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