This article explores interculturalism in Australia, a nation marked by the impact of coloniality and deep colonising. Fostering interculturalism—as a form of empathic understanding and being in good ...relations with difference—across Indigenous and non-Indigenous lived experiences has proven difficult in Australia. This paper offers a scoping of existing discourse on interculturalism, asking firstly, ‘what is interculturalism’, that is, what is beyond the rhetoric and policy speak? The second commitment is to examine the pressures that stymy the articulation of interculturalism as a broad-based project, and lastly the article strives to highlight possibilities for interculturalism through consideration of empathic understandings of sustainable futures and land security in Australia. Legislative land rights and land activism arranged around solidarity movements for sustainable futures are taken up as the two sites of analysis. In the first instance, a case is made for legislative land rights as a form of coloniality that maintains the centrality of state power, and in the second, land activism, as expressed in the campaigns of Seed, Australia’s first Indigenous youth-led climate network and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, are identified as sites for plurality and as staging grounds for intercultural praxis.
This article explores violence in place, with the intent to more broadly configure the notion of violence within sociological and anthropological discourse. So too it strives to expand the field of ...inquiry into the effects of human-induced violence on the place world, as made up of homelands, villages, communities, and ancestral realms. Throughout the discussion links are drawn between three particular forms of violence and their harmful effects on place: the physical destruction of place, the de-signification and social disordering of place identity and character, and elemental decay as ecological decline and toxicity in place. I argue that particular epistemic habits and dispositions allow for such violence to be carried out, in the pursuit of power, authority, land, and resources. Furthermore, other epistemic habits and dispositions, namely those provided for by Indigenous epistemologies, might present pathways out from unmitigated violence and towards practices of refrain and axiological return. I propose that this is achievable through a return to kincentricity, as expressed through human responsibility over rights, and recognition of place agency and sentiency as expressed through local empiricism.
"…ngabaya painted all this, you know when we were kids we
would come here and look and sometimes the paintings would change,
they were always changing." Annie a-Karrakayny
Fully illustrated, Jakarda ...Wuka (Too Many
Stories) draws on a combined 70+ years of collaborative
research involving Yanyuwa Elders, anthropologists, and an
archaeologist to tell a unique story about the rock art from
Yanyuwa Country in northern Australia's southwest Gulf of
Carpentaria.
Australia's rock art is recognised globally for its antiquity,
abundance, distinctive motifs and the deep and abiding knowledge
Indigenous people continue to hold for these powerful symbols.
However, books about Australian rock art jointly written by
Indigenous communities, anthropologists, and archaeologists are
extremely rare.
Combining Yanyuwa and western knowledge, the authors embark on a
journey to reveal the true meaning of Yanyuwa rock art. At the
heart of this book is the understanding that a painting is not just
a painting, nor is it an isolated phenomenon or a static
representation. What underpins Yanyuwa perceptions of their rock
art is kinship, because people are kin to everything and everywhere
on Country.
Jakarda Wuka highlights the multidimensional nature of
Yanyuwa rock art: it is an active social agent in the landscape,
capable of changing according to different circumstances and
events, connected to the epic travels and songs of Ancestral Beings
(Dreamings), and related to various aspects of Yanyuwa life such as
ceremony, health and wellbeing, identity, and narratives concerning
past and present-day events.
In a time where Indigenous communities, archaeologists, and
anthropologists are seeking new ways to work together and better
engage with Indigenous knowledges to interpret the "archaeological
record", Jakarda Wuka delivers a masterful and profound
narrative of Yanyuwa Country and its rock art.
This project was supported by the Australian Research Council
and the McArthur River Mine Community Benefits Trust.*
Negotiating Yanyuwa Rock Art Brady, Liam M.; Bradley, John J.; Kearney, Amanda J. ...
Current anthropology,
02/2016, Letnik:
57, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Archaeologists have routinely used insights derived from the study of rock art to learn more about the lifeways of humans from the deep and recent past. Yet questions concerning the contemporary ...significance, symbolism, and meaning of rock art to Indigenous communities have often been overlooked in pursuit of archaeological agendas. In this article, we examine contemporary engagement with rock art by the Yanyuwa Aboriginal community in northern Australia’s southwest Gulf of Carpentaria region using relational and affectual experiences to highlight how rock art is rendered multivocal, sentient, and an active social agent in the present. We argue that, by focusing on the wider social context of rock art, such as the networks of relationships that images are embedded within and the powerful affective nature of motifs, researchers are better placed to examine rock art in a holistic sense while also considering notions of change, continuity, and relevance in relation to visual heritage.
Testimony and witnessing require sentiency, not humanity. Sentiency is distinguished here as the capacity to experience energetic coalescing between elements/entities/presences and to derive a ...response from such encounters. Taking as its focal point the kincentric ecology and lifeworld of Yanyuwa Country in the south-west Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia, this paper strives to expand the conceptual roots for a discussion of testimony and witnessing through the principle of “unflattening.” Unflattening is a commitment of orientation, one that counteracts the type of narrow, rigid thinking that is flatness, a condition in which humans are often unable to see past the boundaries of current frames of mind, the limits of our existence, our ontology, epistemic and moral habit (Sousanis, Unflattening (Harvard UP, 2015)). In a settler colonial context such as Australia, these are conditions which reflect a dominant epistemic tradition of the West, which relies upon certain ontological habits, reflective of a capitalist, modern, neo-liberal and individualistic tendency. But this is not the only Law and way of knowing that exists across the great landmass of Australia, mapped as it is by the languages and Laws of diverse Indigenous language groups. In Yanyuwa Country, communication between multifarious agents is common, ranging from those between humans, deceased kin who reside as “old people” in Country, Ancestral Beings which have become the embodiment of Country, non-human animals, elements, objects and places. Each and all are capable of communicating; be it as expressions of recognition of one another, revelation of emotional states, health or disorder, responsivity to the presence of others, Law and local empiricism. Drawing on my ethnographic encounters with Yanyuwa families, I aim, throughout this paper, to unflatten on three fronts: first, expand the relational scope of potential communicative pathways to take in sentient presence as a catalyst for relationality (carried forth by responsiveness to and between presences), second, examine the multidimensional nature of testimony and third, expand our vision of the enactment of witnessing – to consider who, what and when. I consider Indigenous, specifically Yanyuwa, relational ontologies as they bond and unify the human and non-human across a field of sentiency and communicative intention, shifting the focus or primal orientation to either side of and all around the human.
Testimony and witnessing require sentiency, not humanity. Sentiency is distinguished here as the capacity to experience energetic coalescing between elements/entities/presences and to derive a ...response from such encounters. Taking as its focal point the kincentric ecology and lifeworld of Yanyuwa Country in the south-west Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia, this paper strives to expand the conceptual roots for a discussion of testimony and witnessing through the principle of "unflattening." Unflattening is a commitment of orientation, one that counteracts the type of narrow, rigid thinking that is flatness, a condition in which humans are often unable to see past the boundaries of current frames of mind, the limits of our existence, our ontology, epistemic and moral habit (Sousanis, Unflattening (Harvard UP, 2015)). In a settler colonial context such as Australia, these are conditions which reflect a dominant epistemic tradition of the West, which relies upon certain ontological habits, reflective of a capitalist, modern, neo-liberal and individualistic tendency. But this is not the only Law and way of knowing that exists across the great landmass of Australia, mapped as it is by the languages and Laws of diverse Indigenous language groups. In Yanyuwa Country, communication between multifarious agents is common, ranging from those between humans, deceased kin who reside as "old people" in Country, Ancestral Beings which have become the embodiment of Country, non-human animals, elements, objects and places. Each and all are capable of communicating; be it as expressions of recognition of one another, revelation of emotional states, health or disorder, responsivity to the presence of others, Law and local empiricism. Drawing on my ethnographic encounters with Yanyuwa families, I aim, throughout this paper, to unflatten on three fronts: first, expand the relational scope of potential communicative pathways to take in sentient presence as a catalyst for relationality (carried forth by responsiveness to and between presences), second, examine the multidimensional nature of testimony and third, expand our vision of the enactment of witnessing - to consider who, what and when. I consider Indigenous, specifically Yanyuwa, relational ontologies as they bond and unify the human and non-human across a field of sentiency and communicative intention, shifting the focus or primal orientation to either side of and all around the human.
The main argument presented here is that in cultural contact zones, such as the Australian settler state, there can emerge violent tendencies in dominant patterns of thought, as both epistemic habits ...and systems of value. The logic of coloniality is one of war, destruction and inequality, and this is expressed through attempted erasure and actual ambivalence towards Indigenous peoples, their lands, waters, Laws and cultures. This is supported by habits of epistemic violence and axiological retreat. This paper examines such habits, through an ethnographically informed and localised case study of the destruction of an ancestral Dreaming site on Yanyuwa country in the Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia. In this instance the body of Yulungurri, the ancestral Tiger Shark, manifest in a large cycad palm, was cut down. Read through the lens of axiological retreat, and coloniality's ambivalence towards Indigenous presence, the discussion considers the dispositions which lead to and support violence in such forms and how these might become naturalised or concealed in everyday life.
Among the strategies employed by colonial authorities to 'manage' Indigenous people, forced removal and centralisation to townships was a deliberate attempt to fragment relationships to home ...territories. For Yanyuwa, an Indigenous group in northern Australia, this meant being removed from their saltwater 'country' in the Gulf of Carpentaria and resettled 60 km inland. Despite this violent act Yanyuwa saltwater identity has remained strong. Whilst enduring, it has however undergone changes in the way relationships to place are established and maintained. Travelling through saltwater country with younger and middle generation Yanyuwa has revealed that sometimes relationships to place are marked by conditions of fear, nervousness and uncertainty. Not classically held to be dispositions of a 'proper' Indigenous person, these reveal that states of intimacy require time and certain conditions to flourish. So too, distance, signalled by fear and uncertainty, is a relational state that defines a vitally important relationship with country.
In this paper I explore the kincentric ecologies that define sea country for Indigenous Australians, in particular the Yanyuwa of Northern Australia. Despite colonial alienation from their coastal ...territories, Yanyuwa have sustained a four-decade long legal fight for restitution. Using the framework of 'urgent patience' as resistance against 'social death', this paper tracks the historical legacy of legislative land rights for saltwater peoples.
There are distinct bodies of cultural knowledge attached to the sea. In this paper we orient the focus towards the nature and extent of cultural framings of sea territories, as inclusive of submerged ...landscapes, for Indigenous maritime peoples in northern Australia. This approach is distinguished by a pluralist methodology and reorients the primal focus of a human geography and broader geographical scholarship concerning submerged landscapes to begin with an Indigenous perspective. Engaging ethnographic accounts of Indigenous Australian knowledges of Sea Country, as inclusive of ancient pre‐inundation landscapes that lie out‐of‐sight on Australia's continental shelves, highlights the potential for a more expansive vision of human connections to the past and present continental landmass of Australia. Indigenous oral traditions, Dreaming Ancestor narratives and songlines provide extensive detail to assist in understanding these parts of the greater Australian landmass and in this paper are brought into relation with recent sea floor mapping efforts which operate to draw back the water and reveal commensurable geographies upon which to envision possibilities for socialised realms of human emplacement. Both bodies of knowledge generate information of submerged landscapes that call for an expansion of thinking on where the land ends and the sea begins and how submerged terrestrial landscapes are understood across cultures as part of human geography. The approach outlined here calls for a habit of bringing principled systems of understanding to stand together as part of an explanatory schema for a world populated by and yet differentially known by people.
Short
There are distinct bodies of cultural knowledge attached to the sea. In this paper we orient the focus towards the nature and extent of cultural framings of sea territories, as inclusive of submerged landscapes, for Indigenous maritime peoples in northern Australia. This approach is distinguished by a pluralist methodology and reorients the primal focus of a human geography and broader geographical scholarship concerning submerged landscapes to begin with an Indigenous perspective.
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