Mapitjakuna Shall I Go Away From Myself Towards You? Being-with and Looking-at Across Cultural Divides

Mapi~J’auga-Shall I Go Away From Myself Towards You? Being-with and Looking-at Across Cultural Divides

Ute Eickelkamp Anthropology, Macquarie University and The University of Sydney

Anthropologists increasingly express links between individuals or collectivities through the discursively convenient prefix ‘-inter’; inter-personal, intersubjective, inter-cultural, inter-textual. However, attempts to describe the psychodynamics that effect the linkings that are integral to human social experience have not held pace. I want to suggest that a regard for the ontogenetic primary forms of encounter-looking, eating, playing-an substantiate the analysis of being a self among other selves within and across the boundaries of social worlds. Engaging a phenomenological and psychoanalytic perspective, this paper examines how We-relationships have been variously structured by Pitjantjatjara Aborigines in encountering others at home and in Germany.

Theoretical preliminaries This paper will have achieved its aim if it can contribute to the anthropological understanding of encounter. Anthropological here means the ontology of human psychosocial experience. In my attempt to analyse various encounters, including what are perhaps failed encounters, between a group of Australian Aboriginal women, German audiences, field informants and myself, I follow the phenomenological method of interpreting ‘encounter in the being of its appearances’ (Buytendijk 1951: 441; my translation).’ Put differently, the task is to elucidate encounter as lived experience in relation to knowledge of the existential structures of being. My thinking rests on the premise that the encounter between two selves is the foundation for all other forms of sociation, both structurally and ontogenetically. Related to this first premise is a second that the original modes of encounter are looking (mother and infant look at each other) and playing (the infant’s play with the breast after he has stilled his hunger) (Buytendijk 195 1 : 450). Both looking- at and playing-with are relational experiences by definition and therefore require that distance has made its appearance, that a first severance of I and non-I has occurred. Although always unfolding in relation to particular and hence diverse environments, this ontogenetic situation of becoming oneself is common to all human existence and it is this commonality that enables us to relate to others. Our capacity to sustain elaborate forms of sociation hinges on our earliest encounters with the world. We experience ourselves as being in a world with others because the self emerged as a psychic

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unity through the link with another. My concern then, is to refer the discussion of encounters to this base level of the phenomenon that Buytendijk (1951: 434; my translation from the German) has succinctly described as ‘the relationship of being itself that links our presence to that of another’. Apart from Buytendijk’s existential analysis of encounter, I specifically draw on the phenomenology of social relations by Schutz (1976; see Wagner 1970) and on Sartre’s (1972) study of the gaze. Since my empiricism includes the imagination, and in particular its unconscious dimension, I use in-depth psychological knowledge (in particular concepts from object-relations theory) without, however, psychoanalysing the individuals involved.

I will be dealing with encounters that took place in various cross-cultural settings and in contexts that are inherently political. This in itself, however, is not the endpoint for analysis. Rather, I use somewhat out of the ordinary instances of encounter as magnifying props for the investigation of an experience that, in the course of everyday life, is taken for granted instead of being problematised. Some of the themes that I will discuss-Australian Aborigines in the international arena, cultural representation, museums-have been dealt with extensively in the growing area of anthropological research on ‘intercultural space’.2 This thematic link notwithstanding, the epistemological and methodological pitch of the approach taken here is pretty much out of tune with ‘multi-sited ethnographies’ of ‘hybrid’ and ‘negotiated identities’, the ‘traffic in culture’ (Markus and Myers 1995), practices and discourses of meaning production, or debates of primitivism and the gaze. Being mostly hostile to psychoanalysis and only marginally engaged with phenomenology, such anthropologies, it seems to me, often fall short of elucidating the very element that they assert to have found on a global scale-the ‘inter’. I would argue that, as long as we neglect to analyse how people experience the social as a psychic reality, that is, as a relationship between self and other selves, the idea of ‘intercultural spaces’ remains, if not a trope, a positivistic claim that leaves in question the positivity of the phenomenon.

Encounter refers to the experience of the self in the presence of another. Phenomenologically it makes no difference whether two people meet for the first time or have spent a lifetime together. Their co-presence and mutual awareness alone are what defines an encounter or, in the terminology of Alfred Schutz (Wagner 1970), a We- relationship. Importantly, the We-relationship must retain a degree of openness and indeterminacy, a principal gap between self and other, because what we do not know of the other, that which remains concealed in his turning towards us, makes a relationship possible. We experience the presence of another self because we perceive that parts of the other remain ‘hidden’ from us, just as we know that our sense of self is different from the way others perceive us. (Buytendijk 1951: 473; Simmel 1965: 342-5). I want to suggest as a preliminary for the discussion of cross-cultural encounters that the existential gap between self and other varies not only from encounter to encounter, from one instance to another. It also varies across societies and it transforms historically. How much physical and psychological closeness we can tolerate, and how much distance we need from others, are culturally mediated and collectively calibrated for a variety of contexts. Such inter- psychological baselines are hard to measure by observation, but we all know them for real because our emotional life and behavioural comportment, in other words, our social sensibilities, are organised around them. For instance, kissing and the holding of hands between heterosexual and homosexual lovers in public is a common sight in the Western urban milieu. Such would be a most unusual behaviour for Aborigines, who find it a shameful thing to do, at least in the context of their home communities. Physical contact in public between adults is pronounced, but, in accord with the homosocial organisation of

MAPZTJAKU~A - SHALL I GO AWAY FROM MYSELF TOWARDS YOU? 317

most parts of life, it is largely between women and, less often, between men. Older women in particular may sit on the ground with one knee resting on the leg of another, or hold hands while queuing up in the store, or groom each other during a church service, or stand behind a close friend or daughter after a long separation, holding one of her breasts. It should be born in mind that the nature of the public in a kinship society, with a high degree of familiarity between all members, presents a psychological field of interaction that is very different to that of a mass society. Such difference notwithstanding is the fact that any form of co-presence is predicated on otherness. Implicitly, this means that one cannot encounter oneself, not even in a mirror, because the indeterminacy of the other is lacking. We may meet parts of ourselves under certain special circumstances: when suffering a pathological condition of self-alienation, in nocturnal dreams, and very early in life when the image of the body is only partially integrated. (This is why infants play with their feet as if these were ‘things’, but because the hands are one of the first organs of the self, we hardly ever see one hand play with the other. See Buytendijk 195 1 : 474.) In terms of its ontogenetic development and structurally, the connecting of oneself to another relies greatly on non-lingual presentations, and especially looking. The ‘first encounter is that of the look that meets our look’, writes Buytendijk (1951: 454; my translation). Importantly, the pre-reflective experience of being a self among other selves precedes the world of objects. Scheler (1923: 303; quoted in Buytendijk 1951: 455; my translation), in his interpretation of the nature of sympathy, explained that, ‘first, the child does not notice a thing-the eyes of another-that are there among other things; instead, it sees that another is looking at him and this, moreover, always in a certain manner’. It is indeed the self- consciousness that emerges in relation to another which enables us to encounter things. The world affects us because our self relates to things through various forms of symbolisation, including perceiving, reaching for, playing with, rejecting, fearing, desiring, naming, and contemplating. We are engaged from the beginning in a reciprocal relationship with other selves as well as with objects that do not have a self-consciousness. This ontogeaetic situation is the primal condition for the social construction of reality, as existential analysis has shown. I have suggested that the organising power of the gaze plays an essential part in all human world building. This is to say that different ways of looking-and by extension, forms of lingual address-reveal something about how relatedness as such has been elaborated in specific cultural life-worlds.

The main part of the paper is organised in four sections. The first investigates the structure of being-with that unfolds through the dynamics of a Pitjantjatjara speech phrase. The context is the early part of my anthropological fieldwork in northern South Australia, when I was a newcomer, a visitor among the Anangu Pitjantara people and+xcept when I met again those women with whom I had shared two weeks in my home country during the previous year-a stranger. In the second section, I examine how looking-at creates otherness. Addressing the social (intersubjective) origin of the experience of space, I consider some ontogenetic aspects of the gaze in the cultural milieu of Aboriginal kinship. Both sections then, deal with the spatiality of being, and the role of positioning the self vis-8-vis an other. The affinities that exist between the two modalities of positioning- speech and looking-are given brief consideration. Shifting perspectives in more than one way, section three describes a few episodes from a two-week cultural exchange visit by twelve Aboriginal women to Germany. The final section is an attempt to analyse what could be considered a genuine encounter at last, when the gaze itself is put on display in a preliminary phenomenological study of a spectacle that took place in a museum of anthropology.


Being-with Among the many modes of behaviour, speech manifests the structures of encounter that are typical for a given collectivity. As the following example seeks to show, forms of address in particular express social idioms of being-with that may not lend themselves easily to cross-cultural translation.

The polite form of asking permission to approach a person or a group of people in the Pitjantjatjara dialect is ‘mapitjakuna?’ This may be translated as ‘shall [will] I go away from myself towards you?’ The verb-stempitja means ‘to come, go’, also contained in the dialect name Pitjantjatjara in contradistinction to the neighbouring dialect, Yankunytjatjara. The latter uses yankunytja for ‘coming, going’. In both terms, being on one’s way is not specified directionally, which requires a prefix: ma- (‘away, outwards’), for example, or ngalya- (‘towards, in this direction’). In both instances, the point of reference is the speaker. The future marker -ku (‘will’), indicates that the utterance is intentional and aim-directed. It also signals that the possible answer is optional, which lends politeness to the utterance as in the English ‘shall’ or ‘may’. The last particle, nu, is the first person short-form pronoun, so that the phrase mapitjakuga literally means, ‘away going will I?’. The other as the goal of action or as addressee is implied in the context of interaction, and the towards-you remains an unspoken suggestion. It is nevertheless part of the question, because, as I will explain in a moment, it is indeed this unspoken suggestion that is being responded to.

The emphasis in this socio-lingual construction of initiating an approach is on the first decision, namely to remove oneself from a position one is presently inhabiting. To ask if this was all right strikes me as self-addressed in the first instance, for one cannot ask another to posit one’s own wish-and this is what the question expresses, the wish for something you have not where you are. In this first sequel of opening up the space of engagement, the other, as the object of desire or as somehow tied to it, is set up as a mirror to oneself. From the standpoint that I (as speaker) wish to take, that is, from the position of the other, I am facing back at myself, revealing my state of lacking something. And that makes me accountable for my desire before anybody else can be dragged in, so to speak. The favourable answer to the question if I may go away from myself is wiya palya, literally, ‘no, all right’. This form of expressing consent operates through the negation of an unspoken suggestion, which relates to the second part of the question. The ‘no’ announced by the other negates for the self the tacit option that the towards-you may be denied. Unlike an affirmative response to the second part of the question, the negation of the silent option of the towards-you re-directs the inquiry to the first part, the problem of moving away from yourself. It throws the asking subject back onto itself, thereby sustaining the self-reflexive space. In other words, the responsibility for engagement is established as lying with the person who intends to alter a given situation, engendering the possibility of dimensional shifts of sorts-spatial, social, emotional, p~l i t ical .~

As my growing knowledge of Pitjantjatjara in the field made me realise, my initial, and very frequently asked, question in English, ‘Can I come over?’, was only tolerated as not rudely pushing the responsibility of being with me onto the ‘recipients’ because it had already been decided who would be held accountable for my conduct. I came to understand this after I had made my first big mistake and thereupon witnessed my female companions being heavily scolded for it by the men in my presence. I have to emphasise that, rather than being a conventional and often used phrase, the question mapitjakuga? is hardly ever asked in the business of everyday life. In fact, what struck me most during the

MPITJAKUBA - SHALL 1 GO AWAY FROM MYSELF TOWARDS YOU? 319

time I spent with the &angu-travelling between communities, sharing their company at workplaces, in front of houses, and, above all, around fires in bush camps-is that everyone seemed to know where to go, with whom to sit, to share food, camp and vehicle with. Instead of asking permission, the We-relationships thus lived merely required the announcement of one’s own wishes or a request: I am going in your car, you drive home via this place, hand me the meat, and so forth. To a newcomer, the running of one’s affairs from day to day, including conflict, appeared miraculously orchestrated. I do not think it suffices to say that the rules of kinship are pulling the strings. The experience of kin- relatedness, however, may. The ego-quality of being part of a body social nearly as familiar as one’s own makes nearness a condition of selfness, and being without company an utterly pitiful state. Myers (1 99 1 b), in his discussion of the notion of walytju as used by Pintupi Aborigines, likewise emphasises self-relatedness as forming the starting point for interaction with others. The wider meaning range of the noun walytja as ‘belonging together’ or ‘family’ obtains a specific socio-semantic value when used reflexively as the active adjective ‘oneself (e.g. ‘nguyulu walytjankgku pulyaau ’, ‘I fixed it myself [example from Goddard 1992: 1 SO]). Contemplating the Pintupi self-understanding, Myers (1991b: 109) explains, ‘[tlhis reflexive use of walytju as “self’ suggests that the critical notion of relatedness is rooted in the givenness of the individual, extending outward from a spirit whose identity derives from The Dreaming’. From a metaperspective, it also suggests that the givenness of the individual from The Dreaming is the cultural articulation of selfhood as being-with. Walytju, ‘belonging together as oneself or, as I would put it, partaking, signals an intrasubjective perception that is explicitly and literally grounded in the We-relationship with ‘country’. I can here merely make brief reference to the subject- object dynamics that structure Aboriginal selfhood in relation to The Dreaming in such a way that a person can feel his or her identity to also reside in certain place^.^ We- relatedness, as it were, has different gradients of closeness, and these are expressed in culturally distinctive ways. For Western Desert Aborigines, to share the direction of the gaze signals closeness and often familiarity, in contrast to ‘looking at’, which is experienced as confrontational.

This brief discussion indicates that the question mapitjukunu? signals a distance of a particular kind. If the expressed wish for moving towards an other begins by asking whether one is allowed to move away from oneself, three facts are being posited at once:

1. that both I and the other already occupy a space (place) of being-with; 2. that there is a distance to be crossed between myself and the other; and 3. that one cannot approach an other without leaving one’s present position first (such

requires a motive, a reason, or, as I said before, a desire). The great concern that AEangu have with tracks is another manifestation of this social

logic. Reading the tracks of a perso-footprints or vehicle tracks-rarely aims at finding out where that someone is. Instead, it is about finding out what a person is up to. Seeing that he or she left place X and went to place Z-a campsite, a bush food-harvesting ground, a house, a store-indicates why movement occurred, why place X was left; because it lacked something; food, money, warmth, company. I do not remember ever having been able to ‘sneak away’ from where I was without being asked where I was going, the ‘where’ always meaning ‘why’ and all that comes with it. The uncovering of motives also allows for a certain degree of predictability. Once when a friend and I wanted to go kangaroo hunting (maluku), we had everything except a rifle, I offered to go around and try to borrow one, but she said something like this:


No, we wait here [that is, by a fire at her house]. So and so’s rifle will be coming around this way, he lent it to that man who went hunting. But this one hasn’t got much petrol and only a few bullets. He will be coming here soon, he knows my husband got bullets. I tell him we go in your car, with my bullets, and give him some kangaroo for the rifle after.

The man eventually appeared, but I cannot remember any longer if things worked out according to my friend’s expectations.

As a newcomer, I was always asking if I was allowed to approach, which is a self- depleting exercise; to continuously playact for company or for some piece of information revealed not just one or two motives for wanting to move away from where I was. It signalled relentlessly that I had no point of departure, no being-with. Not to have a place from where to remove oneself makes it hard to approach an other. In that sense, I was truly an outsider, run out of my own place. Although I was sharing momentarily the space and time with those I encountered face to face, I had not yet become a contemporary, someone who, as Alfred Schutz has explained the notion, can ‘bring into each concrete situation a stock of preconstituted knowledge which includes a network of typifications of human individuals in general, of typical human motivations, goals, and action patterns. It also includes knowledge of expressive and interpretive schemes , .,’ (Schutz 1976: 29). The stranger, although different (in his not-being-me) from the other who is my fellowman, is already a type of person, and the quality of the encounter between strangers depends much on how each party conceptualises the type. Insofar as the interpretive schemes of the interactants overlap, the encounter is between contemporaries. The notion of the stranger (rnaliki in the Pitjantjatjara dialect), or of the enemy (mirpagtju), and likewise the related notion of the guest, are elements in the ‘network of typifications’ that constitute contemporaneity in the wider context of Aboriginal kin relations. The question of where and how the boundary between kin and stranger is drawn depends on a muititude of situational factors that have to be assessed in the light of concrete experiences. Their discussion exceeds the scope of this paper by far, but a first step may be to take recourse to existing anthropological depictions of typical others in Central Australia. Given his unique position as adopted insider, it is helpful to read Theodore Strehlow on the idea of the guest among the Northern Arrernte, as he found it in the 1930s:

It is interesting to note that the term applied to a ‘guest’ by his host literally translated means ‘beggar for free food’; and in a land which Nature has so frugally endowed with means of sustenance a beggar, unless his class and his totem group entitle him to the grudging hospitality of his host, is a very unwelcome person who deserves little or no consideration. (Strehlow 1947: 41)

Another type is the permanent alien. Elsewhere, Strehlow (1965: 128) describes how a Pitjantjatjara man who had fled his country after killing a man, was socially integrated into a Western Arrernte group as a permanent alien called unktelta, and granted a wife. Conceivably, the wide-ranging movement of people in Central Australia-in groups in times of severe drought, and individually when, for instance, fleeing from a revenge party-has contributed to the development of a shared etiquette of how to approach camp as a stranger across different language groups. The approaching stranger is expected to sit down at some distance, making himself noted by lighting a fire and waiting to be greeted and ‘taken in’. The commonality of this prescribed behaviour for meeting strangers indicates the outer limits of the horizon of contemporaneity. Within the boundaries of compatible kinship systems, the identification of the stranger as a certain kind of relative

M P I T J A K ~ A - SHALL I GO AWAY FROM MYSELF TOWARDS YOU? 321

determines the appropriate formal behaviour. As is well-known, the classificatory kinship systems of Australian societies tend to incorporate ‘permanent aliens’, including non- indigenous individuals such as visiting anthropologists and many other professionals working in indigenous communities.

However, there is one kind of stranger who is entirely outside even the contours of a We-relationship, and who-being excluded from the sphere of humanness+annot be made kin. He is in fact the closest other and on account of this very proximity to the self, cannot be further assimilated. Hence, this type of stranger is positioned at the margins of the familiar and beyond. Until knowledge of a global world began to play a substantial part in the self-consciousness of Central Australian Aborigines, gradients of alienness, or social proximity and distance, were projected onto geographic space. These projections also embrace relationships between the living and the dead as mediated through the spirit- world, with mediums of encountering-nocturnal dreams, songs, ritual, sorcery-peculiar to this realm. Annette Hamilton (1979) has described a concentric arrangement of the familiar for the Yankunytjatjara in the 1970s, expanding from the inner circle of one’s immediate relatives with whom one shares camp, to various spheres of the lesser known

... where the sorcerers and mamu are fearfully dangerous, and the likelihood of friendly support is low. Further away again are totally different people, who enjoy cannibal feasts, copulate with dogs, and have other unspeakable practices. Here the kangaroos are small and thin, the men have gigantic penises, the women are insatiable, and the winds blow from the wrong direction. Here some say the world ends and tums into a gigantic, endless rockpool of salty water. (Hamilton 1979: 44)

To envision the unknown in opposition to the familiar and acceptable is a form of negation that affirms the self. Long before LCvi-Straws demonstrated this mirroring (contrapuntal) technique in the collective imagination at work in myths, Freud (1 984) had shown how negation splits the primordial coincidence of interiority and exteriority into I and not-I. The unconscious does not know a ‘no’ and does not want to differentiate. Only the non-recognition of the unconscious on the part of the ego, in other words, only the negating principle itself, affirms the unconscious as a distinct function of the self. Given the intrapsychic significance of affirmative negation, it is hardly surprising to find that knowledge of the outside world through travel, telecommunication and other experiences of an international community, has not eradicated images of non-human otherness. The idea of the unknown as such can only originate from the known, just as the unconscious is a function of ego-consciousness. Following the dynamics of self-splitting in terms of object relations theories (Abraham 1924; Klein 1929% 1929b, 1935, 1936; Bion 1959), one could say that the other first occurs as an estranged or expelled part of the self and, as an exogenous perception, allows for feelings of love and hate to develop. The Kleinian notion of the part-object as the product of phantasy that may find anatomical representations (e.g. biting off a fifiger), appears writ large in the cultural imagination of Central Australian societies, where these dynamics are manifest in collective representations. One powerful example are the demonic projections called mumu, malignant cannibal spirits who bite infants and kill, roast and eat human beings in their underground caves. The red-glowing eyes of these night-dwelling demons are said to stare at you out of the dark, or visit you in your dreams. It is not my aim to present an exhaustive analysis of this most prominent figure of the Western Desert imagination, but I here want to draw attention to one constitutive aspect, that of the devouring gaze.


Looking-at Patterns of eye-contact are developmentally and culturally constituted, as Riess (1 988) has demonstrated in her illuminating essay titled the ‘Power of the eye in nature, nurture, and culture’. Drawing on studies in child development, and assembling narrative texts and figurative material from Ancient Greece, Classical Rome, early Judaism, Egypt, and Buddhist Asia, Riess identified four functions of the gaze that correspond to developmental phases:

1. 2.

3. 4.

as an agent of social-emotional bonding (innate impulse of interpersonal gazing); as an agent of conflict (disapproving parental looks are projected into the environment); as a moral agent (the inner eye signalling superego anxiety); and as metaphor and symbol (foresight, hindsight, self-reflection, inner vision as wisdom).

Looking and being looked at are the foundational experiences of communication. The mutual gaze creates at once the distance and the bond necessary for any exchange to occur, opening up the field of meaningful representation, or symbols. Looks can hurt, console, protect, threaten, appease, embarrass and much more. The emotional plasticity of the gaze as experienced in early childhood has obtained a multitude of collective representations: Medusa’s deadly female eye-power, the evil eye, the good eye of amulets or other magic objects, the East-Asian guardian figures with fierce eyes that are set up in front of temples, warding-off eyes on drinking vessels, or the Hindu all-seeing ‘third eye’ located between the two ‘natural’ eyes or in the heart. The sacred objects from Australia, hidden away in keeping places, also manifest eye-power as one form of contact. Eye-contact itself can be the negative symbol of binding incestuous strivings originating in early childhood. According to Roheim (1 97 1 : lo), the Arrernte have projected the mother in the person of the stranger called alknarintja, literally meaning ‘eyes turning away’. Riess (1988: 419) summarises the socially productive function of looking as follows:

Mutual eye attunement never ceases to exist as a social force.. . . The impact of the early eye-to-eye contact between infant and caretaker lives on through childhood. It enters into the gradual process of internalization of mutual gaze patterns.

Significantly, the early eye-to-eye contact is not purely visual. Embedded in the intimate experience of feeding, looking is fused with the incorporating activity of the mouth and the hands grasping for the breast. One may indeed say that the powers of the eye-guarding, warding-off, deadly, evil, seductive-are transformations of the psychogenetically early experience of the devouring eye. The mamu is one such collective representation of a devouring gaze pattern. In mostly visual (dreams, hallucinatory visions, drawings) and narrative (myths, songs, stories) form, it symbolises the split-off bad part of a fused parent- ego image. Being a function of an unconscious defence dynamic, the mamu could be seen, following Riess’ scheme, as an agent of ~onf l ic t .~ It is now possible to go beyond Strehlow’s ecological determinism and recognise in the Arrernte notion of the guest as beggar for food another variation on the theme of the devouring eye. Like the mamu, the idea of the other as beggar is grounded in the genetic affinity of looking, eating, and-in extension of these earliest forms of representation-speaking. I am indicating the larger horizon of object relations because the non-lingual dimension of communication is

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particularly significant in cross-cultural situations, where the constitution of selfhood is likely to be at variance. In short, I want to suggest that the first experience of otherness, which lives on in concepts of the stranger, occurs through the structure of a shared space, and this is created through the dynamic of the mutual gaze.

With the aim of mapping out further the space of encountering, I take recourse to Sartre’s exegesis of fear as flight from being looked at, which can be transposed to the fear of the internal stranger that the mamu objectifies. In the chapter on the existence of the other in his Being and Nothingness, Sartre depicts the following (imaginal) situation:

This soldier who is fleeing formerly had the Other-as-enemy at the point of his gun. The distance from him to the enemy was measured by the trajectory of the bullet, and I too could apprehend and transcend that distance as a distance organised round the ‘soldier’ as center. But behold now he throws his gun in the ditch and is trying to save himself. Immediately the presence of the enemy suITounds him and presses upon him; the enemy, who had been held at a distance by the trajectory of the bullets, leaps upon him at the very instant when the trajectory collapses; at the same time that land in the background, which he was defending and against which he was leaning as against a wall, suddenly ... becomes the foreground, the welcoming horizon toward which he is fleeing for refuge. (Sartre 1972: 295)

The trajectory of the bullet is the trajectory of the gaze and the devouring gaze of the mamu can be apprehended as the self turned against itself-put at its own gunpoint. But where can the flight from oneself find refuge? In the We-relationship, I would suggest. For fear is employed when the distance within myself as it is secured in the We-relationship, collapses. ‘Fear’, Sartre continues, ‘is nothing but a magical conduct tending by incantation to suppress the frightening objects which we are unable to keep at a distance’ (Sartre 1972: 295). I will have more to say about the organising power of looking later. But let us maintain that the We-relationship is a safe ground and so it is that one is not vulnerable to the ogre’s attack within the protective space of lived relatedness, of human company in bright daylight or within the warm-lit sphere of a fire after dark. Living in We- relationship is being inside, living without company is being outside. An amusing observation comes to mind which John von Sturmer related to me about life in an Aboriginal camp in Cape York when people want to chase their dogs away from the fire, they yell at them, ‘Outside!’ The mamu ’s gaze appears in the dark, becoming visible when you leave your home, ngura, also meaning womb. The cannibalistic monster appears beyond the radius of the homely and familiar, at the moment when the cosy and comfortable turns into the uncanny because, as Freud (1985: 345) pinpointed an observation by Schelling, that what ‘ought to have remained ... secret and hidden ... has come to light’. The Heim(e)liche (in its double meaning of homely and secretive) of the social bond becomes the Unheimliche, the uncanny, when the ‘I’ meets itself in its unknown modality, when what was meant to abide in secrecy is released out into the open, flashing its presence at you in the unbound space in which the object of the gaze finds itself.

The sociality of kin, predicated upon a dynamic structure of relationships where each individual already occupies a place as a type of person, dictates that knowledge of the other in the sense of fully grasping or taking hold of him or her is averted. The nearness of kin is lived by not making nearness explicit, in so far as the familiar is posited as given. The familiar does not have to be worked for in the sense of enduring the unfamiliar and reducing it. By not facing the unfamiliar of the other, by refusing to be put at the gunpoint

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of a look, such ‘blind’ familiarity also occludes the full view onto the self. Thus in Pitjantjatjara, it is considered impolite, meaning hurtful, to look someone straight in the eye, to ask someone for his or her personal name, or to speak to others of that person by naming him in his presence. Degrees of permissible looks are articulated through the kinship system, where an avoidance relationship can mean that two individuals may sit next to each other, without being allowed to look at one another face to face. Apart from the kin-based specifications of how to engage with an(other), it appears that direct encountering is generally avoided because it poses a threat-of making visible what must remain concealed if sociation is to continue on the basis of a familiarity supposed as given. The look in the eye is hurtful and uncomfortable for both parties; for the one ‘hit’ by the look which decentres him, and for the one who looks because he finds in the eyes of the other an engagement with his own which he cannot see in any other way.

My question is how engagement can occur with people who do not posit a given familiarity, and who, to the contrary, consider it impolite not to look you straight in the eye.6 They believe that by doing so they demonstrate respect for the other, even if it really means that they are staring their eyes out in search for their self. In what follows, I will describe some such uneven encounters. They took place on the other side of the globe, and before I began fieldwork in Australia’s Western Desert.

Guests in Berlin November 1993. I had been hired by an Australian gallery owner to accompany twelve Aboriginal women artists-ten from Anangu Pitjantjatjara lands, one from Adelaide, one from Melbourne-and one of their non-indigenous advisers on a two-weeks ‘cultural exchange visit’, as it was called, in my home country. On the evening of their arrival, we drove from Berlin’s Tegel airport, reaching a small hotel in the former Western part of the city after dark. I had arranged for payment of the rooms in advance and, when making the booking, just explained this was for indigenous performing artists from Australia. ‘No problem’, the woman and her husband told me, ‘this is an international place’. We entered the building through the back entrance, each of the twelve women and three or four white companions, including myself, carrying several bags and suitcases. I remember the hotel owner standing in the long narrow corridor and watching the procession with growing irritation, her eyes swallowing every movement until she had reached a point when she obviously felt that she had lost control over her place. Her sight, I feel certain, was that of a dark and as yet undifferentiated mass, these women filling her little rooms with their big bodies, their luggage and foreign sounds. With horror and fascination, she exclaimed, ‘ Wir haben hier j a schon Gelbe und Braune gehabt, und von iiberall her. Aber so schwarz-das hab’ ich j a nicht ma1 im Fernseher gesehen!’ (We have had here yellow ones, and brown ones, and from all places. But this black-I haven’t even seen it on television.)

Her irritation did not subside, and she remained unable or unwilling to integrate the women into her picture of hotel guests. Later, she translated the economy of her fear into monetary terns, telling me that her business was at the brink of collapse as most guests were leaving the hotel in flight from the sight of the Aboriginal women. I wondered if any one of them was going to see the women perform on stage in one of the bigger theatres, where they were attracting large-and paying-audiences. In fact, the main reason why the gallery owner had organised for the women to come was to stimulate business. And in the formal context of presenting ‘ancient songs and dances’ to German audiences, I largely found myself being envied for sharing the non-public space of the backstage with the

M P I T J A K U ~ A - SHALL I GO AWAY FROM MYSELF TOWARDS YOU? 325

women. I asked myself who is worse-the businesswoman incorporating the Aboriginal artists as cultural authenticity labels into her gallery, or the businesswoman expelling them from her money-making shelter? Throwing them out of her place was not an act of bad faith, and if I want to condemn her as racist I also have to acknowledge the authenticity of her decision-no false tolerance here. Not so with the gallery owner, who wanted the cake and also to eat it: promoting the purity of Aboriginal art-both traditional and contemporary-she rejected an idealising notion of Aborigines, many of whom, so she assured me, were rather inefficient in conducting a modem or a traditional life: ‘You will see with your own eyes when you go to Central Australia’. But she also wanted approval and gratitude from the women for the work and the money she had invested in them. Like the hotel owner, she pointed out the fact that she was losing money. At the same time, she demanded to be seen as being on their side, publicly and privately. Yet she requested that I do not tell the women that she was staying in a very expensive hotel in the best part of town. They found out anyway and saw nothing wrong with it, except that they thought it strange that she wanted to keep her abode a secret. When the hotel owner threw the women out, the gallery owner launched an attack and she lodged a hefty complaint with the Australian Consular General.

Most upsetting for the women was that there was trouble. They asked me what they had done wrong, if they were too noisy, or if perhaps they had not tidied their rooms properly? Later, upon arrival back in Australia, the women found themselves swarmed by a crowd of journalists who wanted to hear nothing about their beautiful performances, but only about the racist incident in the hotel. However, at no point had the women called the owner of the hotel a racist and instead, they repeatedly expressed sorrow for her, calling her ngakutjara, ‘poor thing’, meaning someone without company. In contrast, they thought the gallery owner was rumu rumu, a crazy woman and troublemaker responsible for their harassment by the journalists. As a consequence, they resolved not to grant her entry permission to Agangu Pitjantjatjara lands in the future. It would, of course, be naive to assume that racial discrimination was unknown to the women who, as their companion from one of their organisations told me, would sometimes not be able to book a hotel room in Alice Springs on the pretext that is was full when this was not the case. But the women did not express discursively the idea of being denied presence because of who they are. I found it impossible to complain and express my shame in front of the guests when they themselves never pronounced such a judgment. I remembered this two years later when, during fieldwork, I learned that insult means to refuse to give what is being asked for when you do not deny that you are in possession of what is desired. For example, someone requests to be given petrol in the middle of the road, his vehicle having run out of gas. In such a situation it is far more polite to lie and say, ‘Sorry, I haven’t got any’, and drive off, than to go into lengthy and embarrassing explanations why you cannot share what is in the tank. Such an affirmative refusal is considered hurtful, a plain ‘no’, instead of a negating ‘yes’, which throws the responsibility for the request back onto the person who had asked. In this way, people can ask for a lot without being rude. So, by not calling the hotel owner racist, by not asking for a response, the women were avoiding a straight “no” that the hotel owner would surely have delivered. This throwing-back-at-yourself technique was a very powerful means of deflecting injury, similar to the effect of the mumu figure and similar to a child covering or averting his eyes from the disapproving look of the caretaker.

Although the women did not engage in a discourse about discrimination, sometimes their action was like a volley in a fast game of tennis, playing unerringly the return of the gaze. When stared at or photographed through the window by a busload of tourists while


walking the streets of Berlin, one of them would pretend to hold a camera and shoot back. Once we were relaxing on the big leather lounge in the dimlit hallway of the second, much bigger hotel, when we noticed how an elderly couple was trying to pass the section in the shadows of the walls, careful not to be seen. One of the younger women sneaked up on them and, jumping right into their way from behind, she mimicked a gorilla for them. And when we had just arrived at this place and the many bags were being carried into the building by one of the male staff, while we were just about to wander off, a man approached me: ‘Excuse me, may I ask a question? Am I right to suppose that, in their culture, women are not allowed to carry anything?’ I said I was not sure and had to consult the women. Straightening her posture and with her head held high, Pantjiti announced loudly, in English: ‘That’s right. We are the Royal family.’

The gaze displayed ‘The appearance of the Other in the world’, writes Sartre (1972: 255) , ‘corresponds ... to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines the centralization which I am simultaneously effecting’.

One of the scheduled events of the cultural exchange visit was to take the women to the anthropology museum in Leipzig in former East Germany. I can only conjecture the reasons that the organisers had for arranging this visit. Since the motive can hardly have been to educate the Pitjantjatjara women about their own culture, it is most likely that the museum was seeking some sort of consent from the visitors regarding its display. The anthropologist in charge was an Aboriginalist familiar with the politics of representation. She had removed or covered up items forbidden to the eyes of women who would be hurt if they caught a glimpse. The display of contemporary paintings next to artefacts from the past paid further testimony to the museum’s commitment to partnership in a shared multicultural presence, without, however, abandoning its educational role. The exhibits, maps, sketches, legends, explanatory boards and arrows pointing the way around the tour of learning, revealed a didactic attitude that seemed old-fashioned to me and which I had come to miss in the modernised museums of the West. But most relevant here is that the anthropologist had tried to make the room safe for the women who likewise had sought to present themselves in the most respectable manner. They looked very neat to me, with their colourful skirts, new jackets, white socks and sneakers, carefully combed hair, some wearing scarves around their heads, and hands folded behind their backs. I did not feel too much tension on their part. Rather, the women seemed curious and interested and in the Australian section more than in any other. There was some chatter and only brief glances thrown at the showcases with objects from different parts of the world as we walked towards Australiana.

If I remember correctly, we first came into a small room with just a few exhibits- stuffed Australian fauna, tools and weapons-behind glass. From there, we entered the main area, a spacious sunlit room. Like the rest of the museum, its walls were lined with showcases, but here most of their content was covered up with cloths. In fact, this now appeared as being the purpose of inviting the women; to show them the hiding-except for one exhibit in the middle of the room, impossible to ignore and at the same time appearing as if forgotten to be removed. With its enormous size and centre stage position, it radiated a centrifugal power that had swept all else into the peripheral zone of the walls, including us visitors who stood frozen by the door when we first saw it. All chattering stopped and

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the silence lasted an eternity of perhaps two minutes. It was this: a life-size model of a Central Australian Aboriginal family made from clay.7

Lebensgrosse Figurengruppe im Abschnitt ‘Ureinwohner Australiens ’ (Life-size Group of Figures in the Section ‘Australian Aborigines ’). Museum f i r Wlkerkunde zu Leipzig. Artist: Giinter Loose, 1952. Photograph: Ingrid HBnse. Reproduced with kind permission from Birgit Scheps, Curator at the Museum of Anthropology, Leipzig.

On a patch of sand was erected a traditional shelter, in front of which was placed the figure of a sitting woman. Next to her was a clay infant in apiti, a large wooden container also called coolamon. Standing upright was the figure of a man arrested in his step of approaching the camp with a kangaroo on his shoulders. Apart from the traditional pubic coverings, the figures were not dressed and the light yellowish colour of the clay made them look starkly naked. None of us said a word, the surprise was total, and all action was looking. The Aboriginal women did not move their eyes from the scene at the centre of the room, but the anthropologist’s gaze, my own and that of the other two white companions criss-crossed from the model to the women looking at it, then to one another, and finally rested on the ground. There seemed no way out of the situation that had thrown us onlookers into disorientation. The spell was broken when one of the younger women made a move. Pushing the headphones of her Walkman behind her ears, she tiptoed forward, straight ahead and right into the exhibit. She let herself drop down next to the clay woman and took the baby out of the coolamon into her arms, rocking it gently. All of us cracked up with laughtcr, I certainly with relief from a sense of shame.

Looking back, I can see that this shame was a false sentiment that stemmed from a rather confused combination of things. I feared that I might be rejected as a companion by

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the Aboriginal women for looking at them-which is exactly what I was hoping to do and have done since in my work as an ethnographer. Apart from the investment I had at the time in this engagement-I wanted it to work out well in the hope of gaining research permission-it was also significant that the process of socio-cultural unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall was in its infancy and as hosts, we were all intensely aware of the possibility of a physical assault on the guests in a climate of heightened racial hatred, especially in the eastern parts of the country. Although the women wanted to learn about the history of our national past, and in particular about Hitler’s bunker in Berlin, they did not seem to envision themselves as implied. And they were right. There was nothing to be morally critical of in the exhibit as such, no reason to single out the life-like depiction of Aborigines from the figure of the soldier in a war museum, the death mask of the Egyptian Pharaoh, or the Friedrich Wilhelm statue in the park. The ease, however, with which the guests literally handled the situation was not the result of political reflection, but rather based on the fact that, as far as I can make out, the clay figures did not resemble anybody they knew. They were prototypical portraits, which greatly diminished their life- semblance. I can say this because I was told that in 1949 the late potter from Victoria, William Rickert, visited the former mission station Ernabella and made clay busts of a number of men and some women. Upon seeing the portraits, the latter panicked; some ran away, and fear only subsided when one of the men smashed the busts. The reason appears to be that they feared their soul was being captured in the object and lost to themselves.

Without going into a deep analysis of the fear evoked by the mens’ own images being captured in clay, I point to the obvious: portraiture, including sculptural portraiture, was an entirely unknown category of representation. In the cultural imagination of Aboriginal Australians, the object-status of things-a pole, a design, a flat stone-ould and can be symbolically suspended through the ritual enactment of The Dreaming. The syncretic interplay between different mediums of representation, such as the rhythmic and melodic structure of songs, poetically evoked imagery, dance movements, knowledge of the mythical landscape, body painting and designs on ritual objects, activate ancestral presences. The effectiveness of such acts of symbolic condensation rests, in my view, on iconic relationships that bind the various expressive mediums into a whole with a reality- status of its own. Sansom (1995) has emphasised the metonymic character of the symbolic associations, which explains why any single part-a name, the view of a site, the presence of a particular person-may activate an ‘enchainment’ of many more by stringing together contiguous symbols or overlapping pairs of symbols into a long chain of associations. I am not entirely in agreement with Sansom’s analysis of an Aboriginal aesthetic, but it is clear that, with the use of photography, motion pictures, and much exposure to non-indigenous portrayals of Aboriginal society in all sorts of ways, other representational paradigms have come to play a part.

During the last fifty years or so, the relationship to images of people has changed. And with these, the image of the self-in the literal sense of visually recognising personal features-has also been transformed. For one, people have been wearing clothes for the last three generations at least. With the covering of most parts of the body the face has become the focal field through which a person in a picture is identified. A few years ago, a Pitjantjatjara Council anthropologist undertook to identify a large number of individuals- most of them naked-in archival photographs. She travelled across Anangu Pitjantjatjara lands showing these pictures to the descendants, in particular to members of the older generation who would have known some of the individuals in person. When, after a considerable while, she still had not been able to elicit a single name, with the viewers

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only shrugging their shoulders and asserting that they had never seen any of the people in the pictures, she became suspicious. Surely, she thought, something other than the fear of the image of the dead must be at issue; nor could the visual amnesia be merely a matter of embarrassment and shame over nakedness. Another possibility was this: that the h a n g u in the mid-1990s could not decipher the pictures without problems. Although the right to speak, the issue of nakedness, and the taboo of presencing the dead may all have played a part, another aspect that contributed to the difficulty was that people were unable to recognise easily the Gestalt of naked bodies as particular individuals. She then covered the bodies with her hand, image by image, so that only the faces were shown. In this way, a considerable number of people were identified by name.

The issue of nakedness was one of the reasons for my own shame in the museum, because, so I feared, the nude clay figures implied that we, the Westerners, were wrapped in images of primitiveness in our perception of Aborigines. The involved efforts on the part of many culture brokers to create an image of indigenous cultural superiority notwithstanding, such a suggestion was still very feasible. The adoption of the association naked with primitive by many of the descendants of the Nikidi (Pitjantjatjara expression adopted from the English ‘naked’ and used to refer to the older generations who did not know how to wear European-type clothing) people only underlines the reality of this image. Being more complex than it may first appear, the issue merits a separate discussion (see, for instance, Glowczewski 1991, and Duelke 2002). Here, I can only point out some aspects. The visitors from the Western Desert showed acrobatic skill in switching representational style. For the purpose of visiting a museum or a church, they dressed in ‘mission style’; for their artistic performances, they ‘dressed up’ in body painting, fully aware of the paradigmatic shift involved, as I learned through a joke they played on me. One of my tasks-and, in the eyes of many, privileges-was to announce each of the stories to be performed by the women on stage. Dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a t-shirt with the logo of the Aboriginal women’s council, I told the audience the title and a short summary of the story from The Dreaming we were about to see enacted. Invisible to the audience, I was doubly dressed, with a layer of the story painted on my skin. The women had decided to apply the designs of the story to be performed on my chest, breasts, and upper arms in the sheltered space of the backstage. On one such occasion, when the design on my body was finished and I was about to put on my t-shirt, one of the women said: ‘No, leave it. You’re dressed up proper way, you can go out like this, and say the story. We do it too.’ They all looked at me, and I felt pretty cornered. But seeing my horror at the thought of going on stage ‘naked’, the women burst into laughter. That certainly brought home to me the limits of our contemporaneity in the blink of a moment. But things are even more complicated.

Among the Pitjantjatjara people of the former mission station Emabella, nakedness has been associated with primitiveness and ignorance for a long time. Mention of the old people who were ngurpa, not even knowing how to wear trousers, how to eat sugar, or what an automobile is, is usually accompanied with the laughter of embarrassment, or by an expression of SOITOW, ngakutjaru. It is interesting to note in this context that, according to Strehlow, the Arrernte would mock the laughter of the Western Desert people as a sign of their unsophisticated ways, whereas Strehlow himself saw it as a proof of self- contentment with one’s life that comes with the ignorance of alternative possibilities. And so he writes about the Pintupi and Ngalia groups he met in 1932

... they were a cheerfid, laughing people, who bore themselves as though they had never known a care in the world. Even the ‘civilised’ Aranda men at the


Mount Liebig anthropological camp commented on the cheerfulness of the desert nomads: ‘They are always laughing-they can’t help it’, they said, shrugging their shoulders at the simplicity of these ‘ignorant’ people. (Strehlow 1965: 132)

At Emabella, not to wear clothes is slowly becoming acknowledged with some pride as belonging to the old ways, ara irititja. It seems to me that this very shift towards appraisal of the cultural past demarcates the newly emerging boundaries of contemporaneity. The traditional dress of ritual body painting has gained valency in the context of contemporary cross-cultural encounters, but the custom of walking around without clothes outside the ritual sphere is unthinkable and absurd. In other words, it belongs to the life-world of the past with its own and different scope of ‘conventional “plausibility”’ (Devereux 196 1 : 367). In fact, to undress entirely in public is regarded as a sign of madness, of having lost all ways whatsoever.

What then evoked the response on the part of the women to place themselves alongside the naked clay figures in the museum; and what, one may ask further, made the encounter funny for all who were involved in that moment; and were we all laughing about the same thing? Put differently, the question is how to locate the participants in the paradigm of the given situation when, in all likelihood, there was more than one syntax at play, more than one rule of how to put things together.

After the youngest woman had made the first move, two more women joined in the playful engagement, skilhlly handling the women’s tools, investigating the fake bush fruit in another vessel, and I think one even shook hands with the clay man. None of this infised life into the clay figures in the way a puppet player does or a child immersed in playing with a doll. To the contrary, the mock play-for the women were playfully pretending to play-affirmed and even enhanced the figures’ prop character or object- status. I think we were able to laugh together-not about each other-because for both sides, the figures looked hopelessly old-fashioned, like wax works frozen in time and outside the reach of contemporaneity for any of us. If the incongruity between model and reality had initially caused embarrassment, it became hilarious as soon as the Aboriginal women pronounced it further by pretending to identify with the image, thereby making very clear that they did in fact feel closer to us looking at them. Yet, the degree of positive identification with the figures should not be underestimated either and may be established by examining it on the level of the body-image. More obvious than such conceivable affinities is that the presence of the guests brought into sharp relief a discontinuity in the aesthetic of appearances, and such disjunctions commonly provoke laughter. It is also clear that the figures fell out of line as one among other ‘Aboriginal exhibits’ as soon as the women stepped into the picture. However, none of this really explains why the Aboriginal women walked into the exhibit, instead of just standing by. For the attitude held by the women towards the model to become transparent, it is necessary to consider again the nature of the objects on display.

In their semblance to ‘a’ traditional family from Central Australia, the clay figures belong to the European tradition of aesthetic realism. Although they do not seem to be portraits of particular individuals, they are not intended as lasting mementos of a particular event or epoch and, for this reason, appear more akin to wax works than to statues. They are models and certainly not art objects intended to create a life of their own through a particular aesthetic form. The purpose and function of the clay figures was to educate the museum visitor about Aboriginal life by seeing, working on the assumption that there would be no conceptual hurdle between the figures and what they were supposed to stand for. A Western beholder of a certain age would approach the figures metaphorically, that

hf4PITJAKUaA - SHALL 1 GO AWAY FROM MYSELF TOWARDS YOU? 33 1

is, as a three-dimensional picture of something else. As I have mentioned above, such a tradition is alien to an Aboriginal aesthetic. It may be helpful to refer again to Sansom’s recent analysis of the inner nature of Aboriginal aesthetics, which he sees as operating through what he calls ‘metonymic enchainment’ as opposed to metaphoric substitution.

Although Sansom is largely concerned with the aesthetic of Aboriginal religious thinking, his interpretation of the paradigm of The Dreaming can shed light onto the cross- cultural encounter described in the present context. Referring to Stanner’s (1963) view of the Aboriginal response to static representations as being in the imperative mood, Sansom explains:

A design points beyond itself to demand action. Most often, a song calls out for a dancing complement. Story is interspersed with mime. ... there is a stimulus towards the adding of part upon part, the thrust that is a movement towards a ‘following up’ of the Dreaming by the representation of a semed enchainment, . . , As indicated by Stanner, the second imperative is . . . a driven observance to be noted for its effects in time and on time. There is a push towards the reinstatement of Dreaming actions in the here and now. The viewing of geomehic figures acts as: ‘A kind of command for an exemplary action by living men as the appropriate response’. (Sansom 1995: 272)

Substituting the ‘geometric figure’ of a sacred design with the alien semblances in clay, it may be argued that the basic orientation towards any representation, namely the ‘push towards the reinstatement of [Dreaming] actions in the here and now’, also compelled the women to respond by action, by ‘following up’ the old ways if only for a brief moment of humorous play.

In fact, the fun aspect of the encounter was more important than my description may tell. It now seems to me that the entire incident of the two-week visit by the Aboriginal artists to Germany could be rewritten as a study in humour and fun. I hope to have conveyed at least implicitly the powerful effects that fun, humour, jokes and laughter have on the creation of We-relationships and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion across cultural divides. I think such a study would also lead back to the theme of the devouring gaze and testify to the fact that an intimate relationship exists between joy and aggression that produces the particular facial expression of laughter. Like looking and playing, laughter is a primary form of encounter and universally effective because, as cross-cultural early infancy research has shown, it is not learnt but evoked mimetically. Joy and aggression are also the basic elements of play, and it was this ambiguity of fun and threat that one of the women had so cleverly exploited in her staged encounter with an elderly couple in the hotel when she mimicked a gorilla. However, without talking again to the women about how they experienced their time in Germany and especially what they felt and thought when they saw the clay figures in the museum, it is difficult to illuminate further their motivation for engaging the exhibit. I therefore conclude with another attempt to analyse the encounter from my own perspective, reflecting again on the power of the gaze.

Back to the clay figures in the museum. All they were standing for in this moment of encounter between the Aboriginal women and us German hosts was our gaze. I felt that where I directed my eyes would reveal to our guests my true position, who I was looking with. How exactly did it come to this ‘sliding of the whole universe’? I shall again take recourse to Sartre’s analysis of the other.

Before the women entered the room, the representation of them in the form of the clay family simply meant this: I, the non-Aboriginal visitor, was seeing the other as object. Not


being looked back at in the absence of an other, the centralising effect of my gaze organised space as a totality-just me and my relationship with the things in the world, nothing but the distance that my gaze measures between me and this spear in the showcase, between my eyes and the woman statue, and between the different objects, the hut, the man, the woman and the infant in the wooden bowl. But here already a complication arises, because the instrumentality of the objects I am looking at is of a particular kind; the clay figures are meant to stand for an other outside a We-relationship, and as such they are objects whose sole purpose it is to be looked at. Put differently, just like a hammer refers to the act of sinking a nail into the wall, or a chair to a certain posture of resting the body, the representation of the other refers to my gaze. That is the instrumentality of the clay figures, to represent my look at the other as object. Unlike hammering or sitting, however, the gaze has the power of organising the world. This means that when the Aboriginal women looked at the figure they were looking at my gaze, thereby decentring my world in which I am now an object being seen. I think this is exactly what Sartre (1972: 257) meant when he wrote ‘... my apprehension of the Other in the world ... refers to my permanent possibility of being-seen-by-him; that is, to the permanent possibility that a subject who sees me may be substituted for the object seen by me.’

It appears that an encounter between those who avoid the straight look in the eye and those who seek it was made possible via the detour of the exhibit. Representing the gaze, the figures allowed us to look at one another without advancing right up to the eyes. Having displaced all of us in one way or another, they made it possible for us to ‘go away from ourselves’, even if only a short distance. And I think it was important not to strive all the way towards identification, because the insistence upon one’s own position, upon one’s own point of departure, and upon the self-centring power of looking deflected possible injury and sustained self-responsibility. The Aboriginal women from Central Australia not once indicated that they perceived themselves as victims-nor as heroes, for that matter; not when we were thrown out of the hotel, not in any museum and not during the performances in front of a thousand eyes. In my attempts to plead guilty, to explain, to defend the women and other similar impulses, I was thrown back upon myself-wiya palya!

Acknowledgments I wrote a first version of this paper for the occasion of the adjunct conference held externally to the 2001 AAS Annual Conference in Melbourne at the Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University, Sydney. I am indebted to the participants and conveners of the session ‘Encounters’, Franca Tamisari, Jennifer Biddle, and John von Sturmer for their encouraging and critical comments. It was John von Sturmer who first suggested that I write about my pre-fieldwork experience with Western Desert women in my home country, for which I am especially thankhi. Many thanks go to Jadran Mimica who proof-read the draft and proposed that I rethink and elaborate certain sections. Michael Allen has very generously offered encouraging comments and editorial advice, and he also suggested that I add to the list of ethnographica of the gaze the Hindu (and Buddhist) ‘third eye’. This is as much appreciated as the request by one of the referees to articulate more precisely my argument by making entirely explicit how I am concerned with the link between encounter, otherness and the gaze. Special thanks are due to Birgit Scheps, curator at the Museum of Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, for providing the

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image as well as valuable background information about the exhibit. The paper was also presented in the staff seminar at the Department of Anthropology, Sydney University, and I thank all those who helped me through their questions to make clearer its purposes. Needless to say, I am entirely responsible for the shortcomings that remain.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5 .

6.

7.

It may be helpful to clarify further at the beginning of discussion the position I am seeking to develop. Buytendijk’s (1951: 441) actual phrase is ‘Wir miissen also auch der Begegnung begegnen und m a r im Sein ihrer Erscheinungen ’. He explains that the phenomenological method requires the same attitude towards all phenomena, and hence the encounter too needs to be encountered, namely from the necessarily ambivalent position of psychological participation and its simultaneous suspension through reflection about it. This is not unlike the ambivalence of the ethnographic fieldworker, who is at once participant in and observer of lived situations. Epistemologically, the difference between phenomenologist and ethnographer concerns the status of ontology-where the former sets out to uncover the forms and structures of Being, the latter presupposes these and proceeds to explain the constitution of particular existences. Methodologically, my analysis of remembered encounters falls halfway between these two positions, and the ethnographic description of events alternates with the description of their formal structures and psychoanalytic interpretations. Fred Myers (1986, 1991a, 1994, 1998, 2002a, 2002b) especially has contributed to the recent discussion of Australian Aboriginal art as intercultural production. Comprehensive references to the contextual debates can be found in his works. My phenomenological description of the socio-semantics of the phrase rnupifjukuw is largely directed at the aspect of self-responsibility, and does not claim to exhaust its meaning range. For a recent comprehensive exploration of ‘ ... how Western Desert speakers use interpersonal resources in varieties of contexts of social interaction’ see Rose (2001 : 14). The speech example discussed here would approximate the suggestive mood type in the system of imperative mood person described in this instructive if, in my view, over-categorised functional grammar. For other excellent discussions of the ‘logic’ of The Dreaming and ‘personhood in country’ see, for example, Stanner (1 963), Munn (1970), Morton (1987). It is worthwhile noting that the archaic oral-ocular dimension of the moral universe whose periphery is populated by agents of conflict in the form of cannibalistic spirits, is also manifest in the otherwise unrelated cultural expression of the Mosaic revenge pattern, ‘an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’. Von Stunner (1981) has presented a very useful outline of how Aboriginal social etiquette differs from European manners of approach and public interaction. For reasons I will describe briefly, my description of the exhibit differs slightly from what the image reproduced here shows. The imitative representation of other cultures through models that depict stereotypical settings is, of course, not unique to former East Germany. The figures, made in 1952 by the artist Gunter Loose, are part of a cultural history of ethnographic exhibitions common throughout Europe and America. As Birgit Scheps, curator at the Leipzig Museum, kindly informed me, the photograph shows the model as it was exhibited from 1969 until 1985, in front of a landscape panorama aimed at conveying the ‘state of nature’ of Aboriginal lives. In 1988, Scheps prepared an exhibition about the history of the local museum culture. She removed the clay family from ‘nature’ into the centre of the room in order to highlight their status as artefacts of their makers. I wonder if the Aboriginal visitors in 1993, had they become aware of this change, would have appreciated the shift as a decision appropriate to their culture in the same way that they did appreciate the covering of ‘dangerous’ objects,

THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

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Documents

Mapitjakuna Shall I Go Away From Myself Towards You? Being-with and Looking-at Across Cultural Divides