The Australian Aborigines and the Human Past

Indifference to events which may actually have taken place between the Dreamtime and European contact is commonly held to be a salient feature of traditional Aboriginal thought. This contention contains a significant element of truth but it may have been exaggerated by some anthropologists. Structural-functionalist emphases on myth as charter led not only to the rejection of historical interpretations of Aboriginal myths which were ill-considered and naïve, but also to an excessive neglect of potentially fruitful attempts to extract from myths clues about post-Dreamtime experiences. This neglect has unduly strengthened the view that Aboriginal thought is entirely sui generis and that its supposed indifference to human history is an inescapable cultural attribute of Aboriginality. A sketch is offered for a reappraisal of the significance of Aboriginal myths for Aboriginal history.     

Labrador metis ethnogenesis*

Recent claims to Aboriginal (native or indigenous) identity include new peoples who may not have had an historical consciousness as distinct peoples. This paper presents such a case from Canada, the recent ethnogenesis of the Labrador Metis. These Metis claim Inuit ancestry. Their claim is opposed by Labrador's two established Aboriginal associations and government. Yet Labrador Metis have incorporated under the Labrador Metis Association, filed a land claim with the Canadian government, and are pressing their case before the public. The paper discusses how the Metis are attempting to negotiate Aboriginality, some of the sociocultural consequences of Metis ethnic mobilization, and why Metis are claiming to be Aboriginal at this time.     

Mythologising culture

This second part of Mythologising Culture examines the responses of Aboriginal people in western Sydney to the valorizing of Aboriginality by the Australian nation. As Aboriginal culture has become the object of restitution, regret and reconciliation, Aboriginal people are being called upon to represent and produce Culture in iconic forms such as painting, dancing and other performances and representations. These activities, often depicted as remedial, are seldom initiated and controlled by Aboriginal people, but rather disturb cultural adjustments and established social relations. I discuss a range of responses elicited by these post‐colonial activities, from enthusiastic embrace to the rejection of state sponsored culture. Further, I consider the structural implications of suburban Aborigines being offered the chance to distance themselves from the anonymous suburban poor.     

Mythologising culture

In western Sydney, I found an extreme version of what I propose is a national Aboriginal mythopoeia, that is, a powerful system of beliefs and practices in relation to Aboriginal people and culture. A reified Aboriginal culture is promoted at institutional sites and in reconciliation discourses that evokes the presence of something precious and mysterious that must be re‐read into local Aboriginal people, but which assiduously avoids their actual circumstances and subjectivities. The awkward relationships and avoidances evident in a western Sydney reconciliation group are posited as a benign example of this mythology, born of a ‘sentimental politics’ of regret and reparation at work in Australia. Unity between the state and civil society is evident here, thus requiring an analysis that goes beyond a critique of government policies and programmes as intentional and rational, and grasps the nature of the widespread desire for Aboriginality. Through ethnographic attention to the actual relationships of Indigenous people and others, anthropologists can avoid being complicit in this regressive, separatist construction.     

An Integrated Unit

In this article, the author analyzes Arthur Efland's Art and Cognition, which advocates study of the visual arts for its cognitive benefits. The author argues that Efland's cognitive premises are largely sound but that his specific recommendations often belie the general principles he espouses. Efland focuses on the interpretation of baffling works that deliberately flout traditional views of what constitutes a work of art. He thereby ignores his own emphasis on the role of categorization in human cognition. Moreover, although he stresses the cognitive importance of individual goals and intentions, Efland favors sociopolitical interpretations. Such interpretations disregard contradictory evidence of the artist's likely intentions and downplay the personal value of art. The author views Efland's emphasis on visual metaphor as inconsistent with his recognition that the visual arts possess a distinctive immediacy and directness.     

Aboriginal youth,hip hop and the politics of identification

This paper explores the identity work taking place around contemporary subcultural hip hop amongst Australian indigenous youth in two disadvantaged urban locations. Previous work on Aboriginal hip hop has been attentive to the interface between tradition and modernity. However, existing scholarship has lacked a deeper ethnographic understanding of the dynamics between youth and parent cultures, and the tensions between the two generations. This article is based on research with young hip hop enthusiasts, community activists and educators. It deals with the cultural politics of identification and sees hip hop practice as associated with a process in which Aboriginality is crystallized as a principal affiliation and as offering an account for experiences of social marginalization. Far from being an outlet for expressing a prior or essential Aboriginality, hip hop as cultural practice is associated with the production of particular identifications.     

The artist Carl Abrahams and the cosmopolitan work of centring and peripheralizing the self⋆

The article looks at the work and life of Jamaican artist and ‘citizen of the world’ Carl Abrahams. Responding to Gell's argument that art should be thought of as a ‘technology of enchantment’, and to a wider approach that seeks to explain art by reference to cultural context, the article takes Abrahams's own Weltkenntnis, or world‐knowledge, as its focus. The Weltkenntnis of an artist, or indeed any person, is often at odds both with their surrounding cultural situation and the technical means they have to express themselves. It is never entirely possible to reduce a particular form of self‐expression either to the wider worldview or to a particular set of technical effects. The article explores the conceptual tensions involved in Abrahams's claims to be a cosmopolitan artist and his work of centring and peripheralizing himself in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica.     

Sorcery and the dividual in Australia

In this article I present an analysis of Australian Aboriginal sorcery, applying concepts from the New Melanesian Ethnography. My starting‐point is Keen's approach to magic among the Yolngu, which engages Strathern's concept of the dividual, but which focuses on the extension of partible aspects of the person in space and time. Building on Keen's analysis, I draw on ethnographic material from Cape York Peninsula to argue that Aboriginal sorcery might be understood not only as the extension of partible aspects of the person, but also in terms of the interplay between the internal divisions and external connections of dividual personhood, linking that interplay to the various invasive techniques understood to be employed by sorcerers. On that basis, I argue that, in the central Peninsula, sorcery beliefs are best understood as forms of ‘indigenous analysis’ (Strathern) or ‘naïve critique’ (Kapferer) that simultaneously articulate and obscure the anxieties that inhere in postcolonial Aboriginal sociality.     

The Activity Approach : New Lines of Research

The emotional reactions of an actor that resemble those experienced by the character he is portraying serve as an index of the artist's penetration into the sphere of the needs (motives) of that dramatic character, an indicator of the naturalness, verisimilitude, and accuracy of the behavior ofthat character, which is the most important condition for fruitful creativity in the theater [6]. The ability to transform one's own artistic, creative need (a "meta-meta task," in the terminology of K. S. Stanislavskii) into the motives of the behavior of the portrayed person, into his "metatask," is an extremely important aspect of an actor's talent and also of his professionalism [2,8]. This ability is closely related to a personality trait that may, very provisionally, be designated by the term emotionality, by which is meant the ability to respond forcefully to emotion-producing stimuli. In an actor, emotional responses to the reproduction in the mind of corresponding emotionally colored situations assumes special importance [1,13]. The number of studies employing objective recording of the physiological changes accompanying an actor's emotional responses is still very limited [1,3,5,9,10,15].     

The ‘Spirit’ of the Thing: The Boundaries of Aboriginal Economic Relations at Australian Common Law

Aboriginal economic relations have been misconstrued as a type of primitive exchange in at least one native title case discussed in this paper. The pursuit by Aboriginal native title claimants of recognition at law of customary economic rights as inherent in, or an adjunct of, native title rights failed in Yarmirr and Others v. Northern Territory of Australia and Others (1998) 156 ALR 370 (the ‘Croker Island case’) for several reasons. The applicant's native title was found to be non‐exclusive of other interests, and a right to trade in resources of the sea was rejected. This case was argued in part by relying on historical material regarding Macassan trading arrangements. The profound alterity of Aboriginal relationships among persons and things, as the Croker Island evidence of property and trade relations demonstrates, have been re‐constituted in legal discourse as an absence of economic relations. In this paper, we argue that there is no sound basis for the distinction made between commercial and non‐commercial native title rights, whether in the Native Title Act 1993 (Commonwealth of Australia), or in recent judicial reasoning. We contend that native title rights and interests constitute a sui generis species of property relations that enable economic rights as conceived in Aboriginal tradition and custom to circulate in the modern market. Aboriginal customary economic relations of and between Aboriginal groupings are markedly distinct from, yet not incommensurable with, the normative conception of economic relations in the Australian market. We argue that a reformulation of the current Australian legal ideas about economic life is necessary for the recognition of Aboriginal economic institutions in native title claims and other economic arenas.     

Race,privilege and the growing class divide

When Wilson argued back in 1978 that by the mid-twentieth century social class mattered more for getting ahead than race, he launched a rigorous scholarly debate about the relative importance of race and class that continues to this day. Since the 1970s, the gap between the black middle class and the black poor has widened, lending credibility to Wilson's claim, but also raising new research questions for scholars to ponder. In this essay, I suggest that extending Wilson's model to include a new period, encompassing the last twenty-five years, would help to illuminate more recent structural advantages that contribute to class privilege in American society as well an emerging fault line within the black middle class.     

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.     

Sickening Bodies: How Racism and Essentialism Feature in Aboriginal Women's Discourse about Health1

In the last decade there has been much interest in the concepts of ‘racism’ and ‘essentialism’ and the ways in which these notions have been appropriated by Aboriginal people to demarcate a specifically Aboriginal space (Cowlishaw 1986; Lattas 1993; Langton 1981; Morris 1988; Muecke 1992). Central to these concerns is the issue of black/white relations and the specificities of racial oppression. Following these concerns in this article I explore the nexus between the metaphorical dismemberment of self and the corporeal dismemberment of sickness which is reflected in the high mortality rates and disease patterns of Aboriginal people. I extend Fanon's concept that racism has the power to alienate ‘a man of colour’ from his own self-image to argue that it more than metaphorically breaks the human body (Fanon 1991). I provide a window into a much neglected area of research: how notions of illness and social relatedness are constructed in particular socio-historical circumstances. I explore the meanings of illness as expressed at the level of community and as a form of embodiment associated with unequal colonial relations. I focus on indigenous exegeses which articulate Aboriginal women's experience of illness and their sense of identity. I draw on the work of Leder (1990) to foreground a phenomenological view where selfhood is continually confronted by circumstances that make present the ‘body’ as a ‘sharp and searing presence threatening the self’. I also apply Sansom's (1982) model of illness and the significance of carers in an Aboriginal community to demonstrate a world-view of personhood that is diffused with other persons and things rather than a world-view that entails a highly individuated and bounded self. In this world-view adequate healing requires a reconstitution of social relations and a re-ordering of the racialised status quo.     

Anthropology,Politics and the Changing World of Aboriginal Australians

Essentialism has become a fundament of Aboriginal activism in modern Australia, with the result that informed, first-hand empirical observations of anthropologists who chronicle the deterioration of life in many Australian Aboriginal communities tend not to be taken seriously simply because their authors are not ethnically ‘Aboriginal’. This problem has contributed to a relative absence of analysis of the economic history of Aboriginal Australians, fostering instead an approach that prioritises the political and cultural rights of indigenous people above the kinds of life-enhancing circumstances that are necessary for them to participate in the economy and create wealth. This kind of essentialism has also resulted in a disregard for the rights of indigenous people as individuals, rather than as communities seeking self-determination, especially with regard to the rights of women and children. The work of Professor Ronald M. Berndt and Dr Catherine Berndt should serve as an example for today's anthropologists in encouraging broader expert participation in debates on indigenous disadvantage, despite the threat of admonishment or criticism by Aboriginal rights activists wielding the weapon of racial priority or essentialism.     

Sir William Jardine and the Ichnology of Annandale

ABSTRACT

Sir William Jardine was a polymath; he was one of the world's foremost ornithologists, and ichthyologists, as well as a knowledgeable geologist, entomologist and botanist. He was a talented and skilled artist and engraver and a keen hunter and fisherman. He was also the author of the book The Ichnology of Annandale that represents the first book ever published on the subject of ichnology. It was here in this volume that Jardine coined the word ichnology. It is also one of the rarest ichnology publications, as it is believed that only 135–140 copies were ever printed. This volume remains the most lavishly illustrated book in vertebrate ichnology literature. This paper discusses the work of Jardine, the finds from his estate and his role in defining ichnology as a science.     

Legitimising Belief: Identity Politics,Utility, Strategies of Concealment,and Rationalisation in Australian Aboriginal Religion

The ‘women's business’ on Hindmarsh Island has had spectacular success although vital evidence had been kept secret ‘in a sealed envelope’. This paper, drawing primarily on the author's own encounter with the native title claims procedure, discusses various formative processes involved in the contemporary construction of Aboriginal indigeneity in which religious belief is heavily valorised. Subjected to a process of rationalisation for a long time, religious traditions are now being used as a strategic resource in native title claims. In the endeavour to make best possible use of the jurisprudential opportunity offered, the maintenance of secrecy and cloaking of information emerges as an important strategy. Secrecy clearly is an integral part of traditional Aboriginal culture. However, cloaking in fact may not only privilege esoteric contents, but merge with attempts of deliberate deception. Yet, in itself this too might be considered an Aboriginal cultural tradition.     

Haeckel und das Schöne in der Natur

The influential evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), well‐known as a highly disputatious defender of Darwin's work, sought to unite science, philosophy, ethics and art in an all‐embracing world view that he called ?monism“. In this essay his ideas and reflections on aesthetics in nature and their application are reviewed. According to Haeckel, art should be based on motifs that are to be found in the diversity of life forms, which represent, in his opinion, the highest imagineable specification in aesthetics. Beauty in nature should open men's way to nature, and man must not place himself in opposition to nature. Haeckel himself, who was also a gifted artist, helped find the way to such an attitude by publishing thousands of drawings of organisms, mostly microscopically small marine species. His illustrations made organismic structures accessible that a broader public was previously almost unaware of. With these representations he was most influential in almost all areas of art around the turn of the century, including architecture, interior design, painting, glass art and furniture design.     

Preparation and use of plant medicines for farmers' health in Southwest Nigeria: socio-cultural,magico-religious and economic aspects

Background

Little is known about the use of bush medicine and traditional healing among Aboriginal Australians for their treatment of cancer and the meanings attached to it. A qualitative study that explored Aboriginal Australians' perspectives and experiences of cancer and cancer services in Western Australia provided an opportunity to analyse the contemporary meanings attached and use of bush medicine by Aboriginal people with cancer in Western Australia

Methods

Data collection occurred in Perth, both rural and remote areas and included individual in-depth interviews, observations and field notes. Of the thirty-seven interviews with Aboriginal cancer patients, family members of people who died from cancer and some Aboriginal health care providers, 11 participants whose responses included substantial mention on the issue of bush medicine and traditional healing were selected for the analysis for this paper.

Results

The study findings have shown that as part of their healing some Aboriginal Australians use traditional medicine for treating their cancer. Such healing processes and medicines were preferred by some because it helped reconnect them with their heritage, land, culture and the spirits of their ancestors, bringing peace of mind during their illness. Spiritual beliefs and holistic health approaches and practices play an important role in the treatment choices for some patients.

Conclusions

Service providers need to acknowledge and understand the existence of Aboriginal knowledge (epistemology) and accept that traditional healing can be an important addition to an Aboriginal person's healing complementing Western medical treatment regimes. Allowing and supporting traditional approaches to treatment reflects a commitment by modern medical services to adopting an Aboriginal-friendly approach that is not only culturally appropriate but assists with the cultural security of the service.     

Aboriginal content: Who's got it—who needs it?

‘Aboriginal content” and “aboriginality” have become serious concepts in Australian television circles in recent years; virtually a commodity that radio and television transmitters are required to demonstrate in order to hold their licenses. Some of the peculiar issues raised by both Aboriginal television transmission, and the larger society's perception of Aboriginal culture through television, are discussed here.