In Australia, it’s ‘Aboriginal’ with a Capital ‘A’: Aboriginality, Politics and Identity

The politics of identity discussed here are still at the heart of current Indigenous Australian struggles for recognition. In the 1960s, for ethical and political reasons, the term Aboriginal became an ethnonym written with a capital ‘A’ to designate the descendants of the first inhabitants of Australia, some 500 groups speaking different languages. Aboriginal groups have not only different language names and cultural backgrounds, but different histories — massacres, forced sedentarisation in reserves, separation from their parents of children of mixed descent, discrimination, criminalisation — all of which broke the transmission of some peoples’ heritage. Yet many claim their ‘Aboriginality’ which gathers all under an Aboriginal flag (since 1972), even if not everyone agrees on the definition of a common identity. Some priviledge an identity of continuity, based on language, localised spirit-children and ritual links with the land, pre-contact modes of existence; others put forward an identity of resistance, rewriting colonial history, valorising a national Aboriginal identity that encompasses all mixed descendants, struggling for land-rights, against bad living conditions, exclusion and exploitation. First published in 1997.

Forbidding and Enjoying: Warlpiri Taboos

This chapter systematically analyses Warlpiri taboos showing how they can all be dispatched into four contexts (socialisation rituals, totemic relationships, mother-in-law/son-in-law relation, death) and four domains (space, language, sexuality and goods, especially food). Each combination of a context and a domain virtualises forms of obligations and ritual transgressions, which connect all taboos in a hypercubic way (see chapter 6). In that underlying entanglement of prohibitions and transgressions, any structural dualism seems to be conjured. Taboos become a way to create human and non human heterogeneous temporality, both as a vertical transmission – in the succession of generations re-enacted through socialisation and mourning rituals – and as a horizontal differentiation perpetually redefining these modalities of alliance and of ritual interdependance between the totemic groups. Everybody has an interest in reproducing a balance that respects the Law and pressing others to do the same, as well as giving what he/she has so that others will reciprocate. Such a social pressure partly explains the refusal to accumulate and the systematic circulation of all possessions, cars, clothes, etc., although it does not prevent conflicts. In fact, a certain dissensus is valued. First published in French in 1991.

Doing and Becoming: Warlpiri Rituals and Myths

This chapter analyses the relation between Warlpiri myth and ritual from the perspective of the cosmological and ritual differentiation of male and female. It is a challenging repositioning of gender in relation to religion and spirituality based on an Aboriginal cosmologic which values a mythical androgyny of some hybrid totemic human and non human ancestors of current humans and their totemic species, animals, plants, or phenomena like rain or fire. To reactualise such a virtual androgyny in themselves, both men and women perform ceremonies reenacting through dances, songs and painted bodies the totemic travels but in ritual spaces restricted to one gender. In this ritual separation, they are both involved in land tenure and dream revelation of new designs to paint, sing or dance as a reactualisation of a virtual collective and earth memory. Women can dream for men and more rarely men dream for women. First published in French in 1991.

Prelude: The Wooden Egg Made Me Sick By Nakakut Barbara Gibson Nakamarra

Warlpiri ritual leader from Lajamanu, Central Australia, Nakakut Barbara Gibson Nakamarra, recounts her dream revelation of two songs for totemic ancestors of the Rain and Emu Dreamings (Jukurrpa). She explains how the dream took her on a journey from her country in the Tanami desert, where she was living hunting and gathering until she was moved to a reserve. The dream takes her up dancing with ancestral women up North where one Emu songline disappears in the Ocean. The testimony ends with the magic reunion of the narrator and the book’s author at the birth of her second baby in Broome, Western Australia.

Warlpiri Dreaming Spaces: 1983 and 1985 Seminars with Félix Guattari

This chapter unfolds a dialog between Guattari and Glowczewski about Australian collective dream-work, totemism and rituals of resistance during collective discussions, including Eric Alliez, Jean-Claude Pollack and Anne Querrien. ‘Félix Guattari — Barbara is an anthropologist specialising in Australian Aboriginal peoples who has written a fascinating piece of work about the dreaming process. I’d like her to tell us a bit about the collective technology of dreams among the Australian Aboriginal people she has studied. In this context, not only do dreams not depend on individual keys, but they are also part of an a posteriori elaboration of the dream that anthropologists have characterised as mythical. But Barbara comes close to refuting that definition. And dreaming is identified with the law, and with the possibility of mapping the itineraries of these people, who circulate all the time since they cover hundreds of kilometers. Barbara, I would like to ask you to try to tell us how the dreaming method functions. My first question is to ask you to explain the relationship between dream, territory, and itinerary.’

The ngangkari Healing Power: Conversation with Lance Sullivan, Yalarrnga Healer

This chapter is based on the transcript of a one hour filmed conversation with an Indigenous healer, a Yalarrnga ritual leader who grew up in the desert community of Boulia and studied archaeology and anthropology at James Cook University: Lance Sullivan was invited to France in 2017 by the festival of Shamanism and Ancient Traditions that gathered 200 healers from around the world. He then agreed to share publicly his knowledge and experience to explain how he was initiated as a child to heal according to the ngangkari ‘cleverman’ tradition practiced by different desert tribes. His examples of the way he operates to pull out the source of pain from men and women, who suffer physically or spiritually, demonstrate that people’s health is connected with the care of the land. He also comments on different forms of magic love and sorcery.

Resisting the Disaster: Between Exhaustion and Creation

This chapter responds to debates on the anthropocene, by transversalising planetarian social, technological and natural disasters suffered in Africa, the Pacific, Brazil, Haïti and elsewhere, through past and present colonisation. ‘Anthropologist of micropolitical hope, Barbara Glowczewski, is among the vanguard of key global Guattarian thinkers. Deploying Guattari’s three registers of ecosophy to understand the foliatedness of disaster in the anthropocene, she provides a range of examples, from artists’ responses to crises and neoliberal betrayals, collective intelligence marshalled against the violence of privatisation, experimentations leading to micro-social innovations challenging the criminalisation of asylum seekers, and political actions against the endo-colonialist policies of settler states. Eschewing victimal discourses traded like stocks by big media, she eviscerates the dehumanising logic of humanitarian care in the form of ‘assistancialism’ and as some Aboriginals know it, ‘sit down money’.’ (Gary Genosko, 2017). First published in French in 2011.

Myths of ‘Superiority’ and How to De-Essentialise Social and Historical Conflicts

This chapter analyses racism in France and Australia. It shows how accusations of racism can mask an ontology of superiority in which the victims of racism, here a French Polynesian anticolonial writer, are themselves accused of being racist by people who identify with the colonial power. Indigenous people as well as migrants, especially Muslims or Gypsies in France, are accused of racism for laying claim to their history and culture while coming from past French colonies in Africa and Indochina or current French territories in the Pacific or Caribbean islands. In Australia despite a multicultural policy, refugees are incarcerated if they are not selected by the UN HCR channel. Aboriginal people are criminalised and many succumb to death-in-custody. Claims to difference are reduced to hierarchical models or denied recognition in the name of universalism as opposed to cultural relativism. Glowczewski, shows that a third option is possible. If France and Australia– each in their own way – deny their citizens the right to be different, initiatives emanating from civil society promote innovative ways of envisioning a multidimensional society in which the recognition of differences and specific rights have their place at the same time as universal human rights are respected. Unpublished keynote paper, 2012.

A Topological Approach to Australian Cosmology and Social Organisation

Aboriginal kinship has stimulated many mathematicians. In the 1980’s, Glowczewski showed that there is a non euclidian ‘topologic’ that is common to what Indigenous Australians call their “Law”: a non hierarchical system of classificatory ritual kinship, a projection of the mythical travels of totemic ancestors (the Dreamings) into the landscape and a system of ritual obligations taboos. In other words, the social valorisation of heterogeneity recognises irreducible singularities shared by humans, non humans and the land as a condition for a commons that in no way homogenises society into a hierarchical order. The topological figure of the hypercube was used here to illustrate some complex Aboriginal relational rules that exclude the centralisation of power both in social organisation and in the totemic cosmology. To translate Indigenous spatio-temporal concepts Glowczewski was partly inspired by science fiction, that speculates about the 4th dimension. When shown the hypercube as a tool to account for the kinship logic of their Dreamings, the Warlpiri elders thought it was a ‘good game’! First published in 1989.

Lines and Criss-Crossings: Hyperlinks in Australian Indigenous Narratives

This chapter presents digital forms of anthropological restitution developed in the late 1990’s and early 2000 by Barbara Glowczewski with different Aboriginal peoples for their own use and a larger audience. She designed the CD-ROM Dream Trackers (Yapa Art and Knowledge of the Australian Desert published by Unesco) with 51 elders and artists from the Central Australian community of Lajamanu in the Northern Territory. Quest in Aboriginal Land is an interactive DVD based on films by Indigenous filmmaker Wayne Barker, juxtaposing four regions of Australia. Both projects aimed to explore and enhance the cultural foundations of the reticular way in which many Indigenous people in Australia map their knowledge and experience of the world in a geographical virtual web of narratives, images and performances. The relevance of games for anthropological insights is also discussed in the paper. Reticular or network thinking, Glowczewski argues, is a very ancient Indigenous practice but it gains today a striking actuality thanks to the fact that our so-called scientific perception of cognition, virtuality and social performance has changed through the use of new technologies. First published in 2002.