Fred R. Myers

8/3/2019 Fred R. Myers

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Locating Ethnographic Practice: Romance, Reality, and Politics in the Outback

Author(s): Fred R. MyersSource: American Ethnologist, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Nov., 1988), pp. 609-624Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/645509 .

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locatingethnographicpractice:romance,reality,and

politics in the outback

FRED R. MYERS-New YorkUniversity

"first contact"

InearlyOctober of 1984, the banner headlines of the Melbourne Heraldrangout "WE FIND

LOSTTRIBE."This was the firstpublic revelation of the entry into contact with Euro-Australian

civilization of yet another remnant group of hunting and gatheringAboriginal people in Aus-

tralia's Western Desert. (There were nine people: two older women and their children, com-

prisingtwo young men, a young woman, two adolescent boys, two adolescent girls.)With the

publication, as well, a protractedstruggle began among several categories of social actors to

determine the meaning of thisevent and therebydefine relevant courses of action. The meaning

of the contact event and its consequences were interpreteddifferently by local Aborigines

themselves, by the "new people," the press, the Ministerof AboriginalAffairs,Aboriginal agen-

cies, and sympatheticwhites-in termsof their own motivationsand their favored conventions

(romantic,scientific, medical) for representingthe Aborigine. Ultimately, the Aboriginalclaim

to "own" the event as non-news prevailed, to some extent through their deployment of an-

thropological representationvia "experts"(my co-researcher, BetteClark,and me) who could

mediate between them and the nation-state. Incertain respects, the termsof this struggletook

an ironic turn, if one considers the usual opposition of Western history to other people's

"myth": this time, Aboriginal history opposed the mythical Australianappropriationof "first

contact."

Asanthropologists,BetteClarkand Ifound ourselves playinga complicated role in this strug-

gle that involved the problem of ethnographic representationin provocative ways. This paperis an exploration, then, of the theoretical and practical significance of a kind of ethnographic

work,an interpretivepractice, that Iwill call applied hermeneutics. Much has been made latelyof the problems of representationas a signifying practice, but few have considered the practiceof

signifyingin a concrete context.

practice, theory, and "representation"

The problemof "representation"is central to much of the current debate in anthropology as

it is in historyand in the arts. Scholars within (and between) all of these fields have been de-

Thispaper explores the contest over the meaning of the appearance of previouslyuncontacted Pintupi Aborigines in late 1984, arguingthat an importantsite of Pin-

tupi social action is transaction with the outside and theirstruggle to define theirown frameworkof understanding. The event was interpreted by varying "audi-

ences" in terms of their differingmotivations and favored conventions for repre-

senting the Aborigine. Ianalyze my role as ethnographer, scientist, advocate, and

academic and the use of ethnographic knowledge in mediating these competingdiscourses. [AustralianAborigines, interpretation,politics]

locating ethnographic practice 609



veloping critiquesof representationthatemphasize, varyingly,that accounts are "constructed"

(orfashioned) according to discernible literaryand visual conventions and devices, that theyare situated in particularhistoricaland social contexts, and that the accounts should be ques-tioned as elements of discourses that purportto "know" but can be seen as legitimating rela-

tions of power, hegemony, and subordination. Collectively, such treatments have drawn atten-

tion to representationas a practice, a social practice of signification.

Underlyingall the critiques (poststructuralist econstruction, Foucaultian discourse analysis,and so on), which are sometimes referred to as "postmodern," is what Eagleton (1983) has

called succinctly a challenge to the realistor representationalsign, that is, the sign as "a trans-

lucent window on to the object," "quite neutral and colourless in itself" of which the "only

job is to representsomething else, become the vehicle of a meaning conceived quite indepen-

dently of itself" (Eagleton1983:136). The problem with this view of the "sign as 'reflection,'

'expression' or 'representation'" is "that it denies the productive character of language"

(1983:136).

This is partlywhat Wagner (1980) meant by the "invention of culture," but in focusing on

how language produces or constitutes the reality it depicts, critics have identified a variety of

problems with ethnographic writings. One is that ethnographies may construct authoritative

representationsof others in a realistmold that misconstrues the world it purports o represent-

in the sense of pluralityof voices within that social world (Clifford1983, 1986), in the sense of

suppressingor ignoringthe largerconditions that underlie the relationship between observer

and observed (Asad 1986; Dwyer 1977; Said 1978), or in the sense of misconceiving the on-

tological status of the facts offered as representingsome "system" beyond the events and pro-

cesses in which the "facts" are intrinsicallysituated (Geertz 1973).

By calling attentionto how the ethnographer, like the native, constructsreality, postmodern

criticism seems to callethnographic reality

intoquestion.

Forsome,

the rhetorical self-aware-

ness about the making of anthropological discourse has tended to a ratherNietzschean skep-

ticism about empirical knowledge as something determined entirely by the conventions and

the projectof the "knower." There are, however, other voices in the postmodern camp that

can help formulatecontemporary ethnographic practice in ways that are more accurate and

engaged with the world.

The problem may not be with the attemptto describe, butwith descriptions thatefface their

own status as signs and foster the illusion of perceiving realitywithout intervention.Of course,

one solution to thisdifficulty, proposed earlyon within the Russian Formalist radition,has been

what Barthescalled a "double" sign, a sign that calls attention to its own nature as a sign-to

the construction as a construction. Another solution is implied in ethnographic practices ofcomparison, through which anthropologists learn to look through the sign-the textual repre-

sentation-and the historically specific disciplinary questions to which it responded, toward a

"reality"beyond the words, which remainsthe goal of understanding.These interpretiveprac-

tices have been little discussed, as far as Iknow, but they suggest that an awareness of textual

construction has an importantplace in ethnographic work.

Much of the recent reaction by anthropologiststo the postmodern critiques by Boon (1982),

Cliffordand Marcus(1986) and by Marcus and Fischer(1986) has been based on the idea that

this critique dismisses the reality of ethnography's project altogether (cf. Ghani 1987:346). I

think this reaction is a misreadingand a conflation of two trends in postmodern criticism-one

which may indeed be nihilistic while the other may encourage anthropology to focus anew onmore ethnographically productive sites.

Forthe purposes of simplicity, one can characterize the conflated critical positions as those

of Clifford 1986), on the one hand, and Marcus and Fischer(1986), on the other. Cliffordseems

to stressethnography as a genre of writingwith specific conventions (especially the convention

of "realism")and he is interested in ethnographic texts as they speak to each other and to other

genres. Marcusand Fischer, if I read them rightly,are concerned with how changing conven-

610 americanethnologist



tions of representationhave broaderpolitical and social implications, how they might be used

to come to terms with the anthropological problem of representingan altered, modern social

reality.

Formany practicing anthropologists, the literariness of rhetorical self-awareness gives it a

ratherself-absorbed, intellectualist, elitist, or apolitical quality removed from the nitty-grittyof

social life. It can be, on the contrary, quite sensitive to relations of power, conflict, and implicit

judgments. Thequestions raisedmay be appropriateto an anthropology that is less centralized,

that has many masters-or many differentsorts of audience. Marcus and Fischer write that:

interpretivepproaches an only remainrelevanto widerreadershipsnd can onlybe a convincingresponseo theperception f compellingglobal homogenizationf cultural iversityftheycan cometo termswith hepenetrationsf large-scale oliticalandeconomicsystemshathaveaffected, ndeven

shaped, hecultures f ethnographicubjectsalmostanywhere nthe world[1986:44].

So-called postmodern anthropology is, in such ways, asking questions similar to those gener-

ated increasingly by work under local auspices, that is, of a decentered and less Eurocentric

anthropology.

Inwhat follows, Iargue in favor of this latterposition as more positive and generative of these

considerations of postmodern thought for contemporary anthropology. I use the case of my

experience as anthropologicalconsultant duringthe unexpected appearance of nine previouslyuncontacted Western Desert AustralianAboriginal people in late 1984 to illustratemy claim.

The problem is how to represent polyvocality, not merely in subsequent analysis, but "on the

ground" as a participantin varying discourses, multiply motivated by often clashing politicaland personal goals. Isuggest that inthe changing circumstances of anthropological praxiscom-

mon to recent ethnographers, representationshould be viewed as a contested process that is

of central concern to the conditions in which most of the people we study now live.

the context

It is relevant that the Aboriginal people who are partlythe subjects of this paper, Western

Desert people who speak a dialect often referred to as Pintupi, were until the middle of this

centuryhunter-gatherers.From the 1930s until the mid-i 960s, these people had been leavingthe desert and an autonomous foraging life (in which they lived in small groups of 20-25 peo-

ple) for stays and finally sedentary residence on government settlements and mission stations

(cf. Gould 1969; Myers 1986a; Tonkinson 1978). The reasons for this dislocation are complex

and, at certain levels disputed (see Myers 1986a; Nathan and Japanangka 1983), but the ex-

pansion of Euro-Australian ettlement is ultimatelythe reason.The concrete context is not one of itinerant Westerners and an abstracted "Other." In No-

vember of 1984, Bette Clarkand Iwent to Kintore and Kiwirrkura t the request of these two

Pintupicommunities. We carried with us a personal familiaritywith the people, detailed pre-vious ethnographic knowledge, and also the credentials as "social scientists" that we had ac-

cumulated throughthe years of our association with the Pintupi. Inthis situation, postmodern

enough for any surrealist, representation itself-"reality"-was a central issue. Here, it was

clear, if anthropologistsdo not construct representations,others (journalists,government offi-

cials, or white gatekeepers to Aboriginalcommunities) have an interest in providing represen-tations of their own. Farfrom being alone, the anthropologist'saccount competes not merely

with other versions but also with other discourses. The empirical foundation of his or herknowledge, under these circumstances, may be of critical value. At the same time, I suggest,the practicalcircumstances of engagement (in this case, the context of "self-determination")

have an important nterpretivevalue because they lead us to see new problems, new issues, in

the data.

Inthese terms,moreover, an anthropologist's accountability (toone's subjects?to Truth?) or

his or her representationsis a directly related problem, because the struggleover the interpre-




tation of this event was itself a form of social action, possibly even a characteristic one in the

lives of many encompassed communities. An importantsite of Pintupisocial action now-in

the productionand reproductionof their identity-is theirtransactionwith the outside and their

struggleto define theirown frameworkof understanding.One could take the discoveries of the

meaning of Aboriginal action as revealed in current events and see them as a continuity of

interpretingmeaning that stretches from past to present, but that would fail to recognize how

these interpretationsare now meaningful in the different,political context into which the an-

thropologist is likely to be drawn.

the case and the actors

The firstwe heard that nine Western Desert Aboriginalwithout previous experience of Euro-

Australiansociety had been contacted was a radiotelephone call to me in New YorkCityfrom

a schoolteacher friend at theAboriginal

settlement ofPapunya,

where thePintupi

had once

lived. Atthatpoint, the discovery was still secret, not yet revealed in the press. Subsequently, I

received a call from the Central Land Council (an Aboriginal organization based in Alice

Springs).They asked me to act as consultant forthe JointWorking Partyof the Department of

AboriginalAffairs and the Land Council to determine the identity and condition of the new

people, theirreasons for makingcontact, theiraspirations,the expectations of the other Pintupi,and so on. There was tenuous cooperation and suspicion between these organizations, who

representeddifferent interests,and I was hesitant (as an outside American anthropologist)to

enter such a conflict. ButIwas also very interestedto find out what had happened, and Iagreedwhen it became clear that the Pintupithemselves wanted me to come. Itwas decided that I

would come with BetteClark,who was then my wife and who had been working with Pintupiwomen as an anthropologist.

Myfieldworkwith Western Desert Aborigines began with dissertation research in 1973-75,

at a small community (Yayayi)that had separated itself from the large government settlement

for Aborigines at Papunya, Northern Territory.'These Western Desert people had been the

subject of curiosity in the popular press in the 1950s, after Donald Thomson's expedition to

"Shangri-la" Lapilapi),where he camped for a few months with people who were Pintupiand

still leading a hunting and gathering life (see Thomson 1975). In the early 1960s, there was

much popular interest in the reportsof patrol officers of the Welfare Branch (see Lockwood

1964; Long1964a, 1964b) who were encountering the "last"traditionalhunter-gatherers om-

ing into contact with "white civilization." lan Dunlop's romantic ethnographic film DesertPeople derives from this period, a last chance to record on film how Aboriginal people more

or less outside the influence of white Australia lived their daily lives.

The fact that many Pintupihad only so recently come to have experience of settlement life

made me interested in them, but they also had a fierce reputationas difficult and intransigent

people at Papunya settlement. Throughouttheir historyof settlement-during which many of

them had died through illness, infection, and violence-these "last hunter-gatherers" pre-served a kind of distance and autonomy from the assimilationist goals of the government agen-cies (see Myers 1986a: chapter 1).

IrevisitedPintupi people with BetteClarke as co-researcher in 1979 and 1980-81. It was at

the end of this period, after a year of political developments, that Pintupiwere able to moveback to live in their own homeland area for the firsttime in almost 20 years-at Kintore,North-

ern Territory.This was 200 miles west of Papunya and Yayayi, the government settlements

where they had been living when Ifirst knew them. I worked on a claim for the returnof Ab-

original land to its "traditional owners" for periods in 1981, 1982, and 1983-this was with

claimant groups comprised of people of several different languages (none, however, from the

PintupiIalreadyknew). In1984, Icompleted a monograph on my research with Pintupi-speak-




ing people (Myers1986a), just priorto the appearance of the "firstcontact people." One ob-

servation is especially critical, I think, to the position I take in this paper about ethnographic

representations.The sociohistorical conditions in which Iengaged them (the intimateand rel-

atively autonomous nature of the contact communities in which they lived and the conditions

they placed on my participation)were always critical to what I learned. Aboriginesmaintained

that to live with them I had to "help Aborigines," that is, I had something like the obligation

they had to each other as coresidents of a community. It was essentially on this basis that Bette

Clarke and Icomprehended our relationshipto the events at hand.

Bythe time we arrived in Australia,there were several distinctive and conflicting represen-tationsof the situation,and these defined the dialogical constraints with which ourethnographywas to contend. The event came to be defined, for many of the participants,as an opportunityforredemptionand the formulationof an identity. Iwill tryto outline the interpretivescenarios

very briefly.1. The Australiangovernment, a Labourgovernment with a policy claiming to be supportive

of Aboriginalpeople and approaching an election, was concerned about the political reper-cussions of mishandling the treatment of the newly contacted people. Additionally, this gov-ernmentdefined itself in opposition to the rathercoercively assimilationistpolicies of the 1960s

(see Rowley 1970) duringwhich an earlier(and publicized) wave of Western DesertAborigineshad arrived at government settlements and had died in large numbers through illness and in-

fection. The Labourparty,since Gough Whitlam's short period as Prime Ministerin the 1970s,

had been in supportof "Aboriginalself-determination."

The Minister for AboriginalAffairs,Clyde Holding, had been one of the first to be informed

of theirexistence and he had responded by telling journalistsfromthe Mebourne Herald in his

own electoral district-resulting in the rather sensationalist account to which I have referred.

Thisstory

hadrepercussions among

theAborigines,

notonly

because of their resentment about

the publicity (focusing especially on photographs for which they received no compensationand which they demanded be returned), but also because it produced a flood of interest in

these "new" scientific curiosities.

Holding and his bureaucraticrepresentativesin the Department of AboriginalAffairs(DAA)

seemed most concerned to avoid a repetition of such Aboriginaldeaths at firstcontact as had

occurred in the 1960s when those without much immunity to the many diseases they would

face arrived n settlements. Politicallyas well as humanly, this would have been disastrous,and

the DAA felt it to be their charge to ensure the health and well-being of these uncontacted

people. Thus, Holding-presumably on the advice of others-wanted to send out a govern-

ment-organizedindependent medical team to see to the health dangers, and this intensified asreportscirculated of illness (colds, headaches). Infact, one doctor from the NorthernTerritoryHealth service, eager to visit the new people for his own reasons, took it upon himself to flyinto Kiwirrkurawhere they now were living)and begin examining them unofficially and with-

out community permission. When he was discovered by the local leaders, the doctor's notes

were taken from him and destroyed. He was told to leave. The Pintupi objection was that he

had not asked their permission. This incident, whatever its official status, greatlyexacerbated

tensions and distrust between the Pintupicommunities and the Government.

2. The local Aboriginal people, who had actually made the contact, have generally been

known under the rubric of "Pintupi." Once themselves migrantsout of the desert into "first

contact" at settlements like Papunya, they had recently returned o theirown formerhomelandsat Kiwirrkura,WesternAustralia and Kintore,NorthernTerritory.The Aborigines saw the 1984

events in a very differentlightfromthe government, although forthem, too, the meaning of this

contact was partly a "redemption" from the misfortunes-illnesses, deaths, and culture

shock-of the 1960s. Remembering the losses they had suffered when they moved to Papunyaand attributing hese to the doctors there, they wanted "no government doctors." This is not,one should stress,a complete rejectionof Western medicine, although their understandingand

locating ethnographic practice613







the problem:terms of reference as consultants

Itwas on the conflict between medical science and local autonomy that the Minister'sand

the government'scommitment to "self-determination"foundered, in thatthey did not think that

local Aboriginal conceptions, judgments, and values could be the decisive ones. A simple cul-

turalrelativismis not so easily sustained here, however. What if the new people died? To whom

was the Minister'sresponsibility?He saw his responsibilityto protectthem both in termsof the

probabilitiesof sickness and health as understood in Western medical (materialist)terms of

cause and also in the lightof Western values about the rightsof individuals and communities.

An anthropologist may speak easily of cultural relativismand self-determination, but what if

the Pintupiconceptions of cause and effect were harmfulto the new people? DAA personnel

asked me just this. There was no clear rightand wrong. Moreover, the Minister was not sure

that what he heard was actually what the Pintupiwanted. He suspected that it representedthe

advice of more radical political organizations in CentralAustralia(such as the CentralAustra-

lianAboriginal Congress)

thatmight

want to embarrass thegovernment.

Or itmight

be

prompted by the advice of whites, close to the Aboriginalcommunity, whose countercultural

sympathies-often deeply hostile to the rationalscience of the mainstream-romanticized the

Aboriginalcapacity for independence and judgment of new circumstances. What did the Ab-

origines themselves reallywant?

The government faced three essential problems. These were reflected in the terms of refer-

ence provided to us by the Joint Working Partyof the DAA and CLC.The problems can be

summarized as follows:

1. Whatdid the local Pintupipeople and the new contact people want? This would require

knowinghow to interpretPintupistatementsand actions. Thegovernment representativeswere

also concerned about whether the statements issued were authentic-that is, did they represent

what the Pintupireallywanted or were they somehow transformedby others (activists,advisers,

interpreters)n the transmission?

In this case, our past ethnographic knowledge provided a context for interpretingcurrent

assertionsby Pintupias well as their commonsense understandingsof the new contact group's

motives for contact and reasons for action. Our analyses would amount to judgments about

whether or not these were ways Pintupi usually render accounts of and for courses of behavior.

Previousknowledge of many of the individuals involved, their backgroundsand relationships,

was also a basis for fast and reliable study, not least because we already had relations of trust

with most people at Kiwirrkura nd Kintore-at a time when the Pintupiwere extremely sus-picious. Furthermore,as we were "experts"(with a Ph.D. and M.A.),the government could be

seen to have acted responsibly in obtaining our advice.

2. Are the Pintupi plans and decisions informed?Are they based on comprehension of the

risks and dangers of differentcourses of action (such as illness)? Obviously, this point raises

most pressingly the question of whose worldview and values should predominate in the eval-

uationof the situation.

3. Thus, the thirdproblem was whether the proposed course of action was beneficial or

harmful to the local communities and to the new contact group-based on our "scientific"

assessment.

Ultimately,the Pintupicommunities prevailed in keeping out the journalistsand the imposed

medical examination, sustainingtheirview that there was "no news" and that local autonomy

was the supreme value from which Aboriginal social action should proceed. The strategyof

interpretationwe deployed on behalf of the Pintupifollowed their view of the event as "his-

tory"-to emphasize the detail of the new people's lives, their genealogical links to known




individuals in settlements, and their longstandingties to the geographical area where they had

arrived.

So, was this "FirstContact"or the "Reaggregation"of band members long separated?What

relationshipdid what we observed, as consultants, have to the practical issues at hand? The

ethnographers'strengthwas to see this contact not as a break fromthe past, but as an extension

of Aboriginal goals and values.

analysis: placing autonomy

This review of a complex ethnographic practice helps to clarifyhow the political, historical,

and social situation of the researcher(s)and the immediate issue determined the concepts

throughwhich we would "interrogate"the empirical evidence. Interestingly, he thrust of the

anthropological analysis and the rhetoricalstrategyof its presentationwas to deconstruct the

"romance" of this firstcontact by presentingthe local points of view and to show what benefits

would flow fromacceptance of Aboriginal autonomy.I want to emphasize why the Pintupihistorical account of the reaggregationof relativescould

so powerfully provide the meaning of this event, counterposed to the more mythical "firstcon-

tact" stories. In the Pintupiconstruction and that of the new people themselves, contact was

no penetrationof some membrane standing between the past and the presentor myth and his-

tory. They had come south, having seen smokes, "to look for relatives." What they enjoyed

most, which was obvious to anyone, was extending their social ties, playing with children,

takingon their roles as relatives to a much wider network than they had enjoyed in their iso-

lation. Previously, they had only known of these relatives throughtheir mothers' reports. Whydid they leave the isolation of the bush? When the old man who had been the father of the

children died (at a place not far north of LakeMackay known as Kuwarla),we learned, theywere "sorry" yalurrpa)and left the area, heading south. Likeother Pintupiin the numerous life

histories we had gathered in the past and like Pintupiin the present,they moved away fromthe

place of death. After a death (the wrongly rumored "killing," which may have resulted from

eating spoiled canned goods at an old mineralexploration camp), they had hoped to find some

of theirrelatives,a common motive for travel-an acceptable basis of accounting for action to

any Pintupi.This is how we understood their project, their goals in the move. As applied hermeneutic,

furthermore,he concepts used to representthissituationto the potential readersof our report-of "traditional

culture," "autonomy,"and of "self-determination"-were

conceptsthat were

immediately meaningful to our anticipated audience, rhetoricalpremises of our own culture

that normally need no further interpretationand were, thus, enforceable terms. This form of

translationrepresentsa presentationthat Nichols calls rhetoricaldemonstration:

Wemight aythat hefoundation f rhetorical emonstrationependson dressingopics, placescom-monto demonstration hatever tssubject-matterr medium, n the garbof commonplaces, haredassumptionsropinions Nichols1981:179].

These "premises"also were the context defining my analysis of the empirical data.

It is importantto illustrate how this proceeds. It was obvious from numerous observations

and events that the Pintupiat Kiwirrkura id not treat the new contact people as entirely "spe-

cial," not as specimens to be cared for in a bell jar. Food, for instance, was more specificallygiven to them by others in the community, butthis was regardedas similarto any other sharingwith relatives. Thus, their food supply-things brought to the community by the local doctor

for their consumption-was also extended to (or shared with) the largergroup. This straight-forwardethnographic fact required interpretationat other levels. Itwas related to the Pintupi

management of the meaning and goals of the contact itself: these people were relatives (wal-

ytja)with whom sharing is appropriate; they were not scientific objects.




Atyet another level of analysis, namely that of our evaluation of the impactof "contact," this

"fact"takes on furtherrelevance: the transition to the contact situationwould have less shock

forthe new people. They received goods and care from people they knew and trustedas rela-

tives, essentially an extension of the familiarcontexts and circumstances they had known all

their lives. When troubled by new diseases and strangecircumstances, the comments and con-

fidence of relatives were reassuring,offering a supportive context in which to explore what

mightbe expected from new situations. Further, hey were able to act themselves and to take

on responsibilityas independent actorswithin this frame-as relatives. One can see this clearlyfromwhat follows.

The local doctor's treatmentstarted, similarly, from the premise of how local Aborigines

would interact with the new people rather than from a scientific ideal of medical quarantine

and isolation. He privileged their own values on interaction and gave an important responsi-

bility to the judgment of the Pintupithemselves, a responsibilityon which they prided them-

selves. Dr.Scrimgeour recognized thatclothing and food would be shared with the new people

(despitethe

danger,in Euro-Australianerms,of infection). The new

peoplewould not be able

to understandrestrictionson theirmovements and actions thatmightbe based on an alternative

theoryof health and disease. Even those Pintupiwho partlyshared the Euro-Australianheory

of "hygiene" would be unwilling to refuse the new relatives what they wanted. This meant that

exposure to the sicknesses endemic to contemporary Aboriginal communities would be im-

mediate and intense. Given this situation, visits by relatives from other communities would not

tremendously increase the danger, while theirpresence mightofferpsychological benefits. The

treatment, herefore,accommodated itself to the culturalrealities of Pintupilife but was foreign

to the plans envisioned by Holding's advisers. In the government's notions of authority inter-

vening on behalf of subject populations, protectingtheir health, these advisers representedthe

hegemonic definition of contested reality by the nation-state with its refusal of authoritytolocal understandings.

Those who have seen the film FirstContactabout highland New Guinea will remember how

impermeableseems the membrane between "native" and "white explorer,"between the prim-

itive world and modern civilization. How differentwas the experience at Kiwirrkura!We ar-

rivedat Kiwirrkurafter dire warnings from some in the DAA and others (on the other side) at

the CentralAustralianAboriginalCongressquite fearfulof bringing infection to the new people.

We were preparedto have no direct contact with them, but to find out about events and aspi-

rations through talking to others-especially from my friend of long acquaintance, Freddy

West, who was a leader at Kiwirrkura.Within hours of arrivingat Kiwirrkura, owever, as we

sat at Freddy'scamp, the new people simply walked up and sat down with us, introduced as"relatives"by kinship status and we talked. They were certainly, by language, the Pintupiof

20 years ago, but they were Pintupiand itwas no differentfrom meeting any other of Freddy's

relativesjust as we had done in the past.

Inthe stocktakingof one of the Euro-Australianswho accompanied the Pintupion theirjour-

ney to find the "lost" people, their "materialculture"was of significance. Itconsisted of a large

metal axe, well-used and with a short handle, some wooden dishes (pirti), large bundles of

spears and spearthrowers, and girdles woven of human hair. To me, as well, these objects,

however roughly made in comparison to many I had seen over the years, had an authenticity

and power as indexes of a life thatwas "other."I confess to having felt a special privilege when

WarlimpirrngaTjapaltjarri,he oldest of the young men, showed me his crudely hewn mirru(spearthrower)and other objects. The well-trained ethnographer, Iwrote in my notebook that

the spearthrowerhad no spinifex resin on the handle and no stone knife embedded there. Then,

the framechanged as Tjapaltjarri,my "wife's mother's brother,"invited me to throw his heavy

spear, that precious potential museum object. And so Idid, moving back frommyth to the real

relationshipthe Pintupisought to establish. Tjapaltjarri nd his spears were not the last living

representativeof a wholly other way of life; he was a man who was becoming a friend and






curing power, when they got sick during the early contact phases. The loss of maparnpa rep-resents a loss of Aboriginal power, literallyor metaphorically.Thetwo new men, contrastingly,still with their traditional mudcurls and headbands and admired by their relatives, were re-

gardedas full of power and able to cure the sicknesses to which the others were subject. In this

sense, the new people's independence and assertiveness constituted both proofas well as met-

aphorical illumination of the earlier destructiveeffects of contact on Aboriginal life.

history: a dialogical construction

The anthropological task was to translate the Pintupi's understandingof the new people as

relatives into termsthatwould hold the representationof the West at bay. This is, it should be

clear, a revision of the ethnographer'svoice and at the same time, Ibelieve, an acting out more

faithful in its commitment to the native point of view.3 Our report presented the event as "no

news," in two ways. First,the interpretationinterruptedthe absoluteness of the "entry" into

ourhistory

now, from the StoneAge

to thepresent-which

was the journalistic narrative.By

claiming that we already knew about them, the reportdefended against furtherclaims for sci-

entific invasion. This was science as knowledge but also as rhetoricalstrategy.Second, by em-

phasizing the relevance of accepting local, Pintupivalues (about autonomy, knowledge, rela-

tives), the reportprovided a framework for comprehending the new people's motive for con-

tact-what they wanted fromtheir lives-as well as for their treatment.

We interviewed the new people-to follow our terms of reference as consultants-about

where they had been living,determiningtheir residentialhistoryin narratives,and cross-check-

ing them by finding out their conception sites (that is, the places their mothers were residing

when they were conceived-an importantdimension of social identityin the Western Desert).

Guided by what I understood as meaningful reasons within Pintupi culture,these accounts

were checked against more direct questions-addressed both to the new people and to the

other Pintupi-about why they had made contact.

The ethnographic frissonof recognizing "culture"made palpably real, not unlike the expe-

rience in Sahlins' (1981) recounting of Captain Cook's demise in Hawaiian terms, consisted

precisely in that their accounts of the contact event were so evidently continuous with ordinary

Pintupi renderings.The powerful moments were those when custom and shared knowledge

reached across the gap between the contacted and those already within the Euro-Australian

orbit.When the two new men made their first contact with Pinta Pinta(the firstperson outside

theirgroup in 20 years),they tried to introduce themselves by explaining that theirgrandfather

had died near the place where they met. Throughcalling on this basis fordefining their identity,theywere formulating heirright o be there and suggestinga possible genealogical relationship

to Pinta Pinta.

Thegeneralsignificance Pintupiattributed o the contact was repetitivelyresonant in actions.

The primaryassertion that they were kin was evidenced in their action against FreddyWest

(whomthey had known as their relative,Tjukurti jakamarra)he nightafterthey were firstcon-

tacted-when they threw spears at him in anger for not having come to look for them during

the past 20 years. Some weeks later, the real sisterof one of the new Tjapaltjarrimen arrived

fromBalgocommunity to visit them; as she wailed in sorrow, they attacked her for having left

them behind and never tryingto look after them. When they saw her daughter, their "niece"

(yukari), he cries of griefand loss as they hugged her were profoundly moving and demonstra-tive of their reasons and hopes for making contact.

metaphor and the embedded critique

To pursue these meanings was to understand, beyond specific claims, what the new people

wanted from their changed lives and also to recognize how the presence of the Australianna-




tion-state and its administrativeand political needs constituted a new reality against which

Pintupiautonomy was to be tested. Thefirst instance of this challenge, then, was in the meaningof the event itself and who would determine its meaning.

In interpreting his event, as a consultant, one had to see how the new people symbolizedthe largerissue of Pintupiidentityand autonomy. This, Ibelieve, was the meaning the Pintupi

themselves tried to give: not justour rhetoricalstrategyor our metaphor.The issue was not their

identity as "Pintupi"as an ethnic group, because that label does not represent a particularsocial group or any particularcommunity of persons; ratherit was their identityas Aboriginal

persons with cultural rights to certain places and the expectation of self-direction. Pintupistressedexplicitly that they (that is, Aboriginal people) and only they could and did find the

"new mob." They contrasted, as I have pointed out, their autonomy and control in this senseas differentfromtheirown "firstcontact" in which they were the passive recipientsof contact.

Also, many of the Pintupiviewed the event not simply as a peculiar moment, but as within the

context of their movement back into the desert in which they hoped to define the conditions

of theirengagement with the largerEuro-Australianociety-government, tourists,mining

in-

dustry.They took the opportunityof my visit, in this marked situation, to explain to me their

plansfordeveloping and controlling the area, their plans for new outstationcommunities, andso on. Thequestion was whether DesertAborigineshad the right o determinewho could cometo theircommunities and who not. Thus, the new contact became, to some, an instance of this

largerproject.At one time, an anthropologist could write and hope to engage the readerthroughthe figure

of sympathy for the situation of Aboriginal people. Ifone adopted this sort of presentation ofthe evidence, the first contact would be shown as assimilated in the largerresponsibility and

plansof local Pintupileadersto reinhabit the desert, as one more burden forAboriginalpeopleto bear. One could

pointout how the

Aboriginesnow face the

problemof

controlling reporterswho patrolthe skies in small airplanes, tryingto land on theirremote airstrips o get the story-and then to leave. Forthe Pintupi, this invasion was purely and simply a failure to recognizetheirassumed rightsto control entryto their own country.

However, in our engagement as consultants, we came to wonder if the bureaucratsand oth-

ers in Australiacould be moved by "sympathy" or whether they were now skeptical of the

sincerityand authenticityof Aboriginalmotives, implicit or explicit. (This is equally true now,one suspects, of any representationof Aboriginalcultures.)Cynical or not, the questions posedof Aboriginalaction were serious threats to delegitimize Aboriginal "authenticity."Were the

Aboriginesgreedy, desiringto control resourcesthat could be exchanged formoney?Were they

ignorant or naive about the realities of state and corporate power? Were they just lazy andunprogressiveobstacles inthe way of improvinga declining Australianeconomy? What specialrightdo these people have to land, differentfromthose of hardworkingwhite Australians?Were

they simply manipulated by other white Australianswith a differentpolitical agenda than the

government?

These questions provided, if you will, the sociohistorical context of our advocacy research.To understandthis is to recognize how significantthe audience is in determininganthropolog-ical representations,of writing in a historical context. Here, the image implied in our reportwas of the re-creationof a Western Desert Aboriginal community-embodying hope for theirfutureas a people founded on their autonomy and self-determination. Is this a representation

thatthe hardened hands of the DAAwould believe? Ifone knows the realforces arrayedagainstthese Aboriginalhopes, forces they do not understandfully (ifany of us does), was the situationto be understood or representedas poignant?Tragic?Where, in this contest, should the socialscientist situate himself or herself?With hope, as many do, or with skepticism?Does it help the

Aboriginessimplyto accept theirunderstandingsof the world ifthese are unrealistic?Thismightsound good to the Aborigines, but what is the consequence of simply deferringto a bad plan?When does deference become posturing?




Our account attempted to sustain what we understood to be Pintupi purposes and more

deeply to link the contest itself to the project of Western Desert Aborigines to regain control

over the conditions of their lives-a projectthat promised more for the health and future of the

new people than any limited medical intervention could. How we reported it, its poetics (to be

a bit grand),could not be separatedfrom the politics in which representationsare intrinsicallyembedded.

representation and anthropological politics

In this context, to focus on the problem of representationis to come face to face with the

political implicationsof our knowledge within the social relations we study.Self-consciousness

about our writingand research as a practice is not simply more productive for how we write.

Itis exactly the process of transaction in representationbetween the West and the rest that is

the site of ethnographic practice, not as some abstracted hermeneutic but as the practice of

interpretationwithin the very projectof self-definition of the people we study.

Duringan earlier period, the political power of representationwas not fully understood bymost indigenous peoples. Often, anthropology acted on their behalf, defending the difference

of local cultures both through its criticism of ethnocentrism and through its defense of their

social orders in the mode of functionalistexplanation. However, this redemptiontook place in

termschosen by the anthropologist, terms that made sense in his or her home communities.

These representationswere, further,used in the West (especially in Americananthropology) to

maintain a sense of alternative possibilities for social life. Now that indigenous peoples have

come to be judged on the basis of such representations, anthropological practice may become

itselfa site of social action

inthe modern

world.4 Thataction,

oftenenough,

becomes one of

contesting representation.In reconceptualizing the interpretive practices of anthropological work, much depends on

who one perceives the audience to be and what questions one is addressing.As forquestions,

whether an ethnography of Aborigines seeks to understand a "hunter-gathererway of life" or

to understand "the changing role of women and health care delivery" will have an important

consequence, for example, on what one takes to be relevant. Both of these can be empirical

questions, and such questions maywell take their impetusfrom a varietyof scholarly, practical,

or disciplinarydiscourses. To put the issue of audience forward as central to interpretive prac-

tice, however, one mightask what gap exists between an anthropology that is responsive to the

people with whom we work and the interestsof academic anthropological theory (cf. Myers1986b). Inthe present, Aboriginalpeople in Australiado understand the potential political im-

plicationsof our representations.Forthatreason, as the Pintupicase shows, the concerns raised

by postmoderncriticism about the constructed nature of anthropological representations,con-

structionsand conventions that the writersmay takequite forgrantedbutthatmay hide difficult

assumptionsand relationsof power, are more significantlythose also raisedby our informants.

This critical focus has no intrinsic meaning other than that of its use; it can lead us to sterile

textual debates but also to more richly engaged research about the world in which we and our

subjects live.

Anthropologicalstudy can provide more than a critical mirror or our own practices or crit-

ical distance on our own culturalperspectives. Because the assumptionsof audience and pur-pose have been covert, the value of rhetorical self-awareness is in drawingour attention to the

constructionsthrough which, as professionals, we have learned partlyto read but which still

mask many difficult and misleading assumptions about the purpose and politics of our work.

Alternative ormsof anthropological practice may be theoretically liberatingbut not by denying

empiricalethnographic work; in fact, we know our subjects betterby holding them less defin-

itivelyto the problems conventional to anthropology as academic practice, and that is the goal.




These applied practices may provide a horizon of interpretivequestions thatactually improves

our appreciationof the data. Such practices may continue to appropriatethose with whom we

studyto some extent into our frameworks,but they hold this appropriationin a tension that is

more than just our translation of them by giving priorityto local political purposes. Thus, and

only belatedly, did Icome to understandthe currentPintupi political projectand their struggleto reformulatea cultural identity in its redemptive dimensions, recovering from the losses and

sorrow of their earlier contact.

What makes the struggleover the meaning of "first contact" anthropologically meaningful

beyond its account of a single event or a single group of people? In rendering this struggle

intelligibleeven to those who opposed some dimensions of the Pintupi interpretation,my inter-

pretationwas heavily metaphorical-presenting the contest over meaning as partand parcelof the Pintupi struggle for autonomy, itself a struggleto maintain their own values in the face

of Euro-Australian omination. Icame to see in this contest the most significant social process

in contemporary Pintupi life; thus, the new questions did improve my understandingof their

lives. Butthisanalysis,

even located at the newpressure

point ofPintupi

culturalreproduction,

speaks powerfully to our own conditions and presentsmetaphorically,an even deeper embed-

ded critique(asMarcus [n.d.] and Marcusand Fischer[1986:11 6] have described them) of our

society by revealing the processes of the state in dominating local constructions of what is. This

contraposition of the local and the translocal, seen as contrasts between the intimate, local

meanings and those derived from external realities, reveals what we have ourselves become

and what sortsof autonomy we no longer even expect.

notes

Acknowledgments.hispaperwasoriginally resentedna sessionentitled"RealitysRhetoric?r HasEthnographyeenCoopted?"which IcoorganizedwithAnnetteWeinerat theAmericanAnthropologicalAssociationAnnualMeetingnChicago,November1987. Theviewsexpressednthispaperowe much ovariousperiods f shared esearch mong hePintupiwithBetteClark. would like othank effSteadandMikeNiblettand othersat theCentralLandCouncil,Dr. DavidScrimgeour,nd thosePintupi t Warlun-gurra ndKiwirrkuraho helpedme to understandhecomplexities fAboriginalifeinCentralAustralia.Iwould like to thankShirleyLindenbaum,PamSmith,and the reviewers from the American Ethnologistfortheireditorialuggestions, nd SusanHardingor herinsistence n furtherlarification.Mydeepestgrati-tudeandappreciation o to FayeGinsburgor hercommentsand constructive riticisms n severaldraftsof thispaper.

'This esearch, tYayayi,Northern erritory,assupported yNSFDoctoralDissertationmprovementGrantNo. GS37122, NIMHFellowshipNo. 3F01MH57275-01, and a research rantrom heAustralianInstitutef

Aboriginaltudies.Research t

Yayayind

Yinyilingkin 1979 andat New Boreand

Papunya,Northern erritory-undertakenointlywithBetteClark-was supported ythe Australiannstitute f Ab-originalStudies herresearchwas supported ythe Social SciencesandHumanitiesResearchCouncilofCanada). hortvisitswithPintupi t Kintore,NorthernTerritorynd KiwirrkurandBalgo,WesternAus-tralia n 1982 and1983 were madepossiblebyworkwiththe CentralLandCouncil.

2Sansom1980)has offereda splendidaccountof thesignificance f knowledge s a sortof "property"among ringe-dwellingboriginal eoplein Darwin.

31 amindebted o SusanHardingorhelpingme to clarifyhispoint.

4Erringtonnd Gewertz 1987)have also recentlyried o showhow interpretivendstylisticpracticesinethnography-suchas theemphasis n "reciprocity"nddialoguewith nformants-maybedrawn ntolocalpoliticalactivities, position hatrecognizes hematerialignificance f anyanthropologicalepre-sentation na worldwheresuchaccountscirculatena broader mbit hanever.

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submitted 27 April1988revised version submitted 21 June 1988

accepted 27 June 1988

624 american ethnologist

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Fred R. Myers