Yumbulyumbulmantha ki-Awarawu. All Kinds of Things from Country. Yanyuwa Ethnobiological Classification.
Dwyer, Peter D.
Yumbulyumbulmantha ki-Awarawu. All Kinds of Things from Country.
Yanyuwa Ethnobiological Classification By John Bradley, Miles Holmes,
Dinah Norman Marrngawi, Annie Isaac Karrakayn, Jemima Miller Wuwarlu and
Ida Ninganga Research Report Series, Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Studies Unit, The University of Queensland. Volume 6, 2006.
Pp:vii +174. ISBN: 1-86499-826-1 Price: AUD$30.00 paper
Yanyuwa country includes the tidal reaches of the McArthur and
Wearyan Rivers and the Sir Edward Pellew Islands of Australia's
Northern Territory. Anthropologist John Bradley has lived and worked
among the local people since 1980. In this book, with five
co-authors--four are Yanyuwa elders--he brings together observations and
understandings of the diverse ways in which the people talk about, think
about and engage with the land and sea, plants and animals that they
experience.
Chapter 1 locates the work within a broad context of
ethnobiological inquiry. Chapter 2 discusses methodological issues,
noting a necessary reliance on the knowledge and memories of older
people, briefly acknowledging the impact of contemporary events on
traditional knowledge, and reporting the 'drive to preserve sacred
knowledge' that is 'being pushed by a core group of five
senior women and a few younger people' (p.7). Chapter 3 provides a
splendid overview of the Yanyuwa environment as 'both a physical
and cultural landscape' (p.9). It would provide an excellent
learning experience for an early undergraduate audience, in revealing
the influences of, for example, kinship, dreamings, Yanyuwa
understandings of habitat and land, and linguistics upon local
conceptions of what emerges as not merely a stand-apart natural world
but, rather, a socio-natural whole.
Chapters 4 to 16 turn to the ethnobiological substance of the work.
Yanyuwa understandings of animals dominate the content but one chapter
concerns plants and another, wisely, discusses spirits that to the
people 'have their place and Law like every other living
organism' (p.111). Some kinds of animals are understood to be
physical embodiments of the Spirit Ancestor, many are named for their
kinship with people or with other kinds of creatures--suckerfish are
kinsmen to the shark, small barnacles may be kinsmen to the turtle--and
others are represented, and named, on the bases of the habitats that
they favour--saltwater crocodiles are kin to rocky ledges of the
islands--or their place within a hunting economy. English glosses
provided for both names and the actions of animals, and the many
quotations from local people, guide readers toward a Yanyuwan
perspective on the natural world. The people's insistent
identification as li-Anthawirriyarra--'people of the sea'--is
often built into the nomenclature, the classification and the stories
they tell. It may be significant, however, that the English terms
'steer' and 'heifer' are sometimes used
descriptively, or as names, in reference to young male and young female
dugong (pp.36-37). The matter is not developed but hints at the
possibility that, in contemporary contexts, familiarity with creatures
of the land may sometimes inform understandings of creatures of the sea
and, thereby, point to some reorientation of identity construction.
From the outset the book adopts a strong theoretical position in
contrasting universalist and relativist approaches within ethnobiology
and stating a preference for the latter. The authors distinguish these
approaches, primarily, in terms of different emphases upon the salience of natural discontinuities in informing classificatory arrangements. To
universalists, discontinuities are given and so dominate classifications
that there is only limited space for accommodating social and cultural
factors. To relativists such factors are the predominant influences on
people's classifications of nature. The distinction might be
summarized as a contrast between empirically-grounded and
poetically-grounded readings of the natural world.
There are two difficulties here. First, though the authors favour
'relativism' as best reflecting Yanyuwan understandings--and I
have no quarrel with this--the book is organized in such a way that
readers, especially junior readers, may be left with a stronger sense of
ways in which these people do name and categorize the natural world than
of the intricate and fluid ways in which they engage with, and
poetically experience and communicate, that world. From Chapter 4 to
Chapter 16 it is categories of things--dugong and sea turtles;
shellfish, shells and shell-like creatures; birds, bats and flying
foxes; floral species; spirits--that frame the content and, ultimately,
seem to organize Yanyuwan thought. The informative tables and,
particularly, the numerous appendices reinforce this sense of
categorization and are likely to be grist to the mill of
etically-inclined analysts. A different structure may have better served
the theoretical intent. As it stands there are many chapters where the
authors feel a need to digress and remind their readers that, despite
appearances, categorization is not the predominant Yanyuwan orientation
to environment.
Secondly, while accepting that there has been a long-standing
debate between those whose approach to environmental knowledge has been
'universalist' and those whose approach has been
'relativist' my own sense is that, as with much scholarly
discourse, the two schools of thought are talking past each other for
the simple reason that they are asking quite different, though
legitimate, questions of the same material. On the one hand, scholars
ask whether, and, if so, to what extent, all people share common
approaches to thought and knowledge. On the other, they ask how the
thought and knowledge of particular groups of people both grows from,
and informs, the ways in which those people live. In the first case, the
emphasis is with 'global minds'; in the second case, with
'local contexts'. It is not necessary, or helpful, to see
answers to these distinct questions as philosophically, or
ideologically, opposed.
The book under review contributes useful information and insights
with respect to both sets of questions.
Peter D. Dwyer
The University of Melbourne