Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
Die Unambal: Ein Stamm in Nordwest-Australien . A ndreas L ommel
Adam in Ochre: Inside Aboriginal Australia . C olin S impson
Djanggawul: An Aboriginal Religious Cult of North-eastern Arnhem Land . R onald M. B erndt
The First Australians . R onald M. B erndt and C atherine H. B erndt
Arnhem Land: Its History and Its People . R onald M. B erndt and C atherine H. B erndt     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
Applied Anthropology: The Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Industry . Jon Altman
Marketing Aboriginal Art in the 1990s . Jon Altman and Luke Taylor     

Film Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
Emu Ritual at Ruguri. Filmed in 1966 and 1967 by R oger S andall , for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies with N icholas P eterson as consultant.
Walbiri Ritual at Ngama. Filmed in 1966 by R oger S andall , for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies with N icholas P eterson as consultant.     

BOOK REVIEW

Book reviewed in this article:
An Historical Legend of the Zapotecs. P aul R adin .
Aboriginal Population of Northwestern Mexico. C arl S auer .     

Myth and Ontology in Aboriginal Australian Society

Time Before Morning: Art and Myth of the Australian Aborigines . Louis A. Allen .
Australian Aboriginal Mythology . L. R. Hiatt , ed.
The Australian Aborigines: A Portrait of Their Society . Kenneth Maddock .     

Aboriginal fire management in south-eastern Australia: aims and frequency

Aim To examine the purpose of burning by Aborigines of south‐eastern Australia. Location South‐eastern Australia. Methods A survey of the ethnography and ecology relating to Aboriginal fire. Results Ecologists have only recently acknowledged the past history of Aboriginal burning. Its purpose was to maximise plant and animal food resources. Main Conclusions The seasonal timing and frequency of Aboriginal burning is embedded in various ecosystems.     

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

Australian Aboriginal Social Organization . David H. Turner.
The Affinal Relationship System: A New Approach to Kinship and Marriage among the Australian Aborigines at Port Keats . Aslaug and Johannes Falkenberg.     

Unstable relations: a critical appraisal of indigeneity and environmentalism in contemporary Australia

The 1970s witnessed the emergence of a protest‐based environmental movement in Australia. We outline here the history of the unstable meeting of environmentalism and Aboriginal interests, before turning to Marcia Langton's recent critique of the progressive ‘green left’ in Australia. 1 We summarise Langton's argument: environmentalists would deny Aboriginal groups the benefits that flow from native title‐related agreements; environmentalists live at luxurious distance from the realities of remote and rural Aboriginal poverty and social problems; environmentalists exalt ‘noble savages’. We critique these claims on the basis that they pay inadequate attention to the structural inequities that underpin the market in native title interests and, further, deny the reality that Aboriginal groups often seek to form strategic alliances with green groups, arguing for conservation of their country on their own—or shared—terms. We argue that any appraisal of the present status of ‘green‐black’ relations needs to consider these factors seriously.     

Christianity in Aboriginal Australia revisited

Despite the substantial Aboriginalist literature on Christianity, Aboriginal Australia has been largely peripheral to the emerging subfield ‘the anthropology of Christianity.’ In the introduction to this collection of essays, we argue that the reasons for its exclusion include Christianity’s late arrival, its limited fortune in the colonial encounter, and its continued marginal role in organising the values of Aboriginal life. However, it is precisely because of the rather unremarkable history of conversion in Aboriginal Australia that our volume can inform current debates in the general anthropological literature on Christianity. As the essays concentrate on Protestant forms of Christianity in remote Australia, we address the ways in which Aboriginal converts experience what are often argued to be the common features of modern Protestantism, namely, transcendence, rupture and belief.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:
The Epidemic of 1830–1833 in California and Oregon . S. F. C ook
The Aboriginal Population of the San Joaquin Valley, California . S. F. C ook     

Ngadju kala: Australian Aboriginal fire knowledge in the Great Western Woodlands

Indigenous fire knowledge offers significant benefits for ecosystem management and human livelihoods, but is threatened worldwide because of disruption of customary practices. In Australia, the historical prevalence and characteristics of Aboriginal burning are intensely debated, including arguments that Aboriginal burning was frequent across the continent. Frequent burning is supported by contemporary Aboriginal knowledge and practice in some regions, but in southern Australia evidence is typically limited to historical and ecological records. Towards characterizing Aboriginal fire regimes in southern Australia, we collaborated with Ngadju people from the globally significant Great Western Woodlands in south‐western Australia to document their fire knowledge. We used workshops, site visits, interviews and occupation mapping to aid knowledge sharing. Consistent with the established significance of Aboriginal fire in Australia, planned fires were important in Ngadju daily life and land management. However, Ngadju use of fire was characterized by its selectivity rather than its ubiquity. Specifically, Ngadju described only highly targeted planned burning across extensive eucalypt woodlands and sandplain shrublands. By contrast, frequent planned burning was described for resource‐rich landscape elements of more restricted extent (granite outcrop vegetation, grasslands and coastal scrub). Overall, Ngadju fires are likely to have resulted in subtle but purposeful direct effects on the vegetation and biota. However the extent to which they collectively constrained large, intense wildfires remains unclear. Ngadju demonstrated a predictive knowledge of the ecological consequences of burning, including attention to fine‐scale needs of target organisms, and application of diverse fire regimes. These are consistent with the recently proposed concept that Aboriginal burning was guided by ‘templates’ targeting different resources, although diverse regimes predominantly reflect edaphically driven vegetation patterns rather than template‐driven use of fire to create resource diversity. We conclude that Ngadju fire knowledge fills an important gap in understanding Aboriginal fire regimes in southern Australia, highlighting a novel balance between frequent and constrained use of fire.     

New Millennium,New Anthrozoös

Abstract

Published eyewitness accounts and stories from Aboriginal Australians are used to provide an overview of the geographical extent and characteristics of cooperative fishing between Aboriginal Australians and dolphins in eastern Australia. These sources indicate that cooperative fishing was geographically widespread in eastern Australia, involved both bottlenose dolphins and orcas, and had a significance (emotional and spiritual) to Aboriginal people beyond the acquisition of food. These fishing interactions represent both context and precedent for the economic and emotional objectives of contemporary human–dolphin interactions such as dolphin provisioning.     

Aborigines and Tin Mining in North Queensland: A Case Study in the Anthropology of Contact History

Much of the 'new history'of Aboriginal contact with Europeans in Australia lacks an adequate socio-cultural understanding of Aboriginal society and its diversity. Attempts to produce overall models of contact have obscured, too, the diversity of European activity and its impact. The outcome has been too hollow and passive a view of Aboriginal responses to Australian colonial situations. The aim of the present paper is to examine, from an anthropological perspective, a particular contact relationship: tin-mining and Kuku-Nyungkul Aborigines in southeast Cape York Peninsula, north Queensland, between 1885 and 1940. Iargue that it is only through such case studies that we can gain adequate insight into Aboriginal perspective' on colonial history.     

Recognition of Aboriginal rights, interests and values in river research and management: Perspectives from northern Australia

Summary Aboriginal people perceive land and water as equal components of country, and hold distinct perspectives on water relating to identity and attachment to place, environmental knowledge, resource security, and the exercise of custodial responsibilities to manage interrelated parts of customary estates. This paper documents Aboriginal perspectives from certain areas in northern Australia, defined as the region of tropical savannas stretching from Townsville to Broome, and offers a number of suggestions for improving current knowledge of Aboriginal values and Aboriginal participation rates in water and catchment management. The paper highlights the cultural significance of rivers and water in selected northern regions, and provides a preliminary outline of research and management priorities as determined by key north Australian Aboriginal land management organizations. Priorities include developing the capacity for collaborative aquatic resource management, conservation of traditional ecological knowledge, riparian resource inventories and threat assessment, as well as improved Aboriginal participation in catchment management and water policy. Although there is a strong north Australian focus to this paper, the issues raised are relevant to water and natural resource management policy throughout Australia.     

Categories of race: technologies of knowing and governing Australian aborigines†

This article documents the first decades of the work of the Aboriginal Protection Board in Victoria, Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, as it oversees the establishment of mission stations to gather up Aboriginal peoples and provide protection from settler violence. It augments existing accounts of white settler governance of Aboriginal peoples by examining the social and historical conditions for the emergence of separations and distinctions between Aboriginal peoples through shifting governmental versions of the ‘Aboriginal problem’. The production of race-based categories of persons is highlighted in the State's management of the Aboriginal children through the mission systems and their effects on Aboriginal ties to community and identity.     

Book Review*

Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange . By Annette B. Weiner. ‘Elota's Story: The Life and Times of a Solomon Islands Big Man . Edited by Roger M. Keesing. Birds of My Kalam Country: Mnmon Yad Kalam Yakt . By Ian Saem Majnep and Ralph Bulmer. Australian Aboriginal Concepts . Edited by L. R. Hiatt. Killing Me Softly: The Destruction of a Heritage . Phyl and Noel Wallace. Thomas Nelson (Australia). Mediterranean Family Structures . Edited by J. G. Peristiany. Class, Power and Ideology in Ghana: the Railway-men of Secondi . By Richard Jeffries. Language and Thought. Anthropological Issues . Edited by W. C. McCormack and S. A. Wurm. The Anthropology of the Body . Edited by John Blacking. Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction . Edited by Esther N. Goody. Ethics in Social and Behavioural Research . By Edward Diener and Rick Crandall. Urbanization in the Americas from its Beginnings to the Present . Edited by R. P. Schaedel, J. E. Hardoy and N. S. Kinzer. Prehistory of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea . By Virginia Drew Watson and J. David Cole. Fire and Hearth: A Study of Aboriginal Usage and European Usurpation in South-western Australia . By Sylvia J. Hallam. Art in Society . Edited by Michael Greenhalgh and Vincent Megaw. Form in Indigenous Art: Schematization in the Art of Aboriginal Australia and Prehistoric Europe . Edited by Peter J. Ucko. Stone Tools as Cultural Markers: Change, Evolution and Complexity . Edited by R. V. S. Wright. Early Hydraulic Civilisation in Egypt. A Study in Cultural Ecology . By Karl W. Butzer.     

Rejecting the Rainbow Serpent: An Aboriginal Artist's Choice of the Christian God as Creator1

In this paper, I illustrate the way one Aboriginal artist challenged what he perceived as an essentialised concept of Aboriginality, by rejecting rainbow serpent iconography. The motivations for this rejection were the artist's strong belief in the Christian God as creator and his reaction against New Age representations of Aboriginality in which the rainbow serpent signifies Aboriginal spirituality and is posited as the single creator for all of Aboriginal Australia. A conflict arose at the artist's gallery when he refused to exhibit a rainbow serpent painting by another Aboriginal artist. Publicised in the local newspaper, the rejection of these artworks started a brief public debate about the role of Christianity in Aboriginal culture. The various positions adopted by the Aboriginal protagonists highlight the complex processes of negotiation, dialogue and debate surrounding diverse constructions of identity.     

A Review of: “Images: A Reader”

Photographs are a ubiquitous feature of Aboriginal life in Northeastern Australia, with images of relatives being prominently displayed in most Aboriginal houses. This display of photographs is tied to a form of distributed personhood that draws on photographs to create a sense of social immediacy in the absence of close kin. This sense of immediacy also occurs in relation to photographs of the dead, giving these images a particular force for Aboriginal viewers. But further consideration of this force of photographic images suggests that they should be treated neither as things nor as aspects of persons, despite their seeming ability to manifest agency in Aboriginal life-worlds.