Emplaced Myth: Space, narrative and knowledge in Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea.

Smith, Benjamin

Emplaced Myth: Space, narrative and knowledge in Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea Alan Rumsey and James F. Weiner (eds) University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2001, vii+281pp., ISBN 0 824 82389 3

This timely and stimulating collection is one of two books that have come out of the 1997 'From Myths to Minerals' conference in Canberra. It contains a series of papers on topics of myth, place and knowledge that cover the wider Austronesian region and seeks to provide constructive comparisons between Australian Aboriginal and Papuan materials and the analytic approaches of their associated anthropological sub-disciplines. Given the cultural and historical ties across the wider region, as well as the intense involvement of Australian anthropology with both areas, the exercise undertaken here is clearly a useful one. Somewhat perversely, however, the strongest chapters (in particular those by Lattas and Weiner) tend to deal with one or the other region rather than attempting a comparative analysis. In the papers that do attempt such an analysis, the comparisons made often tend towards a generalised account of Aboriginal social and cosmological organisation. However, as a collection the papers are more successful in achieving the volume's aims, as well as providing a useful comparison of approaches within the two sub-disciplines and between authors.

In his introduction, Rumsey discusses such comparative analysis through an analogy with the Melpa-Ku Waru practice of 'making twos', the 'contingent juxtaposition' of previously isolated entities or categories which illuminates their shared qualities. Although there appears to be an implicit tension between assumptions of underlying crossregional relatedness on one hand, and opportunistic comparison on the other, the overall effect throughout the volume reflects the spirit of Rumsey's paper, allowing the reader to develop multiple connections within and beyond the collection which cross-cut the regional divide. As such it provides a welcome example of a contemporary comparative anthropology.

From an Australianist perspective, several of the articles unfortunately appear to reproduce a set of regional, descriptive and analytic biases, although the collection as a whole simultaneously provokes renewed critical engagement with such accounts. The characterisation of Aboriginal Australian connections to land tends to focus on examples drawn from northern Australia, with continual references to 'dreaming tracks' and the propagation of the notion of the foundation of Aboriginal existence being based in an unchanging mythological corpus. Rumsey's introduction maps out the differences in mythical emplacement between three particular Melanesian areas (Morehead River, the middle Sepik and southern Vanuatu), but compares them to a somewhat generic account of the Australian 'dreaming', drawn from Strehlow's Aranda material, and work with Ngarinyin people in the Kimberley region. This characterisation is compounded in several of the papers (those of Wassmann, Stewart and Strathern, and Silverman for example), where strongly localised Melanesian cases are contrasted with 'Aboriginal Australians' who are typically discussed in terms of peoples from the northern part of the Northern Territory and most commonly the Yolngu of northeastern Arnhem Land and their neighbours.

One particular result of this approach is to characterise Australian Aboriginal societies as focused on 'travelling stories'. This ignores the situation in other areas, such as Cape York Peninsula, where 'emplaced myths' are often not stories linking large distances. Thus, in northeastern Cape York Peninsula many (totemic) stories 'do not appear to be part of such a [narrative] sequence, nor do they have any complex formal explanation' (Chase 1980:149). As one Lockhart River man explained (Chase 1980:151):

 them muta [totemic site] himself, just like that ... .
 Mightbe that minya ("animal") do something there
 before, well, that place belong him there. Where he
 come from, we don't know. Business for himself, no
 more wefeller. Sometimes we know all them things,
 sometimes just that place ... Main story for me and my
 father, he just like that. I don't know where he come
 from. He always there from the beginning, he just place
 himself.

Another problem with the volume's approach is that it tends to occlude not only regional differences but also the effects of social change on 'emplaced myth' in Australia. Weiner's paper, with its focus on South Australia, mitigates this (as does a brief section in Silvermann's), particularly in its excellent, if occasionally verbose, discussion of cultural production within a situation of more radical social change, but more material on emplaced myths in less 'remote' contexts would have been welcome. To continue Rumsey's use of the work of Deleuze and Guattari, such examples allow us to explore the particular ways in which sociocultural production 'striates' space, particularly when interwoven with state agency or corporations and community organisations and where indigenous and non-indigenous life-worlds are profoundly interwoven. That such effects are clear even in more 'remote' parts of Australia is a matter given little attention here. In central Cape York Peninsula, for example, the Chevron Pipeline project with which Rumsey opens his introduction, alongside other intercultural projects like land-claim hearings, have acted to frame, and in some cases have clearly stimulated, a renaissance in more definite landholding groups and the political and proprietorial importance of 'emplaced myth' across the region, a process usefully outlined by Weiner in his afterword.

Redmond's critique of Nancy Munn's structural scheme relating country, people and the ancestral past follows John Morton in addressing a deterministic bias in the Australianist canon. Redmond identifies a similar schema in Howard Morphy's work, and it is reproduced in many of the volume's papers for which Morphy's work acts as a cornerstone in approaching Australian Aboriginal relations to place. I found Redmond's approach--which emphasises the ongoing mutual embeddedness of personhood, event, knowledge and place--extremely useful, although I am unsure how much his psychoanalytic bent adds to the core argument. Like the recent work of Francesca Merlan, Redmond's article articulates a more nuanced understanding of change and event within Aboriginal cultural production, an approach as vital in other areas of Australia as in the relatively remote Kimberley region.

Among the other papers, Deborah Bird Rose provides further useful work interrogating the relationship between environments, colonialism and cultural production. As with Redmond's turn towards 'mutual embeddedness', Rose's paper is particularly useful in her discussion of Aboriginal experiences of destruction of country and its implications for ongoing sociocultural production. Lattas provides an ethnographically and analytically rich defence of notions of the 'cargo cult' and 'magical thinking', both of which have been attacked for their apparently exoticising effects. His chapter provides a complex but clear account of the ways in which profoundly different world views may be sustained in articulation with supposedly 'modern' forms of organisation (e.g. corporations). Although based on a Melanesian case study, this chapter is likely to find strong resonances in Aboriginal Australia. Beyond its academic import, work of this kind provides an important resource for applied anthropology, illuminating the cultural matrices that underpin the local emplacement of forms of knowledge and action originating from the 'developed' world.

Silvermann's paper also touches on the contemporary intermeshing of the supposedly exogenous and the indigenous, focusing on 'tourist art' in the Sepik. His interesting and refreshingly global approach is again handicapped by an occasionally stereotypical handling of Australian material and a not unproblematic distinction of 'traditional' and 'contemporary' Aboriginal art, both of which handicap comparison of the material he draws on. Silvermann's paper, like Wassman's elsewhere in the collection, also touches on similarities and differences between Iatmul and northern Australian ownership of knowledge, noting a difference of emphasis in the Sepik, where the primary focus of identity is over names associated with the ancestral beings and not dreaming places or associated artistic forms, an interesting distinction that Wassmann deals with at greater length, but which could have sustained further analysis in both cases. Wassmann's account of the 'process of proving ownership through demonstrations of knowledge', in which bodies of knowledge are protected through ambiguity and provocative partial revelation, might also have found useful parallels in areas of Aboriginal Australia which receive little attention in this collection, for example in arguments over overlapping native title claims in northern and central Queensland.

Other papers in the collection include Wagner's brief but rich paper on the intense and analogically extendable relationship between myth and locality apparent in Daribi cosmology, and a paper by Stewart and Strathern which employs a distinction between 'origin' and 'creation' in the comparison of the place/myth nexus in West Highland Papuan and Yolngu contexts. Bolton's article, the last before Weiner's afterword, provides an account of some of the ways in which museum practice has changed through engagement with indigenous Melanesians and Australians. The paper generally overcomes the moralism that marks much engagement with this topic, drawing together ethical practice and intellectual engagement to address the challenges of contemporary curation. As with the rest of the papers and the collection as a whole, its strengths are most apparent when generalism is avoided and 'twos made' that extend our appreciation of local particularities through a body of regional material and analysis.

REFERENCES

Chase, A. 1980 'Which Way Now? Tradition, Continuity and Change in a North Queensland Aboriginal Community', unpublished Doctoral thesis, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Queensland.

Reviewed by Benjamin Smith, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, The Australian National University, Canberra, and School of Australian Environmental Studies, Griffith University, Brisbane, <benjamin.smith@anu.edu.au>.