitutes the grounds of an inclusive identity that is neither amorphous nor arbitrary. Yolngu identity is literally and ontologically grounded, giving rise to a sense of locality and relatedness that is experiential, embodied, and Ancestrally authorized. Although by the time it reaches the sea, the water is composed of different currents associated with different clans, to the camera (and the casual viewer) the waters appear as one, and thus, differences submerge. Hence, just as sameness does not reduce everything to an indivisible, amorphous condition, an assertion of difference does not entail a complete and irrevocable separateness between individuals or groups. Sameness in this context is premised on a cultural assumption that the ever-present coexistence of difference between groups and individuals (as identified by clan, country, sacra) is not an obstacle to the production of intersubjective identification and knowledge. Instead, the emphasis is on the brief—but transformative —mimetically charged moments that mediate across such differences. Equally, as evidenced in the materiality of this ontological

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source, identity is neither fixed nor static. Coming from the ringgitj of individual clans, the waters surge together: “same but different.” While to the eye the various currents within the waters appear indistinguishable, by the time the waters reach the sea, different clans’ waters flow as distinct currents. Again, same but different. This is not to say that Bangana attempted to present an idealized version of Yolngu culture in which everyone existed in nonhierarchical or otherwise nondifferentiated relationships. As various ethnographers have described, Yolngu ritual serves a number of simultaneous purposes and agendas. 23 Ceremonies are always in danger of being riven by the politics that provides a structuring undercurrent to the performances and organization of events. I have no doubt that there were implications to the choice of this story and the inclusion of certain sites and sights that could be only understood in relation to the existence of certain rivalries and/or power struggles between clans. Or even within them. Keen argues, for instance, that Aboriginal ceremony is always a political event in which long-standing rivalries and disputes between groups provide an undercurrent to performance and the kinds of emotive outbursts and accusations that can erupt. The making of the video can also be read through a more specific politics relating to claims by younger Warramiri men regarding the source of the waters, asserted in negotiations with various Aboriginal and Balanda agencies. The video, with its firm affirmation of the truth by landowners right across the region, including Warramiri elders, was seen by many to be a direct refutation of these claims. 24 While this is one important subtext of the claims to truth asserted in the video, I think it would limit my analysis to see it only as a product of an interclan struggle. I believe Bangana’s focus on the “big picture” sought to overcome (or perhaps even resolve) these tensions by (re)uniting Yolngu in the quest to imagine themselves and their place in the “Balanda world.”  Worlding a Yolngu World

Ultimately, then, I see Gularri as an attempt by Bangana to enable contemporary Yolngu audiences to recognize themselves within part of an enduring Ancestrally ordered and authorized pattern of meaning and relationship. As a remedy for the perceived problem that the youth were becoming like Balanda and forgetting their identity, Bangana’s vision of Yolngu Culture is not only a refusal of the conventional Western models of social development but is promoting a lived sense of local identity and

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privileging forms of knowledge derived from an entirely different ontological relationship to the world in the fullest possible sense. By adapting ngarra ritual for public television broadcast, Ngalambirra and Bangana not only made a call for unity—they produced it. Flowing across the ruptures brought by missionizing and modernity, the waters mimetically conjoin Yolngu pasts and presents, mediating across the divisions of the traditional and the modern, the “primitive” and the technological, the old people and the self-identified “new generations.” Unlike the ethnographic salvage imperative to relentlessly record what James Clifford calls a “present-becoming-past” (1987, 122), Gularri contains both modern and traditional within a single frame without a sense of tension. There is no evidence of an imperative to assert tradition by dressing up, stripping down, or otherwise excluding markers of modernity. The shadow of the helicopter and Ngalambirra’s synthetic shirt and prosthetic leg were not perceived as evidence of disjuncture or disruption to be edited out. 25 In the wider, inclusionary temporality of the Ancestral Always, they coexist as part of a modern Yolngu world, a world that is made and recognized as Yolngu by Yolngu through rom. Indeed, modernity is enframed by rom. There is thus a temptation to invert Clifford’s phrase, to claim Gularri as a project concerned with the past-becoming-present. However, I would argue, that it is more accurate to say, in terms of a Yolngu conceptual framework, that Gularri (like ritual) is concerned with producing the Ancestral Alwaysbecoming-present by making the Ancestral visible, manifestly recognizable, and hence enduringly relevant in the face of the modern. Thus, to extend the metaphor of flow, Gularri implicitly pushes against the currents of change as figured by the Balanda imaginary with its dualistic tendency to posit tradition and modernity as inherently irreconcilable. There is a profound sense in Balanda thinking that when Yolngu become modern —manifesting a recognizable version of the contemporary, global culture by adopting branded sports shoes, dreadlock hair styles, or four-wheel drive vehicles —they sacrifice that which is essential about their Aboriginality. As I have been arguing here, the genius of the Yolngu imagination lies in its ability to recognize the Ancestral in new contexts and to envisage a place within a modernity that does not imply a break with the past. The Yolngu imaginary allows for mimetic forms of adaptation —a play of sameness and difference —without necessarily invoking a sense of contradiction or loss. To see and make connections with the practices and priorities of the generations that have gone before, while taking up the possibilities of the modern and the technological —this is Yolngu contemporaneity: the shimmering screen of the television set is a site for revelation and ritual participation.

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In fact it is the conjunction of ritual form and technology that gives Gularri a special potency. The backward and forward effects of the mimetic provides a double movement of incorporation: the conjunctions of the technological, the Ancestral, and the new generations produce not a contradiction, but a constitutive moment. Hence, the production mediates against the divisions that would seek to locate Yolngu Culture in an archaic and unrecoverable past by appropriating a domain of prowess and power once deemed “Balanda.” In this instance the technological brings forth the Ancestral. In the process, Yolngu rom is rendered “modern” and the “Balanda technology” becomes “Yolnguized.” In these ways, Gularri created a “homely flow” of television: a poiesis made possible by the conjunctions of camera and transmitters, screens and speakers. In the process, the Ancestral is seen, recognized, and affirmed by participating audiences as a source of a vital, productive, and actively incorporative modality for making sense of the world on Yolngu terms despite radically changing contexts. Indeed, there was also a distinct sense in which those who participated in making Gularri understood the potential of video to reach forward in time. Knowing that master copies would be stored in controlled temperature archives in Canberra and Alice Springs, both Bangana and Ngalambirra planned for this video to survive indefinitely as a powerful Ancestrally authorized revelatory force. As they told me, they imagined that in years to come, after their deaths and once the inevitable mortuary restrictions had lifted, new audiences of Yolngu would be able to watch the video and “see” for themselves, finding their own stories, connections, and interpretations, and in the process become drawn into a renewed relationship with the overarching truth of the Ancestral. On the one hand, because of this potential for future generations to locate their own truths and make connections through the processes of their own viewing, there is a kind of timelessness built into the production. Yet on the other, even though it was not produced to be a historical record per se, in time Gularri will inevitably become one. As future viewers watch, with an appreciation of the aging and passing away of the figures who appear on-screen, the technology will inevitably bring to the fore a sense of a linear temporality (in a Western sense). The implications of this did not escape those who worked on the project. Both Bangana and Ngalambirra explicitly expressed to me their expectation that this new modality of cultural production provided a means of them holding a stake in the “strengthening of culture” into the future. Indeed, both men understood that the video would take on an increased luster of truth and power over time when, after their own deaths,

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the replay would enact a presencing of people who have become part of the Ancestral. In other words, both men anticipated that the combination of Ancestral presence and historical perspective —especially given Yolngu concerns regarding the threat posed by changing lives and discontinuities of cultural practice and knowledge —would mean that the video would increasingly become more powerful and irrefutable evidence of—and an enticement to —Yolngu knowledge and connections. In this sense, then, Gularri works not only to enable the current generation to imagine the possibility of living meaningfully as Yolngu but also to ensure a flow of the Ancestral into the future: reaching, moving, and connecting those yet unborn to the source of their culture and identity.  On Reconciliation and Redemption

On a concluding note —and this is not to undermine the above argument but rather to augment it by emphasizing the always multivalent nature of Yolngu cultural production —Gularri must also be acknowledged as a very personal project of attempted redemption and reconciliation. Making the video, working with clan leaders, recording stories in this new format provided a unique opportunity for Bangana to attempt to mend the reputation and relationships that had been so severely damaged when he tore the clan bathi (dilly bag). Even though he never appears on-screen, whenever I watch the video I witness an act of atonement and recognize a demonstration of Bangana’s commitment to Culture. Bangana once told me that a great singer does not simply repeat the songs he has learned from others. Each individual, if he is to build a reputation as a masterful ceremonial singer, must learn and incorporate the complex details of a clan song lyric, structure, and tune and then reproduce it in ways that mark it as his. His singing was not a slavish copy of an unchanging Ancestral repertoire: he was proud to be known for his distinctive style. Yet this did not mean that when he performed the clan manikay he was understood to be singing his own creation. As he explained, his skills lay in his ability to bring a combination of poetics and musical innovation that subtly reworked the familiar imagery and musical styles of clan manikay, revealing it afresh to listeners (although such innovation was always kept within strict boundaries). In other words, Bangana’s singing re-realized the Ancestral through the powerful merging of imagination with the presencing of immanent Ancestral potential. Similarly, it seems to me, Bangana used Gularri to demonstrate, to the widest possible audience, his capacity to finesse the spaces between Balanda

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and Yolngu, “tradition” and “modernity.” Drawing on the depths of his knowledge and expertise of both “worlds,” the production revealed him to be a consummate mastermind and broker of Culture. Bangana showed that it was possible to adapt the Ancestral to the particular demands of the technology. He provided a practical and viable solution to the considerable epistemological and political constraints posed by the very notion of a public broadcast of Ancestral information. He used television to draw viewers away from the lethargies and distractions of the everyday and to move them toward what he called a “connection with their Culture.” In this way Bangana sought to (re)identify himself as an individual with a deep and abiding regard for rom. In many ways, this project marked a claim to power and recognition that might traditionally have been made through a performance of virtuosity within the ceremony ground (an arena that, especially in relation to some clans and individuals, remained somewhat marred for Bangana because of his destroying the clan bathi).26 Yet, as I have argued, Gularri also has particularly and self-consciously “modern” effects. As the video and its broadcast perform the “worlding” that I describe above, it manifestly demonstrates its director as a particularly capable and influential modern Yolngu subject, distinguished by his ability to take on the kinds of conceptual, technical, and political challenges involved in a new form of cultural production that could be recognized and appreciated across the divisions of clans, communities, generations, and, as I discuss in the conclusion, even across the bounds of culture itself. Indeed, Bangana used Gularri to position himself as an individual whose power, authority, and expertise arose from the successful fusion of these formally separate domains. Ultimately, however, despite the kudos that he garnered as a consequence of the success of the video, and his growing prominence as a ceremonial singer, Bangana’s Culture work could never be sufficient to repair the damage done by ripping the bathi. The literal rending of the social fabric caused by this incident and its aftermath continued to inflect his relationships both within and beyond his own clan. Misfortunes and deaths were attributed as being caused by the “dilly bag story.” At Bangana’s funeral many people told me that they believed this serious transgression to be the true cause of his premature death. (As one brother explained, the official account of a heart attack was a story deliberately circulated by the doctors in order to prevent the inevitable reprisals against those deemed to be responsible for the malicious sorcery that many believed was the true cause of death.) At the memorial service (a ceremony modeled on Balanda practices, occasionally incorporated into the funerals of prominent Yolngu, in which

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both Yolngu and Balanda give speeches about the deceased to an assembled audience of specially invited visiting dignitaries and community members), a Ritharrngu woman spoke specifically of the Gularri video, acknowledging the important work that Bangana had done for her clan and emphasizing his qualities of generosity and respect for other Yolngu. Yet as Susan commented to me later that day, the “problem,” as she referred to it, had continued to weigh heavily on Bangana. So much so that he had foretold his own death only months before his heart attack. With hindsight borne of loss and sorrow, Susan confirmed to me, as we sat beside his body in the funeral shelter, that no amount of videomaking—no matter how impressive, influential, or well received —could ever have dispelled the shadow cast on this extraordinary life by that one moment of recklessness all those years ago.

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Conclusion

If there is one overarching argument in this book, it is this: Yolngu use media to (re)produce relationships. In Yolngu hands, photographs, audio recordings, video, and radio generate mimetic ripples that reach beyond “everyday” time and space, amplifying an invisible yet sensuously encompassing intersubjective field of unity. As I have described, by facilitating the kinds of experiences and understandings more usually expressed through art and ritual, the expressive power of the audio and visual media is giving rise to new forms of cultural practice in Gapuwiyak. Although these technologies can often raise serious concerns regarding the manifestation and management of Ancestral presence, these risks are being assessed in light of their capacity for Yolngu to find new ways to bring to light the similitudes and “samenesses” that confirm, again and again, the underlying relationships and connections that undergird the “Yolngu world.”1 While researching this book in the 1990s I perceived Gapuwiyak as a place where, despite the obvious extremes of poverty, overcrowding, and disease, there existed a strong sense of hope for the future. That this was my overwhelming impression certainly at least partly owes to the nature of my project and the robust enthusiasm of my chief informant. These days my encounters with Yolngu are more often tinged with a shared sense of despair. As time passes and as I have become closer to people, I have become much more aware of the cumulative effects of powerlessness and loss that are manifesting in a distressing array of social problems and conflicts. Yolngu are talking about how life is getting harder: more frustrating, more boring, more disappointing, more dangerous. It’s my impression that Balanda working in the region are also increasingly admitting (whether in policy papers or in a flood of tears over a cup of tea in the health clinic) to losing heart and a sense of direction.

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In light of these developments it would seem that the effects of Bangana’s media endeavors are already a thing of the past—flashing moments of triumph and innovation in a broader and fast-moving history of culture that is extremely difficult to encompass (whether analytically, bureaucratically, or emotionally), much less “revitalize.” Yet I want to stress that this is not necessarily how Yolngu see things. People in Gapuwiyak and surrounding communities understand Bangana’s legacy to manifest in ways and places that exceed the impact of occasional Gularri replays. In a very Yolngu way of describing things, some people have started to tell me that Bangana’s vision has not been lost with his death; they say that his way of thinking about media and rom is now held in the mulkurr of other Yolngu. The way they describe it—“I’ve got that vision in my head now. . . . He’s guiding me, helping me to see the way. . . .”—it’s as if Bangana’s way of envisaging a future through media has been literally impressed into the imaginations of others, shaping the way they see and do things and giving rise to new projects, even as these emergent videomakers take up different subjects, directions, techniques, and collaborations. There could be no more fitting tribute to a man whose unique contribution to indigenous media was to recognize, and push, the mimetic potential of this technology in accordance with protocols and imperatives of his own cultural imaginary. While driven by a concern for the “blindness” and “deafness” afflicting young people who are consequently “forgetting their stories and connections,” Bangana did not seek to use media technologies to create an archive of facts for future generations. Instead, he worked with an understanding that knowledge arises from being exposed to places and images, that one discovers for oneself information and identity in country, in pictures, in dreams. He made media to stimulate his audience into a seeing, finding, and (re)remembering and recognizing of rom as something always already present in the Ancestral sites and sights that he made visible on-screen —and thence in viewers’ imaginations. As I have described, the identity and identifications that Bangana valued and sought to promote, both at home and beyond the borders of Arnhem Land, entailed much more than being labeled or self-described as Aboriginal. The difference that he valued—the sensuously constituted identifications and revelations that he privileged as constitutive of a quintessentially “Yolngu point of view”—is profoundly unlike the kinds of difference that are used to constitute a collectivity in the forms of identity politics that are premised on exclusionary, oppositional, or racialized practices. In this context, identity is not a pregiven category into which one is born or designated. Nor is it a choice or a life-style decision. 2 Rather, at the heart of Bangana’s project is a concern about the ongoing viability of

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a particular ontological position as an experiential basis for relating-in the -world. Although at one level Yolngu privilege the unmediated knowledge that comes through experience and exposure to country, sacra, and story, there is also a corresponding imperative operating, one that requires subjects to actively undertake the cognitive work of understanding or “seeing” for themselves. Bangana sought to reinforce and thereby carry forward a particular kind of modality of being-in-the-world by bringing together images of country with bodies of knowledge and embodied audiences who will engage and reciprocate with certain kinds of culturally prescribed practices and affective responses. From this point of view, “Yolnguness” becomes a question of perspective, and culture a matter of skilled sensibility. In this conclusion I want to gesture toward the broader implications of these arguments. I want to indicate how Yolngu modes for worlding the world extend beyond the visual—and how, at least potentially, they also provide a means of reaching beyond northeast Arnhem Land.  Beyond the Visual

First, I need to emphasize that my privileging of the visual means that I have said less about the significance of the spoken and sung word, the tune, the vibrations of Yolngu music, and the communicative potential of Yolngu radio requests. 3 My analytic emphasis on the “Yolngu eye” and “ways of seeing” in relation to Gularri has meant that I have had to defer discussing in any depth the significance of other sensual realms and the importance of synesthesia to the production of the knowledges and experiences I describe.4 Briefly, in Gularri (and, I would argue, more generally in ritual and other less official moments of mimetic cultural production) the effects of synesthesia are crucial. In the case of the video, not only is the audio track an essential feature of the production, in terms of the effects of the spoken and sung word, but the spaces between viewer and screen are filled with sounds and sights that pull the world together in a kind of embodied gestalt of the senses. Hearing and seeing the mimetically charged evocations of the Ancestral, the subject experiences a world that is united through the senses: the spaces between subjects and sacred objects and images are traversed and filled as the Ancestral becomes manifest and surges into the viscera of the audience. In this way the moment of Ancestral revelation —the “coming from everywhere” that Bangana describes —is experienced as a sensuous reality. The optical surges of shimmering, the echoing of the yidaki and the

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Figure 29. “Coming from everywhere”: Ngalambirra sings the country at Warrawurr, the vibrations of his voice and the poetics of song combining with the visual imagery to create an encompassing field of meaningfulness.

tremulous incantations of the dhalkara singing the yindi names of place, enable the apprehension of the Ancestral as the sensuous world coalesces for the perceptual subject. Not only do the senses traverse a field between viewer, “object” (Ancestral image), and “subject” (Ancestral Being); they are the source of visceral permeability. They provide a lived-experience of the very unboundedness of the body; they experientially reinforce the significance of being able to connect, to touch, to know beyond oneself. In other words, the intersubjective relationship between the Ancestral and the living subject is constituted as an intercorporeality mediated by all the senses, not only the visual. 5  Toward an Intercultural Regard?

Next, I must acknowledge that I realize that in arguing, as I have, for a model of cultural difference at the level of a lived, embodied ontology, there is the danger of being seen to be imposing a new hierarchy of authenticity in which Yolngu are reinscribed as the “real” Aborigines. It could be read from my arguments that Aboriginal people from other parts of the

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country, who as a result of different histories and diverse life experiences no longer share this cultural perspective, somehow lack culture. Equally, my emphasis risks promoting a particular kind of Yolngu authenticity and implying that Bangana’s project was somehow more “cultural” or more “Yolngu” than other forms of contemporary production in the region. This is not my intention. In writing this book, I seek to do justice to Bangana’s vision while acknowledging that his perspective (or at least my interpretation of it) is but one version of indigeneity in a socially diverse, highly political, and contested arena. There are many ways of being Aboriginal in contemporary Australia, as most Yolngu themselves are well aware. Indeed, many people from Gapuwiyak have developed a sympathetic understanding of and close relationships with other Aboriginal people who do not share their ontological orientation toward the world. Nevertheless, the profound yet often underappreciated differences in perspective that separate them do, at times, give rise to frustrations and an active disidentification with the wider Aboriginal community. Bangana, for instance, often struggled with the fact that Aboriginal bureaucrats in national government positions appeared just as blind to Yolngu concerns as any Balanda. Yet, I stress again, as far as Yolngu are concerned these differences are not immutable. As I have said, as far as Bangana was concerned, making media was only one aspect of a larger life project concerned with finding ways that Yolngu might continue to “remember who they are” amid the distractions and inertias of contemporary life. He was also deeply interested in communicating with non-Yolngu about Yolngu culture. For all his emphasis on “strengthening Yolngu culture,” he understood it to be his life’s work to take up, work within, and refigure the spaces of the intercultural that so profoundly shaped his life (and his discourse at this level). Unlike many contemporary cultural activists who seek to assert a difference premised on an exclusive, essentialized, or racialized identity, Bangana was not invested in identifying, recreating, and perpetuating an unbreachable distinction between Yolngu and non-Yolngu. Instead, he brought a Yolngu cultural logic to his attempts to communicate with people beyond northeast Arnhem Land. Bangana held the view that anyone willing to put in the proper effort and affective intentionality could learn to become Yolngu, to “see like a Yolngu,” and ultimately, as he put it, be “recognized as Yolngu.” He was quite explicit about the way in which the inclusive and incorporative (in the fully somatic sense of the word) dynamics of his project extended into the spaces of the intercultural. He believed that his video would reach beyond Arnhem Land and would generate connections and understandings

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with people who would never have the opportunity of visiting Arnhem Land in person. This attitude reaffirms both his emphasis on the experiential rather than the exegetic in these contexts and the possibility of nonlocal viewers engaging with Yolngu poiesis. (Indeed, I am quite certain that he believed far more in the power of Gularri to reach and connect with Balanda than any impact my written work might have in communicating about Yolngu culture.) As I have suggested, Gularri exists on a continuum with the early attempts at intercultural rapprochement of the Adjustment Movement and the many subsequent attempts by Yolngu to show Balanda their Ancestral objects, designs, dances, songs, and places. It was, in my view, a more sophisticated and more successful attempt than the Adjustment Movement, this by virtue of its capacity to presence the sacra in the modern world without unduly exposing the Ancestral.6 In other words, Gularri must also be recognized as a culturally specific form of activism and advocacy in which Yolngu promote the possibility of an intercultural regard by exposing Balanda to the constitutive power of the Ancestral —and thus invite them to participate in an affirmation of Yolngu rom. This notion of intercultural regard goes to the heart of my argument. It provides a more specific sense of the kind of respect and understanding that Yolngu expect to arise from the process of coming-into-relationship via the senses (and, in the process, offers a very different sense of an intercultural mimetic dynamic than that described by Taussig). I use the term “intercultural regard” as another way of gesturing toward the ways that Yolngu understand Ancestral presence to mediate across the gaps of difference, generating a shared space of co -presence, and, in the process, producing the grounds for reciprocation and respect. For what is at stake for Yolngu in these cultural demonstrations is something more than mere exchange or interaction. What is required of the onlooker is a form of seeing that is neither detached observation nor a desiring, acquisitive gazing. Rather, there is an expectation that the act of showing—and the powerful presences that are brought forth—invites a response in the viewer that is open and appreciative, thus allowing the other his or her place —his or her perspective —from which a certain kind of understanding prevails.7 What are we to conclude about the likelihood of the ethical, political, and imaginative engagements demanded by Gularri being taken up in any meaningful way by non-Yolngu audiences? Is it possible for Balanda to view—and to recognize—Gularri on the terms in which it is intended? Or are Yolngu still naively mistaken in the assumption (all these years after the Adjustment Movement) that by showing us their culture they will be able to generate a meaningful engagement with people who are in no posi-

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tion to know anything about the story or the inside information associated with these Ancestral scenes? Clearly, given the history of blindness and misrecognition that has characterized relationships between Balanda and Yolngu over many years, there is cause for pessimism. As I have described, Gularri does not easily engage the Balanda imagination. (Even after working on the production and living in the community, I needed years of reflection to reach the kinds of understandings I have described here and, clearly, many words and pages to convey these understandings to you, the reader.) Witnessing my struggles to understand—to see and connect via Gularri—led, at times, to Bangana’s own conviction wavering in this respect. He said to me, more than once: “You guys [Balanda anthropologists] keep looking, looking, looking, but you just don’t see.” When I asked him how he thought I might learn to really see Gularri, he indicated that he had reached the conclusion that if Balanda were to truly glimpse the “whole picture” it would be necessary to provide more details of the story and its meaning. bw: If you talk about the Gularri right? If you talk about the gapu [water]. To really understand you’ve got to understand the rest of the story that goes with the Gularri. jd: All the bits we left out. bw: Yo [yes], plus the sacred stories. To really understand. And these are the kinds of things I’m thinking for the future. Using video to start telling nyumukiny stories, just little stories, about other sacred things involved. Just outside stories like I said before, ’cause as you said there, anthropologists don’t understand. And to get you guys to understand, you’re going to have to get the whole picture in your mind. But I can’t make that decision. At the time of this conversation, I reconciled myself to the idea that it would take me years of further fieldwork to become a properly appreciative viewer of Gularri. It seemed highly unlikely that other Balanda could ever engage with the video in the ways it was intended. However, I have changed my mind. In retrospect, I would argue that to conclude that, just because we don’t know these stories, people, and places, we —Balanda— can see nothing at all in Gularri, is to sell short the technologically enhanced capacities of the modern Western imagination. I want to suggest that the revitalized —and increasingly sophisticated —mimetic faculties of modern Western subjects can provide the basis for the kind of imaginative engagements and recognitions that Gularri invites. As I have argued throughout this book, Heidegger’s conclusions about the nature of a technologically mediated modernity are profoundly challenged by the experiences

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of living in a world mediated by media technologies. It is exactly because we live in a world saturated by technologically produced images and sounds that we know for ourselves the “magic” of mimesis. It is for these reasons that, at least experientially, we understand the impossibility of maintaining a strict distinction between “copy” and “original,” “subject” and “image,” the “real” and the “represented.” Consequently, I suggest that contemporary Western viewers are in fact well positioned to see beyond the representational orthodoxies that have for so long shaped our perspective on the world —and the other cultures and cultural productions that we have encountered.8 Indeed, as I have said, Bangana not only understood —and lived —the possibility of what might be described as a bifocal cultural range; he encouraged Balanda to attempt to do the same. While at one level he operated with a profound assumption that merely by watching—simply by being exposed to —Gularri, viewers would be connected to the Ancestral, he also emphasized the importance of the active kind of looking and imaginative processes involved in seeing for oneself. So what would the work of seeing for ourselves require —and enable —in this instance? How might non-Yolngu recognize the Ancestral via the shimmering surface of a television screen? As Morphy (1989, 36) has pointed out, the shimmering effects produced by the cross-hatching technique used in Yolngu painting are crossculturally recognizable. These oscillating painted lines produce an aesthetically mediated visual experience that offers the viewer an engagement with the painting that does not depend on figurative reading or decoding of story. I would extend this observation to propose that this effect, if viewed with an appreciation of the revelatory dynamics that constitute the Yolngu world, provides Balanda with the possibility of a sensually derived apperception of the ontological imperatives that I have been elaborating in this ethnography. In other words, the shimmering effect offers an aesthetically charged experience of the power of the Ancestral to show itself across the bounds of culture. As I will now describe, in Gularri it is the close-ups of the water that most effectively call into play the kinds of identifications that enable one to move beyond oneself, beyond that which is already given and already known—and hence, the restrictions of the “world picture”—and to experience an invisible yet encompassing world of relatedness and truth. It is these images, rather than the alluring beach scenes or the Cultural shots of old men telling their clan stories, that provide the basis for a deepening Balanda appreciation of “Yolnguness.” Hence, despite my repeated emphasis on the specificities that inform Yolngu ways of seeing, I want to conclude by enacting a final shift of per-

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spective. I want to demonstrate that the images of the shimmering waters of Gularri can generate connections across the bounds of culture.  Glimpsing the Ancestral

One does not have to be initiated, or even to believe in the Ancestral (or, for that matter, Being), in order to undertake the ethical and imaginative work of attempting to perceive the world from a Yolngu perspective. If one approaches Gularri with an imaginative intentionality and visceral openness —the kind of openness that Marks (2000) claims is cultivated by the active spectatorship that intercultural cinema demands —it is possible to glean something about the depths and power that inhere in Gularri. In the seemingly meaningless (and aesthetically confusing) close-ups of water that the CAAMA crew were so disinclined to shoot, there is an opportunity to undertake the kind of active looking that I am arguing is essential if one is to move toward the possibility of an intercultural regard.9 The filmic imagery of Gularri—most especially those close -up shots that Bangana so valued —can allow a Balanda viewer to surrender, if only briefly, the impulse to know—and thereby master—the “world as picture” and thence glimpse something crucial about “seeing” from a Yolngu point of view. For, as I will now show, the luminous patterns made by the flowing water as they move across the TV screen do entice and enable an experiential kind of knowledge about the Ancestral source of Gularri, even for viewers

Figure 30. Flowing, surging, connecting, revealing.

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who watch without the benefit of either narrative detail or specific knowledge of country. Even though I do not experience the surge of connection and recognition that the video stirs in Yolngu, Gularri enables me to make connections of my own. Indeed, as I write this final section, I am newly enthralled by Gularri. The above image, taken directly from the opening sequence of the video as I prepare this work for publication, provides fresh stimulus to my imagination and further evidence for my argument for the revelatory potential of media technologies. This image is technically a “still,” yet it is alive with movement. Pulsing. Shimmering. Viewing it as it glows on my computer screen, I experience an invitation to “connect” at multiple levels. I now cannot fail to see the correspondence between the patterns in the water and the criss-cross patterns in the rocks that mark Ancestral journeys that I know are to be found in some of these sites but that are not shown on screen. Immediately my mind’s eye makes the connection to the fine cross-hatching designs that produce the “bir’yun effect” that I have seen in art galleries and in catalogs as well as on the painted bodies of initiates in circumcision rituals —the correspondence more striking to me now than ever before. Looking further I also see the diamond-shaped motifs that typify Yirritja moiety clan designs—designs that are woven into the sacred clan bathi, painted on the bodies of young boys in their circumcision ceremonies, and displayed on bark paintings made for show in the galleries and books that circulate this imagery far beyond Gapuwiyak. The viewing also brings to mind the faces of the people I have known who are associated with the video and have now passed away (as well as their children and grandchildren who live on in Gapuwiyak and the surrounding communities). I feel a wave of nostalgia and lament, as well as an incredible fondness. I am moved, in all senses of the word, as I am emotionally and imaginatively connected with those I am remembering and seeing. In this way I come to understand the expression marr wanga rongyrirr (heart/soul returns to country) that is so often used to describe the effects of the video by many Yolngu I spoke to. However, even without such personal connections, even without an experientially derived affinity with the production and the country it shows, I suggest that it is possible for a Balanda to glimpse, experience, and thereby know something crucial about the power of such productions. As I have described, Yolngu harness mimesis in order to presence, bring forth, and connect, rather than to merely imitate or represent. The mimetic potency of Yolngu art does not derive from the figurative elements of painting—what Morphy describes as the “iconically motivated representations of objects of the human and natural environment” (1991, 152). It is

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not the iconic “look-alike” elements of Yolngu art that hold the revelatory power. Rather, it is the abstract, aesthetically engaging effects of painting or, in this case, the dappled luminiscence of water on an LCD screen that provide Yolngu with the possibility of an experience of the Ancestral. It is the generative effect of poiesis—the experiential dimensions of recognizing the emergence into visibility of an underlying sameness and unity—that, I have argued, is at the heart of the Yolngu mimetic endeavor. And so I propose that by opening one’s senses and imagination to the radiant oscillations exemplified in the close-ups in the video, a certain insight into the active and bidirectional mimetic play through which the world is worlded becomes possible for Balanda. Looking at the rippling, shifting, shimmering patterns in the water, I see a visible manifestation of a cultural system premised on, and enlivened by, a constant interplay between revelation and containment, showing and concealing. As the sun glints on the surface of the water, I experience a sense of how such glimpses can accumulate, enabling a recognition that is simultaneously a revelation. In the moving images, as the dappled patterns take shape on its surface, only to disappear and reform, there is a sense of a dynamic borne of appearance and disappearance, revelation and concealment. This visual effect produces an optical imperative to look, to be drawn into relationship, as the pulsating energy of the water (or painting) pushes out from the screen (or bark) across the distances between viewer and image. In these ways, the powerfully abstract images actively break the surface of the apparent or everyday. As I view this photograph with images in my mind of the pulsing 3-D effect I have experienced in Yolngu bark paintings hung in art galleries, the shifting, moving shapes in the watery images produce a palpable sense of the profoundly intersubjective nature of what Bangana called the “Yolngu world.” The quivering optical enticements of the cross-hatching patterns enable a glimpse of the dynamic and constitutive play of the Ancestral as it surges forth, filling the sensual spaces between the audience and the video or bark, and thence between me, the viewer, and the Ancestral itself; manifesting the possibility of recognition and mutuality, even as it recedes again into the invisible realm of immanence.10 When I look at the shimmering waters of Gularri, I glimpse something vital about a Yolngu way of relating-in-the-world. I see Ancestrally charged imagery that invites eyes to look beneath the surface: to know, to be touched, and to be moved by invisible visceral connections that such seeing enables. I sense the productive play of presencing and containment that brings forth luminous and powerful Ancestral truths while simultaneously conserving them. I experience something palpable about the

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possibilities of a vital and enduring source of insight and identity that invites and encompasses individual perceptual subjects into a wider matrix of belonging and shared meaning. And I recognize this as a reservoir of meaning and meaningfulness, a source that simultaneously offers creativity and continuity in the face of the changes and challenges of contemporary Yolngu life. Ultimately, I see a chance to participate in an affirmation of Yolngu rom. I see an enticement and an opportunity: to look beyond the perceptual blocks produced by our own cultural preconditioning, and to open ourselves to the possibility of relating to Yolngu and their cultural productions in ways that might, in turn, generate the grounds for the kind of intercultural regard that Yolngu have been seeking for so long. I understand this book to offer a contribution toward such a possibility.

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Notes

Prologue 1. The term “Yolngu” means “person” in the clan dialects of northeast Arnhem Land. It has become the most commonly used collective term for the indigenous inhabitants of this region. 2. The sword represents a mythic link to Maccassan sailors and is often used as a public symbol to identify the Dhalwangu clan. 3. The people of northeast Arnhem Land refer to Australians of European descent as “Balanda,” a term apparently derived from the Macassan word for the colonizers of their lands: “Hollander.” (See the introduction for a brief explanation of contact history with fishermen from what is now Indonesia). 4. Donald Thomson was the pioneering anthropologist in the region, leading three expeditions into eastern Arnhem Land between 1935 and 1942. Well known for his exceptional still photography, his detailed field notes, and the significant collection of material culture he assembled, Thomson also shot film footage during his second expedition in 1936–37. Unfortunately, all the Thomson cine film was destroyed by fire in 1946, making it highly unlikely that the screening was of footage taken by Thomson and impossible to determine the origin of the film that Bill recalls. 5. The term “old people” is used by Yolngu to refer to people of previous generations and so is not necessarily a reference to their age at the time.

Introduction 1. This research was undertaken prior to the widespread availability of DVDs, mobile phones, and Internet access in Gapuwiyak. 2. Prior to European colonization the rich fishing grounds of this coast had brought large numbers of non-Aboriginal visitors who traded and mixed with Yolngu, which began a history of contact with foreigners that extended back through centuries of Macassan trepangers (Malayspeaking fishermen from Macassar, modern-day Sulawesi) (Dewar 1992, ix). Dewar suggests that this long history of contact with its “gradual diffusion of ideas and technology” lessened Yolngu culture shock at the European arrival and equipped Yolngu to deal with Europeans more assertively than other Aboriginal groups (6). 3. Yolngu from the areas around Gapuwiyak did have occasional violent contact with pastoralists and other itinerant Europeans in the western and southern areas of Arnhem Land, but in general they experienced less frontier warfare than in other areas of the country where the land was more highly valued by settlers (see Dewar 1992). In comparison to other denominations, the Methodist missionaries who established settlements in the region from the 1930s were relatively tolerant of local beliefs, customs, and languages. They offered Christianity as a religion that could be integrated with local traditions, enabling a “fulfillment” of traditional religion (Bos 1988, 430). 4. Unlike other schools in the region, Gapuwiyak Community Education Centre, or CEC, as it is called, does not have a bilingual education system, and all education is undertaken in English. 5. See, for example, Abu-Lughod (1997), Appadurai (1996), Ginsburg (1991, 1993, 1995, 2002), Hamilton (2002), and Larkin (2002). Sociologists have also made important contributions to

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7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

this subject area, emphasizing the reterritorialization of time/space brought about by satellite communications in discussions of the emergence of global culture. For these scholars it is this temporal-spatial reconfiguration of the world—in terms of both the literal fact of the interconnections generated by globalizing forces and a more profound sense of new types of relationships that arise out of this —that is perhaps the defining feature of modernity. See, for example, Giddens (1990), Featherstone et al. (1995), and Lash (1999). The notion of the imaginary in this sense was first discussed by Hamilton (1990). See also Ginsburg (1993a) and Rowse (1992) on the “administrative imagination” and remote indigenous settlements. See, for instance, Tomlinson (1991). This lecture was delivered under the title “The Establishing Metaphysics of the Modern World Picture” and is published in The Question Concerning Technology (1976). Ethnographers such as Jennifer Biddle, Ute Eickelkamp, Michael Jackson, Franca Tamisari, Tony Redmond, and Christine Watson, often building on with the now-classic phenomenological semiotics of Nancy Munn (1973), have variously demonstrated the ways that such an approach provides productive insights into the expressive and sensuous dynamics of Aboriginal lifeworlds (often specifically in relation to the visual). See particularly Biddle (forthcoming) and Tamisari (1998, 2004). Similarly, I have sought permissions from the families of other deceased people to use their names and images here. See Morphy (1991, 77). See Paul Stoller’s advocacy of a sensual scholarship and ethnographies that explore “the fusion of the intelligible and the sensible” (1997, xv). See, for instance, Fabian (1983), Clifford (1988), Pratt (1992), Rony (1996), Kaplan (1997), and Russell (1999). Cf. Christina Grasseni’s (2004) discussion on the use of video to develop “skilled vision” in ethnographic research. Cf. Weiner’s (1997, 207) discussion of what he calls the “aesthetics of culturalism.” As anthropologists such as Paul Rabinow (1977), James Clifford and George Marcus (1986), and Michael Jackson (1998) have variously demonstrated, intersubjectivity—the dynamic interplay between self and other through which we make sense of the world —is what makes ethnography possible. Ethnography is a research process that relies on the ethnographer fostering spaces of shared meaning; the practical realities of fieldwork soon make it clear to the neophyte researcher that it is through specific relationships with specific individuals that one gains entry to the amorphous spaces of culture. I want to extend this insight to argue that it is through specific kinds of relationships that one gains particular kinds of insights into the nature of the cultural.

1. Culture and Complicities 1. See especially Clifford and Marcus (1986), Marcus and Fischer (1986). Although see also Ginsburg (1995b) for a discussion of early, practice -driven responses by ethnographic filmmakers to the cluster of issues that became known as the “crisis of representation.” 2. Ginsburg (1993a) has noted that the kinds of discussions that led to the establishment of BRACS appealed to the Australian administrative imagination because it corresponded with policies of self-determination that predominated at the time. 3. Multi-sited approaches have been key methodologies in much of the anthropology of media, and increasingly in ethnographic projects more generally. See Marcus (1995) and Ginsburg et al. (2002, 4). 4. Although the word “remote” as used to describe producers from geographically isolated bush communities is increasingly problematic, especially in view of the reconfiguration of spatio temporal relationships between places and peoples brought about by communications technologies, this shorthand reference nonetheless allows for the point to be made that the Aboriginal producers and audiences in the bush have a specific cultural-historical background that differs markedly from Aboriginal peoples in other parts of the country. 5. In 1990 the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) replaced the Department for Aboriginal Affairs (DAA). ATSIC was dismantled in 2005 as part of a federal government move to “mainstream” indigenous policy and service delivery. BRACS has been re -acronymized as RIBS (Remote Indigenous Broadcasting Services) and is now administered by the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA). 6. Many communities had already installed their own satellite television and radio retransmission equipment before the arrival of BRACS. 7. For instance, Philip Dutchak reported that “the most powerful tool ever put into Aboriginal

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8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

hands is the video camera,” going on to assert that the technology would enhance Aboriginal visual and oral traditions “which surpass any European heritage” (1992, 48). See discussion by Ginsburg (1993a). See, for example, ATSIC News (Spring 1991): 14; Molnar (1994a, 3). For a more comprehensive overview and critique of BRACS, see Molnar (1990, 1994a, 1994b), Corker (1989), Venner (1988), Meadows (1992). Notably, the media scholars who championed indigenous media throughout the 1990s did not undertake extensive ethnographic fieldwork themselves. Their arguments about the potential for BRACS relied heavily on the work of Eric Michaels (whom I discuss in the following chapter) and survey/interview material gathered from across the country. Nonetheless, by stressing the importance of Australia’s indigenous media in national and international contexts, these commentators contributed academic weight and comparative data to the case for media being made by indigenous peoples themselves. See Meadows (1994a, 1994b, 1995), Molnar (1994a), and Molnar and Meadows (2001) as exemplars of communications scholars whose enduring interests in, and sympathetic analyses of, Australian indigenous media seem, at least partially, directed toward policy makers and funding bodies whose decisions continue to shape the possibilities of this growing media sector. Ginsburg has pointed out that this kind of relationship is common, even usual, in indigenous media production. She blames what she calls the “erasure of the white guys” on an essentialized identity politics and a discursive strategy unable to accommodate or acknowledge the critical role of non indigenous advisors, much less the effects on local culture that such collaborations may produce (cited in Marcus 1996, 14). See also Hinkson (2004, 2005) on the underacknowledged intercultural partnerships that form the mainstay of organizations in the Aboriginal community of Yuendumu. No doubt these discourses of culture and tradition have been informed and reinforced by ideas and stories from other places. Film, in particular, has played an important role in the emergence of this cultural self-confidence. During the late 1970s and 1980s large numbers of Yolngu from Gapuwiyak were cast in a number of feature films set in other parts of the country during the violent era of colonial dispossession. The BRACS operator Frank Gambali and his father acted as warriors from a Victorian costal tribe gunned down by settlers in the acclaimed Australian film series Women of the Sun: Alinta—The Flame (James Ricketson, director; Bob Weis, producer, 1981, Generation Films, Australia). Some of his sisters and brothers donned skimpy loincloths and tended to an ailing Tom Selleck in the trashy western Quigley Down Under (1990). These actors not only offered filmmakers a historical authenticity in the form of indigenous languages and ritual repertoire but, crucially, some of the women were willing to perform topless (Ricketson 1983). Yolngu from Gapuwiyak also featured in the historical drama Burke and Wills (1987) and provided an element of primitive mysticism for Hollywood in The Right Stuff (1983). The internationally acclaimed Yolngu rock band Yothu Yindi from neighboring Yirrkala plays both with and against tropes of tradition and modernity in songs that feature a techno -enhanced yidaki (didgeridoo) beat and lyrics about going “back to culture.” Gambali was one of the actors in the film Alinta the Flame and appears fourth from left in Figure 5. The council later banned non-BRACS workers from the building in an attempt to prevent equipment from being damaged by children. Phillip Batty reached a similar conclusion in “Who Told You We Wanted to Make Our Own TV?” (1993). Batty particularly identified Michaels’s role in fostering such attitudes. However, in the intervening years BRACS has flourished in many communities especially because of the emergence of a number of long-term regionally based trainers and the changing digital technologies that increasingly facilitate not only production but also the networking of BRACS radio and television. This is a slight refiguring of Kobena Mercer’s (1990) notion of “the burden of representation.” Nonetheless, despite the somewhat rough and unprofessional look of these videos, local audiences watched them with great interest when they were broadcast, often on the same day, in their raw, unedited state. Ginsburg uses the term “embedded aesthetic” to refer to the way in which certain qualities of Aboriginal cultural production can only be appreciated by keeping analytic attention focused on the wider context of the production and reception of a work. Gapuwiyak BRACS was certainly not considered a failure by TEABBA. On the contrary, it was considered one of the most successful because it was active, on-air, and contributing to the TEABBA network. Although he had an increasingly senior role as a singer within his clan he was not yet a dhalkara (ritual specialist).

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23. We spoke mainly in English, although with time I was able to include a smattering of Yolngu words and expressions in our conversations. His proficiency in English was overwhelmingly superior to my grasp of Yolngu matha. 24. As he later told me, he successfully avoided attempts to jail him under Balanda laws by arguing that if the government seriously honored the importance of Yolngu sacra, then they would leave it to his clan to inflict a punishment according to Yolngu rom. 25. In the months after I left, Bangana was elected chairman of TEABBA. He was appointed to national indigenous media committees and went to conferences where he delivered speeches about the role of media in strengthening Yolngu culture. 26. Keen (1994, 137) translates rom as “right practice” or “proper practice,” bringing an important emphasis to the place of practice in the transmission and manifestation of Ancestral knowledge and identities. 27. These taped discussions provide the source of the lengthy quotations used throughout the book. 28. As Keen (1994, 134) describes, Yolngu are always circumspect about giving information about things that they are not in a clearly authorized position to speak about. People will often reply to fairly simple questions with a cursory “I don’t know” when they feel that there is someone older or more ritually senior who should impart that information. In this instance, then, I took these deferrals, sometimes by quite senior clan members, as evidence of Bangana’s particular status and experience in the arena of brokering Culture and making media. 29. This injunction to learn by looking and the corollary that once you have seen something it is “known” has been commented on by many anthropologists working within Aboriginal Australia. 30. For example, Howard Morphy is said to bring a Manggalili perspective on things because of the influence of Narritjin Maymuru, the artist he acknowledges as a “teacher who guided my whole work” (Morphy 1991, xv), whereas Peter Toner (2001), an ethnomusicologist who also worked extensively with Bangana during the mid-1990s, understands his work to represent a particularly Dhalwangu clan view. 31. Readers familiar with Eric Michaels’s work will no doubt recognize the similarities between our projects and our protagonists, which run far deeper than a shared taste for Bob Marley T- shirts. 32. Similarly, the production of Yolngu art can be seen as a response to, and a negotiation with, these intercultural forces (Morphy 1991). 33. Drawing from Marcus (1998b), Ginsburg calls for the recognition of the complicities that give form and shape to so much indigenous media production. What I am suggesting, though, is that a notion of complicity or collaboration, while crucial to acknowledge as a central dynamic factor in my research, potentially obscures the important and structuring differences between ethnographer and informant.

2. (In)Visible Difference 1. For instance, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1968), Jean-Paul Sartre (1966), Michel Foucault (1970, 1979), Laura Mulvey (1975), Guy Debord (1977), and Jacques Lacan (1978). See Jay (1994) and Levin (1993) for thorough critical analyses of the place of vision in twentieth-century philosophy. See also Evans and Hall (1999), Mirzoeff (1998), and Jenks (1995) for other approaches to visual culture. 2. For instance, the feminist scholar Kaja Silverman (1996, 2000) has responded to theories of the gaze by considering how styles of looking might produce new possibilities for an embodied politics. 3. See Taylor, ed. (1994), Pinney (1997), Banks and Morphy (1997), and Ruby (2000). 4. See Fabian (1983), Clifford (1988), Jenks (1995), and Grimshaw (2001) for a critique of the “ethnographic eye” and the place of vision in the production of anthropological knowledge more generally. See also Pink (2001), Grimshaw (2001, 2002), Pink et al. (2004), and Grimshaw and Ravetz (2005) for recent explorations into the possibilities for a revitalized and theoretically resituated visual anthropology. 5. See, for example, Banks and Morphy (1997), Ginsburg (1994a, 1995b, 1998), MacDougall (1997, 1998), Ruby (2000), and Shohat and Stam (2000). 6. For other accounts of indigenous media, see Asch et al. (1991), Aufderheide (1995), Carelli (1988), Chalfen (1992), Leuthold (1998), Marks (1994, 2000), Molnar and Meadows (2001), Prins (2002), and Weatherford (1990). 7. See also Chalfen (1992) and MacDougall (1998, 74). 8. Victor Caldarola was an early advocate of this position, arguing that anthropology must move away from “content” to examine “the practices which surround the production, use and interpretation of these visual forms” (1988, 433). Anthropologists now claim this attention to the social practices of media as the discipline’s most significant contribution to the study of media (Ruby 2000, 225).

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9. Raymond Williams described technological determinism in 1974 as “an immensely powerful and now largely orthodox view of the nature of social change. New technologies are discovered by an essentially internal process of research and development, which then sets the conditions of social change and progress. Progress, in particular, is the history of these inventions which ‘created the modern world.’ The effects of the technologies, whether direct or indirect, foreseen or unforeseen, are as it were the rest of history” (1974, 13). 10. See especially “For a Cultural Future” but also other chapters in the posthumously published collection of Michaels’s writing, Bad Aboriginal Art (1994). See also O’Regan (1990), Langton (1993, 1994), Hebdige (1994), and Ruby (2000) for a closer examination of Michaels and his legacies. 11. Coniston Story, Warlpiri Media Association, Yuendumu (1985). 12. See Michaels and Kelly (1984b). 13. See Deger (1996) and Hinkson (2004, 2005) on Michaels’s somewhat static and reified approach to Warlpiri society. 14. In part owing to Michaels’s legacy, Warlpiri Media remains an internationally recognized and (relatively) well-funded regional hub for indigenous media production and training. Melinda Hinkson, an anthropologist who has researched media in Yuendumu since the mid-1990s, conveys a sense of the vitality and adaptability of indigenous cultural practices in her descriptions of more recent Warlpiri media making. See also Ginsburg (2002) for a discussion of postMichaels developments of Warlpiri Media. 15. See Turner (1990, 1991, 1991b, 2002) for further discussion. I note that Turner’s discussion of mimetic propensities in Kayapo culture in some sense foreshadows my own (see chapter 4), but that he uses the term in a different way than I do, i.e., as a form of imitation. He thereby brings a representational logic to bear on technologically mediated processes and effects that I will argue, at least in a Yolngu context, exceeds this framework. 16. Ginsburg (1991). See also Prins (2002) for a discussion of the dialectical processes of imagining “Indianness” and the ways in which Native Americans use primitivist images in their own self-representations. 17. She writes: “the quality of work is judged by its capacity to embody, sustain, and even revive or create certain social relations . . . For the sake of discussion, I will call this orientation embedded aesthetics, to draw attention to a system of evaluation that refuses a separation of textual production and circulation from broader arenas of social relations” (1994b, 368). This insightful notion proved to have deep and also locally specific resonances in relation to the aesthetic qualities of the Aboriginal media production I encountered in Gapuwiyak. 18. See Spitulnik (1993), Dickey (1997), and Ginsburg (1999, 2002) for an overview and review of the anthropology of media including indigenous media. 19. See O’Regan (1990), Hebdige (1994), Burnett (1995), Ang (1996), Shohat and Stam (1996, 2000). 20. Although, to give Moore her due, she does acknowledge the inherent limitations, and potentially imperialist assumptions, of this view from afar. In questioning the validity, necessity, or value of a project of “representation” via video for Kayapo, Moore has anthropology, not the Kayapo, in her sights. 21. See Stanner (1958, 108–9). 22. And, in my case, an invaluable complement to the phenomenologically sensitive ethnographies currently emerging out of Aboriginal Australia. 23. Heidegger calls this constitutive impact of technologies “the Enframing.” The camera both epistemologically and ontologically enframes the world and its subjects, thereby generating a particular kind of subject-object relationship. As a result of revealing the world through ocularcentric technologies, what he calls “Being” is concealed. (Being in Heidegger’s sense of the term does not refer to a quality of individual subjectivity; it is always already there; it inheres in the world: the immanent, invisible truth of Being lies outside temporality or human influence.) In short, the camera produces a particular way of seeing and knowing the world that in turn produces modern, “Western” subjectivity and modern forms of knowledge. 24. Spivak (1985) describes the effects of colonial texts as a “worlding of the world,” arguing that hegemonic acts of translation and discourse effectively distort, exclude, and erase others. 25. Mimica writes: “Heidegger’s subsequent poetical ontology is a dismal failure . . . precisely because it insists on being an ‘unveiling’ of a primordial structure of human existence, yet it is conducted within the limited horizon of the modern Western world and its cultural-historical matrix, which Heidegger had selectively reappropriated and distorted, yet deemed inexhaustible” (1993, 84). 26. Debra Spitulnik has also pointed toward the problems of categorizing indigenous media, but for slightly different reasons. In an early review of the anthropology of media, she identified the way that the phrase “indigenous media” has been used to cover a “broad spectrum of media phenomena” (1993, 304), demonstrating that the label “indigenous” is used “quite flexibly”

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in the literature to refer to producers, owners, subjects, and audiences. She goes on to argue that the isolation of indigenous media as a distinct area of study “blurs its important connections with issues of media use across widely divergent settings” (304) and poses a challenge to scholars to situate the production and reception of these alternative media forms “within the larger contexts of available media forms” (306). 27. Weiner’s own work on teche and Yolngu art (chapter 6 in his book Tree Leaf Talk [2001]) is suggestive in this respect.

3. Tuning In 1. Kava was introduced to locals of the region by a Fijian pastor as an alternative to alcohol. Imported from the Pacific islands and sold by enterprising locals at twenty dollars a bag, it is widely consumed and considered by many (Yolngu and Balanda) to be an increasingly significant social health issue. 2. Estimates in 1995 placed the combined population of the community and its numerous “homelands” at 1,084. Of that number, over 50 percent were under the age of twenty. (Figures from October 1995 unpublished Gapuwiyak health services records.) There is a possibility that these figures have been inflated for the purposes of attracting a greater funding base. 3. In an informal survey of community television ownership in 1997, I determined that 70 percent of Yolngu houses possessed a television set. Of these, a further 40 percent owned a VCR. Most homes had at least one ghetto blaster cassette recorder/radio. These numbers fluctuated as equipment broke down in the extremes of heat, dust, and humidity, or conversely, when someone had a windfall in a card game or royalty check and purchased new machines from the community store. 4. A large part of the BRACS job at that time involved responding to the demands for Hollywood videos by locals who treated BRACS rather like an in-house video service and expected movies to be played on demand. These kin pressures were difficult to avoid, so most nights there were several movies being broadcast from the selection purchased by BRACS and supplemented by privately owned videos. At night the piracy warnings and trailers at the beginning of the movies enabled the worker to start the video and walk home before the feature began. Showing late-night movies sometimes meant that BRACS was left on all evening, effectively blocking out the ABC television until it was switched back in the morning when we others came to work. Complaints came in from Balanda trying to study via “Open Learning,” who were missing the lessons that broadcast in the early hours of the morning. Some people became disgruntled about interruptions to the ABC’s news service, and eventually the council decreed that there be no interruption of the ABC during the news and current affairs. 5. See Berndt’s 1962 landmark publication, An Adjustment Movement in Arnhem Land; Bos (1988), Rudder (1993), and Magowan (2001b) on Christianity; McIntosh’s work on Yolngu relationships with Macassans (1999, 2004); and aspects of Morphy’s work on the production of art (1983a, 1983b, 1991, 1998). 6. See Sansom (1980), Trigger (1992), Povinelli (1993), and Cowlishaw (1999) for notable exceptions in relation to other Aboriginal groups from remote regions. 7. Keen, for instance, has devoted much time to arguing the case that employing a clan model in analysis is misleading in a Yolngu context, insisting instead that ethnographers pay greater attention to the local tropes, cultural metaphors, and body imagery that inform the ways that Yolngu describe and differentiate themselves (1995, 502). 8. As a result of these new contexts of identification, the term “Yolngu” is often used in an inclusive sense to reach beyond the linguistically defined borders of Yolngu clan country in northeast Arnhem Land to refer to other Aboriginal people, including those with light skin and (what Yolngu would describe as) “no culture”—those having no indigenous language, land, or traditional ritual life. At other times “blackness” is taken to be a marker of “Yolnguness” and the term “Yolngu” is used to refer to, to identify with, diasporic African populations seen on television. For instance, one woman who ordered a Bony-M music video from Darwin was excited to discover on viewing the images that, unbeknown to her, her favorite band was “Yolngu,” that is, they were “black.” 9. My sisters brought a favorite video telemovie to watch with me after I had told them about the specific circumstances of the breakdown of my marriage, because, they said, my story was the same as in the movie. 10. The Whoopi Goldberg musical Sarafina! was just one of a series of films about Southern Africa shown on BRACS during 1995–96. Ordered from Darwin at the request of council members, movies like Cry Freedom (1987) and Mapantasula (1988) provided narrative dramatic structures for identification that documentary with its more dry or detached storytelling did not so easily invite. (Even so, I was often called on to explain the nuances of plot or dialogue.) In these dramas inspired by real historical characters or events —a genre familiar to many Yolngu

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11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

because of their own acting experiences —Yolngu found meanings that resonated in their own lives. These films added to knowledge collated from earlier favorites, such as The Gods Must Be Crazy (1981) and Shaka Zulu (1983), which were also accessible and popular with audiences who viewed them through the filter of their own experiences and complex relations to primitivism, colonialism, and modernity. As Robert Bos comments, there were “two factors which contributed to this [traditionalist] view being developed and maintained: the prevailing structural-functionalist orthodoxy (in which the overriding model of society was one in which the various institutions functioned to maintain the stability of the social system), and the fact that Aboriginal people present their religion as ancient, permanent and unchanging” (1988, 424). Michaels (1994, 92) suggested that potentially the most devastating impact of television could be the introduction of fictional narratives —thereby introducing a foreign conceptual category antithetical to local notions of truth. However, as I will describe, Bangana’s concerns about the impact of media indicated a concern with a different kind of “truth.” I use the term “Culture” here and later to emphasize again the self-conscious and deliberate identification of particular kinds of practices as the basis for Yolngu identity. As discussed previously, my work with Bangana was premised on —and indeed contributed to —a reification of certain aspects of Yolngu life and experience in terms of “Culture” as an authentic and valuable basis of identity. Yet, as I argue throughout, although manifestations of Culture in the form of traditional song, dance, or painting are cross -culturally recognizable, Balanda and Yolngu appreciate its meanings and effects in quite different ways. Clearly “Yolnguness” in this instance is not a racialized or otherwise binaristic form of identity. In our discussions about this, Bangana would encourage me to stay in Gapuwiyak with the promise that if I stuck with our work—and applied myself—I would eventually be able to see in a Yolngu way and to be trusted by the elders to be exposed to “inside” or restricted Cultural knowledge. This combination of exposure and application would enable me to become Yolngu (and be recognized by other Yolngu as such). I borrow the term “mimetic labor” from Andrew Lattas (1998). In this sense Bangana was using BRACS to “fight fire with fire,” as Warlpiri had put it all those years ago. What I am suggesting here, though, is that this catchy, and seemingly straightforward, slogan belies the complex nature of what is being responded to —and struggled over. See also Barrara et al. (2000) on Yolngu metaphors and the renaming of Gapuwiyak BRACS. Many ethnographers have observed that the temporal qualities of the “Dreamtime” are such that the past inheres in the present. As Elkin (1964, 234) wrote: “To the Aborigines . . . time is now. Then is a past . . . that past, however, is present, here and now.” Stanner (1987, 225) put it this way: “one cannot ‘fix’ the Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen.” I adopt the expression “Ancestral Always,” a term better suited to Yolngu cultural logics than Morphy’s “Ancestral Past” (1991, 297), or Francoise Dussart’s deliberately oxymoronic “Ancestral Present” (2000, 18).

4. On the “Mimetic Faculty” and the Refractions of Culture 1. See Halliwell (2002) for a discussion of the varying implications of these categories throughout a history of Western representational practice. 2. During the twentieth century mimesis took on a renewed conceptual life as social theoreticians such as Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and, more recently, Michael Taussig have variously applied a theory of mimesis to exploring the aestheticized, politicized, and embodied cultural practices of modernity. Other notable contemporary theoreticians who use a concept of mimesis include Jacques Derrida, Rene Girard, Christopher Prendergast, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva. 3. Taussig (1993, 20) makes this point. 4. Buck-Morss comments, “it was precisely Benjamin’s point to bridge the gap between everyday experience and traditional academic concerns, actually to achieve that phenomenological hermeneutics of the profane world which Heidegger only pretended” (1991, 3). 5. Instead of characterizing this “failure of likeness” in terms of lack, Taussig positively values the effect, for it generates the dynamic that produces difference. The generation of the similar—but never exactly the same —is a process that opens the space for new forms of difference to emerge. For example, Taussig describes the experiences of an early-twentieth-century American explorer, R. O. Marsh, who took a portable phonograph on his travels to the interior of Colombia for the purpose of seducing and soothing the “wild” Indians he met. Quoting from the adventurer’s own account, Taussig recounts a story in which Marsh teaches a chief’s daughter to dance to the music of the “miming machine” while the father gazes on, contentedly smoking U.S. Navy tobacco. As Taussig describes, Marsh himself took a particular delight in the recognition of this quintessentially “modern” moment of shared familial pleasure. Taussig’s own imagination

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6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

is also clearly stirred by this tale of multiplying mimeticism. As he writes, such moments create an “intercultural nexus, a new cultural zone of white and Indian social interaction for discovering strangeness and confirming sameness” (1993, 195). In this particular encounter, the essential strangeness that separates the European and the Indian is exposed when the chief offers Marsh his daughter (and after a moment of hesitation, the “girl on the hillside” as well). Marsh declines the offer, the daughter flees in tears, and the space of conviviality and “sameness” is shattered. This is a necessarily simplified accounting of Taussig’s work (which is inherently slippery and evasive of easy summation), which is intended to position myself as drawing from but eventually veering in another direction from his particular trajectory of mimetic theory. There are, of course, other versions of this kind of mimetic dynamic of imitation and difference, most notably in the work of Homi K. Bhabha (1994), whose descriptions of a taunting kind of mimetic encounter emphasize the potential of mimicry and parody as a subversive basis for the production of culture and identity in colonial contexts. From a Taussigian perspective, my proposed emphasis on similitude as the crucial mimetic outcome in Gapuwiyak can seem reductive —too obvious, only half the story. Not only is it theoretically impossible —every copy is by definition not the same —such an assertion surely appears politically, socially, and theoretically deeply suspect. If the gaps between the original and the copy provide the spaces in which difference and identity are (re)produced, a mimetic movement from likeness to sameness would, according to such logics, imply the elimination of difference, and the production of an enveloping, smothering stasis. See Myers’s (1986) seminal ethnographic elaboration of this concept. See Tamisari (2000). Although he is not a phenomenologist, Morphy also gestures toward the significance of what I have identified as the mimetic aspects of Yolngu art by using the term “connection” rather than “representation” in his analysis. He writes that a notion of connection “is consistent with the idea that designs and their meanings arise out of ancestral action rather than simply represent it. The use of ‘representation’ would suggest a gap between signifier and signified that is not consistent with Yolngu ontology” (1991, 189). See Morphy (1984, 26). The term bundurr (knee) has similar connotations. See Morphy (1991, 187–89), Keen (1994, 71–73, 303), and Tamisari (1998, 250), who variously describe how such terms blur the boundaries between the literal and metaphorical when Yolngu use and experience the body as a hinge between the self and the Ancestral in ritual practice. Whereas Biddle insists on difference providing a critical dimension, or indeed making possible this bidirectional becoming, I am interested here in the ways in which, as Benjamin’s formulation would have it, that “in mimetic action there occurs a ‘sublation’ of the split between I and object, subject and object” (Gebauer and Wulf 1995, 269). E.g., Myers (1986, 67), Morphy (1991), Tamisari (1998), Magowan (1998).

5. Taking Pictures 1. See Michaels (1994, 63–77), M. Benjamin (1993), Langton (1993), and Hinkson (1996) for various discussions of the issues surrounding filming in remote Aboriginal communities. 2. In order to introduce an overarching ontological theory of mimesis and technology, I have deliberately not discussed the important differences between photography, cinema and television, and audio recording as “presencing” technologies. See Sobchack (2000) for a sustained historical/phenomenological analysis of the different phenomenological qualities of these imaging technologies. 3. Derived from translations of Central Desert languages, the terms “Dreaming” and “Dreamtime” are commonly used by non -Aborigines as well as some Aboriginal people to refer to indigenous creation or Ancestral stories, but they are not commonly used by Yolngu. See Bos (1988) for the concept of “The Dreaming” in relation to northeast Arnhem Land. 4. The animation of the story told by Shirley, entitled “Djet,” has been broadcast on several occasions on ABC television as part of The Dreaming series and was also shown at the 1998 Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. 5. Although Yolngu public ideology emphasizes men’s control of knowledge, the reality is quite different. Women, and older women in particular, are reluctant to act as a spokesperson, to be filmed, or to otherwise reveal the extent of their knowledge in such circumstances. (Thanks to Howard Morphy for this point.) 6. A subsequent interview with Shirley provided usable footage. 7. In more recent years many critiques have specifically considered Western photographic practices in terms of issues of race, power, primitivism, visuality, and scopophilia. See, for instance, Rony (1996) and Russell (1999). The argument about technological modes of appropriation and

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8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

intercultural politics I advance here differs from these because it is grounded in Yolngu cultural logics. See Moore (1999, 1). See also the film Crocodile Dundee (1986) for an ironic reworking of the “spirit theft” trope in Arnhem Land. Michaels refers to Baldwin Spencer, who made extensive audiovisual field recordings of Aboriginal people from 1901 to 1912. He describes Spencer’s encounter with one Warrumungu elder who claimed that his camera “extracted a vital essence from his liver, threatening his life [while other] Aborigines responded with less hostility and seem to have enjoyed the novelty of the camera and its products” (1994, 1–2). See Myers (1982), Nancy Williams (1982), and Morphy (1991). Michaels goes on to stress that the failure of many photographers to satisfy their Aboriginal subjects lies “not so much in the quality of composition, the technique, the aesthetic product, but in the relationship between the camera person and the subject” (1994, 17). Michaels’s emphasis on the significance of the social processes of production, whether in cross-cultural image making or within Warlpiri productions, provides a crucial insight into Aboriginal media practices. These days there is a far greater public awareness that there are cultural issues surrounding photography in these contexts, especially in media circles where producers find themselves having to comply with protocols and policies enforced by media associations or land councils. See MacDougall’s chapter “Beyond Observational Cinema” in Transcultural Cinema (1998, 125–39). The exact nature of the ontological reflections generated by these camera technologies varies according to the medium and the philosopher/theorist. For a further discussion of cinema and modern magic, see Moore (1999). Truth and Method (1975, 135), cited in Casey (1991, 228). As Biernoff describes, dangerous places exist wherever life spirit is concentrated (1974, 98). This notion of depletion by photography seems to echo Benjamin’s (1968) concerns about the role of photography in destroying the “aura” in a work of art, but it is not quite the same. In this formulation the copy is not only less than the original; the act of copying is depleting the “essence” or presence of the original. It becomes increasingly difficult to speak about the original, or to distinguish the original from the counterfeit—a hierarchy that matters very much to Benjamin’s own ontological sensibilities. For him there is no question that a painting contains aura (the material trace of being original) whereas a photograph does not. Taussig describes a technologically mediated colonial encounter whereby the camera provides the means for the “eye grasping what the hand cannot” (1993, 32). As Biddle states, developing Taussig’s argument, the modern magic of imaging technologies lies in its capacity to produce a “closer and closer likening, a conjuring of the object’s ‘essence’” (1996, 12). This conception of mimetic technologies producing a kind of distillation by which likeness becomes seen/known/grasped as “essence” casts a refractive light back onto the scopic drive that has characterized Western encounters with the “primitive” other since the development of these technologies. This formulation of the mimetic thus also helps to explain the Sydney producer’s desires to keep the camera rolling. A related kind of argument about scopophilia and the desire to capture or appropriate images of others has been made by critics such as Russell (1999, 120–24). I will not dwell on this here, except to say that the producer’s own understandings about the camera as a benign representational technology can be critiqued in the context of these theories. Keen (1994, 135) describes how the “flesh, fat, and blood of the dead were imbued with power which one who stole them could tap in order to enhance their power or harm others.” See von Sturmer (1987) for a nuanced discussion of the relationship between political, personal, and Ancestral power as manifest through singing. Similarly, the anthropologist Ken Maddock failed to perceive Yolngu motivations, describing the Adjustment Movement as “a cryptic and ineffectual gesture” (1972, 8). Berndt interpreted this complaint in fairly straightforward economic terms. He argued that taking photographs and showing films of sacred objects had resulted in anthropologists taking away their only wealth, namely, the power to hide the rangga. He explains that the clan leaders were operating with the idea that if they were to be shown publicly, then they should receive something in return. Although see McIntosh (2004) for an alternative perspective on these events and their implications from Elcho Island. Morphy describes the Bark Petition as a statement of land rights that “became a symbol to the Yolngu from Yirrkala of their struggle for land rights and today has a prominent place in the new Parliament House in Canberra. More importantly, the Bark Petition was part of a process of negotiation that introduced elements into the discourse between European Australians and Aborigines which for a time altered the terms of the argument” (1991, 18).

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25. As Morphy observes, the phrase “now you understand” was used by a Yolngu elder to W. E. H. Stanner during proofing stages of the Gove Land Rights case. If one returns to Stanner’s description of the original context in which the phrase was used, it becomes clearer that—from a Yolngu perspective —something is going on that challenges a Western logic of knowledge production. Morphy explains in a footnote: “Stanner and the Aborigines’ lawyer Purcell were taken to a secret place where they were shown a sacred object. ‘One of the men said to me: “now you understand.” He meant that I had seen the holy rangga which, in a sense, are the clan’s title deeds to its land, and had heard what they stood for: so I could not but “understand”’” (Stanner 1979, 278, cited in Morphy 1983b, 131). Stanner’s use of quotation marks around the word “understand” conveys an understandable epistemological disquiet. It would seem that the relationship between perception and understanding expressed in English by phrases such as “I see” or “I hear you” are quite literal in this context. This tendency for Yolngu to equate seeing with knowing is often commented upon by ethnographers, who have trouble not only in working out exactly what it is that they now know but in getting Yolngu to elaborate on this newfound “knowledge” (see Tamisari 1998, 257). This sense of the constitutive dynamic entailed by seeing, knowing, and connecting is explored throughout this book, particularly in the later chapters. 26. There are more complex dimensions to the Adjustment Movement than I have the space to go into here. It was a complicated strategic maneuver, with a range of local influences, motivations, and implications, especially in regard to the role of Christianity in influencing Yolngu expectations and local power dynamics between clans and individuals. 27. Arguably the lack of a local community art center, which in other places provides a point of sale and other forms of support for artists, is a significant factor in lack of “art” production. However, Bangana always insisted that this was not the reason. 28. It is likely that my gender and possibly my childless status only added to my disadvantage when it came to any consideration as to whether or not I should be told or shown something about these matters. This is not to say that women can’t or don’t know “inside” information; see Morphy (1984, 114) and Magowan (2001a). 29. As Morphy points out, the rights concerning paintings are much more widely distributed than the membership of an individual clan. In this instance certain clans or individuals in Gapuwiyak would have rights and claims over these paintings. As he also demonstrates (1991, 75–99), the status of a painting as restricted or public can vary according to the context in which it is produced. In other words, it is not simply the case that Gapuwiyak Yolngu are upset by Yolngu from Yirrkala revealing “secret” paintings. Any tussle over issues surrounding revelation and circulation is likely to be more complex, political, and positioned than that. See also Myers’s important discussion of the “revelatory regime of value” (2004, 3) that underpins Pintupi painting in relation to the emergence of an Aboriginal fine art market.

6. Flowers and Photographs 1. For the sake of convenience I will refer to these various forms of media as “recordings” unless otherwise specified, although the discussion tends toward the visual and particularly the photographic. Equally, I reiterate that these processes of remembering and envisaging that I describe as the work of the mind’s eye should be appreciated as intrinsically synesthetic and embodied. 2. As has been well documented in Aboriginal communities, particularly in the northern and central regions, photographs and other recordings (i.e., film, video, and audio recordings) become restricted upon the death of the subject of the recording. Restrictions regarding images, recordings, and names of the deceased are widespread, although the specific practices vary across different regions; see Biernoff (1974, 100), McIntosh (2004), Michaels (1994), and Biddle (2000, 177). In the past, in the northeast Arnhem region, any recordings or photographs were ritually destroyed or buried with the body. More recently this practice has been modified and it has become usual for recordings to be locked away, or covered up, for a period of time extending up to several years. 3. Although sisters are usually required to maintain a distance from the body and funeral shelter, in this case an exception was made. Shirley, who as mother’s mother had an important, ritually prescribed role of authority in relation to the organization of the ceremony, said she would “recognize” me through my “Balanda side.” By emphasizing my relationship to Bangana as one of a close colleague and friend, rather than Yolngu kin, Shirley provided a way that other Yolngu might accept my presence and avoided what would otherwise have appeared as a serious transgression of protocol. Thus identifying me, Shirley declared that I was to be a bunggawa (boss) for the funeral and must therefore remain in close proximity to the body and Bangana’s immediate family throughout the ritual. 4. I am in no position to decisively comment on how much these emergent attitudes and practices

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5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

had been reflected in the context of other funerals. Morphy (personal communication) has observed that in Yirrkala photographs have been used in funerals for several years and that this practice has gradually spread. I don’t know for certain if this was the first time photographs were used in this way in Gapuwiyak, or if this practice was adopted from Yirrkala, but certainly several Balanda who had lived in the community long enough to be familiar with such restrictions commented with surprise about the extent to which prohibitions on filming and photography had been eased during this funeral. During the mission years, when the practice of burying bodies in graves replaced traditional burial practices, Yolngu incorporated many Balanda elements into their mourning rites, including the use of silk flowers. On the final day of the funeral these artificial blooms are presented to the grave in ritualized dance, arranged on the mound in colorful adornment, where they stay for months, even years, until they fade and fall apart. The literature reveals the various perspectives and the less than fixed orthodoxies regarding what happens when someone dies. See, for instance, Keen (1994, 236) and Warner (1969, 414–46). In addition, she wanted a photograph to send to sorcerers in other communities in order to determine the people responsible for this untimely death. This shelter, usually made from tree branches and bark, was in this instance constructed from corrugated iron and timber before being wrapped at the base in red fabric. It had quickly became apparent to those of us involved in preparations that the lack of airflow in this “modern” style of construction urgently required the addition of an air-conditioner and fans to keep the space that would house the coffin and close mourners and ritual managers habitable. With a large air-conditioner jutting out of the back and power cords running to the nearest house, the shelter was filled with purpose -bought furniture for the body: a bed for the coffin to rest on, bedside tables, table lamps, and floor mats, making it by far the most elaborate Balanda-style construction I had encountered in such circumstances. (The bedroom suite was all the more striking to me because in life Bangana lived in far more basic circumstances. Susan slept on matching sheets on a mattress beside the bed, while others simply slept on the sandy floor under shared blankets.) As I understand it, the decision to build and furnish the shelter in this way was informed by a desire to emphasize Bangana’s prowess in the “Balanda world” and enact a kind of distancing from tradition as an explicit acknowledgment of the controversial reputation that Bangana had acquired as a result of his destruction of the clan bathi. As the funeral made clear to me — through the various undercurrents of clan politics and interpersonal blame and suspicion that circulated throughout the camps —this act continued to be seen as dangerous, destructive, and definitive, especially at this moment when Bangana’s personal relation with the Ancestral became the focus of ritual intent. This Balanda theme did not, however, make the funeral any less Yolngu. One explanation/interpretation of this shelter was that it represented the first house built in Arnhem Land, a site and occasion that provided the basis for further poetic allusions that reached beyond recent history to refer to Ancestral events. In this way this aspect of the funeral demonstrated again the incorporative genius of the Yolngu imagination and the way in which the contemporary and contingent is actively made sense of and given deeper and multivalent meanings through a cultural poetics that identifies and generates connections between past and present via the rich imagery of Ancestral events. There was no VCR at the house for viewing the hour-long compilation of video footage of Bangana produced by TEABBA (the regional indigenous media association of which Bangana had been treasurer), and so after the funeral Susan distributed the twenty copies to close kin, especially those who had organized and managed the ceremony, without Susan having seen the content herself. Although it was not always agreed that Susan and the children (the emphasis was generally on the rights of the children through the patriline) should be in charge of these recordings, Bangana’s brothers sought to limit her access to audio recordings of clan manikay prepared by Peter Toner, an ethnomusicologist who had also worked closely with the deceased. These recordings were to be locked up in the council office for a year because, Mickey Wunungmurra, Bangana’s brother and town clerk, told me, their distribution at this time would be “too upsetting for some Yolngu.” However, Susan was not happy with this decision, convinced that once out of her control the tapes would be taken by Yolngu with access to the office. One Balanda with a long experience in Arnhem Land, Ian Morris, told me that in his experience many factors determine an individual’s decision about destroying or keeping photos, for example, who took the photo, the location, and the other people in the photograph (personal communication, 1995). Yolngu have always included references to the deceased during funerals. The moments in which such allusions are made —by names, by paintings, through song—are managed by the senior clan leaders appointed as organizers of the funeral. (See Morphy 1984 for a detailed

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13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

description of a Yolngu mortuary rite.) As far as I can tell, the immediate family of widow and children would generally have had little say in, or control over, such matters. The incorporation of photographs into mortuary rites thus introduces a new measure of agency, power, and responsibility for the bereaved relatives. The Walkman served a particular kind of cultural purpose as it enabled individuals to contain and control the sound of the recording of the deceased within the public spaces that characterize Yolngu sociality. They could listen and grieve on their own but remain appropriately in close proximity to the comfort of family and ceremonial preparations. Especially in the weeks after the funeral, Susan, while she was still subject to the social restrictions of a widow’s seclusion, used the Walkman a lot. She would sit (and sometimes sleep) on her own by the fresh mound of the grave (which had been dug next to Bangana’s house in the center of the community), listening to her husband singing clan songs while the community returned to its everyday rhythms. The fact that the clan leaders of the Adjustment Movement referred to their display of rangga as a memorial can now make a different kind of sense (see R. Berndt 1962, 40). The active continuous tense of the English language expression that Susan has chosen for Bangana’s gravestone captures this imperative with a simple directness: “We will be missing you forever.” A precise definition of nostalgia might suggest that it is a somewhat inappropriate term for the emotional state I am describing. (Greek notos = return, algos = suffering, therefore nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased longing to return.) See Magowan (2001) on nostalgia in Yolngu ceremonies and Morphy (1997, 125) on the mortuary or commemorative component of almost all Yolngu ritual. Warner (1969, 122) notes that a deceased person “retains a social personality of his own as long as he is in the memory of the group. His ultimate fate is loss of social personality when he is forgotten as an individual and remembered only as an undifferentiated part of a long line of clan ancestors and is absorbed in the general sacredness of the clan well.” In Gapuwiyak today many Yolngu talk about their deceased relatives remaining “here with us.” As I have stressed, Yolngu attitudes, beliefs, and practices in this regard are both emergent and contingent, as indeed is my own grasp of them. In many ways the above analysis still begs a number of questions for which I have no ready answer. For example, take the standard (but by no means universally agreed upon by Yolngu themselves) understanding that over time deceased people transform from an individuated, “living” subject into something more akin to an “Ancestor” “embedded in the Being of the world,” as Jackson observes in another Aboriginal context (1998, 177). The specificities of presencing and remembering facilitated by these technologies would seem to mitigate against this fading back into country and reabsorption into the Ancestral realm. This is, perhaps, especially the case when people die prematurely after having lived only “half a life,” as Susan lamented. Similarly, my presence as a Balanda bunnguwa (boss) of the funeral added an element to the funeral by showing the Balanda-side of Bangana’s life and the respect that he commanded from those of us with whom he worked closely. Whenever Susan needed to leave the shelter she had to cover herself with a sheet. Obviously there was something about her own special and potent status that made the sight of her dangerous to others until the purification ceremony after the burial.

7. Technology, Techne, and Yolngu Videomaking 1. Yolngu often stress this point directly and unequivocally as ontological fact in statements to Balanda such as “I am my country,” or “That water, that design, that rangga—that’s me.” 2. There was indeed an overt and highly political dimension to the making of this video motivated by the bureaucratic processes connected with a sea-rights claim. The perception from Yirritja clans in Gapuwiyak was that a certain influential Yolngu man from Elcho Island was furthering a private agenda by presenting evidence to the NLC (Northern Land Council) about the source of Gularri that did not accord with the version held to be true in Gapuwiyak (“he was telling crooked stories for his own benefit”). Bangana did not want me to go into names or details about this, preferring to downplay this aspect of the production in his official discourse about the video and its efficacies. But for those who know the background, the video can be seen as a direct response to a specific set of contemporaneous concerns. Again, then, Gularri’s multivalency and multi layered meanings are in keeping with the complex and, at times, competing dynamics of more traditional Yolngu ritual production. See Magowan (2005) and McIntosh (1995) for further insight into some of the cultural concerns and politics surrounding sea-rights issues in the area. 3. Clans and locations (listed in parentheses) featured in this video include, in order of appearance,

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4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

Madarrpa (Bungirrinydji), Ritharrngu (Doyndji and Gali), Guyamirrilil (Warrawurr), Madarrpa (Baygurrtji), Guyamirrilil (Bralmina), and Warramiri (Bulumiringur, Bulumiri). Originally it had been planned to also include the Wangurri Gularri, however at the time of filming an unresolved incident had created certain tensions in relation to this clan and it was decided that it would be judicious to avoid the potentially disruptive and even dangerous implications of directly involving Wangurri and their country in the filming. According to Bangana this did not detract from the overall inclusive or unifying effect of the film; he insisted that Wangurri were still included and acknowledged in their rightful place within the flow because the narrator, Ngalambirra, refers to them at several points in the story. However, subsequently this omission has been a point of discussion and concern among certain participants and viewers. Throughout the discussion I use italics to distinguish between the Ancestral waters known as Gularri and the video version of Gularri. I say “version” advisedly, for, as I will explain, when the video is replayed or broadcast there occurs a mimetic conjunction that brings the Ancestral story and the video into a relationship that exactly mediates against such distinctions. Equally, it should be acknowledged that while, according to official Yolngu ideology, there is only one true version of any major Ancestral journey or event, regional variations exist, especially in terms of where key events are said to have taken place. It is likely that, despite Ngalambirra’s assertions that this is “the real, the true” story of Gularri, Yolngu from other communities may have alternative accounts of “the real, true story” that can be seen to represent other interclan alliances. Although seeming to contradict Yolngu claims to an essential “sameness” and unity between Gularri clans, this capacity to accommodate different interpretations and emphases is a distinctive feature of Yolngu knowledge systems. See Keen (1994) for a detailed discussion of the way that such differences, even between members of the same clan, are tacitly accepted and managed, especially in ceremonies with an emphasis on unity and therefore the downplaying of difference. As Morphy says, “It is partly a way of avoiding conflict, of keeping the peace. It is partly out of consideration to others. . . . The ngarra is said to provide a forum for making things straight. In reality it is a forum for agreeing to see things as straight!” (personal communication). CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) Productions agreed to a co production deal in exchange for broadcast rights on Imparja television’s Aboriginal culture program, Nganampa Anwernekenhe. Bangana did the translations for subtitling. I raise these issues not to dissect the production by delineating what was “modern” and what was “traditional” about Gularri. Rather, as I will show, what matters is exactly the multiple ways in which Gularri mediates across these and other distinctions, that is, between “inside” and “outside” knowledges, the “old people” and the “new generation,” the audience and images and country. See especially Fiona Magowan’s insightful work on what she calls Yolngu “aqua-aesthetics” (1998, 2001c, 2005). There are innumerable names, associations, and clan-specific implications of Gularri that vary according to individual clan, clan-based affiliations, and also regional perspectives. And, as I have stated previously, much of this knowledge —and I would add the disciplining itself—was produced by being exposed to rangga. Warner (1969, 382) describes the way that a neophyte would keep his head down while the old men lectured him about adhering to “the code of Murgin [Yolngu] morals” prior to being shown “the sacred totem.” While their accounts appear to be duly circumspect with regard to the consequences of publishing information about the restricted ceremonial contexts that they were made privy to, these ethnographers also reproduce information that far exceeds the boundaries that Bangana imposed on my own work. The severe restrictions I experienced on my access to —and permission to relate —information about Ancestral stories reflects what I have come to understand as a particularly Yolngu postcolonial response to the politics of knowledge in Gapuwiyak. My impression is that information has become marked as “inside” or restricted from Balanda, regardless of whether it is publicly known among Yolngu (or readily available to read in published ethnographies). I also suspect that Bangana’s vigilance in withholding information may have been motivated by his investment in proving himself as a cultural advisor and his underlying ambition to redeem himself for his past transgression in destroying the clan dilly bag. Keen, in particular, tends to characterize these assertions regarding the production of unity as an ideological position that masks the workings of a system of knowledge driven by senior men concerned with rather more profane and self-interested machinations of power and control (1994, 295). However, this fails to capture the sense in which the Yolngu imperative to produce “one people” is concerned with the reaffirmation and reconstitution of the cultural system as lived modality of relating-in-the -world. Keen reports a decline in participation in revelatory and regional ceremonies after World War II (1994, 165) and also reports Yolngu concerns about this decline and strategies to encourage

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13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

the youth to attend to Yolngu rom (208). He also notes that other forms of ritual such as mortuary rites and initiations (dhapi) continued “unabated” throughout the 1970s. I also found during the 1990s that Gapuwiyak Yolngu had a high level of participation in these ceremonies, frequently traveling to other communities or outstations to participate in ritual, often for up to several weeks at a time. I am in no position to gauge the validity of these accusations. Certainly, Bangana rejected my suggestion that this was a reworking of traditional politicking in new contexts. In “The Turning,” Heidegger describes the effects of this enframing specifically in relation to media technologies, asserting that the modern subject’s capacity for seeing and hearing “are perishing through radio and film under the rule of technology” (1977, 48). Yet it must be remembered that, according to Heidegger, this reduction is produced by the nature of technology, not by particular types of technology. Hence, relating to the “world as picture” does not begin when one switches on the television, nor does it end when one puts down the camera. These are simply more literal manifestations of the pervasive processes of enframing whereby the world is rendered and recognized only as a form of objective resource to be used, discarded, and/or represented—what Heidegger refers to as “standing reserve” (17) in “The Question Concerning Technology.” Readers familiar with Heidegger will be in a position to recognize suggestive resonances (and potential dissonances) with his work that are not always made explicit in my discussions. This is not a case of obscuring my intellectual sources; on the contrary, having come to Heidegger after my fieldwork, already attuned to Yolngu cultural imperatives, I have found the many deep conjunctions between Bangana’s vision for media and many of Heidegger’s concerns somewhat startling, and yet too complex and potentially distracting to go into at great length. Similarly, I want to acknowledge that there are many aspects of Weiner’s more properly Heideggerian anthropology that are both clearly relevant to and potentially productive for my work, even though I have not had the space to develop or elaborate the themes here. Certainly, in his comparison between Foi and Yolngu art (2001, 85–99), Weiner (via a reading of Morphy) gestures toward something like the dynamics of concealment and bringing forth that I found in the Gularri video. I say “technologies” because there are a number of distinct technologies involved in the various aspects of production, including the camera, editing suite, television transmitters, and screen, which have different phenomenological effects that were considered separately at different stages of the production. I use the term “technology” when I wish to indicate a return to Heidegger’s more philosophical point about the nature of these machines that mediate relations. Jay draws these distinctions from an analysis by David Michael Levin (1988, 440). The usual translation of this phrase is “the world worlds” (Heidegger 2001, 43). Yolngu are quite aware of the differing phenomenological/semantic impact of their work in varying contexts and are accustomed to adjusting performances or paintings accordingly. (Thanks to Howard Morphy for emphasizing this point.) See Keen (1994), Morphy (1991), Tamisari (1998, 2000), and Magowan (1998, 2001, 2005).

8. Shimmering Verisimilitudes 1. Don Burke visited to present the community with the prize for a video that had been made by the school and featured children singing the theme song of his show. The “Don Burke video,” as it became known, which was shot mainly by a Balanda teacher, was in particular demand for months after the event (as was the video of the singing children made for the competition). The video, almost two hours long, was often put to air in its entirety; shaky zooms, wobbly frames, mistakes and all. The “Don Burke video” is not an arbitrary example: it is a particular favorite among Bangana’s family as it features his daughter Yawulwuy as an eight-year-old giving a speech on behalf of the school, dressed in her best clothes and her clan’s ceremonial feather armbands. For years afterward the video copy remained one of the cherished family possessions; the dropouts and glitches that now interfere with viewing are evidence of the countless replays. 2. Similarly, Morphy has described how Yolngu use paintings to assert the Ancestral basis of their claims to sacra and country (1989, 26). 3. These yindi names (sometimes described as “capital names” by Yolngu) are important powerful names of significant sites and are used to emphasize the country in serious discussions or ceremonial reference to country and identity. 4. Some Yirritja clans such as Bangana’s own clan, Dhalwangu, have Gularri waters that are not connected directly to the flow of the Gularri depicted in the video. Nevertheless, all the Yirritja clans are connected because of the Ancestral legacy of Gularri, which is manifest in certain sacra, designs, and objects. Bangana wanted to disguise the identity of individual dancers in order to provide a more generic representation of Yirritja identity. The aim here again was to remove an individual or

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

clan-centric perspective —making the shadowy jumping and dancing figures representative and presencing of Gularri as it has flowed across the generations for all Yirritja clans. Unfortunately, the effects did not completely produce the anticipated results. It is still possible to discern individuals and thence the clans represented. Indeed, Yolngu actually looked even harder to work out who was whom among the dancing throng, their familiarity with each other in combination with a propensity to look in this manner contributing to a recognition arising out of ways of moving or body types even if the face was not visible. Nevertheless, at another level, the special effects in combination with the clay covering the bodies of the dancers can be seen to produce what Tamisari (2004) describes as a “temporal mask,” the white clay producing a resemblance of, and identification with, the dead and associated Ancestral knowledge, allowing Yolngu to look beyond difference and separation to recognize the “sameness” that binds. Magowan’s discussion of the various features of topography as “co -substantive essences” (2001c) provides an important and ethnographically rich contribution and reevaluation of notions of totemism in the Aboriginal literature by focusing on the kinetic power of song, movement, and evocation. Exogamous marriage patterns result in Yirritja moiety mothers giving birth to Dhuwa moiety children, and vice versa. These matrilineal relationships that crisscross between moieties across the generations constitute an important basis for a trajectory of relatedness through which individuals constitute identity, apart from the patrilineal-based clan identity. I follow Yolngu usage by using the word “story” (dhawu) rather than “myth”: a term that, as Mircea Eliade (1964, 10) notes, tends to relegate events to a “distant and fabulous time,” whereas Yolngu stories relate to a temporality that is better conceptualized as an Ancestral Always. Djunggayarr fulfill an essential role in all Yolngu ritual activity, ensuring the involvement of both moieties in any ceremony or decision regarding country or sacra. Djunggayarr help in the making of sacred objects and designs; they can live at, and care for, the country of their mother clan and take on pivotal roles in ritual (Keen 1994, 109). In cermonies all those participants whose mothers belong to clan groups who own the ceremony are referred to as djunggayarr (Morphy 1991, 64). Hence a djunggayarr for Gularri would call the water “mother.” In the course of our work, Bangana sometimes consulted his djunggayarr in order to confirm a translation or explanation. This essential requirement for the video to demonstrate its authority on-screen makes Gularri somewhat different from the Warlpiri videos that Michaels described, in which the credibility of a video depended on the audience’s knowledge of who had been present during the filming, even if they remained offscreen (1994, 114). In this instance, it could not be assumed that the audience for Gularri would know who had been present during the filming or, for that matter, who had given permission for access to their country and story. Ngalambirra’s mother’s mother was a Madarrpa clan landowner of Bungirrinydji, therefore he was in the ritually significant mari-wartangu (mother’s mother’s holder) relationship to this site and its sacra. The madak is a form of singing without yidaki and is generally associated with raypirri, a form of ritual disciplining and instruction. This role of witness serves an important function when Yolngu impart information. As Keen (1994, 51) describes, the presence of another with rights to a story confirms accountability through the act of looking on and listening in to the telling, thus providing “some protection against having been accused of having said the wrong thing, or having gone beyond one’s prerogatives in giving information.” See also discussions by Biddle (forthcoming) on the significance of witnessing with regard to Warlpiri art and the production of intercultural relations. Gambali did not explain to me the reasons for his gradual withdrawal from the project; however, I suspect that his reluctance was connected to the fact that the videoing, especially of other clan country, was serious and potentially dangerous business. Had there been a dispute about the video he would have been placed in a difficult position, especially given Bangana’s own problems with other clans going back to the dilly bag incident. More generally, it is likely that he would have been uncomfortable about filming country that had up until that point been restricted from cameras because of its mimetic potency. In addition, I think he (probably rightly) doubted his technical competence for undertaking such an important project, even though he was the most experienced video operator in the community. In this way I limited my practical involvement to booking helicopters and charters, keeping track of the budget and equipment, and transcribing translations for the subtitles. Although, of course, I should reiterate that this video would never have been made without my presence, interests, and expertise. For example, films by Trinh Minh-ha, and the Hopi videomaker Victor Masayesva Jr. In clan manikay each “stanza” of a song refers to a feature or aspect of country so that as the song progresses it cumulatively builds an image of a particular place before moving on to

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17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

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the next related place. In this way the imagery can build into a vision of an entire ecosystem (Magowan 2001d, 44). See also Keen (1994, 239–44) on the interpretive processes involved in “finding” meaning in clan songs and designs. These kinds of concessions are extremely unusual in television production, given the time delays involved in sending tapes for approval as well as the costs and inconvenience of changing already edited material. They underscore CAAMA’s commitment to recognizing and working through the often complex demands of making television in Aboriginal communities. The complete community version of Gularri (i.e., a slightly longer, un-subtitled version than the three half-hour episodes produced for Imparja Television) was first broadcast locally on Gapuwiyak BRACS in September 1997. Copies were made for landowners and sold by the BRACS to Yolngu from neighboring communities and outstations. Later that year Imparja Television televised their shows —including subtitling and an introduction in English by Bangana—to audiences across northern and central Australia. Since that time, several more people who were either featured in the video or were referred to by name have died, including Ngalambirra. The video remains restricted in terms of public broadcast within Arnhem Land. Nonetheless, some Yolngu are interested in viewing the video privately and also support the idea of international distribution on DVD. This is a matter of ongoing discussion and negotiation at the time this book goes to press. Many Yolngu have told me that they see Gularri as properly “Yolngu” in ways that other films such as the recent feature film Yolngu Boy (2001, dir. Stephen Johnson, Australian Children’s Television Foundation and Burrundi Pictures Production in association with Yothu Yindi Foundation) are not, despite the Yolngu cast and an extensive consultation and cooperation with Yolngu throughout the production process. See Marion Benjamin’s (1993) discussion on determining Aboriginality in film and filmmaking processes. I have found this acute sense of the inherently political nature of filmmaking and the onus of responsibility and accountability to the community to be common to other Aboriginal filmmaking contexts, including more urban settings. Many Aboriginal filmmakers I interviewed referred to the ways their work was directed and at times constrained by a sense of being answerable to their community and the often sensitive, if not volatile, internal politics that certain forms of journalism and documentary filmmaking could potentially stir up. Classic Metzian film theory assumes that the audience identifies with the camera, their perceptions directed and determined by what the camera focuses on. In the context of this argument I should stress again that Bangana was not an experienced filmmaker. He was in no practical position to take up the highly reflexive and theoretically informed approach to making culture visible in the experimental film languages favored by the film theorists of the avant-garde and intercultural. Such refigurations and resistances depend on a sophisticated grasp of the medium in ways that exceed the existing technical competency of BRACS broadcasters. Whether Bangana might have become interested in playing with the possibilities of digital effects and other experimental techniques for evoking something more visibly suggestive of Yolngu ways of seeing/knowing, had he lived longer, is now a matter of speculation. I suspect he would have. One of the functions of the geometric, non figurative features of the sacred likanbuy clan designs is to restrict the number of people who could interpret them (Morphy 1991, 191). Keen (1994, 227) describes the “related attributes of ambiguity, metonymy, and analogy or metaphor” that enabled a system of knowledge open to interpretation. Biddle (1996, 27) makes a similar point in her discussion of Warlpiri kuruwarri practices. She writes, “painting insures against a neutral, alienable code (knowable and masterable by anyone and everyone).” See Warner (1969, 21). As Magowan describes in the case of Yolngu clan songs, “Ancestral beings are always in the land and sea, covered and concealed, their forms but a shadow until they are sung into vision once more” (2001a, 90). Morphy (1999, 130). See Morphy (1991, 88–92) and Keen (1994, 244–54) for discussions about Yolngu hierarchies of knowing, the acquisition of knowledge, and the ways in which women gain equal access to knowledge outside of the restricted domain of the inside ceremony ground. There is obvious potential here for further analysis of the camera in relation to cultural modalities of seeing. There seems to be something critical about the Yolngu injunction against “staring,” that is, maintaining a direct and sustained gaze on a person when communicating with him or her, that corresponds with Levin’s (1988) discussion of staring and the possibilities of an alethic gaze. What I find striking about Levin’s Heideggerian analysis of staring is the way in which he describes how this kind of vision fails to apprehend the “truth” of what is being looked at; the stare distances the viewer from the object, even as he “nails” it with his eyes. I smile to myself

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31. 32.

33.

34.

as I write this, because it is so close to Bangana’s formulation of the failings of the insistent but unseeing Balanda gaze. “You guys might keep on looking but you just can’t see what is right in front of you,” he said to me more than once, half smug, half exasperated. This double register of emotion is important. It provides a further clue to the dynamics embedded within Bangana’s directorial vision. Because while I have argued that it is not appropriate to show or reveal the sacred significances on-screen, there is still an expectation that Balanda will be able to glean something from the viewing of Gularri. Of course, at another level, the fact that this technology enables unlimited replay makes its function even more like ritual, which must necessarily be repeated and reproduced. See Biddle (2001) and Watson (2003) on the significance of the penetration of touch in the production of Ancestrally potent paintings in the Central and Western Desert. See also Glowczewski (1991, cited in Biddle 2001), on the way that the shimmering effect characteristic of Warlpiri paintings invites a penetrative gaze. Again I stress that I use this term while seeking to invoke a sense of a corporeal seeing, feeling, and remembering that exceeds the mentalistic structures that this expression can conjure. Also, this seeing and becoming “visible” is better characterized as a synesthetic kind of envisioning. Although Marchinbar (the tip of the Wessel Islands) is considered the final destination for Gularri, the story and song we recorded at that location were not included in the final edit because, according to Bangana, the Warramiri landowners had still been “a little confused” by his project at that point and had ended up contributing a “different story,” i.e., they referred to Ancestral sites that did not directly relate to Gularri. Because of their seniority Bangana (and, I presume, Ngalambirra) had been unwilling to interrupt or redirect the flow of their story. The next day, on Cotton Island, another Warramiri clan Gularri site closer to Elcho Island, the situation was rectified by telling the story and singing the Gularri all the way to Marchinbar.

9. Worlding a Yolngu World 1. In comparison to other Ancestral stories, Gularri is an Ancestral complex that is largely event free; its narrative significances tend rather to be connected to the nature of freshwater itself, building specific cultural significances into the kinds of material poetics that Bachelard (1983) explores. While anthropologists have subsequently written with nuance and insight about the meanings associated with and generated by water (see especially Magowan 1998, 2001, 2005), I felt—and still feel—a responsibility to convey my understandings on the terms that they were imparted; a sense made all the stronger by Bangana’s death in 2002, which foreclosed any chance of checking with him about the degree to which I might allude to the layered, multivalent connotations of creation and reproduction that these waters, in their very materiality, embody and engender for Yolngu. 2. I want to emphasize that although it is likely that the crew were well aware of the potential for the water—and therefore their shots of water—to hold culturally specific meanings for Yolngu, it would have been inappropriate for them to have asked or otherwise pushed for more information about deeper significances or aesthetic impulses. Quite literally, it was not their place to do so. To not ask and to wait to be told is an important mark of deference to those whose knowledge and relationships mean that they have the right to impart such information. 3. I stress here that it is not my intention to deny, challenge, or otherwise draw into question the status of the Aboriginality (or the professional skills) of the CAAMA cameraman. My point is that there are a variety of ways of being Aboriginal. In many ways the shared time and conversations of the shoot did forge further understandings between Yolngu participants and the crew from Alice Springs about what it means to be Aboriginal in contemporary Australia. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that the divergent experiences of colonialism have produced some profound differences between Aboriginal peoples. 4. The figurative elements of Yolngu painting appear in the form of iconic representations of animals, people, objects, and places that refer to Ancestral events. The other element, described by Morphy as the “geometric,” includes a range of shapes and designs that do not serve a “look alike” purpose but rather add a dimension that contributes to the art’s essential multivalency and the demands it makes for interpretive viewing. In particular cases, these geometric elements indicate clan ownership. The similarities between designs demonstrate the Ancestral basis of relationships between clans who are linked by the journeys of Ancestral Beings and forces. Diamond shapes of various sizes provide a distinguishing and essential feature of Yirritja moiety clan designs. Indeed, in certain paintings these nonfigurative shapes are sometimes explicitly described by Yolngu as representing aspects of Yirritja clan waterways (Morphy 1991, 173; Caruana 2003, 68), although Bangana never made this connection explicit. 5. Morphy’s identification of this “aesthetic impulse” has proven highly influential in the literature on Aboriginal art, especially because, as other recent scholars and art critics have pointed out,

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

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this shimmering quality—an effect clearly visible to the Balanda eye —is common to paintings from other areas of Aboriginal Australia, particularly the Central and Western Desert. See Dussart (1997), Watson (1999), and Biddle (2001) for discussions of the shimmering qualities of Aboriginal painting in the Central and Western desert. Although he didn’t let on, Bangana had already been through a similar encounter. I discovered at his funeral that Peter Toner, an ethnomusicologist who worked extensively with him on clan songs during the same period as my research, had also produced Morphy’s article in pursuit of an understanding of bir’yun. Marr is often glossed in the literature as “Ancestral power,” e.g., Morphy (1999, 251). In my view this fails to capture the deeply felt, intersubjective qualities that inhere in the explanations that Yolngu provide of marr. Tamisari (2004) captures this sense in her description of marr as “a mode of attention and not a mere sentiment as such, it is a form of transformation and constitution of self and other.” The translations that appear in parentheses were adapted from discussions with Bangana and reference to Zorc’s Yolngu Matha Dictionary (1986). Zorc translates bir’yun as a verb meaning to “sparkle, glitter [or] shine.” His complete translation for malng’thun is “appearing, come out, come to light, happen, turn up, be born.” While I seek to caution against the assumption in much of the literature on Aboriginal art that bir’yun is a standard Yolngu conceptual category, I don’t mean to generate a dispute based on the specifics of terminology or translation. I acknowledge that this kind of overt ethnographic “fact checking” is highly problematic, potentially prefiguring and distorting discussion, not to mention the fact that it sets up all kinds of perverse tensions over ethnographic authority. As I have stated already, the deeply perspectival nature of Yolngu knowledge production means that there is no right or wrong. There is not, nor can there be, one version of how things are. From my work in Gapuwiyak with particular clans and individuals, I’m in no position to comment on how the term bir’yun might be used to communicate something about the quality or characteristics of cultural productions by Yolngu clans living further to the east (toward Yirrkala, where Morphy did his fieldwork). Given the nature of Yolngu knowledge systems, it is likely that different clans, and indeed different individuals, have different ways of talking about these matters. As Morphy himself states: “Each painting . . . is more closely associated with one Ancestral being or a set of Ancestral beings than it is with others and, depending on the likan and Ancestral being concerned bir’yun may have more specific connotations” (1989, 29). Thomson field notes, April 8, 1937, cited by Morphy (1989, 28). Although, as Bangana stated, this dynamic of showing and recognizing is not limited to the visual—singers also “look” for the moment in which the tune comes through—in the following analysis I stick to the visual effects of shimmering as something that is easily evident to the Balanda eye and imagination. Bangana never actually used this term and had difficulty understanding exactly what I meant when I used it with him. Heidegger’s term for truth, aletheia (borrowed from the Greek), conveys exactly this sense of truth as an uncovering or disclosure of what “is.” (See Heidegger 1977b, 12). This kind of understanding helps to makes sense of the way in which Yolngu artists downplay their own creativity or the aesthetic beauty of their work, rather emphasizing their place in a (re)production of truth. See Myers (1999, 220). This sense of a painting becoming powerful at the moment that the design is perceived to show itself would help explain why, once they are painted, the majority of paintings in ceremonial contexts are often only seen briefly by a restricted group of people (Morphy 1989, 26). Morphy’s description of the ways that people look, or don’t look, at paintings made for ceremony—on the bodies of initiates or the lid of a coffin—gives a further sense of how Yolngu manage viewing as a form of exposure to the Ancestral. In ceremonies much of people’s experience of these images in the flux and flurry of ceremonial performance is accrued in fleeting glimpses caught from the corners of their eyes. Yet, in the semi-restricted contexts in which paintings are produced, people who have the opportunity to observe tend to avert their eyes (26). As Nichols (1991, 162) acknowledges, not all documentaries offer this possibility. When the imagery and the figures are unknown and thence unfamiliar, he argues that viewers will relate to the image as they would to fiction. This propensity for finding pleasure in locating patterns is also demonstrated by literate Yolngu who prefer doing puzzles that involve locating words within an apparently jumbled grid of letters over reading books or magazines. As Magowan writes in relation to ritual performance, it is not the act of making visible that renders “the landscape powerful per se; rather, it is their patterning in performance that affords it potency through the fluid movements of the landscape and the seascape which are imaged in song, animated in dance” (2001c, 25).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9

19. Recently Morphy (2005) has written about the concept of buwuyak or emergent imagery, the borderline between the visible and invisible. This concept helps him finesse a delicate and evocative description of the interdependence between the conceptual and the perceptual in Yolngu art, thereby further illustrating the multiple and interconnected dimensions of expressive power of this form of painting. See also Magowan’s masterly depiction of the play between light and shadow manifest through Yolngu women’s song. She describes these performances as a “medium of ancestral brightness” (2001, 90) that envelops listeners in a polyphonic cloak of Ancestral identifications and shared sentiment. Both these analyses offer a complementary approach to the dynamics I describe above. 20. As Morphy’s recent work suggests, many Yolngu artists are equally aware of such issues and are using painting to respond to the kinds of shifting revelatory imperatives that inform Bangana’s project. 21. The trope of culture flow has become a familiar conceptual tool in studies of media, providing a means of describing the ways in which television crosses borders and time zones, generating new identities and linking diverse audiences in new “imagined communities” and even “imagined worlds.” My point here is that these theories fail to account for the levels at which identity might be derived from the specificity of the local at the level of ontologically distinct ways of being-in-the -world. 22. In 1961 Heidegger (1977) made a speech in which he directly referred to the spread of television aerials in his hometown as a sign of the triumph of technology over a state of “being-at-home” (Pattison 2000, 60). 23. See Keen (1990, 1994) and Morphy (1988, 1991). 24. It is also important to note that Gularri does assert a certain order or hierarchy between the clans. The Madarrpa owners of the first site, the Ritharrngu clan from Gali, and the Warramiri from the end point in the Wessel Islands are recognized to hold a special status in this context because of their pivotal positions in the link of connections. 25. Indeed, Ngalambirra’s leg provides a trigger for another set of stories concerning adultery, revenge, guns, and brotherly rivalries, set in the more recent past. 26. This emphasis on individual creativity or style differs from other accounts of reproduction of rom that tend to emphasize the rote nature of ritual performance. While the significance of personal talent and inventiveness in such contexts is certainly downplayed or denied, I found a great appreciation of certain local performers and singers, although praise was usually expressed in terms of their technical skills. See Dussart (2000) and Tamisari (2004) on the significance of “virtuosity” in ritual enactment.

Conclusion 1. Although Gularri constitutes a specific, and in many ways unique, example, the Yolngu uses of media that I describe here can be seen as part of a broader trajectory of resistance in which Yolngu throughout the region, rather than simply taking on the dominant culture on its own terms, draw from their own cultural repertoire to respond to the new contexts and demands of contemporary life. 2. See Michaels’s (1994, 99–125) discussion of the choice between a Warlpiri “cultural future” and what he calls a “lifestyle future.” 3. I have not had the space here to develop my reappraisal of the cultural dimensions of Gambali’s BRACS radio show. In retrospect I realize that he was in fact “completely being Yolngu” in his urge to use radio requests to generate connections between himself and his audience —the songs invisibly traversing country via satellite, making new trajectories of connectedness while he mediated a relationship between past and present. There is something here too about mimetic production of a modern Aboriginal identity —a becoming-in -relation to other TEAABA radio broadcasters —that derives meaning and power from a source other than the Ancestral. 4. See, for instance, Magowan (2001d, 45) on the “co -dependent” relationship between the auditory and the visual in the Yolngu imagination. See also Tamisari (1998, 252) for a discussion of the ways that Yolngu understand and experience the interplay of the senses in the production of knowledge. 5. This sensual gestalt must surely amplify the more “internal” connections that are made at the level of metaphor and metonymy through the poetic inter referencing and evocations embedded in song and story. See Magowan (2001a, 2001d) and Tamisari (2004) for suggestive and ethnographically rich discussions of the place of synesthesia, intersubjectivity, and intercorporeality in relation to Yolngu performance. 6. Morphy (1991) has described the ways that Yolngu art has played a central role in this history of drawing on —and adapting—local cultural forms, practices, and processes in order to shape intercultural relations on Yolngu terms. As he observes (personal communication) in this

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7.

8.

9.

10.

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instance, what is particularly notable is the way that Bangana has harnessed for his video the aspect of Yolngu art that has been previously the most sacred or restricted. In terms of contemporary Australian filmmaking, Gularri is one among many in an impressive and highly diverse range of recent indigenous productions. Directors such as Rachel Perkins, Ivan Sen, and Darlene Johnson are finding international audiences for their work in feature film and documentary. Bush productions of many kinds are also flourishing, from the groundbreaking, high-production-value documentaries and dramas produced by CAAMA, to local BRACS programs that are being fostered through regional media associations and broadcast to audiences in remote regions across the country on the new satellite service ICTV (Indigenous Community Television). Each of these projects takes up the challenge of figuring Aboriginality and intercultural relations in Australia in different ways, each dealing with the expectations and appreciations of a culturally and geographically diverse audience and the need to overcome the kinds of stereotyping and reductions imposed by racist and/or colonialist representations of the past. I must also admit that, with the benefit of hindsight, I am increasingly aware that the use and adaptation of academic theories can never be adequate to the indigenous concepts and experiences I have attempted to describe. Similarly, I wonder, at times, if I have pushed a concept of mimesis too far beyond its limits, thereby potentially impeding rather than facilitating understanding. Such misgivings are one reason why I have been so explicit about the intellectual journey that fieldwork stimulated, as well as the kinds of theoretical retro -fitting necessary to adapt these thinkers for my purposes. Having said that, as I think I have clearly shown, the influences I cite have made it possible for me to think and write the intercultural in new ways and, in the process, demonstrate my experience of the crucial—if inherently problematic —place of Western philosophic theories and anthropological thought processes. In her discussion of intercultural cinema and spectatorship, Marks describes the ways that film is a medium that enables a kind of visceral opening toward difference. For Marks, the ideal audience for intercultural cinema possesses an “interestedness, engagement and intelligence” (2000, 19); these qualities, she suggests, provide the basis for the sensuous receptivity necessary to appreciate the alternative cultural knowledges and experiences that such films convey. Indeed, she argues that “sense experience can be learned and cultivated” exactly through an exposure to films of this sort (23). As I have suggested above, I would extend this argument to include the vibratory and echoing qualities that typify the rhythmic droning of the yidaki and the accompanying singing styles. These musical sounds and styles, built up through repetition and full, deep resonances, fill the auditory spaces between listeners and musicians, fading away until the following stanza sings the next element of the ringgitj.

NOTES TO CONCLUSION

Glossary

ATSIC Balanda bathi bilma bir’yun BRACS bungul CAAMA dhudak’thun dhalkara dharangan dhapi dhawu dhulang Dhuwa dhuyu djunggayarr gakal galka gamununggu gapu Gularri likan

liya madak manikay manymak mali malng’thun mari mari-wartangu mulkurr

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Australians of European descent; apparently derived from the Macassan word for the colonizers of their lands, “Hollander” woven dilly bag made of pandanus fiber clapsticks that accompany singers a shimmering effect, a revealing flash, the light quality at the moment of the setting sun Broadcasting in Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme ceremony Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association to act, imitate, follow, learn; to presence through imitative action Yirritja ritual leader who calls likan names in ceremonies to recognize, understand circumcision ceremony story sacred art, designs relating to the Ancestral one of two moieties sacred, restricted, taboo ritual “manager” from opposite moiety (connected through the matriline) with important responsibilities in relation to ceremony and country a form of ritual dance associated with ngarra revelatory rites feared sorcerer, someone capable of afflicting death or other forms of retribution through magical rites and practices sacred clan designs water Ancestral waters that are the source of identity for Yirritja clans; also, the title of the video produced in Gapuwiyak in 1997 literally, “elbow”; also refers to a fork in a tree where branch joins trunk or a bay between two promontories. With its emphasis on mediating a connection between things, it also serves as a crucial cultural (and corporeal) metaphor for the pivotal significance of the Ancestral connections that link things, places, people. tune a form of song without yidaki (didgeridoo), associated with raypirri (i.e., the imparting of knowledge and discipline to neophytes) public clan songs good, OK presence —shadow, photo, “soul” appearing, coming to light mother’s mother and mother’s mother’s brothers an important relationship with ritual significance derived from being in the position of mother’s mother, or mother’s mother’s brother, to another clan literally, “head”; mind or sensibility; part of the body where thinking happens

247

ngarra ngayangu rangga raypirri ringgitj rom TEABBA wanga wangarr wanggany wungili yapa yidaki yindi names

Yirritja yo Yolngu

248

GLOSSARY

major regional revelatory ceremonies with an emphasis on connections between clans and identity seat of the emotions; heart sacred objects, normally restricted from public view a form of disciplining through exhortation and demonstration important Ancestral sites that mark the crossroads of a number of Ancestral creation tracks, of great ceremonial significance law, culture; the “proper way,” the way of the Ancestors Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association country, land, home Ancestral Being one, once visible projection or presence of someone; shadow; reflection, image, picture, photo; movie, cinema sister didgeridoo, musical instrument made from a hollowed log that makes a droning sound important powerful names of country, sometimes called “capital names.” Important places generally have a number of yindi names, which are used to emphasize the country in serious discussions regarding country and identity. one of two moieties (See Dhuwa) yes the term means “person” in the clan dialects of northeast Arnhem Land and has become the most commonly used collective term for the indigenous inhabitants of this region. The term is also used in a broader, inclusive sense to refer to other Aboriginal people, or to “black” people from other parts of the world.

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Index

ABC radio and television network, 61; video broadcasts in Gapuwiyak over, 61, 64, 232n4 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), 5, 228n5; financing for Gularri, 140; Gapuwiyak BRACS project funding and, 13–15; individual Yolngu relations with, 144, 240n13 Aboriginal culture: art as intercultural tool in, 112–16; BRACS programs and, 18; cultural brokering in, 27–30; “embedded aesthetics” of, 229n20; film technology and, 49–50; government policies and, 10–11; Gularri, and influence of, 188–90, 243nn2–3; “heraldic” style of, 156–57; knowledge imperative in, 196–98; marketing of art from, 236n29; media technology impact on, 38–41; modern identity in, 219–23; phenomenological aspects of, xxvi–xxvii; photography as an issue for, 97–98; politics of filmmaking in, 171–72, 242n22; remembrance practices in, 129–34; Yolngu variations of, 65–67 academic theory: indigenous cultures and, 246n8 “activist imaginary,” representational struggle and, 45–46 Adair, John, 38–39 Adjustment Movement, 110–13, 206, 220, 235n21, 236n26, 238n14 “Age of the World Picture, The,” xxvi, 147 alterity: mimesis and, 86–87, 233n5, 234n6; similitude and, 87–88 Amazonian culture: indigenous media in, 42–44 American-Australian Expedition to Arnhem Land, 111–12 “Ancestral power” in Aboriginal culture, xxvii; Bangana’s relation with, 237n8; barriers for Balanda to, 144, 239n10; creative sources in, 138–39; djalkari (Ancestral footprints), 89; Dreaming stories and, 93–95; in funeral rituals, 119–21; in Gapuwiyak, 10–11; in Gularri: That Brings Unity, 154–62, 171–72, 178, 190–92, 239n4, 243n1; identity and meaning linked to, 72–74, 233n11; inside/outside knowledge and, 179, 181–82; intercultural regard for,

220–26; mimesis and, 102–4; modernity and, 68–69, 74, 151–52, 206–9; ngarra as key to, 144, 239n9; in painting, 194–95; painting aesthetics and, 190–92, 243n4; remembrance aspects of, 132–34, 238n18; revelation of knowledge in, 196–98; shimmering effect and, 204–5; similitude in, 201–2; Warlpiri indigenous media production and, 39–41; Yolngu culture and, xxxi–xxxv, 20 Anderson, Benedict, xxiii anthropological research: limits of, 246n8; mimesis and, 86–87; traditionalist approaches in, 72–74; Yolngu media production and, 38–41, 154–55, 230n8 Appadurai, Arjun, xxiii–xxiv appropriation: ethnographic filming as, 104–6; intercultural politics and, 95–97, 234n7 Arnhem Land: Aboriginal culture in, xx–xxi; clan wells and waterways in, 142–46; designation as Aboriginal reserve, xx–xi; “Dreaming/ Dreamtime” stories in, 92–95; entry restrictions for, xx–xxi; ethnographic study of, 65–67; European Australians in, 227n4; geography and climate of, xx; intercultural relations in, 110–12, 219–23; photography expeditions in, xv–xviii, 227n4; precolonial history of, 227n2 art: Aboriginal interpretations of, 196–98; Heidegger’s discussion of, 149, 240n15; tribal restrictions on production of, 114–16, 236n27; Yolngu advocacy through, 112–16, 235n24; Yolngu aesthetics in, 190–92, 243nn4–5, 245n6 audience reaction: cultural importance of, 179–84, 202–5 AUSSAT satellite, 38 Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies/ Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 38 authenticity: hierarchy of, 44, 47–49, 218–23 Bachelard, Gaston, 243n1 Balanda: barriers to Yolngu culture for, 95–97, 144, 239n10; BRACS project and, 13–15; defined, xiv, 227n3; influence in Gularri of,

259

141–42, 210–12; intercultural regard and, 224–26; media theory and, 70–72; reception of Gularri in, 221–23; Yolngu cultural brokering with, 28–30, 75–80, 104–6, 109–16, 144, 239n10 balaya (clay painting), 158 Bark Petition, 104, 111–13, 235n24 Barthes, Roland, 129 bathi (sacred dilly bag), 22, 114–15, 135, 212–14, 224, 237n8 Batty, Phillip, 229n17 Bazin, André, 99, 102, 177 Beckett, Jeremy, 27, 69 Benjamin, Marion, 242n21 Benjamin, Walter, xxv–xxviii, xxxii, 34, 100, 233n3, 234n12; mimetic faculty theory of, 85–87; “nonsensuous similarities” concept of, 86, 118–19, 200 Berndt, Catherine, 67, 69 Berndt, Ronald M., 67, 110–12, 206, 235n22 “betweenness” of mimesis, 89–90, 194–95 Bhabha, Homi K., 234n6 Biddle, Jennifer, 90, 126, 194, 228n9, 234n12, 235n18, 242n25 Biernoff, David, 123–24 bilingual education: absence in Gapuwiyak of, 227n4 bilma (clapsticks), 60–62, 72, 76, 80, 157, 159 bir’yun (light and movement), 190–93, 243nn4–5, 244nn8–9; intercultural regard for, 224–26 Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe, A, 28, 67 Borroloola community, 141 Broadcasting in Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS), 3–5, 228n2, 228nn5–6; Bangana Wunungmurra as cultural advisor to, 19–30; clan singing recordings of, 60–61; cultural theory behind, 10–11; “failure” of, in Gapuwiyak, 15–19, 229n21; Gapuwiyak radio broadcasts, 9–15, 217, 245n3; Gularri production and, 156, 171, 183–84, 242n18; indigenous media associations and, 5–7; international audiences for, 247n7; long-term impact of, 229n17; media scholarship concerning, 229n11; Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association and, 7–9; video broadcasts of films by, 61, 64, 232n4; Yolngu cultural identity and, 68–69 Broome Aboriginal Media Association (BAMA), 6–7 bundurr (knee), 234n11 bunggawa (boss), 236n3, 238n19 bungul (Yolngu public ceremony), 24, 142 bureaucracy: Aboriginalization of, 66–67 burial practices in Yolngu culture, 237n5 Burke, Don, 156, 240n1 Burke and Wills, 229n13 burrpuy (photography as voodoo), 106–8 Caldarola, Victor, 230n8 Carey, Mariah, 70 Casey, Edward S., 84, 99, 131 Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) Productions: filming of Gularri

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by, 140, 142, 166–70, 186–90, 223, 239n5, 242n17, 243nn2–3; international audiences for, 247n7 Chow, Rey, 36 Christie, Michael, 151 clan identity, 138–39, 238n3; centrality of wells and waterways in, 142–46, 239n8; generational shift in, 145–46; matrilineal relationships in, 161–62, 241n6; possible tensions from Gularri production concerning, 170 clan singing, 60, 242n27; in Yolngu culture, 19, 24, 229n22 Clifford, James, 96, 210, 228n17 colonialism: cultural theory and, 10 community: Western ideas of, 18 concealment, dynamics of, 240n15; power through, 174–75, 186–87, 243n1; shimmering effect and, 204–5 Coniston Story, 40 connection: Gularri as tool for, 223–26; Morphy’s concept of, 234n9; Yolngu cultural emphasis on, 200–202 copying as depletion: Benjamin’s discussion of, 235n17 Cowlishaw, Gillian, 69 “crisis of representation” in anthropology, 2, 228n1 Crocodile Dundee, 235n8 Cry Freedom, 232n10 cultural activism: art as agency for, 112–16; indigenous media and, 15–16, 140–42; intercultural regard and, 219–23; media technology and, 215, 245n1; representational struggle and, 45–47 “cultural imaginary”: anthropological definitions of, xxiii–xxv, 228n6 cultural theory: anthropological study of media and, xxiii–xxv; camera technologies and, 49, 50; colonialism and, 10; film theory and, 38–41, 49–50; indigenous media and, 2–3; media scholarship and, 31–33; relativity of truth in, 176–77; role of photography in, xv–xviii; sensual scholarship and, xxx–xxxv; technology’s mediation of culture and, xxv–xxvii culture flow: Gularri as manifestation of, 207–9, 245n21 Culture for Bangana, xiii–xiv dance: mnemonics in, 130–34; rituals including, 157–58, 161–62, 240n4 “Dancing Queen,” 65, 70 death: Yolngu beliefs concerning, 123, 237n6 Debord, Guy, 54, 230n1 Deger, Dorothy, xxxi Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), 228n5 depletion through imagery: Benjamin’s concept of, 235n15; vs. cultural exchange, 113–14 Dewar, Mickey, 227n2 dhalkara (ritual specialist), 19, 157–61, 163, 175, 178, 180–81, 218, 229n22, 241n10 Dhalwangu clan culture, 230n30; songs in, 60; Yolngu within, 68

dhapi (male circumcision ritual), 156 dharangan (recognition, understanding), 192–93, 202–4 dhawu (story), 241n7 dhudak’thun (Yolngu concept of imitation), 88–89 dhulang (paintings, designs), 177 Dhuwa moiety, 143, 161–62, 241n6 dhuyu (secret/sacred objects), 122–23, 165, 179, 181 difference: art as intercultural exchange and, 112–16; film theory and, 50–52; mimesis and, 87–88; Yolngu acceptance of, 239n4. See also similitude djalkari (Ancestral footprints), 89 Djambarrpuyngu language: as lingua franca for Gapuwiyak, xxi “Djet,” 234n4 djunggayarr (ritual managers), 62, 135; in Gularri production, 162, 165–66, 172, 191, 241n8 “Don Burke video,” 156, 240n1 Dreaming, The (television series), 234n4 Dreaming/Dreamtime: anthropological research on, 93–95, 143–46, 234n3; in indigenous media production, 41, 56 Dube, Lucky, 20 Dutchak, Philip, 228n7 economic conditions in Gapuwiyak, xxii “economy of knowledge”: Warlpiri paradigm of, 40 Eickelkamp, Ute, 228n9 Elcho Island, 111–12, 235n23, 238n2 Eliade, Mircea, 241n7 “embedded aesthetics”: Ginsburg’s concept of, 46, 229n20, 231n17 empowerment: photography as tool for, 10–108 enframing: of Gularri, 188–90; Heidegger’s concept of, 147–49, 231n23, 240n14 “engaged” anthropology: indigenous media and, 37–38 Ernabella community: media production in, 4–6 “ethnographic eye”: visual anthropology and, 230n4 ethnography: cultural brokering in, 27–28; ethical and political constraints in, 186–87; film research as appropriation in, 104–6; intersubjectivity of, xxxiv–xxxv, 228n17; video technology and, 47–48; visualist theory and, xxxiii exchange relations: in photography, xxviii extrasensous similitude, 202–4 Fabian, Johannes, 69 Faris, James, 43 film production: difference theory and, 50–51; impact on Yolngu culture of, 229n13; permission in Yolngu culture for, 107–8; political aspects of, 171–72, 242n22; power of, 198–99; visual anthropology of, 42–44 film theory: audience identification and, 173–75, 242n23; blind spots in, 51–52; cultural interpretation using, 38–41; Heidegger and, 58–59; indigenous media and, 47–49; photographic presencing and, 99–100; technology

and culture and, 49–50; visual anthropology and, 36–37 flowers: in Yolngu funeral rituals, 121–23, 135–36, 237n5 Foi tribe: cultural interpretation of, 53–54, 240n15 “For a Cultural Future,” 41 Forbes, Lassie, 12–13, 25 Foucault, Michel, 34, 36, 185, 230n1 Frazer, J. G., 86 Fulbright Symposium on Indigenous People in an Interconnected World, 27 funeral rituals in Yolngu culture, 119–37, 236nn3–4, 238nn17–20; clan control of, 125–26, 237n11–12; declining participation in, 239n12; Gularri as motif in, 161–62; shelter building, 124, 237n8 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 102 Gaines, Jane, xxviii, 36 gakal (ritual dance), 157–58 Galiwinku community: indigenous media, 9 galka (sorcerers), 63, 66 Gambali, Frank. See Wunungmurra, Frank Gambali gamununggu (sacred clan designs and paintings), 72, 177 Gapuwiyak community, xiii; Bangana Wunungmurra’s leadership role in, 23–26; BRACS radio programming in, 9, 12–13, 70; contemporary cultural influences in, 66–67; cultural brokering in, 29–30, 110–11; films set in, 229n13; funeral rituals in, 119–21, 123–26, 237n11; history and culture in, 9–11; impact of Gularri: That Brings Unity in, 141–42; media technology in, xix–xx, xxvii, 70–72, 227n1; mimesis in culture of, 87–88, 101–4, 234n7; national links to, xxi; population and characteristics of, 62–64, 232n2; powerlessness and loss in, 215–17; public address system in, 12; remembrance practices in, 129–34, 238n17; tribal restrictions on art production in, 114–16, 236n27,29 Gapuwiyak Community Education Center (CEC), 227n4 Gebauer, Gunter, 84 “geometric” element in Yolngu painting, 243n4 Giddens, Anthony, xxiii Ginsburg, Faye, xxiii, xxv, xxviii, 2, 228nn2–3; cultural activism and, 45–47, 59; on indigenous media production, 28, 55–56, 229n12, 229n20, 230n33; on visual anthropology, 37–38 glimpse: concept of in Yolngu ethnography, xxxi Goldberg, Whoopi, 71, 232n10 Gorotire community (Amazon), 42–44 Gove Land Rights case, 236n25 government policies: impact in Gapuwiyak of, xxii Granites, Kurt Japanangka, 5 Grasseni, Christina, 228n15 Greatorex, John, 151 Greek culture (ancient): Heidegger’s discussion of, 148–50; Yolngu video production and, 146 grief: in Yolngu culture, 120–21 Gularri: That Brings Unity, xxviii–xxix, 20, 22,

INDEX

261

30, 128; audience reactions to, 179–84, 202–5; “big picture” interpretations of, 205–9; bir’yun evoked in, 190–92; broadcasts of, 171, 182–84, 215–17, 242n18–19; cinematic legacy of, 246n7; clan images in, 245n24; community version, 171, 242n18; cultural disjunctions in filming of, 188–90; cultural elements in, 157–61; inside/ outside knowledge in, 178–82; intercultural regard for, 219–26; international distribution of, 242n19; landscape and objects of significance in, 168–70; layers of perception in, 172–75; modern and traditional in, 209–12; narrative omissions in, 185–87; narrative sources for, 161–66, 240n9; postproduction phase of, 170–71; production of, 138–55, 165–66, 238n2, 241nn13–14; reconciliation and redemption in, 212–14; relativity of truth in, 176–78; shooting of, 166–70; similitude in, 199–200; Yolngu identity in, 171–72, 242n20 Gunumungu, Shirley, 93–99, 101–4, 106, 117–18, 123–24, 128, 237n7 Guyamirrilil clan, 238n3 Hall, Stuart, xxiii, 48 Hamilton, Annette, xxv, 55, 190 haptic representation: film theory and, 51 Heidegger, Martin, xxv–xxvi, 185; cultural barriers to interpretation and, 53–54, 231n23; culture flow theory and, 207, 245n22; indigenous media and philosophy of, 55–57, 221–22; on modern subjectivity, 75; perception and culture and work of, 80; techne concept of, 138–40, 195; on technology, 147–52, 240n15; on truth, 148–50, 197, 244n13 Hinkson, Melinda, 231n14 “Hollywood Iconography: A Warlpiri Reading,” 39–41 identity: clan identity, 138–39; film and determination of, 171–72, 242n21; intercultural interactions and, 68–69; mimesis and, 245n3; in modern Aboriginal culture, 219–23; nonindigenous advisors for indigenous media and, 229n12; role of media in, xxiii–xxv; in Yolngu culture, 70–74, 138, 232n8, 238n1 Ihde, Don, 110, 207 imagery: Aboriginal control of, 97–98; anthropological scholarship about, 35; cultural management of, 171–72; funeral restrictions on, 120–26, 236nn2–4, 237n10; inside/outside knowledge in, 179–82; remembering through, 128–34; style and, 177–78 imagination: anthropological focus on, xxiii–xxv; ontology and, xxv–xxvii imaging technologies: “presencing” of, 234n2 Imparja (Aboriginal-owned television station), 61, 156, 239n5, 242n18 Indigenous Community Television (ICT), 247n7 indigenous cultures: academic theories and, 246n8 indigenous media: BRACS funding for, 3–5; community-based productions, 5–7; cultural barriers to interpretation of, 52–54; defini-

262

INDEX

tions of, 2–3; as empowerment tool, 42–44; ethnographic research on, 34; film theory and, 38–41; imperialist view of, 54–56, 231n26; intercultural interpretations of, 31–33, 230n31; international audiences for, 247n7; Michaels’ research on, 38–41; nonindigenous advisors for, 6–7, 229n12; reflexive character of, 28–30; representational theory and, 47–49; sensual knowledges in, 50–51; techne in, 138–55; as unification force, 139–40; visual anthropology and, 37–38 intercultural exchange/regard: for Ancestral sources, 220–26; in cinema, Marks’s concept of, 50–51, 53–54, 246n9; cultural brokering and, 28–30, 239n31; through visual culture, 112–16; in Yolngu culture, 68–69, 218–23 interpretation: Aboriginal “revelation” and, 196–98; Warlpiri indigenous media and role of, 40–41 intersubjectivity: in ethnographic research, xxxiv–xxxv, 228n17; of ritual, 91; of Yolngu culture, 87–88, 153; Yolngu remembrance practices and, 131–34 Jackson, Michael, 129–31, 228n9, 228n17 Jay, Martin, 34, 54, 150, 240n17 Jefferys, Gina, 70 Johnson, Darlene, 247n7 Kava, 62, 232n1 Kayapo Video Project, 42–44, 231n15; Moore’s critique of, 47, 231n20 Keen, Ian, 30, 232n7, 235n19; on knowledge systems, 179, 196, 242n25; on mimesis, 88–89; on ngarra, 144, 239n11; relativity of truth in cultural systems and, 176–77; on ritual ceremonies, 209, 239n4, 239n12 Kelly, Francis Jupurrurla, 41 kinship systems: clan wells and waterways and, 143; funeral restrictions concerning, 236n3; in Gapuiwyak broadcasts, 18; matrilineal relationships, 161–62, 241n6; role in making Gularri of, 163–66; in Yolngu culture, 67–68; Yolngu projection onto videos of, 71–72 Knopfler, Mark, 60 knowledge: Aboriginal imperatives concerning, 196–98; bir’yun (light and movement) and, 192, 244n9; inside/outside aspects of, 178–82; media production as tool for, 140–46, 239n6, 239n11; photography as tool for, 110–12; politics of, 144, 239n10; restrictions on access to, 176, 242n25; of sacra, 145–46; seeing as acquisition of, for Yolngu, 236n25; technological challenges to, 114–16 kuruwarri designs, 194–95 Lacan, Jacques, 36, 230n1 land rights: Aboriginal culture and, 104, 111–12, 235n24, 236n25 Langton, Marcia, 3 Lassie Forbes, 12–13, 25 “learn by looking” ethnography paradigm, 28, 230n29

Levin, David, 240n17, 242n30 “lie stories”: Yolngu proliferation of, 144–45 lifestyle changes in Gapuwiyak, xxii likanbuy clan designs, 90, 242n25 “lived imagination”: ethnography of, xxiv liya (ritual song), 159–60 Maccassan language, xiv, 227nn2–3 MacDougall, David, xxviii, 49–52, 156–57 macroperceptions of culture, 110 madak (ceremonial singing), 157, 163, 167, 178, 180, 183, 241n11 Madarrpa clan, 238n3, 245n24 madayin (sacra), 72 Maddock, Ken, 110, 235n21 Magowan, Fiona, 28, 241n5, 242n27, 244n18, 245n4 mali (shadow/spirit), 117–18, 126–27 malng’thun (light, opening up), 193, 195, 244n8 Manggalili culture, 230n30 manikay (Yolngu song), 24, 60, 67, 69; access restrictions on, 125–26, 237n10; Bangana’s recordings of, 124–25, 212–14; in Gularri: That Brings Unity, 160, 241n16 “Mantjarr” (clan song), 60–61, 65 Manydjarri, Bill, xv–xviii Mapantasula, 232n10 Marcus, George, 45, 228n17 marijuana (ganja), 21 mari-wartangu (kinship relationship), 163, 175, 241n10 Marks, Laura, xxviii, 36, 50–52, 83, 98, 100, 142, 246n9 Marrawakamirr, Susan, xxix, 121–26, 128, 131–37, 214, 237n10, 238n13, 238n15, 238n18, 238n20 marr wanga rongyrirr (heart/soul returns to country), 224 Masayesva, Victor, Jr., 241n15 matha (tongue/language), 20, 159, 230n23 matrilineal relationships, 161–62, 241n6 Maymuru, Narritjin, 28, 230n30 McIntosh, Ian, 110 McQuire, Scott, 98–99, 128 media scholarship: BRACS program and, 229n11; cultural theory and, 31–33 media technology: “active” media theory and, xxiv; anthropological research on, xxiii–xxv, 227n5; Bangana Wunumgmurra’s vision for, 25–30; changing role in Yolngu culture of, 20–26, 119–37; cultural mediation through, xxv–xxvii, 4–5; film and culture and, 49–50; in Gapuwiyak community, xix–xx, 227n1; increased Yolngu appropriation of, 127–28; mimesis in context of, 85–86, 233n4; ontological shift in Yolngu culture concerning, 126–28; politics of presencing and, 92–116; production’s impact on subject, 18; relationships produced through, 215–17; remembrance through, 129–34; techne and, 146–49 memory: media production and, 120–21, 127–34, 236n2 Mercer, Kobena, 229n18 Merlan, Francesca, 69

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 72, 80, 230n1 Methodist missionaries: Yolngu contact with, xx–xxi, 227n3 Michaels, Eric, xxviii, 2, 6, 16, 229n11, 229n17, 230n31; Aboriginal communities research of, 38, 118, 245n2; on indigenous media, 37, 41, 56, 141, 151, 241n9; photographic protocols of, 97–98, 235n9, 235n11; on sacra, 102–3 microperceptions of culture, 110 Milingimbi community: indigenous media, 9 mimesis: Aboriginal identity and, 245n3; Ancestral presence and, 113–16; Bangana Wunumgmurra’s cultural vision and, 23–26; Benjamin’s “mimetic faculty” theory, 85–86, 233n3; “betweenness” of, 89–90; definitions and theoretical origins of, 83–85; in film production, 172–75; in images, 98–100; intercultural regard and, 221–23; Kayapo Video Project and, 231n15; media technology and, xxvi, 118–19; ontology of, 88–89, 126–28; photography and, 100–104; presencing and, 98–100, 235n18; remembrance and, 130–37; ritual and, 91; sensual scholarship and, xxxii; similitude and, 87–88; Taussig’s research on, 86–87, 233n5; theoretical limits of, 246n8; video broadcasts in Gapuwiyak and, 71–72, 232n10; video technology and, 96–97; Yolngu culture in context of, xxviii, 81–82, 109–10, 199–200, 233n17, 244n17 Mimesis and Alterity, 86–87, 233n5, 234n6 Mimica, Jadran, 57, 231n25 Minh-ha, Trinh, 36, 241n15 Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF), 64, 232n4 mnemonics: in Aboriginal song and dance, 130–34 modernity: Aboriginal identity and, 219–23; Heidegger’s discussion of, 147–49; indigenous media and, 57–58; mimesis and, 85–86, 233n4; reconciliation and redemption with, 212–14; technology and, xxvi–xxvii; Yolngu culture and, 72–74, 144–46, 205–9, 245n20 Moore, Rachel, 36, 47, 50, 52, 231n20 Morphy, Howard, 230n30, 234n9, 235n24, 236n4, 236n25, 236n29, 239n4; on art and politics, 112–14, 240n2, 245n6; on cultural brokering, 28, 30, 110; emergent imagery concept of, 204–5, 245n19; on knowledge systems, 145, 179, 242n29, 244n9; on ngarra, 144; on regenerative effects of ritual, 147; on shimmering effects, 222–25; Yolngu “aesthetic impulse” concept of, 190–92, 243nn5–6; on Yolngu painting, 190–92, 243n4, 244n15, 245n20 Morris, Ian, 237n11 mulkurr (head/mind), 151, 203–4 multi-sited approaches in media anthropology, 3, 228n3 Mulvey, Laura, 36, 230n1 Munn, Nancy, 228n9 Munungurr, Johnny Barrarra, 75–76 Munuyku clan, 163 music: pop music in Gapuwiyak community, 70–72 Myers, Fred, xxvi–xxvii, 196, 236n29

INDEX

263

National Indigenous Media Association of Australia (NIMAA), 5 Native Americans: primitivist images of, 231n16 Navajo filmmaking: cultural interpretation and, 38–41 nayangu (heart), 2045 Ngalambirra, Charlie, 141, 159–71, 175, 186–87, 210–12, 241n10, 242n19, 245n25 Nganampa Anwernekenhe, 239n5 ngarra ceremonies, 138–39, 143–44, 157, 175, 183, 206, 210, 239n4,10–11 Ngurruwuthun, Charlie. See Ngalambirra, Charlie Nichols, Bill, 36, 198–99, 244n16 nonsensuous similarity: Benjamin’s concept of, 86, 118–19, 200–204 Northern Land Council, 23, 28, 103–4, 144, 238n2 nostalgia: Yolngu concepts of, 132, 238n16 O’Brien, Tim, 131 “On the Mimetic Faculty,” 85 ontological mimesis: Yolngu culture and, 88–89 “Open Learning” program, 64 oral culture: electronic broadcasting and, 19 O’Regan, Tom, 40 Oz Aerobics, 64, 66 painting: shimmering effects in, 223–26; significance of touch in Aboriginal painting, 243n32; Yolngu aesthetics in, 190–95; Yolngu restrictions on production of, 114–16, 197–98, 236n29, 244n15 pastoralists: Yolngu contact with, 227n3 perception: cultural brokering and, 6t9–80; filming Gularri and role of, 188–90; film production and issues of, 172–75; knowledge and, 179–82, 243n33; mimetic theory and, xxxii–xxxv; popular media as barrier to, 75–77, 233n12; technology’s impact on, xxvi–xvii; visual anthropology and, 36–37; visual culture and, 35–36; Yolngu concepts of, 242n30; Yolngu media production as tool for, 153–55; Yolngu modes of remembering and, 128–34 Perkins, Rachel, 246n7 phenomenology: cultural theory and, xxv–xxvii photography: as appropriation, 104–6; cultural issues in, xv–xvi, 235n13; exchange relations in, xxviii; funeral restrictions concerning, 120–26, 134–37, 236nn2–4, 237n10–12; invisible presence in, xxxi–xxxv; knowledge exchange from, 110–12; Michaels’ protocols for, 97–98; mimesis and, 100–104; politics and, 92–116; presencing of, 98–116; remembrance through, 129–34; as “soul stealing” in Yolngu culture, 95–97, 234n11–12; Yolngu cultural contradictions concerning, 109–10, 116–19; Yolngu resistance to, xv–xviii, xxxi–xxxv, 94–97, 102–4, 106–8, 234n5; Yolngu words for, 101–4 Pintupi paintings, 236n29 Poetry, Language, Thought, 147, 149 poiesis: Heidegger’s discussion of, 149; in Yolngu culture, 219–23, 225–26

264

INDEX

politics: of anthropological research, 72–74; indigenous media and, 47–49; intercultural regard and, 220–23; intertribal, 237n8; photography as, 92–116; through art, 112–16; visual media as, 42–44, 231n15; in Yolngu video production, 238n2 popular culture: impact on Yolngu culture of, 66–67, 70–72 postcolonialism: barriers to Yolngu culture and, 144, 239n10; culture and imagery and, 115–16; Gapuwiyak community influenced by, 66–67; indigenous media and, 59 Povinelli, Elizabeth A., 69 power relations: in funeral rituals, 237n12; Gapuwiyak perceptions of, 215–17; generational shift in, 144–46; Kayapo Video Project and, 42–44, 231n15; non-Ancestral sources, 245n3; recognition and, 198–99; shimmering effect and, 204–5; visual culture and, 34–35 pre-cinematic visual theory, 53–56 presencing: appropriation and, 105–6; changing Yolngu attitudes toward images and, 123–26; inside/outside knowledge and, 179–82; politics of, 112–16; visual media as, 92–116, 234n2 Pride, Charley, 71 “Primer of Restrictions on Picture-Taking in Traditional Areas of Aboriginal Australia,” 97 primitive art: commodification of, 96, 234n7 processual cultural theory: identity and, 76–77 production of film: cultural interpretation through, 38–41 production of media: cultural resistance through, 46 public clan songs (manikay): broadcasting and recording of, 14–15 puzzles: Yolngu enjoyment of, 244n17 Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, The, 147–49, 240n14 Quigley Down Under, 229n13 Rabinow, Paul, 228n17 radio programs: BRACS program for indigenous media and, 4–5, 228n6; cultural brokering through, 79–80; in Gapuwiyak, 12, 13–15; raypirri broadcasts during, 20, 65, 69, 75–76 Ramingining community, 9 rangga (sacred objects): as cross-cultural symbol, 110–16, 235n22, 236n25, 238n14; knowledge imparted through, 177, 239n9; public format for, 180, 183, 206, 243n31 raypirri: Gapuwiyak community practice of, 12, 14–15; radio broadcasts of, 20, 65, 69 75–76 “realist aesthetics”: indigenous media and, 48–49 reception of film: cultural interpretation through, 38–41 recognition: importance in Yolngu culture of, 198–202, 244n15 reconciliation: video production as tool for, 212–14 Reconciliation Council, 23 redemption: through video production, 212–14

Redmond, Tony, 228n9 relatedness: intercultural exchange and, 113–16; media as tool for, 215–17; Yolngu cultural emphasis on, 198–200; in Yolngu culture, 88–89 remembering, Yolngu modes of, 128–29 Remote Indigenous Broadcasting Services (RIBS), 228n5. See also Broadcasting in Remote Aboriginal Community Scheme “remote” regions: definitions of, 3, 228n4 representational theory: cultural activism and, 45–47; cultural barriers to interpretation and, 53–54; filming of Gularri and, 188–90; Heidegger’s discussion of, 147–49, 152–53; indigenous media and, 47–49; Morphy’s “connection” concept and, 234n9; photographic presencing and, 98–100, 235n18; politics of, 146–49; visual culture and, 34–35; Yolngu modes of remembering and, 128–34 reproduction technology: increased Yolngu appropriation of, 127–28 resistance: media as tool for, 215, 245n1. See also cultural activism revelation: knowledge acquisition through, 196–98; perception and, 200–204 “revelatory regime of value,” 236n29 Right Stuff, The, 229n13 ringgitj (sacred places), 161–62, 166, 169, 174–75, 183, 186, 206, 209, 246n10 Ritharrngu clan, 238n3, 245n24 ritual: clan wells and waterways and, 143–46; intersubjectivity of, 91; media production as tool for, 140–42; mediated relationships through, 151–52; nostalgia components of, 132, 238n16; obliteration of distance through, 180–82; patterning in, 244n18; purposes and agendas in, 209; regenerative effects of, 147; rote performance of, 213–14, 245n26; technology and, 211–12; in Yolngu culture, 88–90, 234n11; Yolngu mortuary rites, 119–21 rom (Yolngu proper practice), 23, 230n26; cultural discourse and, 32; film as appropriation of, 104–6, 170; generational shift in attitudes toward, 145–46, 239n12; intercultural regard and, 220–23; media consumption and, 75–77; modernity and, 210–12; power of, 187; reconciliation and redemption with, 213–14, 245n26 Rony, Fatimah Tobing, 36, 48–49 Ruby, Jay, 39 Russell, Bertrand, 50 Russell, Catherine, 36, 48, 235n18 sacra: public viewing of, 110–12, 181–82, 235n22, 243n32 sameness. See similitude Sarafina, 232n10 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 36, 230n1 satellite communications: BRACS program for indigenous media programs, 4–5, 228n6; in Gapuwiyak, xxi, 227n5 Schutz, Alfred, xxxv seeing. See perception self-determination: cultural theory and, 10 Selleck, Tom, 229n13

semiotics: indigenous media production and, 39–41 Sen, Ivan, 246n7 sensual scholarship: cultural theory and, xxx–xxxv; film theory and, 50–51; mimesis and, 85–86; Yolngu culture and, 217–19, 245nn4–5 shimmering effect: Ancestral sources seen through, 223–26; bir’yun concept and, 193; in Gularri, 202–5; Morphy’s discussion of, 222; in Warlpiri painting, 243n32; in Yolngu painting, 190–92, 243n5 Shohat, Ella, 70 Silverman, Kaja, 230n2 similitude: mimesis and, 87–89, 100–104, 118–19, 234n7; theme of, in Gularri: That Brings Unity, 239n4; Yolngu embrace of, 199–202. See also difference singing: power as manifest through, 235n20 Skin of the Film, The (Marks), 52 Sobchack, Vivian, 58, 77, 98, 118, 129 social process anthropology: Yolngu culture and, 67 “soul stealing”: photography as, 95–98 Spencer, Baldwin, 235n9 Spitulnik, Debra, xxiii, 231n26 Spivak, Gayatri, 231n24 Stam, Robert, 70 Stanner, W. E. H., 49–50, 236n25 Stoller, Paul, 228n13 storytelling: generational shift in versions of, 144–46; in Gularri: That Brings Unity narrative, 169–70; importance of witnesses in, 163, 165, 241n12; media production as tool for, 140–42; in Yolngu culture, 162, 241n7 Strathern, Marilyn, 36 subjectivity: indigenous media and role of, 58–59 “Sultans of Swing,” 60 Sutton, Peter, 107–9, 156–57 Sydney Morning Herald, 103–4 synaesthesia: in Yolngu culture, 217–18, 245n5 Tamisari, Franca, 88–90, 178, 182, 228n9, 240n4, 245n5 Taussig, Michael, xxvi–xxviii, xxxii, 86–89, 233n5, 234n6; intercultural regard and, 220; on mimetic production, 102, 180, 205, 235n18 techne: bir’yun concept and, 195; Heidegger’s discussion of, 148–50, 240n16; revelation through, 146–49; Yolngu video production and, 138–55 television: Gularri: That Brings Unity broadcasts on, 182–84; mediated relationships in, 150–52; role in Yolngu culture of, 64, 71, 74–77, 232n3; Yolngu culture and impact of, 211–12 “temporal mask” in Aboriginal culture, 240n4 Thomson, Donald, xvii, 67, 192–93, 227n4 Through Navajo Eyes, 38–41 time and space: satellite communications technology’s impact on, 227n5 Toner, Peter, 28, 230n30, 237n10, 244n6 Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association (TEABBA), 7–9; Aboriginal identity and,

INDEX

265

245n3; Bangana Wunungmurra as chairman, 230n25, 237n9; Gapuwiyak BRACS project and, 13–15, 26–30, 229n21; radio programming by, 61, 65 topography: as cultural source, 161, 241n5 touch: cultural significance in Aboriginal painting of, 243n32 trace: Biddle’s discussion of, 90, 126, 194 transnational aspects of media identification, 72–74 Tree Leaf Talk, 232n27 truth, cultural relativity of, 176–77, 196–98; bir’yun (light and movement) and, 192, 244n9 Turner, Neil, 5–6, 56 Turner, Terence, xxviii, 2, 38, 42, 55 “Turning, The,” 240n14 Two Laws, 141 Tylor, E. B., 86 “uncritical cultural essentialism”: indigenous media production and, 44 unemployment: impact in Gapuwiyak of, xxii unity: video production as tool for, 143–44, 239n11 “unrepresentable senses”: Marks’ theory of, 51 value-laden terminology: indigenous media interpretation and, 56 video technology: Ancestral power and, 211–12; Dreaming stories recorded with, 93–95; empowerment through, 42–44; ethnographic research and, 228n15; funeral ceremony productions using, 124–26, 237n9; modern subjectivity and, 54–56; presence in Gapuwiyak, 12–15, 229n19; replay and reproductive potential of, 243n31; representational theory and, 99–100; revelatory nature of, 197–98; video broadcasts in Gapuwiyak, 61, 64, 71–72, 74–77; Yolngu discomfort with, 96–97; Yolngu video production, 138–55 visible difference: indigenous media and theory of, 48–49 Visions of Modernity, 98 visual anthropology: as appropriation, 104–6; cultural dimensions of perception and, 36–37; funeral restrictions on images and, 120–21, 236n2; indigenous media and, 37–38; Kayapo Video Project and, 42–44, 231n15; photographic protocols for, 97–98 visual communication models: indigenous media production and, 39–41 visual culture: “big picture” approach in, 202–5; decline in Balanda dominance of, 127–28; ethnographic study and, xxxiii; Heidegger’s discussion of, 231n23; theories concerning, 35–36; Yolngu concepts of, 179, 242n30 von Sturmer, John, 25, 180 Walkman: Yolngu remembrance practices and, 130, 238n13 Wanapingu, Roy Wuygumbi, 65 wangarr (Ancestral past), 190, 192–93, 198, 206 Wangurri clan, 238n3 Warlpiri culture, 2, 6, 37–41, 151, 241n9; body

266

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painting in, 90; future envisioned by, 245n2; kuruwarri practices of, 242n25; photographic transgressions in, 97–98, 235n11; shimmering effect in paintings of, 243n32 Warlpiri Media Association, 41, 141, 231n14 Warner, W. Lloyd, 28, 30, 67, 142–44, 238n17, 239n9 Warramiri clan, 209, 238n3, 243n34, 245n24 Warrkwarrkpuyngu Yolngu Radio and Video, 13 Warrumungu tribe, 235n9 water and wells, centrality in Yolngu culture of, 142–46, 186–90, 239n8, 243n1; “big picture” interpretations and, 205–9 Watson, Christine, 228n9 Weiner, James, 46, 52–57, 133, 240n15 Wessel Islands: Gularri shooting in, 168–69, 183, 243n34, 244n24 Western culture: influences in Gularri shooting of, 167, 188–90, 241n15, 243nn2–3; memory in, 131–34; photographic presencing in, 98–100. See also Balanda “Who Told You We Wanted to Make Our Own TV?”, 229n17 Wilfred, Nipper, 60 Williams, Raymond, 231n9 witnesses: importance in Yolngu narrative of, 163, 165, 241n12 women in Yolngu culture: barriers to knowledge systems for, 236n28; ceremonial restrictions on, 139; funeral restrictions concerning, 135–37, 236n3, 238n20; resistance to photography by, 94, 109, 234n5 Women of the Sun: Alinta—The Flame, 11, 229n13, 229n15 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The,” xxvi, 85–86, 233n4 “worldings” of indigenous media, 54–56 Worth, Sol, 38–39 wungili (visible projection), 117–19, 126–27, 171 Wunungmurra, Bangana, xxvii–xxviii; on audience practices, 194–95; Balanda expertise of, 124–26, 237n8; “big picture” vision of, 206–9, 221–23; bir’yun discussed by, 191–93, 244n6,11–12; as BRACS cultural advisor, 19–26; broadcasts of Gularri and, 183–84, 243n34; cultural barriers raised by, 144, 239n10; cultural brokering by, 79–80, 109–10, 142; cultural vision of, 26–30, 71–74, 139–40, 205–12, 219–23, 245n6; death of, xxix–xxx, 30, 119–37, 213–14; decline in Yolngu culture discussed by, 144–46; Dreaming stories project and, 93–95; exile from Gapuwiyak, 22–23, 230n24; on Galarrwuy case, 103–4; as Gularri director, 162–78, 188–90, 242n24; Heidegger’s philosophy and vision of, 149–50, 240n15; kinship relations of, 162–63; knowledge systems managed by, 179–82, 242n30; legacy of, 216–17; media production advocated by, 109–10, 156–57; narrative omissions in Gularri and, 186–87; Nganampa Anwernekenhe program and, 239n5; perception in cultural theory of, 77; photography discussed by, 106–8, 116; photos of, xxxi; reconciliation and redemption for, 212–14; restrictions on art

production discussed by, 115; on revelatory aspects of Yolngu art, 197–98; songs recorded by, 60; on “soul stealing,” 95–97, 101–4; video production by, 138–55, 238nn2–3 Wunungmurra, Frank Gambali, 12–15, 18, 25, 27, 229n13, 229n15; Bangana Wunungmurra and, 19; Gularri project and, 165, 241n13; radio programming by, 60–61, 64–69, 80–82, 217, 245n3Wunungmurra, Mickey, 237n10 Wunungmurra, Susan. See Marrawakamirr, Susan Wunungmurra family, xv–xviii, 121–26, 237n10; “Don Burke video” and, 240n1 yidaki, 76, 80, 108, 142, 217–18, 246n10 yindi (important names), 157–58, 178, 180, 218, 240n3 Yirritja clans, 138, 224, 238n2, 240n4, 241n6, 243n4; in Gularri film, 143–44, 157, 160–61, 183 238n2, 240n4, 241n6, 243n4 Yirrkala community, 10, 229n14; art production in, 114; funeral restrictions on photography in, 236n4 Yolngu Boy, 242n20 Yolngu culture: aesthetics of painting in, 190–92; art as advocacy in, 112–16, 235n24; auditoryvisual co-dependence in, 245n4; authenticity in, 219–23; burial practices in, 237n5; clanbased analysis of, 232n7; contemporary pressures on, xxi–xxii, 68–69; continuity in, xxi; cross-cultural practices in, 24–26, 66–67; cultural brokering in, 28–30, 75–80, 109–16; death rituals in, xxix–xxx; deferral and mediation in, 25, 230n28; ethnographic study of, xxxiv–xxxv; European impact on, xxi,

227nn2–3; film’s impact on, 229n13; funeral rituals in, 119–37, 236nn2–4, 237n5; in Gapuwiyak, 9–11; Gove Land Rights case and, 236n25; in Gularri: That Brings Unity, 11–172, 140–42; intercultural space in, 59; intersubjectivity in, xxx–xxxv, 88–89; knowledge imperative in, 196–98; linguistic borders of, 232n8; matha languages of, 20, 159, 230n23; media production by, xix–xx, 15–17, 19–26, 80–82; media terminology in, 1; mimesis in, xxviii, 83–85, 87–89; phenomenological aspects of, xxvii, 240n19; photographic documentation of, xiii–xviii, 117–19, 227n4; photography resisted by, 18, 95–97, 102–4, 106–8; popular culture influences on, 15, 73–74; public creativity locus in, 27; puzzles in, 244n17; remembering practices in, 128–34, 238n17–18; restrictions on art production in, 114–16, 119, 236n29; role of media in, xxviii, 64, 78–80, 232n3; similitude embraced in, 199–202; terminology for photography in, 101–4; Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association and, 9; traditional anthropological research on, 67–69; video production in, 138–55; wells and waterways central to, 142–46; Wunungmurra’s vision of, 26–30; Yirritja links to, 161–62, 241n6 Yolngu Matha Dictionary, 244n8 Yothu Yindi Foundation, 242n20 Yothu Yindi music videos, 10, 28, 141, 229n14 Yuendumu community: media production in, 4–5 Yunupingu, Galarrwuy, 28, 103–4 Yunupingu, Mandawuy, 28 Zorc, R. David, 244n8

INDEX

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a former radio and television producer, is a research fellow and director of the Ethnographic Media Lab in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University.

JENNIFER DEGER,