Dynamic Cosmologies and Aboriginal Heritage

Barbara Glowczewski

Anthropology Today, Vol. 15, No. 1. (Feb., 1999), pp. 3-9.

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Dynamic cosmologies and Aboriginal heritage BARBARA GLOWCZEWSKI

The author is a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientijque, Paris, and has been working on Australian topics since 1979. She has published numerolrs articles and books, mostly on Aboriginal people but also on other subjects -for instance, a cross-cultural analysis entitled Adolescence et sexualit&: l'entre deux (Paris, PUF, 1995). She has specialized in the comparative study of myths, ritual and kinship. She has organized and taken part in many initiatives to promote Aboriginal culture, and produced a 14-hour CD-ROM for the Warlpiri bilingual programme in Central Australia. She has also acted for various Aboriginal groups in surveys and consultancies, developing a special interest in the identity processes arising from tensions between local, regional, national and transnational territorialities. This article was translated from the French by Jonathan Benthall, with help from the author.

The unconscious remains attached to archaic JFixations only in so far as no commitment directs it towards the future. This existential tension may operate by means of either human or non-human temporalities - by which I mean the deployment or unfolding of animal transfor- mations, also vegetable, cosmic and mechanical, re-flecting the acceleration of technological and data pro- cessing revolutions.

FBlix Guattari, Les trois kcologies (GalilBe, 1989)

A hunter gatherer who has reached the social stage of maximum leisure thanks to his stone technology? or a pyromaniac who would have made a desert of the con- tinent with his bush fires? Spiritual guardian of the earth, protecting natural sites and their resources? or ex- terminator of turtles and sea cows through his thirst for flesh and blood? The image of the Australian Aborig- inal, like that of the world's other indigenous people, is today trapped in the settling of ideological scores. On the one hand is the neo-Rousseauist myth of the good savage, flourished by the adherents of a certain spiri- tualist New Age ecology which is looking for the ideal cosmic model for our planetary survival. On the other hand, the myth of the primitive cannibal, without fear or law, irresponsible, violent and parasitic, which jus- tifies colonization, apartheid and even ethnic 'cleans- ing'. Curiously, both models serve to exculpate the powers-that-be from all the evils suffered by contem- porary indigenous peoples. Whether he is descended from the 'good' savage or the 'bad' savage, the tradi- tional hunter, deprived of his pre-contact life style, ap- pears condemned to degeneration, alcohol and violence, condemned to disappear in the name of neo-Darwinian sociobiology. There's no place for him and no future, for there's no right to change.

Among the most pressing needs today is the need to accept everyone's right to redefine their cultural ident- ity. Saying that every culture is dynamic should lead not to condemning to death all those who do not as- similate, nor to deconstructing every memory of the past as an illusion (a too prevalent tendency at the mo- ment), but to defining the future in a new coniinuity which is grounded both in the past and in the ruptures caused by technical, climatic, economic, demographic and political upheavals. A dynamic approach to the sig- nificance of discontinuities is essential for proper ana- lysis of the relationship between Aboriginal cosmology or cosmologies and the environment.

New censors of speech and practice The tourist who is curious to discover the Australian environment with the help of Aboriginal cultures will often remain hungry. With a few local exceptions of Aboriginals offering tourists excursions or employed as rangers in the national parks, the 'first Australians' have only walk-on parts, even in art galleries and craft shops which depend on their products. Certainly the Aboriginals became a minority with colonization, less than 2 per cent of the present Australian population, or

about 500,000. But they represent 40 per cent of the market for Australian art, so why this absence of par- ticipation in the promotion of their cultural and natural patrimony? The celebration of the 1988 Bicentenary allowed a larger presence of Aboriginals on the televi- sion screens, not to do them honour as the first Austra- lians, but because of the insistence of some militants to foreign journalists that the Bicentenary was for them an occasion for mourning rather than celebration. The media missed the opportunity to explore the social con- sequences of such a declaration on the death and there- fore on the survival of descendants of the autoch-thonous cultures (Keen 1988). Since then, there has been concern over the tragic revelations of the long Royal Commission on suicides in prison (Reports of the Death and Custody Royal Commission 1996), and then on the theft of 'mixed blood' children1 (Report on the Stolen Generation, 1996). But people have refrained from pressing the governments to take into account hundreds of recommendations which a number of con- cerned Aboriginals from all over the continent have ar- rived at as a result of long sessions of work and reflec- tion, based on the need to implement collective pro- cesses of 'healing' within Aboriginal families, but also at the level of national reconciliation with non-Aborig- inals.

The Mabo law (1993), which changed the constitu- tion by recognizing the first occupation of the territory by the Aboriginals, serves as symbolic compensation for an historical injustice. But the long debate on its watering down by means of the Wik amendment (1998) has given Aboriginal claims a new direction. Thus the formally recognized existence of Native Title remains insubstantial, to the extent that every group has to ef- fect at the tribunal a bureaucratically difficult demon- stration of its cultural continuity with the land. Hun- dreds of Native Title Claims have been registered to date, or are being mediated, but none has yet been set- tled. The media's focus on conflicts relating to land claims has become all-pervading for many Australians, because it does not succeed in 'representing' the situ- ation in either the literal or the figurative sense. The successes of certain artists, sporting champions or mili- tant leaders are always contrasted with the almost Fourth World living conditions of their families, on the model of the noble savage versus the dangerous canni- bal, shamans or sorcerous guardians of the famous Dreaming. This is travestied in every way, notably that of excluding the Aboriginals from history (Berndt, Bird Rose, Swain, Widlock).

Polemics on Aboriginality are fed by spurious an-thropological debates, a mixture of political correctness and post-modernism.2 Teaching manuals of Aboriginal studies at the primary and secondary level recommend, for instance, avoidance of use of the terms 'tribe', 'myth', 'nomad' or 'dreaming', even if the Aboriginals use the terms themselves - on the grounds that they are derogatory. It is true that a certain colonial culture

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Central Australia, Duck understood 'tribe' as society without political structure, Ponds Region. Photo: 'myth' as lying or illusion, and 'nomad' as landless; but Barbara Glowc7ewski. many Aboriginals have reclaimed these words to under-

line the specifics of their identity. To reject the use of these terms today is to deny Aboriginals the right to define themselves as belonging to such and such a dis- tinct identity which they call a tribe.

Ironically, in contemporary French culture the terms 'tribe', 'myth' and 'nomad' are far from being negative. French anthropologists and psychoanalysts, but also philosophers and psychoanalysts, are certainly no strangers to this popular revaluation (Guattari 1989). For twenty years, publicists have been offering us 'tri- bal' categories. New territorial elements continue to be expressed in these terms: the tribe designates the micro- culture of 'mates', colleagues or other kindred spirits (including those encountered on the Net); myths are the images (star personalities, founding narratives or other values) which a tribe shares as models; and nomadism is a style of life which consists of appropriating geo- graphical or virtual places - urban spaces of work or

Emu foot stencil, Kakadu National Park, Arnhem Land - showing where an ancestral being paused in the Dreaming. From Howard Morphy's Aboriginal Art (Phaidon).

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leisure, music or sports clubs etc. - as scenes where roles define identities. The 'politically correct' decon-structors of language ought to take the meanings of words with more humour, for their gravity of approach results in many misunderstandings and can even be in- sulting for the populations concerned who do not live as 'texts' but as beings of flesh and blood, and more- over beings that think.

Similarly there are attacks on essentialism in the name of deconstructing racism, putting colonial and Nazi eugenic theories on the same level as the beliefs of indigenous peoples who attribute a communal es- sence to human groups: not only deriving from their kinship systems - patrilineal, matrilineal or other - but also extending that kinship to the environment and its resources, for example by means of totemism or the Australian Dreamings (Turner 1988, Glowczewski 1998a). It is paradoxical that at the moment when Abo- riginal studies are at the point of joining the school cur- riculum for all Australian children, such a sectarian ef- fort is being made to see some particularities of Aborig- inal cultures destroyed, as if these threatened the egali- tarian principle of human rights. To criticize the 'essen- tialist' specificity of Aboriginal beliefs or the complex philosophies of Dreaming is to lend some support to those advocates of One Nation who condemn the so- called privileges of Aboriginals in the name of the prin- ciple of equality. Analogous tensions between the aca- demic deconstruction of ethnic primordialism and the values actually endorsed by minorities are, of course, found in many other regions of the world.

In the same way as democratic principles do not re- quire us to doubt the validity of the special help given to disaster victims, handicapped people or war refugees, so there is no reason to reject the specific needs of dif- ferent populations: children, old people, inhabitants of

1, February 1999

Trevor Nickolls' Dreamtime Machinetime (acrylic on canvas, 122 x 60. em., 1981, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), from Howard Morphy ' s Aboriginal Art. Nickolls went to art school in Adelaide in the 1970s and developed a distinctive style of painting which reflects of the contrast between Aboriginal and post-colonial landscapes. Morphy writes that Nickolls developed his own complex iconography to convey the message of colonial violence and greed, and the intrusive impact of technology'. In 1990 Nickolls was one of the first two artists selected to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale.

hot or cold countries, cultural collectivities. If the Abo- riginals claim restitution of land rights and compensa- tion it is not only because their property and children were stolen, but because they claim a spiritual link to the land. Historically, the Aboriginal peoples are vic- tims, handicapped and refugees as a collectivity to which the State owes specific forms of reparation.3 Now these can only be adequate if they are adapted locally, not only to Aboriginal specificities but also to the multicultural alliances peculiar to each region. The problem is that the institutional structures which are proposed in Australia rarely give control to the Aborig- inals in such a way as to allow them to develop what is specific to them in their spiritual relationship with the environment.

Paradoxically, Aboriginal control of the true mechan- isms of decision is as much impeded by the new 'politi- cally correct' paternalists who invade the Aboriginal structures of consultation as by nationalist champions of a form of racism. This social and political exclusion, constantly reproduced by the bureaucracy, seems to de- pend on ideological prejudices with a long continuity in the Australian collective memory. Indeed, until they ac- quired their citizenship rights in 1967, and hence the

vote, Aboriginals were largely thought of as part of the local flora and fauna, a mixture of species that were wild, sometimes aesthetic, often dangerous, unstable, fragile, necessitating protection and isolation because of being threatened with extinction through contact with external, foreign elements. Contact being synonymous with pollution, similar to weeds, polluted territories had to be placed in quarantine, that is to say reserves, or eradicated, indeed even sterilized. The Aboriginal, like a socio-biological guinea-pig, is still often treated like an element in the landscape rather than a fully acknow- ledged social actor.

Yesterday the policy of apartheid sought to cut off the rne'tis4from their Aboriginal origin by forcibly sep- arating children from parents (Royal Commission on the Stolen Generation, 1996). Today, those who wish to take part in national development are accused of inauth- enticity, as if their access to the Whites' language and tools deprived them of the right to their Aboriginal identity. The accusation is a perverse double-bind. The government demands from Aboriginals that they en-gage in 'self-determination' while refusing them self- government; it asks them to make development plans in the Western style to justify their occupation of certain territories, while refusing to integrate their initiatives -such as food crops, fishing, aquaculture, tourism and the like - into the mainstream circuits of commercial distribution and tourist promotion. They are asked to prove their spiritual continuity with the land while being prevented from returning there. It is in this con- text of bureaucratic contradiction that we must under- stand the relationship between the Aboriginals and the conservation policies of the Australian national parks.

When focussed on an Aboriginal cultural heritage, such as the big sacred red rock of the Uluru National Park or the fantastic rock paintings of the Kakadu Na- tional Park, some of these parks recognize, at least by statute, the right to intervene in the management of what have become tourist attractions. Elsewhere, the collaboration of the traditional custodians of the land with the national parks is very rare. It is certainly to be hoped that this will change, but hitherto - with the ex- ception of a few Aboriginal rangers, in demand among other things for their knowledge of local fauna and flora as well as their traditional techniques of burning land (Hallam, Latz) - the practice of conservation- cum-isolation of the parks runs against the return of Aboriginals to the land. Indeed it is often forbidden in Australian parks to camp, make fires or cut trees, hunt or fish. Well, the Aboriginals reclaim their traditional rights as hunter-gatherers, but taking off to the bush the equipment of twentieth century campers: a car, guns, electrical gadgets, packing materials and other non-re- cyclable products. Can it really be said that the conser- vation of the environment is incompatible with the changes that are involved in the contemporary survival of human beings?

According to the current policy of Australian national parks, the only way of conserving the environment is to reduce the presence of human beings to spectators and possibly walkers - though in the southern forests, hikers are discouraged because of the supposed dangers of snakes and bush fires. At the same time, these envi- ronments have been preserved to date exactly because of the harmony that was developed over so many mil- lennia by the native custodians: active custodians in the double sense of hunter gatherers moving in synchrony with the regeneration of resources, and also masters of ceremonies aiming to maintain a balance between human beings and the environment and the reproduc-

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tion of species by means of symbolic activities - the dances, paintings, songs and other rites that punctuate the seasons. It is this overall philosophy of cosmologi- cal balance which is expressed in the different in-digenous concepts translated into English as Dreaming.

The virtual memory of the Dreaming All the sacred sites that Aboriginal people defend today are for them the traces, tracks or metamorphosis of the bodies of Ancestral Beings. These travellers with hybrid forms wandered on the earth before men's appearance, and they live for ever in what Australians now call the Dream- time or the Dreaming ... the Ancestral Beings are not just simple mythical ancestors, hut they are active principles who participate in the becoming [devenir] of things. ... Dreaming is not only a parallel dimension: it is also what is making Law for humans, that is all the words and im- ages that come from the Eternal Beings. Aboriginal people talk about the Dreamings in plural to designate these Beings, the names or totems they inherit from them, the mythical stories which tell of their journeys and are reen- acted in their rituals. ... In the case of the central and western desert tribes, these Dreamings are also geographical itineraries or trails which mark the events of the totemic Beings from site to site: in this sense the Dreaming is the Law dictated by the earth. This English word translates indigenous concepts from dif- ferent languages, such as the concept Jukurppa, used by several desert groups, and which means 'dream' in Warl- pin ... Every Warlpiri person is an aspect [e'tat] of the coming into being [devenir] of the many Jukurrpa, an ac- tive form of a living memory, Jukurppa, the Dreaming space-time, which transcends that person, and which he or she has to actualise in rituals. (Glowczewski 1991a: 16, 17,93)

For many Aboriginal groups, dreamers travel in the Dreaming space-time where they can meet the Eternal Ancestors who are embodied in the sacred sites and dif- ferent totemic species, the Dreamings. The dreamers can receive from them revelations about the Dreaming name and conception place of a child to be born. It is often believed that at death, the Dreaming spirit-child returns to the same place and waits to be reborn. It is as if all life were virtually sleeping for ever in the land, waking up for successive human or non-human lives. Men and women can also dream of old and new songs, designs and dances, coming from different totemic Beings: the Dreaming is creative only in that it gener- ates new forms by combining old ones. This creative process is self-referential (see diagram above). Men and women virtualize themselves into Eternal Ancestral Beings - who actualize themselves into human beings -in dreams, at birth and death, through ritual painting, dancing and singing, and through their identification with totems, places and stories.

When I be@ to work in Australia in 1979, the self- referential allusion to memory, language and image in Australian spirituality, and its bodily and temtorial ex- pression, seemed to me very modern, which is what made me speak of 'tribes of the cybernetic Dream'

(Glowczewski 1984, 1990). But I have always opposed the idea that the Dreaming is a 'dreamtime' where nothing changes, where history is replaced by an eter- nal recurrence. It seems to me that if the term Dream- ing was imposed on Aboriginals as the translation of their diverse concepts and perceptions, it is because the progressive form ing translates a process in the course of being and becoming. Following on from the philos- ophical intuitions of Stanner on the Dreaming, I person- ally defined the reaming as a 'permanence in move- ment', a 'space-time' in the astrophysical sense, a 'per- pendicular' direction where present, past and future co- habit, not because they are confused but because they take part in a virtual memory which human beings and other living species, their totems, actualize as past, present or future, according to each one's instant or place of reference (Glowczewski 1989, 1991~) .

The Dreaming is like a live and unlimited pro-gramme - not just a stock of remembered models for organizing society, but a matrix of infinite combinator- ial possibilities. This is why the Dreaming as a memory is virtual, allowing different things to happen so long as they follow certain rules of patterns. It is a memory where people's biogra hical events are encompassed in the collective memory P of the group but also of differ- ent species and elements, including trees, water, rocks and stars. It is the memory of the earth and of the cosmos which is postulated as holding the essence of some patterns which are reproduced through kinship networks, rituals (in designs, songs, dances), birth marks, footprints and other features found in different species, in the land, the sea and the sky. The combina- tion of these elements and patterns gives birth to new forms: human, animal, vegetable, but also new forms of arts, culture and society. However, nothing is invented as all comes from the virtual Dreaming memory, whose elements and rules of patterns are carried since im- memorial times by different traces in the environment.

This relativity of historical time, spatialized in places or individuals, is not an exclusively Aboriginal percep- tion, but is found in other cultures too and even in the West, in the reconstruction of our history which con- fronts written texts and oral memory. The difference with Aboriginal cultures is that their processes of relati- vization of memory have been institutionalized in the course of time by local philosophies, by mythic nar-ratives and their enactment in male and female rituals, and above all by a cartography which is both geo- graphic and mental and which has no single centre. Every place is a centre in the meshing that it forms with others, just as every individual is the centre of his network of kinship, custodian of his own lands and rit- ual assistant on other peoples'. 6

The Aboriginal cognitive maps which, by means of traditional myths and rites, interpret places in space as so many superimposed reservoirs of memory, have fea- tures in common with some of our most up-to-date cog- nitive models (e.g. Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994, Varela et al., 1993). Since the Aboriginals have a practice of dreaming in their cosmological apprehension of the en- vironment, the Dreaming is not a simple metaphor for a mythic time of origin characterized by fairy stories. Theirs is a reflection nourished by generations of men- tal and psychosomatic experience, both individual and collective, depending on an identification with the envi- ronment which works a little like a mirror, whereby the body reads the earth by its traces which are reproduced on the body and by the voice in order to give life to the forms and reproduce them. If there is a natural heritage which it is urgent to conserve, these are not the mani-

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Toa (direction sign from central Australia) of an emerging human, c. 1904, natural pigments on wood, 44 x 17 cm., South Australian Museum, Adelaide. Morphy writes in his Aboriginal Art that the red bands below the head represent the island that was created in the lake, and the red dots the bushes that later grew there.

festations of nature or culture reified in the open air museums which national parks have turned into, but living procedures which allow reproduction of this dy- namic balance of forms between environment and so- cial actors - not the simple binoculars on four wheels which lovers of nature have become.

Reclaiming the environment for the future A popular CD-ROM inspired by successful environ- mentalist projects suggests how 8 to 14 year old child- ren can save from extinction the wallaby species mala, with the help of a little Warlpiri Aboriginal from the Central ~ e s e r t . ~ It is a fine initiative to educate future generations to protect a multicultural environment. Like other Aboriginal groups prevented from living as itine- rant hunter gatherers, the Warlpiri have developed a strategy of resistance. Endlessly approached by mining companies, they drive a hard bargain on the exploration licences which they grant, in order to protect the sacred sites and the songlines which join them together. Hav- ing become goldmine managers and world-famous painters, they still practise their rites which link them to the Dreamings (totems, myths, eternal ancestors) and the Dreaming (space-time). If they have agreed to popularize their imagery by selling them on canvas, it is as part of a strategy to defend their land by gaining recognition for these Dreaming links which unite men and women to places by means of dreams and rites (Glowczewski 1991a, b). Everywhere in Australia, the Aboriginals seek to propose solutions for resource man- agement which respect their spirituality: for instance, the Yolngu in Arnhemland (Arafura Sea management plan, 1994), the Wik and other groups in Queensland (Woyan Wakan Wuut Manth Thayan Path of the An- cestors - Follow it!, 1995; Gulf of Carpentaria coast and river management, Kowanyama Aboriginal land and natural resources management office, 1992, 1994). In the same way as new forms of 'balance' have been invented between threatened natural species and the contemporary environment, we should let traditional cultures adapt new forms of life in the face of the mod- em consumer society.

To the east of Darwin, Kakadu - a nature reserve for wild geese and other marsh birds - offers tourist trails provided with shelters under rocks covered with thou- sand year old paintings representing ancestral beings and X-ray style animals. No less than a transliteration of the environment, these designs give us a catalogue of natural resources retranslated by the knowledgeable eyes of hunter gatherers and shamans who were ex-plorers in both body and spirit (Elkin 1933). In its radiography of body organs, its analysis of hidden or manifest forms like anatomy engravings, the pictorial art of Arnhemland strikingly unveils, for those who have the key, the close relationship of the environment to the interior landscape, a landscape inherited from the ancestors and remodelled, generation after generation, by this artistry which consists both of repainting the caves, to maintain the link with the life of the land, and also of painting bodies or ritual objects so as to re- generate individuals and society. Among other ancestral heroes, the two Djanggawul sisters named the species and the water-holes, sowing their Dreamings, living to- tems, the principles of reproduction of different animal and vegetable species. They have also left men with the sacred objects that materialize these Dreamings, rituals which allow homage to be paid in order to ensure re- production, and above all the forms or designs with which men rebuild their interior landscapes on the model of the traces that they read in the environment. It

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is thus that they have been able to transpose their rock and body paintings into the format of painted bark which is now sold in the galleries (Keen 1978).

A Sydney Herald journalist was complaining recently that the Kakadu park had no animals in it, the blame falling on the Aboriginals who, according to him, were already responsible for having wiped out the giant mar- supials as well as turning Australia into a desert be- cause of their bush fires. We know today that well con- trolled bush fires are, on the contrary, a way to con- serve species which among other things allows certain plants to regenerate, for the benefit of human beings as well as animals (Hallam, 1975, Latz 1996). So what is happening in Kakadu? The point is that the park is not planned as Kenya-style photo safari. To see the ani- mals, you have to acquire the eyes of a tracker, alert and patient, and if they still keep hidden, maybe they are right. Are the fish getting smaller and smaller? They are poisoned by the fuel of pleasure and fishing boats and by other pollutants tipped into the rivers or the sea. The elders did not want the Dreaming sites to be touched either, where prospecting for uranium and other minerals are widespread today; for them, mining threatened the whole equilibrium between the land, ani- mal species and human beings. It is not too late to re- think the exploitation of land and sea resources within a policy of conservation, but with the Aboriginals in-cluded as partners in planning and management.

On the north-west coast of Kimberley, the Ngarinyin and the Worora are custodians of the famous Wandjina paintings, ancestral beings which watch in perpetuity over the caves, the totemic species and the clans that carry their names. David Mowaljarlai (1993), a Ngar- inyin by his father and a Worora by his mother, ex- plains that he must go on painting the Wandjina, for otherwise they become sad and do not generate enough rain, which would kill not only the earth but also the animal species and humans. Around these haloed and mouthless figures, Western myths have grown: they are angels, or extra-terrestrial, or a civilization older than the Aboriginals. The same speculations apply to the 'Bradshaws', little silhouettes of great dynamic and fig- urative power which cover the caves of the same Ngar- inyin territory and beyond, sometimes being drawn underneath the Wandjina paintings. For Graham Walsh, the 'Bradshaws', named after their European 'dis-coverer', cannot be of Aboriginal origin, on the grounds that until recently the Aboriginals said little about them (Flood 1997). Well, for Mowaljarlai and his like, if they did not speak about them it is because these paint- ings derive from an esoteric knowledge whose secret could not be revealed except on pain of death. He came in a delegation to Paris in June 1997 to bring this mess- age to a UNESCO seminar, together with a photo ex- hibition marvellously documented by his community as part of the Pathway Project, whose aim is to make people more aware of the need to protect these hundred of painted caves by returning the land to the Ngarinyin custodians so as to protect them from destruction by vandalism and diamond prospecting.

The delegation decided with the community elders to reveal the three names given by the Aboriginals to the Bradshaw figures: Jenagi Jenagi the 'Nomads', Gwion Gwion the 'Inventors', Munganunga the 'Visionaries', their ancestors who invented stone knives and installed the Wunan, a system of inter-clan and inter-tribal ex- change which regulates marriage and trading in the Kimberley (Pathway Project 1996). Mowaljarlai is dead today, having fought all his life for the government to give back the land and the rock sites to its custodians

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'Rock Wallaby', 1974, by Welwi Wanambi (c.1920-74),natural pigments on board, 50 x 64 em., private collecion. Morphy writes in his Aboriginal Art that this painting is closely associated with the myth of the Wagilak (Wawilag) sisters and their hunting of wallaby; in most episodes of the story, the wallaby gets away, or comes to life and escapes just as it is about to be cooked. Red bands represent the fire lit to mask the smell of the hunter, and the square block represents a stone over which the wallaby hops.

Ngarrinyin, Worora, Wunambal and others. He took part in more than seventeen land claims which were all rejected, despite numerous anthropological proofs in English (and German), some dating back to the 1930s, about the resistance of these cultures in spite of their forced deportation into reserves (Petri & Petri). Mowal-jarlai was behind the creation of Kamali, the Ngarinyin corporation which has founded Bush University, in-tended for young Ngarinyin and other Aboriginals, and also non-Aboriginals who would like to discover by camping for a few days certain aspects of the link be-tween the culture and the natural Aboriginal environ-ment. This programme has made it possible over the years to pay the lawyers in successive claims by the Ngarinyin, who refused offers of government subsidy because of their concern to stay independent in the management of their affairs. Today this struggle con-tinues with the youngest ones, with the hope of con-cluding an agreement with the Department of Conser-vation and Land Management which has hitherto re-fused to acknowledge a place for the legitimate guard-ians of these sites, even though they are considered by scientists to be worthy of recognition as world heritage.

In 1992, some Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal resi-dents of Broome, an old pearling port of the North-west coast, opposed the idea of a crocodile farm being built on the marsh at the entrance of the town. Filmed by the local Jarndu Yawuru women's resource centre, a Jugun Yawuru woman told the story of the Two Snakes asso-ciated with the place, explaining that destroying such Bugari (Dreaming) places is 'really hurting us', and that if the Snake that sits there is touched 'maybe Yawuru people will be wiped out'. The video was sent to the then Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, who did not oppose the proposed development. But the Yawuru cor-poration with the support of other Aboriginal people living in town organized a protest camp on the pro-posed site, where a big tent was set up to host a public meeting between the objectors and the Shire. 'Broome is not a crocodile country', objected most of the elders;

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'the feeding of the crocodiles [1,000 bred per year] will exhaust all the local fishing stock'; 'if a crocodile es-capes, neither locals nor tourists will be safe any more'. This last argument was even supported by an environ-mental survey, but the main argument was cultural: the place was important for traditional activities such as fishing and ceremony. The Kimberley Land Council made several unsuccessful attempts to block the devel-opment under 518 of the WA Heritage Act, and through proceedings for interlocutory injunctions to prevent the issue of the lease both in the Supreme Court of Western Australia and in the Federal Court.

Meanwhile the crocodile farm promoter, a television personality, was calling for support for his crocodiles, who were threatened with death if they were not shifted urgently to this new site from his existing smaller park in another part of town. Five alternative sites were of-fered by the Yawuru corporation, but a lease on the problematic block of land was granted in January 1994. The following month, the Yawuru obtained temporary protection for this block of land from the Common-wealth Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, under section 9 of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984. A mediator was appointed to in-vestigate the situation, and, on the basis of particular (cultural and sacred) significance in accordance with Aboriginal tradition demonstrated in his report, a new Minister decided that the land would be protected for five years, after which period the situation could be rec-onsidered if the local elders did not show a traditional and cultural usage of this place. In 1998, a local agree-ment was signed between the Broome Aboriginal custo-dians federated in the Rubibi Council and the Broome Shire to manage jointly the development of the region in respect of Aboriginal culture and the protection of the environment. There are now over one hundred de-velopment projects, but at least Aboriginal people are on the management board. My hope is that the ancient heritage represented over a hundred kilometres by the tracks of dozens of different species of dinosaurs, some referred to by the locals as the 'Giant Emu' Dreaming (Glowczewski ed., 1998b), will inspire a local lifestyle which can satisfy both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal quests for the earth's ancestral past and spiritual future.

Conservation of the environment should mean find-ing new ways of guaranteeing the cohabitation of every diversity - animal, vegetable, human, cultural, technical - so as to maintain a fair balance between resources, fishing and hunting. Conserving the environment there-fore entails changing people's frame of mind, not to go backwards as if urban development did not exist, but to invent a new future where the attainments of technol-ogy are put at the service of the natural riches that sur-round us. The projects initiated by Aboriginals for par-ticipation in regional development are becoming more and more insistent in Australia. Here and there munici-pal councils do open their doors to Aboriginals, and Aboriginal organizations negotiate consultative agree-ments with regard to land and marine resources devel-opment. That is without a doubt the most positive out-come: that the national debate on land and sea rights should be fertilized by all these local initiatives which seek to contest exclusion, racial hatred and the destruc-tion of natural resources at an everyday level.

A note on ethnic terminology The expression 'mixed blood' was officially used by the Australian

administration, who distinguished the 'full blood' Aboriginal people of 'pure' Aboriginal ancestry from the 'half caste' (with one Aboriginal parent and another of European or Asian origin), 'quarter caste' (two 'half Aboriginal parents or two generations of non-Aboriginal mixing), etc.

1, February 1999

The French word mdtis refers to descendants of parents or generations of mixed ancestry between cultures of different skin colour, in a way that does not sound derogatory in French. Similarly, in the north-west regions of Australia the Aboriginals who have European and Asian ascendants used until recently the term 'coloured' to define themselves as different from the 'Whites'. Many Indonesians, Filipinos, Malays, Japanese and Chinese came to Australia as indentured labour, especially in pearling and other fishing industries, and mixed with Aboriginal people even though the Australian law forbade it. Since the 1960s, when these laws were repealed, children who have one parent of Aboriginal origin can identify as Aboriginal even if their skin colour is light.

The mixing of Aboriginal languages and English produces local 'Aboriginal English' and 'Kriols' which are now taught as a first or second language in some Australian schools. But curiously the debates about the 'reconstruction' of Aboriginality have not addressed the issue of a Kriol culture, as if there were an Australian resistance against recognizing a new cultural field; on this subject see Wayne Barker (1992), Aboriginal film maker and musician, descendant of the Yawum and Jabirr Jabirr north west coastal people, Malay, Filipino and Scottish.

As a result of French colonialism, French people give the name Cre'ole to both the language and the culture (cuisine, music etc.) born from the colonial mix in the Caribbean. Here again the term is not derogatory.

1. See note on terminology, above. 2. For a critic of American post-modernism, see Anspach 1991. For

debate around these issues in Australia, see Thiele (ed.) 1991, Hollinsworth 1992 (and comments), Marcus 1990.

3. We don't simply owe the indigenous people an apology, We owe them, full stop. Phillip Ahrams, The Weekend Australian, 22-23 August 1998.

4. See note on terminology, above. 5. Cf. 'The incarnation of memory in a group - a business,

institution, club, animal colony, ecological system and so forth -may he thought of as deriving from three constituents: the external memory of inscriptions in the shared environment, the internal memory of individuals, and organizational memory linked to the structure of interindividual relations. This triple inscription defines a complex dynamic depending on the material nature of the traces: their intrinsic stability, reproducibility, transmissibility and accessibility.' Charles Lenay, seminar paper on the 'dynamics of collective memory', Unite COSTECH, Universitt de Technologic de Compikgne, France.

6. According to traditional land management in Central Australia, every man and woman as the custodian and owner of an area, usually inherited from hisiher father, is called kirda ('boss' in Aboriginal English) of that land and the rituals connected with it. But everybody is also a ritual assistant to other lands and rituals, usually defined through hisiher mother and spouse, and as such is called kurdungurlu ('worker', 'lawyer', 'policeman', 'manager' in Aboriginal English). Traditionally for instance only the kurdungurlu could light bushfires.

7. Ingenious! 'consists of 5 missions in which players work with two argumentative but brilliant special agents ... to solve some of the hottest problems in Australian science today'. CD-ROM, mac and PC, for 8-14 year olds. Ingenious Consortium, 1997, ABC, Questacom, National Science and Technology Centre.

Anspach, Mark R. 1991. When American anthropologists go 'post-modern'. Stanford French Review'. 15:l-2.

Barker, Wayne. 1992. 'From half-caste to Creole, the Film maker, the Other', symposium, 'The Film, the Film maker, the Other', House of World Cultures. Berlin.

Bemdt, R.M. 1977, Spiritual and Ritual Change, in R.M. Berndt, ed., Aborigines and Change. Canberra: Australian Inst. of Aboriginal Studies.

Bird Rose, D. 1992. Dingo Makes us Human. Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture. Cambridge: CUP.

Elkin, A.P. 1933. 1980 (1st ed. 1945). Aboriginal men of high degree. St. Lucia: U. of Queensland.

Flood, J. 1997. Rock Art of the Dreamtime. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.

Glowczewski, B. 1984. Le Serpent Arc-en-Ciel veille sur I'lle Mornington: Les Tribus du reve cybernetique: Sur la piste droits B la terre, Australie, Autrement hors sdrie 7: 130-183.

-1989. A Topological Approach to Australian Cosmology and Social Organisation., Mankind 19(3)

-1990. Australian Aborigines: a paradigm of modernity? In M. Blackman, ed., Australian Aborigines and the French, Kensington: U. of New South Wales.

-1991a. Yapa -Aboriginal painters from Balgo and lajamanu. Paris, Baudoin Lehon.

-1991b. Du r3ve 2 la loi chez les AborigPnes: mythes, rites et organisation sociale en Australie. Paris, PUF (Review by M. Laughren in Australian Aboriginal Studies (2); 74-80, 1993).

-1998~. 'All One but Different', Aboriginality: National Identity versus Local Diversification in Australia, in Jurg Wassman, ed. Pacific answers to Western hegemony. Oxford: Berg.

+d., 1998b. Liyan, A Living culture, Jarndu Yawuru oral history project. Broome: Magabala Books.

Guattari, F. 1989. Cartographies schizoanalytiques. Paris, Galilee. Hirschfeld, A.L. and S.A. Gelman (eds.) 1994. Mapping the Mind:

Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: CUP. Hollinsworth, D. 1992. Discourses on Aboriginality and the politics

of identity in rural Australia. Oceania. 63: 137-155 with comments 156-167 and response 168-171.

Keen, I., 1978. One ceremony, one song: an economy of religious knowledge among the Yolngu of North-East Arnhem Land, Canberra, Australian National U.

+d., 1988. Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in 'Settled' Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies.

Hallam, S.J. 1975 Fire and Hearth: a study of Aboriginal usage and European usurpation in south-western Australia. Canberra: Australian Inst. of Aboriginal Studies.

Latz, P. 1996. Bushfires and Bushtucker -Aboriginal plant use in Central Australia, Alice Springs, IAD Press.

Marcus, J. ed. 1990. Writing Australian culture: Text, society and national identity. Social Analysis. 27.

Micha, F.J. 1970. Trade and change in Australian Aboriginal Cultures, in Piling and Waterman, eds., Diprotodon to detribalization. Ann Arbor: Michigan U. P.

Mowaljarlai, D. & J. Malnic. 1993. Yorro Yorro. Everything standing up alive. Spirit of the Kimberley. Broome; Magahala Books.

Pathway project. 1996. Le chemin secret des Ngarinyin. Catalogue d'exposition du Musek d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris; UNESCO.

Petri, H. & G. Petri-Odermann. 1988. A Nativistic and millenarian Movement in North-West Australia, in D. Rose & T. Swain, eds., Aboriginal Australians and Christian Missions, The Australian Association for the Study of Religions (article translated from German, 1964).

Stanner, W.E. 1958. The Dreaming, in W.A. Lessa & E.Z. Vogt, eds., Reader in Comparafise Religion: An Anthropological Approach, Evaston, IL.: Ow, Peterson & Co.

Swain, T. 1993. A place for strangers. Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being. Cambridge: CUP.

Thiele, S. ed. 1991 Reconsidering Aboriginality. Australian Journal of Anthropology, special issue 2(2).

Turner, D. 1980. Australian Aboriginal Social Organisation, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities P.

Varela, F.J., E. Thompson and E. Rosch. 1993. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA.: MIT

Widlock, T. 1992. Practice, politics and ideology of the 'travelling business' in Aboriginal Australia. Oceania 63: 115-136.

Archaeology and the 1997 Peruvian hostage crisis

The author is an associate professor of anthropology in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was in Peru when the attack on the Japanese Ambassador's residence occurred; she was taking

On the balmy summer evening of 17 December 1996, in Lima, Peru, a small cadre of MRTA (Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru) terrorists crashed the an- nual party hosted by the Japanese ambassador to cel- ebrate Emperor Akihito's birthday and took everyone present hostage. With the audacity and precision char- acteristic of MRTA assaults, fourteen terrorists had been able to gain entry to the gala event by posing as

waiters and florists and by blasting their way through the back wall of the diplomatic residence, even though heavily armed Peruvian police lined the street outside. It was originally stated in the 19 December 1996 issue of the Peruvian newspaper, La Rephblica, that some terrorists had entered through a tunnel dug from the neighbouring house which the subversives had rented many months before.

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