the politics of representation: anthropological discourse and Australian aborigines

the politics of representation: anthropological discourse and Australian aborigines

FRED R. MYERS-New York University

Nelther Justice Nor Reason: A Legal and Anthropological Analysis of Aborlglnal Land Rights. MARC GUMBERT. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1984. xviii + 215 pp., maps, tables, figures, footnotes, photographs, references, Index. $1 8.50 (cloth).

Aboriginal Landowners: Contemporary Issues In the Determination of Traditional Ab- original Land Ownershlp. L. R. HIATT, ed. Sydney: Oceania Publications, 1984. 144 pp., maps, figures, footnotes, references. n.p. (paper).

Journey to the Crocodiles Nest. HOWARD MORPHY. Canberra: Australian institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1984. XI + 160 pp., maps, tables, figures, photographs, footnotes, appendlx, references, index. $9.95 (paper).

Sorcerers and Healing Splrlts: Continuity 8nd Change in an Aboriginal Medlcal System. JANICE REID. Canberra: Australian Natlonal University Press, 1983. xxv + 183 pp., maps, tables, plates, appendlx, references, Index. $1 5.95 (paper).

All four of the books reviewed here derive their force and insight, albeit in varying ways, from the altered relationship between researchers and Aboriginal communities and from the impact of Aboriginal land claims on our understanding of indigenous political processes. The anthropologists complex interaction with the community he or she studies has become a defining feature of the project. Central to this altered relationship is a narrowing of the gap between them and us, from both sides. In their growing desire to exercise some control over the processes that define their reality, Aboriginal people see anthropologists less as privileged Oth- ers than as human actors accessible and responsible to Aboriginal expectations. Correspond- ingly, ethnographers experience of being drawn into the picture has made them far more conscious of internal Aboriginal politics and the impact of the anthropological enterprise on those it studies.

Changes in Aboriginal studies over the past 15 years attest to the increasing and inescapable politicization of the anthropological endeavor, with both positive and negative consequences. Because Aborigines now have the right to decide who does research in their communities and what sort of research will be done, anthropologists have discovered a new sense of their on- going moral responsibility and relationship to the local people. The so-called human sciences have been relativized as researchers who are treated as members of these communities feel compelled to conform to the Aboriginal definition of what we should be doing. The question of whose goals and values are to dominate Aboriginal studies is a subtext of all the books under review, reflecting a growing ambivalence about intruding on other peoples lives to do research.

The ethnographic situation of our research has left an indelible mark on what we write, in substance and omission. Indeed, in most of these accounts, the topic of study enters into the process of anthropological research itself. One of Janice Reids informants, for example, tells

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her that he has to be careful about what he says into the tape recorder. If he says sacred things, old people may send a message to a sorcerer to kill him (p. 44). Howard Morphy's willingness to accept indigenous conventions of ritual secrecy, similarly, reflects current practice among anthropologists who no longer feel themselves free to pursue Western notions of scientific ob- jectivity. As anthropologists have seen the unfortunate consequences and recriminations that follow on indiscreet revelation of mythological and ritual details considered restricted in the communities where we work, the Aboriginal conception of knowledge has become a constraint we must accept.

In presenting indigenous informants as "teachers," most researchers express their humility as novices before the complexity of local understandings. This has produced something of an epistemological revolution. Anthropologists do not pretend to complete comprehension of the subjects they discuss with Aboriginal people. Indeed, they are at pains to incorporate this fact into their theoretical positions, distinguishing analytic models from the metaphors and personal experience of their informants. Recent accounts take their strength from a sense of intimacy with Aboriginal people and the privilege of their friendship. The knowledge of individuals comes from long and continuing associations with communities. A feeling of the personal, emotional quality of Aboriginal life is increasingly present in ethnographic accounts and com- ing to take on theoretical priority. From the way both Reid and Morphy write, we get a feel of the impact of death, grief, jealousy, and pride on social action, a sense of ethnographic reality instead of the once-dominant abstractions of social structure.

For years Aboriginal studies have been beyond the pale for most nonspecialists. Many regard the complexity of Aboriginal societies as a special case of people with an elaborate kinship system. At most, Aboriginal materials have provided general anthropology with a substantial challenge to feminist rethinking of hunter-gatherer social systems. A whole new generation of fieldwork by anthropologists in the 1970s, only just now reaching publication, promises to integrate our regional interests with what Peter Ucko once called "world anthropology." Con- ceptually, this transformation has included a growing ethnographic emphasis on the immediate, concrete processes of daily life with a distinction between long-term structures and individual action. The importance of the individual in Aboriginal societies and the deeply political nature of social life are hallmarks of contemporary anthropological work. In the work by Reid, Morphy, and in most of the papers in the Hiatt collection, the theoretical emphasis is on human agency, on individual choice, event, and action-ven in the domains of ritual and landownership. Along with the others, Gumbert's book on the legal basis of Aboriginal land rights ad- dresses the political and material significance of anthropological discourse about Aboriginal land tenure.

The current discourse of Aboriginal anthropology also reflects the traditional anthropological role as defender of the people we studied to an outside audience. This has come to present a special problem for anthropologists who appear in court as experts or advocates for Aboriginal interests, especially in land claims. Since passage of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Ter- ritory) Act by the Federal Government in 1976, it has been possible for Aborigines to claim certain lands in the Northern Territory. Anthropological researchers have played a central role in both the preparation of these claims and in their presentation and interpretation at hearings, as well as speaking to other problems deriving from the political and social encompassment of Aboriginal society by a modern state.

Any reader must keep in mind how significantly these issues underlie ethnographic inquiry. The pragmatic nature of knowledge, always framed in relation to a set of implicit questions and concerns, is well known, but Aboriginalists now ask themselves whose questions and concerns should define their inquiry. More narrowly, is the anthropologist's goal to help win a legal case, to put our knowledge in a form that is likely to be most persuasive to those who constitute an audience? Or is it to remain strictly accountable only to the canons and concepts of scientific reporting? How does this choice affect the representations of land tenure presented in court or

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our arguments about Aboriginal self-determination? At the same time, various Aboriginal groups-in Central Australia, for example-propose to vet researchers' projects. What good, they ask, will these studies bring to them? Some Aborigines believe that anthropologists' careers are simply founded on acquiring and publishing Aboriginal knowledge. Others have become conscious of the effect of anthropological discourse on them, and, not surprisingly, they desire to control it.

As always, anthropological study is situated in various political circumstances, but researchers are more aware than ever of the relationship of the information they collect to the context in which they work. As anthropologists perceive their informants seriously as agents-rather than passive participants-in the events of research, the question of their purposes becomes significant. In Ian Dunlop's afterword to Howard Morphy's book, he describes a poignant mo- ment in a baby's funeral: "It was very beautiful and peaceful, but it seemed inappropriate for us to go too close with the camera. Whether I was being over-sensitive I do not know" (p. 138). But Dunlop also discusses at length the Yolngu part in the production of the film about the funeral. Inevitably, awareness of how Aborigines appropriate the researcher's goals and actions into their own purposes has taught anthropologists not just about the politics of Aboriginal life, but also about the meanings cultural forms have to participants and how sensitive this is to context.

Uncomfortable as it may be, anthropologists are a direct part of the contemporary political scene in which Aborigines live. Restrictions imposed by the sensibilities and conventions of informants mean that ethnographers cannot write up some of the most interesting anthropological material. Readers must understand, therefore, how recent ethnographic work reflects such conditions of research, to understand to whom and how it speaks. This is not merely to explain an absence of information. It is clear that entering seriously into local conventions has had enormous ethnographic advantages, evidenced in the concern to contextualize information. A recognition of the individual and historical sense of events has taken priority over earlier concerns with social structure, while, ironically, cultural restrictions on information, such as death taboos on names and ritual secrecy, make it difficult to treat social life historically or as ego-centered.

In considering the books under review, then, I shall discuss them as representing two related issues in Aboriginal studies. First, they are concerned with the relationship between ethnographic experience and theoretical interests. Second, they address the problem of relating anthropological understandings-a situated form of scientific discourse with its own specific practice-to other political and social contexts, especially to legal conceptions and action.

Janice Reid's Sorcery and Healing Spirits, the first major study of a contemporary Aboriginal medical system, shows how Yolngu Aborigines of North East Arnhem Land (Warner's "Murn- gin") explain life-threatening sicknesses and deaths. Her presentation of Yolngu reasoning about galka (sorcery) i s well written and humane. Combining a thorough, theoretically insight- ful medical anthropology with a sense ofthe political and social situation of indigenous people, i t should go far to satisfy the Yolngu "wish that students, doctors, nurses and others who read this book will gain a greater understanding of and respect for Aboriginal culture" (p. v). The reader is immediately grounded in the significance of the ethnographic situation and the intel- lectual puzzle Reid confronted at the end of her fieldwork:

How was I to reconcile the contradictions in what I had been told? The puzzles were many. . . . What was I to believe [of the many variants]? The answer was crucial to my analysis for Yolngu place great emphasis on knowing the "true story" about any important event [p. xvii].

Reid's conclusion, that "there was as many truths as there were people to tell them" (p. xviii), becomes a central problem for her book. She discovered the cultural solution in her immediate experience that the circulation of information was guarded. Her own relationship to informants


and victims was a significant variable: what she was told depended on what she had a right to know and what a speaker had a right to say.

With its emphasis on the individual and what social theorists have come to describe as human agency, Sorcerers and Healing Spirits is strongly in the anthropological tradition of Sapir and Radin. Variability exists, she insists, because beliefs are held by individuals and individuals think (p. xxiv). What makes the study interesting is that Reid does not stop at a meth- odological individualism but asks how belief is socially situated, reproduced, and revised. Her ultimate question is to explain the continuing value of Yolngu sociomedical beliefs. The result is original and important.

Reid begins the monograph with a now-famous court case in which the Yolngu at Yirrkala brought suit against the Nabalco mining company and the Australian government to prevent bauxite mining on their traditional land. Although the Aborigines lost the case, it provoked the inquiry that led to the granting of Aboriginal Land Rights in the Northern Territory. For the Yolngu, in Reids estimation, the case is an exemplar of their overall cultural stance:

The Yolngu response to the threats to their land which have dogged the community since the early 1960s has had its counterpart in every conflict with outsiders before and sin Whether they have opposed or welcomed the changes, they have always seen themselves, not less victims of an industrial state, but as competent planners and negotiators [p. 21.

On the varying matters of health care, landownership, and law, Yolngu are concerned to defend the integrity of their culture. Focused on control and autonomy, the Yolngu approach to illness and death . . . can be seen as an extension of their approach to other serious concerns (p. 30). It enables them to express the fears about unsettling events which impinge on their lives but to assert jurisdiction over their management (p. 30). Here, Reid goes beyond a simple intellectualist position to a more political and ethnomethodological exploration of the significance of beliefs in a context of social action. Thus,

Statements about the cause of a persons death also have social implications. When an individual advances a hypothesis, he is conscious not only of its plausibility in the light of available facts but of the consequences of voicing it at a l l [p. 1 121.

In this respect, Reid conveys an important sense of the distinction between social structure and human action, one especially essential for understanding small-scale societies where actors must simultaneously sustain the frame of their action as well as pursue a goal within it.

It is Reids further contention that the Yolngu sociomedical theory acquires renewed social value in their attempts to gain jurisdiction over critical matters in their community (p. 11 7). At Yirrkala, Yolngu believe that very sick people should be cared for at home by relatives, while doctors and nurses often pressure families to let patients go to the hospital:

For the family, torn between a desire to do what is best for the patient and a wish to please those who control vital services . . ., the only way to insist on their own decision may be to explain that this is not an ordinary illness but one caused by galka (sorcery) which must be managed at home [p. 1 1 71.

Thus,

the sociomedical theory, as well as providing meaning in the face of affliction and a strategic tool in Yolngu affairs, has a certain tactical value vis-a-vis whites . . . it provides an idiom in which Yolngu can assert their own authority when whites attempt to control their affairs [p. 11 71.

Reids account i s largely in the intellectualist vein pioneered by Evans-Pritchard to make another peoples beliefs credible to the reader. In the chapter on causes of affliction, the author outlines the paradigm she comes to call a sociomedical theory. Yolngu hold that there are numerous sorts of sorcery that can be the proximate cause of illness, while the ultimate causes-the reasons given for the use of sorcery-centre on conflicts between individuals and groups and on breaches of social and sacred laws which cannot go unpunished or unavenged (p. 44). From the outset, we are shown that the choice of sorcery as an explanation of death is not simply an answer to the question of cause, but can also be employed by participants to


lay claim to power and to assert their rights. The social ecology of accusations is revealing: members of a sick persons clan or allied clans are rarely accused.

Chapter 3 turns to the healing powers that can reverse the damage of sorcery. Reid provides us with exceptionally valuable life-histories of four healers (rnamggitj), showing how such people come to realize they have power. It is only in exploring the polarity between sorcery and healing in Chapter 4 that Reid finally comes to the cultural themes concerning the integrity of bodily boundaries. Yolngu emphasize the vulnerability of the body and the properties of blood. Whereas blood contained and controlled gives life and strength, blood uncontained, uncon- trolled or violently shed is a source of danger, illness and death (p. 791, and not only to the victim or patient.

Here, as elsewhere in the study, we see Reids bent to treat Yolngu discourse about health and disease with the same sort of common-sense rhetoric Evans-Pritchard employed for the Azande, rather than to examine the symbolic dimensions of Yolngu images. The meaning of such items as blood might be treated as more problematic, as interpretable, rather than taken at surface value. In her emphasis on affliction, illness, and health, Reid tends to treat the sufferer somewhat as a natural being rather than explicitly as a culturally constituted person. This may be quibbling because, implicitly, in decoding some Yolngu practices, their meanings are provided, but it strikes me that a major aspect of sorcery is the projection of will. One act of galka sorcery, characteristically, deprived a woman of the ability to complete her task or to tell her mother what happened (p. 40).

Unfortunately, Reid does not consider these images in relation to such major themes in Ab- original culture as the problem of autonomy, does not ask why such interventions are perceived as frightening or what makes the loss of autonomy such a danger. Why do some forms of death particularly epitomize peoples existential fears? Nor does the author ask why Yolngu would expect sickness to befall men because others are jealous of their political prominence or healing powers. Are we to read the meaning of such understandings as an expression of local egal itarianism?

To some extent, the fear of galka is an expression of everyones vulnerability and, as Reid makes quite clear, is embedded in the imagery of bodily and social boundaries. Sorcery accusations, she shows, are located at the periphery of social relations-beyond the clan and its allies, not among those one can control through affection and internal mechanisms. Yet, the danger is really more pervasive, and the longer Reid lived among Yolngu, the more she came to understand that suspicions about closer relatives are just more closely guarded. Indeed, her sense of the complex ways in which peoples relations, marriages, and interests bring in a mos- aic of conflicts and loyalties which are not entirely predictable underlines the uncertainty of life in such a society.

It i s precisely here that Reids work is most illuminating on the dimensions of human agency. A central social problem in Aboriginal societies is the degree to which one must consider the secondary consequences of actions. As she writes, a statement about suspected sorcery is not only an ideological or explanatory statement (p. 90). Talk is not cheap. Instead,

Yolngu worrv that accusations may reach the ears of the suspect and escalate hostilities. A sorcery ac- cusation is slanderous and slander invites trouble: be it anger, violence or further retaliation by sorcery Ip. 841.

And, as she points out later, a deliberate non-use of sorcery explanations of sickness may be a strategy to keep harmony in a community (p. 11 5).

This social reality enters heavily into Reids analysis of how illness is managed, what she describes as the search for meaning. Her treatment of this social process shows how the diagnosing of illness involves that proliferation and diversity of hypotheses that puzzled her as a fieldworker. What i s intriguing to the reader is the insubstantiality of authoritative accounts: almost anything goes. The local restrictions on the circulation of personal information are one

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key basis for the diversity of explanations. So, much local reasoning is based on inaccurate and incomplete information. In analyzing how Yolngu arrive at what they consider a true story, she successfully brings to fruition the context-sensitive approach to the political and social circumstances that people take into account in formulating views of a death (p. 101 1. The choice of one hypothesis over another is motivated, not just by its explanatory adequacy, but also by a range of tactical and strategic considerations. Thus, Reid is able to show how the Yolngu sociomedical theory acquires sustaining social value in the contexts of life among whites, as a lever in their attempts to gain jurisdiction over critical matters in their community (p. 11 7). Sorcery beliefs are reproduced, as it were, because they provide for an accommodation with the enveloping society which guarantees a measure of autonomy and a secure cultural identity (p. 1 17).

In addressing the difficult problem of continuity and change in indigenous beliefs, Reid provides several concrete examples of how people rationalize and synthesize differences between the traditional medical theory and their experience of white Australian society and the Western world. When we hear such reasoning in their voice, we get a further sense of that radically decentralized quality of beliefs that underpins the whole book. Two letters that a local leader wrote in attempting to learn the true story of a troubling death (pp. 137-1 42)--one to doctors and the other to Aborigines in other communities-provide us with a deep sense of the Yolngu search for meaning and of the difficulty of knowing anything with certainty. In seeing their critical approach to a problematic situation, we learn something of a paradigm shift from the inside and as elsewhere in the book we recognize in the Yolngu a personal, human quality of people faced with heartfelt ultimate questions.

One senses that Reids work is itself part of the Yolngu quest for meaning-so that doctors and others will understand Aboriginal rules. As many anthropologists have been discovering elsewhere in Australia, she is part of their synthesis, their project of maintaining autonomy and control in their accommodation with whites. In this sort of politics, many questions remain. Where points of view clash, can anthropologists simply be the agents and supporters of their informants? Are anthropologists just their scribes or does anthropological judgment resist this kind of total identification?

Howard Morphys attractive monograph analyzing a Yolngu childs funeral is a companion to Ian Dunlops film, Madarrpa Funeral at Curkawuy. In lourney to the Crocodiles Nest, Mor- phy attempts to explain the single (albeit complex) historical event recorded on film. A se- quence breakdown of the film with text references will undoubtedly be useful for students. This concrete specificity has further important consequences. Because it integrates consideration of the factors affecting participation with interpretation of the symbolism itself, this study is one of the most successful analyses of an Aboriginal ritual cycle. Yolngu ritual symbolism is represented not just as an expression of an underlying world theory but as a creator of it.

A central aim is to show how the ceremony was constructed, the choices that were made as to which songs and ritual events to include and the basis of these choices (p. ix). Morphys concern is as much with the symbols (the signifiers) as with what is symbolized. My focus in the conclusion, he says,

is on the reasons why elements of ritual action were selected for inclusion in the ceremony, and on the analysis of the content of the ceremony as a product of decisions made by the participants rather than as an exercise in structural hermeneutics [p. ix].

Morphy shows how the signifiers of the Madarrpa funeral are organized in relation to the intention of the actors, uncovering the sense of the symbols in the context of the particular ceremony.

By focusing on the event in time and in relation to the goals of specific actual persons, Mor- phys analysis makes the critical hermeneutic distinction between symbols themselves and what is signified by their use. The detailed account and discussion of the Madarrpa childs

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funeral in Chapter 5 , the centerpiece of this book, gives life to the very moving, sadly rich and evocative imagery of the deceaseds spirits symbolic journey to a final resting place at the mythological crocodiles nest in his home country. The image created by the Crocodile Dance that ends the funeral represents interment of the childs body in the grave as an egg laid in the nest, waiting to be reborn. Here,

the meanings of the ritual episodes are discussed in relation to a series of underlying themes that are expressed in Yolngu burial ceremonies and which are integrated within the functions and event-structure of the ceremony [p. XI.

Morphy overcomes the distance of observation not by any tricks with point of view but by intense sympathetic penetration and scrutiny of the image associations of Yolngu metaphor. Thus he lays bare the gripping, inexhaustibly complex quality of the Yolngu ritual imagination, a fantastic conjoining of affect and concept that draws multiple levels of experience into a tem- porary synthesis.

This analysis adds a new dimension to the structuralist study of ritual-the inclusion of human agency in the production of the shifting lenses of connections (p. l l 1) around a structural core. The sense of what Giddens (1 979) called structuration is maintained by Morphys clear distinction of levels in the organization of Yolngu ceremony. Social actors select the components of a ceremony-the ritual episodes, songs, paintings and order of performance--on the basis of four underlying logics: geographical, Ancestral, thematic, social (p. 1 19). The journey of the deceaseds birrimbirr soul, from the place of death to final rest at its spiritual home, i s structurally the most important theme of the burial ceremony, providing thematic continuity from one phase to the next. Ritual episodes must encode features of the spirits journey along the mythological paths of Ancestral beings of his own moiety and be, at the same time, appropriate to the events that characterize each phase (sequences of ritual action that are linked with . . . a particular major event such as placing the body in a coffin [p. 471). The point is that the ceremony itself is an outcome, a construction of signifiers whose meaning is not a simple result of intention. Thus, the Yolngu ritual imagination has a rather undoctrinal and po- etic quality, with a variety of metaphors (or postulated mechanisms) that describe the spirits journey.

Morphys analysis depends on understanding the Yolngu ceremonial system as a corpus ex- tending beyond the burial ceremony, emphasizing a thematic unity on which actors draw in the production of any single performance. Certain events, he writes, such as disposal of the body

may be thought of as the defining characteristics of particular ceremonies, reflecting their primary purpose. However, such events neither exhaust the functions of the respective ceremonies nor of themselves determine the main themes of the ceremony [p. 31 I. The functional events form the structural core of a particular ceremony, but do not contain

in and of themselves the main thematic and ideational content (p. 32). What Morphy shows is how Yolngu select from an objectified corpus of ritual episodes, myths, songs, and paintings to articulate logics on several levels. These planes of structure differ from Levi-Strauss (1966) treatment insofar as Morphys analysis retains the sense of ceremonies as enormous active ac- complishments of ordering, of continuing to make the natural and human worlds coterminous. For example, the songs chosen to begin the funeral activities were selected to emphasize the connections among the clans present to show their common concern (p. 64) while at the same time beginning the steps for the spirits journey. A brief but complex introduction to Yolngu social organization, religion, and mortuary rituals provides the necessary background to follow the particular rituals concrete integration of geography, myth, and social order.

In some accounts of Aboriginal life, it may have appeared as if elders kept power by merely withholding esoteric knowledge. By situating the reader in the account to see the construction of Yolngu burial rituals as creative and synthetic forms of action, Morphy illuminates the im-


portance of an experienced elders ritual and social knowledge in articulating relations on so many levels. Inasmuch as participants choose forms from the overall corpus that sustain agreement and satisfaction among themselves, there i s prestige for those who take responsibility and bring such events to fruition.

At the semantic level, what is interesting i s that these political realities enter into the choice of the signifiers themselves. This operational quality of symbolism is central to the profusion of meaning in Yolngu ritual thought. For example, Phase 2 of the ceremony involves the painting of the childs coffin with the Ancestral design. The choice of the design from Gangarj incorpo- rates the spirits route (it i s on the path) with the dead persons relations with members of other clans-it is his mothers mothers brothers country (an important relationship) and a place to which most other clans at the ceremony are linked (p. 73). The songs of the Gang3 ritual epi- sode, based on the ancestral myth, refer to the floodwaters moving down the inland rivers toward Ganganwhere they are held back by the constriction of the river. To the Yolngu, the singing thus focuses on the power of waters to bring the spirit of the deceased down the river toward his ultimate destiny on the coast. In the ceremony, then, Gang3 is both the signified (the place or point of the spirits movement) and the signifier, because the events there are themselves symbolic at another level of reference.

Despite the elegance of his analysis of the symbolism, Morphy is at pains to insist on the partial perspective provided by looking at ceremony as if it were a theatrical performance, because the content of ceremony depends largely on the social relations between members of the groups participating (p. 105). Indeed, Yolngu clearly perceive the sociological dimension of ritual work as a substantial part of its meaning, dramatizing the networks of relations that exist between people. As Narritjin says, After death, you have to show you are still one company (p. 109). Objectifying salient relations among participants, the weaving of ritual possibilities into an ordered performance is a political construction.

Finally, Morphy considers the implications of the combination of semantics and choice in the production of burial ceremonies. This allows for the crucial distinction between signifier and meaning, between structure and hermeneutics. A fascinating dimension of Yolngu and other Aboriginal ceremonies is that neither the components nor even the themes are usually specific to any one type of ceremony. For example,

Whereas in a burial ceremony the Yellow Ochre dance may be used to find the body and open the shade, in a rag ceremony it may be used to open a dead persons house so that it can be reoccupied [p. 1181.

Moreover, the Ancestral Turtle hunt can be employed as an analogue for finding the body as easily as the Yellow Ochre dance (p. 121 1. Mythological events, as analogical operators, can have a similar content with similar symbolic connotations.

If such an operator has enormous (infinite?) signifying potential, Morphy believes that integration within the event structure of a ceremony fixes its meaning in a particular way and affects the way it will be interpreted (p. 124). This, then, is what gives the ceremony its internal coherence and forms the basis of its collective or consensual meaning. However, it does not exhaust its meaning (p. 126). His collection of exegeses shows that individuals, according to his or her knowledge, can construct their own metaphors and follow their own paths of connection between episodes. Meaning emerges out of a semantic focusing that keys the content of songs and dances with ceremonial themes and pervasive underlying images, but the symbolic media themselves are motivated as well by the requirements of the immediate context.

By focusing on the context of action as the actors define it in a single ritual event, Morphys analysis of Yolngu burials is able to show how the participants create a text whose meanings

es grip their own imaginations. The realization of this emergent quality of cultural construction is only possible when ethnography is situated concretely in the identity, purpose,


and intention of actors. This i s the singular achievement of the revolution in Australian ethnography.

The general focus of Aboriginal Landowners, L. R. Hiatt's edited volume, raises the long- standing issue of local organization. Here, in the essays of Hiatt, Ian Keen, Frances and Howard Morphy, Diane Smith, Athol Chase, and Kinglsey Palmer, we see the relationship between ethnography and some of the legal questions that are of great import to contemporary Aboriginal life. Hiatt, himself one of the primary instigators of the first revolution against what has come to be known as the "orthodox model" of human/land relations formulated by Radcliffe-Brown, has lately reemerged as a leading synthesizer of a more politically sensitive Aboriginal anthropology. Though somewhat enmeshed in the local discourse of Aboriginal studies, these papers by a new generation of ethnographers are extremely interesting and provocative, providing a hint of the variety of relationships to land found in Aboriginal Australia. The studies share an emphasis on the political dimensions of landownership, with Hiatt's introduction and his lead article providing insight into the general social and theoretical contexts which have produced renewed interest in land tenure.

One might well wonder, as Hiatt explains, why "after seventy-five years of professional field research and nearly two hundred years of ethnography . . . it has been so difficult to discover the facts" (p. 1) of Aboriginal landownership. The material in this volume makes it clear that the puzzle involves many of the basic issues in anthropology-from the complexity of the sub- ject matter itself and the social and historical context of our inquiry to the semantics and translation of concepts (like "ownership") from one culture to another.

A measure of this interest has been generated by the research for and presentation of land claims under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act since 1976. These have not only increased the empirical basis for comparison, but also have involved Aboriginal people as interested participants in research and exposed the indigenous political processes underlying traditional land tenure. But some critical theoretical breakthroughs preceded the claims. Ac- cording to Hiatt ("Traditional Land Tenure and Contemporary Land Claims"), the once-dominant notion of Aboriginal landownership as patrilineal is rendered doubtful by the fieldwork of the 1970s. With the "main orientation of this recent work . . . towards the documentation and analysis of process," Hiatt writes,

perhaps its most radical aspect . . . is their break with traditional group sociology in order to stress the interests of individuals. It i s only in these terms, it seems to me, that we can begin to make sense of the rich variety of criteria used by Aborigines to legitimize access to resources or claims to the land itself [p. 211.

Hiatt argues that patrifiliation received too much emphasis in such work at the expense of various other criteria, including cognation. The inclusion of Kingsley Palmer's paper ("Aboriginal Land Ownership among the Southern Pitjantjara of the Great Victoria Desert") reiterates the recent and by now well-known Western Desert emphasis on the significance of multiple criteria in the formation of cognatic landowning groups. Thus, in pre-European times, "multiple criteria for affiliation to land-owning groups may have constituted a set of credentials enabling individuals to gain access to a wider range of physical and metaphysical resources" (Hiatt, p. 1 1). Indeed, Hiatt shows how Radcliffe-Brown excluded from consideration as mistaken his Kariera informants' statements about the sharing of totems because they conflicted with his model of clan autonomy (p. 13).

Hiatt argues that the consideration of individuals' various rights of access played out in political processes and strategies "need not impel us towards a radical individualism" (p. 21). Ethnographers will realize this more complex portrait of Aboriginal society by paying attention to the importance of specific contexts in formulating human-land relationships. In this sugges- tion, Hiatt is invoking something like the interplay between pragmatics and structure in so- ciolinguistics: rights to land are not univocal, but highly context-sensitive. Furthermore, at-


tending to the cultural significance of landownership as more than mere ecology, as providing individuals with a means to achieve fame or sustain autonomy (p. 22), can initiate a more non- positivist analysis of Aboriginal societies as dialectical structures. Indeed, Hiatt cites a case in western Cape York where the competition for ceremonial status militates against the growth and stability of unilineal corporations (p. 18). This sort of dialectical analysis goes far beyond the old models of hunter-gatherer landownership, allowing us to ask about the infrastructural foundations of uniliny where it does exist.

The potential of this approach is strongly exemplified in Athol Chases essay (Belonging to Country: Territory, Identity and Environment in Cape York Peninsula). In contrast to the marked individualism of the west coast people of the Cape York Peninsula, the coastal environment in the east,

with its extreme diversity and richness and generalised availability of most resources has provided an environmental context for wider identity categories to operate in, at the expense of opportunities for individuals and small groups to dominate sub-regions for strategic material purposes Ip. 1181.

Pointing out the productivity of carrying out comparisons around such theoretical frameworks as territoriality, Chase suggests the importance of the physical environment of the coastal regions in understanding territoriality, local organization, group identity and other organiza- tional processes (p. 121).

Like Gumberts book, discussed below, many of the essays in the volume edited by Hiatt deal with the process of land claims and problems with application of the statutory definition of traditional Aboriginal owners in relation to land. The Aboriginal Land Rights Act, based on recommendations of the Woodward Commission and anthropological advisement, defines traditional Aboriginal owners as

a local descent group of Aboriginals wh-(a) have common spiritual affiliations to a site on the land, being affiliations that place the group under a primary spiritual responsibility for that site and for the land; and (b) are entitled by Aboriginal tradition to forage as of right over that land.

Ian Keens A Question of Interpretation: The Definition of Traditional Aboriginal Owners in the Aboriginal Land Rights Act builds from his experience as research consultant in Arnhem Land on the Alligator River I I land claim. He focuses on the transformation of anthropological discourse into part of a legal statute and the conflict between anthropological and legal usages. While this anthropological definition of a traditional Aboriginal owner (the translation of indigenous descriptions into an anthropological metalanguage [p. 291) might be interpretable by anthropologists for their own purposes, in legal practice the definition i s interpreted by the [Aboriginal Land] Commissioner as a set of criteria which statements by or on behalf of Abo- riginal claimants must satisfy (p. 29). Much of the Alligator River I I claim was rejected because the claimants did not appear to be a local descent group as that term was being defined judicially by the Land Commissioner. The irony is that the claimants, who considered themselves to be the rightful owners of this land, were denied their claim because it did not conform to the anthropological model of Aboriginal land tenure incorporated into the Land Rights Act, which is essentially Radcliffe-Browns orthodox patrilineal, patrilocal horde model. Keens concern is that the definition should not deny a grant of land to people who had traditional rights in land yet could not be deemed to form a descent group or to have spiritual connection to a site and land (p. 43).

Many anthropologists who have worked on land claims have experienced the problem of how, in a potentially adversarial process, to present the claimants criteria and expectations of ownership in such a way as to conform to the requirements of the Act. While land claims research has added to our empirical, comparative base, in some cases the need to be an advocate has led to presentations or translations of the indigenous system in ways that are conceptually problematic. If the people could be represented by what consultants thought the judge understood as a local descent group, the facts were oriented to this model. The very questions

polltics of representation 147

asked of claimants, defining Aboriginal customs and concerns in relation to the single issue of ownership as opposed to more complex assortments of rights, distort the local reality of rights to land by ignoring contextualization. Indeed, certain features of Aboriginal land tenure be- came fetishized in the claims process: the right to take food from the land, showing ceremonies-even sacred objects-to the judges party to demonstrate ones rights. The problem is that land claims are not indigenous processes, although they attempt to somehow reproduce traditional rights and claims.

Even in a process meant to recover some of their autonomy, the Aborigines suffer the sub- ordination of their own values and sensib es to Euro-Australian ones. They must speak in public about personal or sacred matters and show strangers objects and rituals of the utmost value. Despite the admirable efforts on the part of Land Commissioners to accommodate the rules of legal evidence and the hearing process to Aboriginal culture, in the claim process Ab- origines must effectively make themselves open to European decisions about their traditional rights. This includes the anthropological consultants decisions about how to present the Ab- original case in terms of the Land Rights Act.

As Keen makes clear, the definition in the Act could also obscure thefacts-especially where local systems of land tenure do not fit the model. In the Alligator II case, some of the clans and language groups that claimants understood to be owning groups were not united by common descent. Although descent as filiation was clearly a ground for recruitment, the Commis- sioner could not accept this as a local descent group nor could one person be a group. Also at variance with Aboriginal conceptions was his ruling that two young people could not be included as a local descent group because they had not the knowledge to exercise primary spiritual responsibility (that is, not a deep enough affiliation). Not only does this seem especially punitive to those Aborigines most dislocated, but it also ignores the process by which young people could expect to gain such knowledge. Judicial interpretation for subsequent claims dropped some of these requirements, but the process had already left some without their land. Finally, for Keen it i s clear that the definition of traditional owners could be interpreted by the orthodox anthropological model only at the expense of making it inapplicable to many systems. But in departing from it, the Commissioner rendered it not only flexible but also arbitrary (p. 40).

The process of judicial interpretation has made even positivistically inclined anthropologists aware of the nature and implications of the analytic constructs used in translating Aboriginal culture. This has not worked so satisfactorily in the claims process itself. As Keen shows in recounting the whole series of Claims to date, the meaning of terms in the Act has been pro- gressively expanded through judicial interpretation. Unlike many other anthropologists, however, Keen regards this as a mixed blessing because

In broadening the definition, he [the Aboriginal Land Commissioner] has torn it from its anthropological roots and converted it into a set of somewhat arbitrary criteria which, strictly speaking, do not amount to a recognition of Aboriginal land tenure at all, and in some cases have led to inequitable findings [p. 241.

Frances and Howard Morphys paper (Owners, Managers, and Ideology: A Comparative Analysis) reflects a similar concern with the discourse and context of land claims research. They argue that

the information is not being gathered in a neutral context; and it is becoming increasingly clear that models of Aboriginal social organisation emerging from Land Rights cases are significantly influenced by ideological and pragmatic objectives [p. 461.

Two substantive conceptual issues have dominated the working out of the definition of Ab- original ownership: the role of women in relation to land, and the role of non-agnates (especially the children of women members) who, often called managers, typically have a complementary set of rights and duties to land. As Maddock (1981) argued, application of the Act,


then, has made anthropologists aware that the simple concept of ownership does not adequately express the complexity of relationships to land among Aborigines. John Bern and Rob- ert Laytons essay (The Local Descent Group and the Division of Labour in the Cox River Land Claim) on the Alawa of Arnhem Lands Roper River area is an example of this problem. The authors discuss a very interesting gender division of labor in landownership, where womens responsibilities were in marked contrast to those of men (p. 691, with womens ceremonial performances of the jarata ceremony expressing the most general and inclusive level of relations to land. While mens ritual asserts the rights and responsibilities of local descent groups for specific sites, it is women who most clearly state the principle of regional exclusiveness (p. 81) of Alawa territory. Are they all, then, simply owners? While i t appears that, as Bern and Layton argue, rights to land at Cox River are organized at two levels, the issue surely is how rights traced through womens collective affiliation constrain succession to specific sites within that territory.

Anthropologists have struggled to accommodate Aboriginal views on the extensiveness of claims within a region and the indigenous processes of according priority to the requirements of the Act for a local descent group. Thus, Maddock, among others, campaigned to subsume the manager category of landholders under the rubric of descent as matrifiliation-allowing local descent group to be a cognatic formation. This view initially foundered on the problem of whether the managers exercised primary spiritual responsibility since their role was complementary to that of the owner (an Aboriginal English term not precisely equivalent to that of ordinary English). Their inclusion, finally accepted by the Land Commission in the case of the Warlpiri at Willowra in 1980, was a major step to including in the list of traditional owners those whom Aborigines considered to be from the country.

However, as the Morphys argue, this has led to an assertion of the equivalence of different kinds of rights rather than an examination of the ranking of such rights in indigenous models of social organisation (p. 46). Anthropologists must try, they suggest, to reconcile the legal concept of traditional owner with anthropological models of Aboriginal land ownership and with what the Aborigines say themselves.

To translate adequately the indigenous conceptions, rights, they maintain, must be ranked. Yolngu, for example, have a conception of widely disseminated rights in land. Indeed, each clan is embedded in a nexus of rights and relationships that ultimately can be extended to incorporate everybody in the Yolngu social universe (p. 58). However,

This cannot . . . be taken to mean that all rights and relationships are equivalent, for ultimately they are just as concerned with differentiating groups, roles and statuses as with expressing an overarching commonality [p. 581.

Indeed, these ambivalent internal political processes of differentiation and commonality have been difficult to sustain in the framework defined by land claims. Focusing on land relationships among three separate peoples-the Yolngu of North Eastern Arnhem Land, the Nga- lakan of Southern Arnhem Land, and the Warlpiri of Central Australia-the Morphys address themselves to the relationship between the patrigroup (or patriclan), and the children of fe- male patrigroup members. These two categories have become enshrined in Land Rights literature as owners and managers (p. 46). While many claims have included managers as traditional owners in order to widen the number of claimants to an area, they show that in each of their three cases, the relationship of owner to manager has a different value. Stressing the rights of managers, therefore, may in some cases operate to the detriment of more significant right-holders (p. 46). In this sense, our definitions and judgments are entering into indigenous processes.

The Morphys discussion departs from the experience that anthropologists decisions on how to represent Aboriginal culture are political instruments that affect the reality of Aborigines. Like Diane Smiths article in the same volume ( That Register Business: The Role of the Land

polltics of representation 149

Councils in Determining Traditional Aboriginal Owners), they draw attention to the inherently political process of traditional landownership that draws anthropological research into its own orbit. What we as anthropologists write on paper, for example, becomes itself a ground for peoples claims to each other.

Smith discusses the effect of European institutions-namely the Land Council Register of Tra- ditional Owners-on Aboriginal society itself. Bringing some of the perspective developed by fieldworkers in western Cape York on the Aboriginal competition for power and control of resources, Smith argues that this Register is creating a class of traditional owners who, through their control of the Land Council, will effectively control future decisions about who is to be included as an owner of some sacred site. With no appeal for Land Council decisions, this structure is likely to create considerable conflict among Aborigines and establishes an entirely new political arena for getting on the register.

Marc Gumberts Neither lustice Nor Reason, as a legal and anthropological analysis of Ab- original Land Rights, has much in common with the articles in the Hiatt volume. But Gumbert is a lawyer as well as an anthropologist. Yet he appears to have had little field experience of Aboriginal society, a source of both strength and weakness. The result of the Land Rights Act, he maintains,

has been to thrust anthropological theory to the forefront of land rights litigation. . . . Faced with this praxis, it is my argument that classical anthropological theory has largely been revealed as grossly de- ficient [p. 21.

Gumberts analysis of the epistemological challenge of the changing political and legal praxis of anthropological work is intriguing, if sometimes blinded by self-righteousness. How- ever, it remains worthy of consideration by both the theoretically and pragmatically inclined. His book has two clearly argued points: (1) that the Land Rights Act as employed in land claims in the Northern Territory has an as yet unexplored potential breadth (p. 69) and, (2) that the restrained ambit of claims has been primarily due to the inhibiting influence of the anthropological unilineal paradigm [that is, Radcliffe-Browns classical model] (p. 69).

Finding Radcliffe-Browns horde model, which locates exclusive ownership of land in a patrilineal descent group, to be ethnographically inaccurate and a cause of legal injustice, Gumbert argues for an alternative view of landownership as vested at a higher level of social organization that he refers to frequently as the community. He criticizes the positivistic bias on concrete and coresiding groups, arguing that even where patrilines exist, for example, they are surface structure that should not be given priority in legal treatment, part of a larger whole.

My own research is largely in agreement not only with Gurnberts rejection of the patrilineal descent group but also with his recognition of Aboriginal emphasis on a wider sociality (Myers 1976, 1982). The Pintupi informants with whom I worked often described ownership of sacred sites by saying they belonged to everyone, to the whole family [that is, a kinship network]. But this statement must be placed in a rather complex political context in which some claims are more important than others. Indeed, the more restricted view Gumbert rejects is not simply a result of Radcliffe-Browns structural-functional search for groups and equilibrium. Anthro- pological treatment of hunter-gatherers generally is inclined to treat them as consisting simply of bands.

While Gumberts analysis is provocative, his scholarship i s provokingly weak: he is hardly the first to make any of these points. Burridges (1 973) significant rethinking of the ethnography of Australia, quite unmentioned by Gumbert, programmatically offered a less positivist view of Aboriginal sociality. The general thrust of Gumberts critique of traditional approaches to land tenure i s extremely promising, but ultimately unsatisfactory in detail because he distorts ethnographic reality. Essentially, he relies on a modification of Meggitts notion of Warlpiri communities for his model of social integration at a level greater than the patriclan itself, which he frequently sees as constituted by varieties of extended patrimoiety organization. Now, such


patrimoieties are not universal, even in the Northern Territory, but even more importantly, the ways in which ownership isextended beyond local groups is itself a critical variable in Australia (cf. Myers in press). In this regard, one must stress the point made by F. Morphy and H. Morphy (in Hiatt) that these rights often do not circulate evenly. To participants, the wider categories of inclusion they discuss may represent paths of succession rather than equivalence. Context is extremely important. The significance of peoples rights is ranked and our models must take account of indigenous principles of ranking claims. By giving so much attention to categories of moiety and section organization as representative of broader principles of inclusion, Gum- bert gives priority to kinship categories which are themselves syntheses of more basic relations and fails to conform to his own call for a geocentric view of Aboriginal landownership.

In the end, he is rather poor, I think, at describing how community organization works or what exactly the structure is. Nor, in relation to the Land Rights Act, is there discussion about how a community would conform to the requirements for a local descent group. Possibly, Gumbert is rather too sanguine on the potential of the Act, when we remember that Keen (in Hiatt) pointed out how some claims foundered on the failure to delineate common notional descent among the claimants.

Gumberts alternative model provides that responsibility for sacred sites and for the land should be with the whole community . . . which collectively has all the sites through its con- stitutive patrilines. . . . In respect of each site, the entire community has a role to play which is, however, variable with each member (p. 102). Gumbert argues that the role will be deter- mined by an individuals genealogical distance from a totemic site and his or her moiety, but this is not quite the process of affiliation as ethnography shows it. There i s information available about the processes through which ownership is extended. What has become increasingly clear since the mid-1 970s i s that the realization of landownership involves political processes. Strangely, Gumbert makes no mention of the very research-which preceded the land claims- that Hiatt (p. 15) described as a watershed in Australian ethnography. This research makes it clear how often landholding groups include a wider community of persons, but with greater attention to the questions of how they are extended and who is included. As Morphy and Mor- phy ask, where might we draw the boundaries without disenfranchising the real custodians? Gumbert provides no sense of the content of community organization, yet the ethnographic literature in Australia is beginning to offer grounds for comparison.

Finally, as Hiatt makes clear, a refutation of the classical model has been well under way for a long time--emphasizing precisely the labile and cognatic structure Gumbert (p. 63) believes he alone has discerned-with the distinct advantage over Gumberts model of recogniz- ing and documenting the significance of politics, negotiation, and competition as critical processes in traditional local organization. Failure to come to terms with this equally antipositivist view seems to underlie an unfortunate distinction Gumbert insists on making-between economic ownership of land and ideological affiliation with the land (p. 85). In imposing this distinction on Aboriginal society, Gumbert totally ignores the value of country or estates in Aboriginal social life as a realization of individual autonomy within a broader context of relationships with others. Ironically, Gumbert seems to make the same mistake as the classical theory he attacks, in seeing land only as a base on which narrowly economic action can take place.

This leads me to the issue of the groups themselves, to present a slight revision of Gum- berts antipositivist critique. In postulating the existence of groups in relation to land, Radcliffe- Brown was not simply the victim of his own group bias, insofar as many Aborigines do speak of entities such as the Yumari mob or the people from X. Gumbert, apparently, would have us subsume this observable reality under a more univocal and undefinably bounded community. The difficulties with this are clear in his discussion of the Uluru (Ayers Rock) claim, involving Pitjantjara claimants. First of all, Gumbert does not make it clear that the point of this case was the demonstration of cognatic descent as a principle of land tenure. In his discussion,


Gumbert chooses to ignore the mounting evidence on Western Desert local organization (Hamilton 1979; Myers 1976; Tonkinson 1978). Thus, he is unable to accept the implications of Laytons report of several groupings made up of individuals recruited from a category of persons existing at a higher level of integration whose members have variable rights over the entirety of the land. Because Layton mentions these individuals as members of a wider community, Gumbert would prefer to treat this as an example of rights vested in a discrete wider community. The truth of the situation, ethnographically, is that ownership is based on individual connections to places, based on multiple criteria, that are realized in political processes: landholding groups are aggregations of persons around sacred sites. There is no sense in Gum- bert of relations around country as a form of political activity and integration.

Ultimately, what is lacking in Gumberts monograph is a sense of human agency among Aborigines. He seems not to consider how a higher level of organization i s sometimes constituted out of individual ties and must be achieved in social action. The formidable issue he delineates i s how to present the hierarchical organization of social systems and, then, how to apply indigenous valuations to new contexts such as European law provided for Aboriginal land tenure. This is no easy matter. Rather, we are discovering that anthropological representations of Aboriginal society are intrinsically political and that we are, inevitably, part of the scene we survey, whether we wish to be passionately involved or dispassionately objective. Aborigines in their usual humane way seem to recognize this dilemma when they ask what our research will do for them and who it is for. This is rather a bald statement of the problem, but it is not a bad question to ask.

The studies in the volumes reviewed here are intrinsically interesting for the specialist. To be sure, none of them represents a grand synthesis or the encompassing vision that works in anthropology occasionally have. However, the value of these studies goes beyond their limita- tions. With increasing awareness of the political and situated dimensions of our own discourse, we are in a new phase of the anthropological project in which ethnographers and subjects confront each other, mutually, as agents. An anthropologist can no longer see him nor herself simply as the representative and mediator of his or her subjects to an Other. Informants recognize that our representations of them propound an image that has power, Thus, we are neither wholly other from our informants nor can we pretend to total identification with them and only subscribe to their local understandings. Indeed, if we take up the latter position, we have nothing at all to offer those into whose lives we intrude. Our sort of understanding requires a different sort of double vision that is promoted, actually, by the complex moral relationship we have to Aboriginal communities.

Exotic, puzzling, and distant, Australian Aborigines were once a model for what anthropology studied. We may now be turning to Aboriginal studies because the problems of Aboriginal anthropology are those of the world.

note

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Annette Weiner for her critical comments on this essay.

references cited

Burridge, Kenelm

Ciddens, Anthony

Hamilton, Annette

1973 Encountering Aborigines. New York: Pergamon Press.

1979 Central Problems in Social Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press.

1979 Timeless Transformation: Women, Men and History in the Australian Western Desert. Ph.D. thesis. University of Sydney.


Levi-Strauss, Claude 1966 The Savage Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Maddock, Kenneth 1981 Walbiri Land Tenure: A Test Case in Legal Anthropology. Oceania 52:85-102.

Myers, Fred 1976 To Have and To Hold: A Study of Persistence and Change in Pintupi Social Life. Ph.D. thesis.

1982 Always Ask: Resource Use and Land Ownership among Pintupi Aborigines of the Australian

in press Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines.

Bryn Mawr College.

Western Desert. In Resource Managers. N. Williams and E. Hunn, eds. Boulder: Westview Press.

Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Tonkinson, Robert

1978 The Mardudjara Aborigines. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

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