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Visual Anthropology
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Seeing the Invisible: Yolngu Video as Revelatory Ritual Jennifer Deger
To cite this Article Deger, Jennifer(2007) 'Seeing the Invisible: Yolngu Video as Revelatory Ritual', Visual Anthropology,
20: 2, 103 — 121
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08949460601152765 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949460601152765
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Visual Anthropology, 20: 103–121, 2007 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949460601152765
Seeing the Invisible: Yolngu Video as Revelatory Ritual
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Jennifer Deger This paper describes a video conceived and codirected by a first-time Yolngu videomaker, Bangana Wunungmurra. Made in local languages and in accordance with indigenous protocols and priorities, the video, Gularri: That Brings Unity, works to reproduce the potent, socially constitutive effects of highly restricted revelatory ritual—for an unrestricted television audience. The paper explores how, under Yolngu direction, the video camera becomes a powerful technology for mediating the relationship between the inside and outside of things, the sacred and the public, the invisible and the visible, thereby challenging conventional Western understandings of image-making and spectatorship, representation, and ‘‘cultural resistance.’’1
PROLOGUE In recent years criticism of the ‘‘ethnographic eye,’’ both within and beyond the discipline, has highlighted the imperialist assumptions underpinning Malinowski’s injunction to ‘‘grasp the native’s point of view.’’2 Such criticisms have led to important revisionings within anthropology, not to mention a rush of projects on the camera and colonialism in cultural and film studies. Yet it is increasingly apparent that this intense focus on ‘‘visualism,’’ observation, and objectification has been somewhat monocular, and that critics have overlooked the potential for other kinds of ‘‘looking relations’’ to arise in intercultural contexts.3 As a result, anthropology’s potential to contribute to current interdisciplinary debates regarding the role of the visual in mediating intercultural understandings and relationships remains greatly underappreciated. In my experience, ethnographic research uniquely enables new perspectives on the embodied, perceptual, cognitive, and imaginary processes by which others see and in a profound sense know the world. Hence, in my work as an ethnographer, media trainer, and video-maker, I want to assert the ethical, imaginative, and JENNIFER DEGER is a research fellow and the director of the Ethnographic Media Lab in the Department of Anthropology, Division of Society, Culture, Media, and Philosophy, at Macquarie University, Sydney. In her recently published book, Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community [2006], she describes her work as ethnographer, media trainer, and collaborative video-maker in the Yolngu community of Gapuwiyak in northern Australia. This research explores the ways local social, political, and aesthetic concerns shape Yolngu uses of media and the potential for these experimental productions to mediate new forms of intercultural understandings. E-mail: Jennifer.Deger@scmp.mq.edu.au
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analytical importance of envisioning culture and difference. I want to consider different styles of looking and seeing, and to approach the dynamics of looking relations, both between cultures and also within cultures, with an attentiveness to the ways that local modes of perception and imaging practices can shape—and in turn be shaped by—different modes of visual communication. To this end, I am interested in refiguring Malinowski’s project by rendering processes of ‘‘seeing’’ far more literally than he envisaged, and simultaneously more complex—politically, philosophically, and cognitively. Indeed, I would argue that a renewed effort toward illuminating how others know the world through vision (and other senses) and images (both ‘‘ours’’ and ‘‘theirs’’) is crucial at this particular moment in social history when the spaces of the intercultural are increasingly mediated and aestheticized through visual technologies. My research explores these issues from the perspective of media production in Gapuwiyak, an Aboriginal settlement in northeast Arnhem Land, where I have been working with Yolngu to produce videos that both reflect and reproduce local social, political, and aesthetic concerns. This paper discusses a 73-minute video, Gularri: That Brings Unity [1997], conceived and codirected by Bangana Wunungmurra, my ‘‘chief informant,’’ valued colleague, and the closest of my adoptive Yolngu kin. I met Bangana when we were both in our early thirties (in 1994). He was a reputed clan singer and wily cultural broker with no prior broadcasting experience. I was a television producer-turned-anthropologist conducting doctoral research into broadcasting in remote Aboriginal communities in northern Australia. Drawn together by mutual interests and complementary skills, we worked on media-related projects from 1995 until his tragically premature death in 2002.4 The collaborative efforts of our time together remain a source of ongoing inspiration and intellectual challenge. From our first discussions it became clear that, in order to understand Yolngu media on Bangana’s terms, I needed to rethink my theoretical frameworks and, in the process, reconsider my assumptions about the efficacies of media technologies and, indeed, the very nature of televisual communication. Prior to my fieldwork, I had been thinking of media as a site of cultural contestation and representational politics, as a struggle over signifiers in the terms exemplified by Stuart Hall [2000] and variously elaborated in the indigenous media literature that had compelled my project in the first place.5 However, Bangana’s repeated insistence that his videos would allow people to look, see, and immediately connect to their culture ‘‘in a Yolngu way’’ led me to conceptualize issues of media, culture, power, and ‘‘resistance’’ in somewhat different terms. Attempting to do justice to the cultural and historical particularities of this media work, I eventually adopted and developed a phenomenological approach to the sensuous social philosophy of audiovisual technologies developed from the work of scholars such as Walter Benjamin [1968, 1978], Michael Taussig [1993], Martin Heidegger [1977a, 2001], Laura Marks [2000], and David MacDougall [1998]. In this paper I focus less on the explicit theory (which I have elaborated elsewhere [Deger 2006]) and instead aim to convey something of the ethnographic richness and complexity of the project itself, as I have come to understand it.6 As I will describe, my struggles to glimpse the imaginative horizons that shaped
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Bangana’s media have made me increasingly aware that the ‘‘frontier of visual anthropology’’—the images, experiences, and processes that anthropologists need to consider in relation to the role of the visual in mediating culture—can extend far beyond that which is manifestly visible. Certainly in Gapuwiyak, where a dynamic interplay between revealing and concealing gives local cultural productions a specific kind of ontological charge and political potency, it is not possible to apprehend adequately the visible without a deep appreciation of its inherent and dynamic relationship to the invisible.
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MAKING YOLNGU VIDEO In the late 1980s, with an urgency compelled by a sense of irretrievable cultural loss and the impending arrival of satellite media services in isolated Australian bush communities, policy makers, indigenous advocates, and academics argued the case for a logical fit between oral cultures and audiovisual technologies, presuming that electronic media would be used to record and broadcast the traditional songs and stories, thereby ‘‘strengthening’’ or ‘‘reviving’’ local culture. The resulting program Broadcasting in Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS) provided remote settlements in northern and central Australia with basic facilities to produce and transmit their own television and radio within their own communities [Meadows and Molnar 2001, Turner 1998]. Many people expected these mini-community television and radio stations—and still do, in my experience—to produce something akin to an indigenous version of cultural salvage, i.e., recording the ‘‘old people’s stories’’ before they are gone. Others have tended to see BRACS as a community development tool, a hub for local communications and information flow, broadcasting education, and entertainment programs; while other advocates have explicitly promoted the political possibilities of an indigenous presence within the national mediascape, and a means of demonstrating an ongoing cultural vitality and the possibilities of self-determination by ‘‘fighting fire with fire.’’7 The video that I will describe here does not fit neatly into any of these schemas, although in many respects my experiences and ethnographic work are closest in subject and direction to Eric Michaels’ groundbreaking study of early experiments in indigenous media production in central Australia in the late 1980s—published in this journal—which provided compelling evidence of the possibilities inherent in what he called The Aboriginal Invention of Television [1986, 1994], and fed directly into the policies that eventually led to the implementation of BRACS. However, whereas Michaels’ analysis separately explored the significance of the off-screen relationships that informed and authorized Warlpiri video production, and the importance of the Warlpiri eye as it informs viewing practices, I argue that it is necessary to consider the technologically mediated relationship between the production, the image, and the viewer as a circuit through which culture is constituted.8 The first major video production undertaken by Gapuwiyak BRACS in 1997 was called Gularri: That Brings Unity. The name refers to the fresh waters associated with clans of the Yirritja moiety in northeast Arnhem Land. Infused with
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ancestral potency, replete with layers of sacred significances, Gularri flows through waterholes, streams, creeks, and rivers across the region, its currents and eddies providing a vital source of identity and relationship between otherwise distant clan groups. In the course of a lifetime all Yolngu will accrue knowledge about their own connection to the Gularri.9 They will spend time in and around these waters, hunting, fishing, and camping. During such times they will be told about the significance of certain features in the landscape and the stories relating to their creation (to varying levels of restricted meaning). At other times, they will perform Gularri in rituals such as Yirritja mortuary ceremonies, enlivening their connections to each other by asserting and invoking this shared source of identity. From a Yolngu point of view, Gularri does not simply represent them—it is them.10 Yirritja moiety people sometimes use the word Gularri to refer to their mulkurr (head, part of the body where thinking and reasoning happens). Clan members do not only share rights to country, sacred objects, and designs. Because they share ‘‘one mulkurr’’ they also share a certain sensibility derived from ancestral sources such as Gularri. Indeed, the imaginations of both moieties are steeped in a watery poetics. Images of flow and confluence, reflection and depth, bubbling and gushing, fresh and salty are elaborated materially and metaphorically to specific cultural effect.11 In ceremonial performances song, dance, and paintings make reference to the objects carried and deposited by Gularri’s seasonal floods, together with the animals and fish that swim in the waterholes and rivers, and the colors and patterns within the water itself. Such images cumulatively build an image of Gularri sites in the mind’s eye of participants, unleashing a rush of affect-laden associations and an experience of connectedness that affirm and enliven the immanent, intersubjective ancestral relationships that link Yolngu across the everyday bounds of time and space. Choosing Gularri as the subject of our first production was an ambitious and potentially problematic decision. As Bangana explained to me, even though the younger generation knew about their Gularri, even though they could sing and dance their identity in relation to these waters, they did not fully understand and had never fully experienced the ‘‘big picture’’ of how it ‘‘connects everyone up.’’ In former days, knowledge of the connections between clans and countries generated by Gularri would be imparted to initiates in the restricted, ‘‘inside’’ domain of regional ceremonies known as ngarra. These ceremonies focus on clan identity [Morphy 1991: 311] and the shared ancestral legacies, such as Gularri, that make certain clans the ‘‘same’’ as each other and thereby linked into relationships of reciprocity and mutuality. Ngarra thus provides an important context for knowledge and responsibility for clan sacra passed on between the generations [Morphy 1991: 105]. Both men and women participate in the dancing throughout the rites, but only men are allowed into the restricted, inside spaces of the ceremonial ground, where the revelation of the clan’s most secret objects takes place. The ceremony serves as a forum for disciplining youths and an arena in which political disputes between clans can be settled, but it also is a means by which certain versions of ancestral events may be asserted over others in the name of ‘‘setting the story straight.’’ Crucially, much of this knowledge—as well as the disciplining effects it produces—is transmitted nonverbally by being directly exposed to rangga (a clan’s sacred objects).
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Such significances make Gularri sites and their associated sights powerful and potentially dangerous, and subject to strict controls. During the months of preproduction, my colleague Bangana undertook the delicate political work of gaining the requisite permissions and collaborations from various clan leaders and their djungaya (ritual managers of the opposite moiety) whose land would be featured in the video. He also recruited the on-camera ‘‘star’’ of the production, Charlie Ngalambirra, a dhalkara (Yirritja moiety ritual specialist) whose status and relationship to the starting point of the story authorized him to tell the story on behalf of other clans (although whenever possible he was joined on camera by appropriate clan leaders and landowners). Only with these key figures and permissions in place could the videoing proceed. We made the video as a coproduction with Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) Productions, which provided a crew of experienced indigenous and nonindigenous professionals committed to working with Bangana to realize his particular vision. Although this crew had no prior knowledge of the particular languages, places, or culture of the region, their experiences of having worked with indigenous communities in central Australia meant that they worked with a relaxed professionalism and an abiding respect for local authorities and protocols. I took on the job of producer, running the budget, organizing transport and bookings, chartering helicopters and other aircraft, and liasing between CAAMA, the community council, and funding bodies. Although he does not appear on camera himself, Bangana took on the roles of co-producer and co-director on the ‘‘Yolngu side’’ of things and is recognized locally as the mastermind behind the project [Figure 1].
MANAGING IMAGES, PRODUCING EFFECTS Despite (quite rightly) claiming the title of director, Bangana was no auteur—at least not in the usual sense. He wasn’t interested in using the screen to show his personal distinctive interpretation of the world. Nor was he interested in representing or archiving records of a ‘‘disappearing world,’’ even though the project was precisely aimed at the younger generations who, as he put it, were becoming ‘‘blind to their culture’’—a formulation that, as I shall show, is deeply suggestive of a distinctive understanding of the relationship between culture, video, and ways of seeing. Above all, Bangana understood his responsibilities as co-director to be managerial rather than creative. From his point of view, it was the ancestral water itself (together with the associated sacred sites, designs, songs, and stories) that would infuse the production with meaning and potency. In accordance with his explicit aim of producing a distinctively Yolngu kind of media, he drew inspiration and authority for his project from ngarra revelatory ceremonies. As described above, these ceremonies focus on clan identities forged through shared ancestral legacies such as Gularri, and work to reinforce the links that bind clans across the region in relationships of reciprocity and mutuality. Ngarra provides the contexts in which elders impart restricted, inside information to explain the big picture of the underlying ancestral order to the assembled participating clans.12
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Figure 1 Checking the audio-playback of the madak on the first day of the shoot: CAAMA sound recordist David Tranter (center front), CAAMA director Shane Mulcahy (left), Bangana Wunungmurra (second from left), Charlie Ngalambirra (right), and Yirritja moiety dancers.
Bangana approached video-making with a sensibility honed by such ceremonies. Coming from a cultural background in which ritual revelation is privileged as the alembic of power, knowledge, and truth, he saw a potential for television to be used to specific cultural effect. Able to reach an audience dispersed over both time and space, and beyond restrictions of clan, age, or gender, video technologies offered
Figure 2 The madak infuses the production with an ancestral authority and power.
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him a chance to produce the effects of ngarra in a contemporary form and context. He claimed that apart from ‘‘setting the story straight,’’ by showing the order of the Gularri flow and the hierarchies of connection that its flow created among Yirritja clans, viewing the video would have a powerful and constitutive effect on its audience. The connection generated between country and kin via the camera and screen would produce effects on the viewers that would once have been produced in ngarra. In short, Bangana was confident that the images themselves would have a powerful effect, that the act of seeing this video would connect viewers to their country and kin, generating an experience that would affect not only knowledge transference but, like ritual, reinforce and reconstitute at an embodied and experiential level a shared sense of Yolngu identity. In order to succeed, this bold and innovative plan had to work within the strict cultural protocols that protect sacred places and objects from exactly the kinds of mimetic excesses and ever-expanding circuits of circulation that broadcast technologies promote. Like other forms of Yolngu cultural production, the Gularri video could only work if access to certain levels of information remained controlled, while enabling all participants to glean a measure of understanding and insight based on prior knowledge and processes of deduction. In short, Bangana had to make a video that was light on narrative detail and exegesis, in which the most important and powerful images did not appear on screen but were nonetheless palpably evident to a Yolngu audience. Early on in preproduction he told me, ‘‘Video is manymak (good). But you have to be careful, because you can see almost everything.’’ Although it took me a while, I eventually understood that this suggestively oxymoronic statement encapsulates the aesthetic imperatives at the heart of Gularri and points to an abiding concern with the dynamic interplay between showing and concealing that also lies at the heart of ritual performance.
THE OPENING-UP To a non-Yolngu viewer, the introductory sequence—the ‘‘opening up,’’ as Bangana referred to it—is the most obviously experimental and ‘‘cultural’’ part of the video. Beginning with a close-up shot of water flowing through the frame, the video unfolds with the voice of Charlie Ngalambirra (who remains off camera) intoning the yindi yakko (important, ritually significant names) that are associated with Gularri. As the slow and measured beat of the bilma (clapsticks) becomes quick and insistent, the screen fills with images of Yolngu dancers. Men and women move, jump, and sing in response to the dhalkara. Although individual facial features are deliberately obscured by backlighting and special effects, we can nonetheless see the white clay smeared across the dancers’ foreheads, marking a shared affiliation with and through Gularri. As close-up shots of water are superimposed over their bodies, the intensity builds with the rising sound of Ngalambirra’s tremulous voice and the growling voices of the dancers as they onomatopoeically conjure the force of surging floodwaters [Figure 2]. This style of performance, known as madak, generally is only undertaken in serious ceremonial circumstances. In this case it was performed especially for the
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video as a way of unequivocally announcing to Yolngu viewers that this was no everyday television program. As in a traditional ngarra, the madak works to imbue the event, in this case the broadcast, with the mimetic charge of ancestral presence, making the subsequent, and apparently more ‘‘mundane,’’ images that follow much more potent and significant than they might otherwise have been. From a Yolngu point of view, the actual images of the dancers—the shots that are the most obviously ‘‘cultural’’ to a nonlocal viewer—are of little consequence or interest. The dancers, Bangana said, ‘‘just get in the way.’’ Originally, we were not even going to film them. The footage was eventually shot and included in the postproduction largely as a concession to the CAAMA crew who, understandably, found it hard to resist the visual allure of such images (especially in contrast to the rest of the video, as will become clear). Bangana had lingering reservations about this decision, which was really the only concession to CAAMA and to the visual appetites of nonlocal audiences, not because the dance is secret or sacred but because he was more interested in other types of shot for this sequence— namely, the close-up, full-frame images of the Gularri water. Rather than approaching Gularri as something to be represented, recorded, or archived, these water shots operate as a kind of mimetic distillation of meaning and ancestral power. On the surface, the glistening waters appear unremarkable. Yet at another level, especially when shown in this context with the accompanying madak, the images of the water act as a kind of ‘‘stand in’’ for the sacred objects and designs that could not be included in such a public presentation. As Bangana told me, ‘‘It doesn’t matter that we can’t include all the sacred stuff. . . everything is there, in a Yolngu mind, those things are included. . .. So really we’re not getting rid of anything here. It’s still there . . . it’s all there’’.13 In one sense, this comment can be taken literally. Gularri is not only the sacred source of these objects, it is where they continue to belong, hidden and secure beneath the surface of the water [Warner 1969: 21]. At another level, this statement refers to the mimetic and revelatory dynamics that infuse the images and which invite certain kinds of viewing and connection.
A MIMETIC SURGE Michael Taussig’s [1993] brilliant and idiosyncratic writing on mimesis, technology, and the senses points toward a way of considering such claims without reverting to formulations of ‘‘primitive magic.’’ Apprehending the mimetic as a powerful combination of sensuous and cognitive acuity that is foundational to the production of knowledge and relationships with others and the world, Taussig takes the concept of mimesis (via Walter Benjamin) far beyond definitions that reduce it to either the mere act of copying or evidence of irrationality. His recasting of mimesis as a sensuous process involving copy and contact resonates strongly in Gapuwiyak, a place where people are already highly attuned to the power of mimesis, albeit in a slightly different way than for either Taussig or Benjamin, because of the value placed on similitude and the generation of sameness.14 The Yolngu aptitude for mimesis is particularly evident in rituals where dancers reenact ancestral events and creative beings for onlookers with
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an appreciative eye for a performance of virtuosity. The mimetic is activated when a Yolngu woman performs as the ancestral white cockatoo with a tight bend in her elbows and a rhythmic flapping movement from her shoulders. In the process an artful dancer is said to become ‘‘the same’’ as the cockatoo. This kind of performance is a way of presencing and connecting. It activates (for both the dancer and onlookers) a feeling-laden experience of the underlying intercorporeal, intersubjective unity with kin and country laid down by ancestral beings and events. And it is this experiential aspect of ritual that is at the heart of Bangana’s project. He aimed to activate a particular kind of sensibility and to enable certain kinds of ‘‘connections’’ that are understood to arise from a coming into contact with the creative source of Gularri itself. This performative and easy-to-identify mimesis is only one aspect of a cultural concern with the production and recognition of similarities that extends, often less obviously, into many aspects of Yolngu life, including photography. When Yolngu takes a photograph or video of someone, the image is said to be ‘‘the same’’ as the person. Moreover, especially in the case of older people, the photographic image can be treated as being the same as their sacred objects, designs, and country. In other words, in this cultural context the camera is appreciated as a device that performs a kind of mimetic labor: in the act of producing a visible likeness it presences both the visible and the invisible (or restricted sights and sounds) associated with that person. Certainly, such understandings are subject to shifting interpretations, as these technologies are becoming more commonplace.15 But in this instance, Bangana understood that the madak would dispel any ambivalence about the ontological status of the images ensuring that viewers would relate to the images of water, kin, and country in a ‘‘Yolngu way.’’ Seen in this way the images are replete with a layered ancestral potency that generates a sensuous and bidirectional connection between perceiver and perceived. This produces specific kinds of embodied, material effects. It triggers a surge of images, associations, and memories that flood through the viewer. Yolngu viewers understand that, as they watch, the sights and sounds of Gularri will enter their body through their eyes and ears—unblocking their senses, reconnecting them to their country and the invisible sacra that are simultaneously presenced and contained beneath the surface of appearances. Understood in this way, the video technology performs what von Sturmer [1987: 72] argues is the objective of Aboriginal ritual—namely, the ‘‘obliteration’’ of distance between subject and country=sacra. Or as Bangana put it, ‘‘As soon as they watch, they’ll be connected. And that’s really powerful in the Yolngu world.’’
VISION AND VERISIMILITUDE Such ‘‘power’’ is difficult for nonlocals to perceive. Viewers accustomed to the types of image of Yolngu that have found their way into the Western imagination through feature films, ethnographic records, and the playful mix of the everyday and exoticism of Yothu Yindi music clips, generally find the video disappointing, even dull. Largely devoid of spectacle, narrative explanation, or other concessions to a non-Yolngu audience, most of the production has been filmed in a style
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that might best be described as ‘‘documentary realism.’’ In the sequences that follow the ‘‘opening up,’’ static shots of ‘‘talking (and singing) heads’’ are intercut with close-ups of water and pans across the surrounding countryside; wide shots establish the scene of a location; montages work to build up a detailed picture of each site; aerial shots track across the country from above while Ngalambirra’s songs carry the sound track. Apart from the opening sequence, there are no elaborate filmic or editing effects [Figure 3]. Although the CAAMA production team was certainly open to local input at the level of style as well as content, they were limited in this regard, as Bangana provided very few specific directorial instructions about such matters. To a large extent, the video’s stylistic simplicity can be interpreted as the result of both Bangana’s lack of experience as a filmmaker and the CAAMA crew’s deliberate decision not to impose an aesthetic that would detract from, or impose on, the people and places they were filming.16 Yet while the fact that Bangana had no training as a director explains this ‘‘hands off’’ directorial approach and the straightforward, even bland, filming style, the resulting footage was nonetheless compatible with his own cultural purposes. Bangana saw the camera primarily as a tool with which to render specific sites visible on screen, effectively opening a field of vision to the audience. From his perspective, the most significant and active modes of ‘‘seeing’’ in this project were not those of the cameraman or the director but the viewers’. Indeed, Gularri was made to stimulate and promote Yolngu ways of knowing, experiencing, and relating to country by facilitating a constitutive dynamic of showing and seeing. Such a dynamic is at the heart of Yolngu ceremonial performance. As Franca Tamisari describes [1988: 251], the work of Yolngu ritual is to make visible the social, political, and emotional dimensions of the relationships laid down by the ancestral. The importance of this ancestral imagery extends beyond the strictly visual to the poetics of song, which these connections also make visible in the mind’s eyes of singers and audiences. The ethnomusicologist Fiona Magowan beautifully describes how in Yolngu clan songs, ‘‘Ancestral beings are always in the land and sea, covered and concealed, their forms but a shadow until they are sung into vision once more’’ [2001: 90]. Such synaesthetic processes of active envisaging, as practiced and refined through ritual, provide a kind of imaginative primer for the way that audiences responded to the video. Equally important here is the fact that Yolngu place a strong epistemological emphasis on people seeing things for themselves. This adds another crucial dimension to the way that Bangana understood the potential of the camera. Like the realist traditions of documentary filmmaking, beginning with Bazin and Kracauer, he worked with an explicit intention to allow the images to ‘‘speak for themselves,’’ using the mimetic capaciousness of the television technologies to reveal to his audience the world ‘‘as it is.’’ However, Bangana’s use of the camera was more complex than in any straightforwardly empirical sense, so that what appears on screen shows things exactly as they are or suggests that this is all there is. While it might be fair to say that the making of Gularri was informed by an epistemological disposition in which, at a profound level, seeing is believing, as I have already suggested, this is neither a naı¨ve nor a one-way process. Viewed through a Taussigian lens, one can think of the camera as a
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‘‘transparent,’’ bidirectional conduit for connecting to the invisible by means of the constitutive power of mimesis. But this formulation still does not adequately capture the revelatory dynamics that are at the heart of the project.
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BETWEEN REVEALING AND CONCEALING The dynamic manifest in the movement between the outward form and the inner content is the basis of Yolngu sacred knowledge [Keen 1994: 164], producing a system of knowledge in which meaning is hidden or obscured as well as revealed [Morphy 2000: 135]. This happens through a dynamic, bidirectional process in which information, imagery, names, and places move along the continuum from dhuyu (restricted) to public. According to cultural ideology it is the older men who have access to control this restricted arena, which provides the source of their power (in both a political and a more ‘‘ancestral’’ or rom (law) sense—the two being aspects of the same thing; von Sturmer [1987]). However as Morphy [1991: 91] describes it, the ‘‘veil of secrecy’’ surrounding inside knowledge is often thin: women and noninitiates are often more knowledgeable about the inside meanings of ritual and what goes on in the men’s ceremony ground than the public ideology surrounding secrecy would allow. What matters most, he argues, is that there is a sense in which access to certain information, imagery, and objects remains controlled, while enabling all participants to glean a measure of understanding and insight based on prior knowledge and processes of deduction. Especially in ritual contexts, the act of making something visible is commensurate with an act of disclosure. It effects a bringing-out into a public gaze, with the attendant risks of such an exposure, which can be understood in terms of a loss of power or potency. As most of the sites we filmed had previously been restricted from photography, the act of filming was in itself a form of disclosure. To a Yolngu audience, the fact that certain important sites had been filmed for broadcasting was recognizable as something momentous—an act of revelation and exposure sanctioned by clan leaders for the contexts of this production. Nonetheless, limits and restrictions about what could be filmed still remained, varying from site to site. Following the instructions of landowners, we avoided certain areas that were deemed too powerful=secret=sacred. At times, though, the act of not showing entailed something more complex than simply not filming certain things. In these instances, it was a matter of generating and managing a dynamic between showing and concealing within the frame itself. Interestingly, the very fact that Gularri was shot by someone other than a local actually enables just such a dynamic. From time to time in the film images on screen—shot and framed by the ‘‘unseeing’’ or naı¨ve eye of a cameraman filming places he knew nothing about—fail to focus on certain features in the landscape that are highly significant to certain Yolngu viewers. Consequently, while on the surface of things the camera appears to show everything, the wide, generous pans giving no sense of anything being hidden, many important features of a site were included, but only and quite literally in passing. The images present themselves as if they are all there is to see, yet in fact the camera provides only one axis of the ‘‘seeing’’ actually being invited. To a knowing audience, there are invisible
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‘‘underneath’’ or ‘‘inside’’ meanings, connections, and references embedded within a frame, to be seen and appreciated. The effect for a knowledgeable viewer is such that the camera lens stays on the surfaces of things, showing everything without fixing onto anything in particular. Meanwhile the constellation of imagery associated with the site—the sacred designs, the objects, the features in the landscape, the faces of the deceased—coalesce for each viewer as their mind’s eye projects an invisible overlay onto the screen. This kind of viewing requires an imaginative conjuring of multi-layered and outward-extending patterning of ancestral references, images, kin, objects, and connections with other related kin and countries that is itself a form of ritual participation, more usually practiced in ceremonies. However, it must be stressed that while these active, imaginative processes are essential to the generation of meaning and insight, Yolngu stress that this is a way of seeing what is already there. The ontological force lies in the creative, revelatory capaciousness of country (or, in this instance, the Gularri waters). In other words, from a Yolngu point of view, the source of these images—and indeed the stimulation for this kind of seeing—is the invisible underlying connections of rom. Thus, the insights and illuminations available to the attentive and the knowledgeable are the work of recognition. Against the slow pans and static shots of the water and country, each viewer is able to zoom in imaginatively to a particular rock or tree and thereby ‘‘see’’ the stories that are embedded in the landscape, actively recalling other events, connections, and relationships that take on certain meanings and refractions because of the underlying connection of Gularri. In other words, by leaving the field of vision open for inspection, Bangana was able to use the camera as a technology that simultaneously conceals as it reveals, deferring the work of seeing to a highly differentiated audience, allowing for diverse perspectives as well as for the recognition of commonalities between groups [Keen 1994: 216].
TELEVISION AS TECHNE There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name techne. Once that revealing which brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearance was also called techne. Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. The poiesis of the fine arts was also called techne. —Martin Heidegger [1977a: 315]
I have already indicated that Bangana deemed the full-frame shots of water to be the most important in the video. These shots not only function as a kind of mimetic distillation of ancestral presence, they operate at the level of a visual poetics: the flowing, the play of depth and shallows, the surging revelation and concealments of patterns and shapes, enacted by the very materiality of Gularri, work to stimulate certain styles of associative thinking that potentially enable new insights in the mulkurr of viewers. The glistening of sun on water adds yet another layer of visual stimulus and depth of meaning. As Morphy has described it, the shimmering effect produced by the fine cross-hatching in Yolngu art (sometimes referred to as bir’yun) has been the most restricted component of Yolngu art [1989]. In this new technological context, the shimmering
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Figure 3 Charlie Ngalambirra begins his narrative at the source of Gularri.
Figure 4 Surging, flowing, glistening, patterned—the visual poetics of water enact an aesthetic of revelation and concealment.
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waters are simultaneously everyday and sublime, their momentary flashes and glimmers producing an aesthetic effect that exemplifies the revelatory dynamics of illumination described above. Heidegger’s later work on art and poetry (as opposed to his musings on technology) provides a conceptual language that allows me to move closer to expressing what I have come to understand of Bangana’s aims—namely, that he made Gularri to enact a poesis, a bringing-forth and making visible of the invisible underlying unity of what he called the ‘‘Yolngu world.’’ Bangana did not treat culture as a resource to be objectified, salvaged, or archived. Nor was his filmmaking informed by a struggle over signifiers (although, in many ways the video does also effect a holding back in terms of refusing to display or perform ‘‘culture’’ in the terms dictated by Western imaginations). The point is that Gularri is not a film about Yolngu culture—it is film that seeks to produce Yolngu culture and identity by generating a specific experience of viewing that is immediately recognized by Yolngu as something other than the ordinary or everyday act of watching television. Just as in ritual, where connections are enacted, embodied, and asserted through performance and revelatory climaxes, in this case it is the act of viewing video that works to reveal, reconstitute, and enliven the links between viewers and their country and kin. Thus, like ritual, Gularri offers its Yolngu viewers a chance to participate in an affirmation of their fundamental connectedness in and through the patterns laid down by ancestral forces. Each viewing offers the possibility of adding another layer of experiential, embodied, and affect-laden knowledge of, and connection to, country and kin across the everyday boundaries of time and space. From a Yolngu point of view, the kind of multidimensional ‘‘seeing’’ which I have described—a cumulative coming to knowledge that is at once conceptual and aesthetic—is entirely proper. Ultimately, as Bangana assured me, such processes enable a knowledgeable viewer like Ngalambirra to see ‘‘everything’’—his land, his designs, his sacred objects—in a single frame of glistening water [Figure 4]. Surging, flowing, glistening, patterned—the visual poetics of water enact an aesthetic of revelation and concealment.
CONCLUSION Working alongside Bangana on Gularri provided an invaluable opportunity to observe and participate in an ongoing history of indigenous experimentation with new cultural forms [Michaels 1994, Morphy 1991]. Yet even as my role as collaborator put me in the center of events, it was only in retrospect—after repeated viewings, discussions, and some fairly wide-ranging reading—that I was in a position to arrive at the understandings of the project that have been offered here. For, as I have described, in attempting to apprehend the efficacies of Gularri on Yolngu terms, I have had to learn to look beyond the surface of the screen toward the imaginative processes, the corporeal connections, and the ontological impacts of the video imagery as perceived by local producers and audiences. Taking a cue from my Yolngu kin and media colleagues, I have learned to attend closely to how the mimetic conjunctions of camera, screen,
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image, and viewer mediate an embodied connection between the ‘‘outside’’ to the ‘‘inside’’ and the ‘‘public’’ to the dhuyu (the sacred, restricted). In this way I have come to recognize that by tracking the sparkling waters of Gularri across the region, the video does so much more than simply relate a mythic narrative of the past; for it engages and encompasses viewers in a renewal of embodied, intersubjective connections as viewers sensuously participate in the revelatory process by bringing their own awareness of, and sensitivity to, the presence of ‘‘inside’’ imagery within the frame, thereby effecting a kind of ‘‘bringing forth’’ and making visible of the immanent patterns of the ancestral. The result is a kind of television that profoundly challenges abiding concerns about the objectifying and distancing effects of technology (as exemplified by Heidegger himself!). Indeed, one of Gularri’s many gifts is its potential to stir imaginations beyond Arnhem Land: its shimmering waters offer an enticement toward not only a deepening appreciation of Yolngu culture but the nature of the visual encounter itself. Harnessing the expressive power of television, Bangana used video technologies to stimulate a certain kind of sensibility and to provide the basis for a shared (but differentiated) experiential knowledge of the connections and patterns laid down by Gularri’s flow. Under Bangana’s direction, the television proved an ideal technology for a culture concerned with managing the relationship between the inside and the outside of things. The edited sequences link clan sites together in a specific and directed flow of connectedness. They provide a kind of ‘‘see it for yourself’’ veracity and connection, without exposing or ‘‘giving away’’ too much. The dynamic manifest in the movement between the outward form and inner content reproduces an experiential system of knowledge in which meaning is hidden or obscured as well as revealed. Indeed, as Howard Morphy suggests in relation to Yolngu art, what matters most in this cultural system, more than secrecy per se, is what is achieved by concealment, a withholding of information and imagery.17 In other words, just as much as showing, the act of containing, of not showing, enhances the potency of what might be thought of as ancestral capital—and concomitantly amplifies its impact on the viewer at the moment it is revealed. The multiple significances described above locate Gularri as a project that has more in common with more traditional forms of Yolngu cultural production such as dance, art, and music than it does with Western traditions of documentary and media activism [Ginsburg 2002]. Seen in this way, Gularri ultimately offers visible evidence of the creativity and resilience of the Yolngu imagination. This, I believe, is also how it plays back in Gapuwiyak. I know that Bangana certainly intended the mimetic ripples of unity to extend beyond the particularity of the Gularri waters. Using the structure of ngarra, with its emphasis on relatedness, the video works to generate a sense of a shared identity that extends beyond specific clan affiliations to a more generalized collective sense of what it means to be Yolngu. As Bangana put it, ‘‘This video shows the big picture . . . a picture of Yolngu culture.’’ From this point of view, Gularri’s blend of media technology and ritual forms offers the ‘‘new generation’’ an encompassing sense of meaningfulness and belonging in the face of the often enormously debilitating pressures of contemporary life.
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EPILOGUE: THE BROADCAST When the Gularri video went to air for the first time on the local TV channel, an almost eerie stillness descended on the community. The bitumen and dirt roads linking the houses, usually trafficked in the evening by gangs of strolling teenagers and kava drinkers on their way to join a circle, were empty. The open-air basketball courts with their off-kilter hoops and fading court markings lay abandoned. There was no sign of family groups walking between camps shining flashlights and brandishing sticks for the cheeky dogs; no sign of the toddlers, their siblings, and cousins who play within shouting distance of the card games, nor of their parents gambling under the streetlights. No headlights or sound of diesel motors, or ghetto-blasting reggae, or Christian gospel tapes broke the night’s subtle solemnity. Everyone, it seemed, had tuned in. With television sets balanced on upturned flour tins and power cords pushed inside through broken louvres and torn fly screens, family groups sat outside on sheets and blankets spread across the raked ground. At other camps, people stayed inside to watch under the ceiling fan, silhouetted in the darkness by the glow from the screen. This was not the usual noisy, semidistracted way of watching bitcha (television). Usually televisions blared day and night in the houses that had them; life rarely stopped completely for any show except, perhaps, Aussie-rules football finals. But this was different; this was new. For the many who had never attended a ngarra, as well as those who had, the production was immediately recognizable as a Yolngu video. As Ngalambirra’s madak reverberated on the warm night breeze, the Gularri waters flowed from BRACS to television sets across the community. As the conjunction of camera and microphone, screen and speaker mimetically amplified ancestral presence, Yolngu settled down to watch—respectful, attentive, and engaged. For many, if not most, it was the first time they had seen certain locations, even though they had likely sung and danced them many times. Sitting in the kin groupings in front of glowing screens, the people of Gapuwiyak were drawn into a shared space of relatedness through the act of simultaneous seeing, even as they were ‘‘seeing’’ different things. As I tuned into the sounds of the evening, I heard women’s weeping songs arise from several directions. Taking up Ngalambirra’s tunes with their own clan songs, the women sang their country. Crying for family, for the ancestors, and for the Gularri, their voices overlapped and merged in the darkness. In another camp I caught sight of a man tapping his cigarette lighter on the floor, keeping time with the bilma (clapsticks)—listening, looking, seeing, and participating—while his other hand cradled the child that lay across his lap. Taking in these extraordinary scenes, I wandered between the houses until I came to Bangana’s place. He wasn’t watching TV either. Sitting on his veranda with his wife, Susan, he observed quietly from the shadows. Seeing me approach, he caught my eye and smiled.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT Parts of this article have been previously published in Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community, by Jennifer Deger [University of Minnesota Press, Copyright 2006 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota].
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NOTES 1. Thanks to the organizers, participants and respondents involved in the ‘‘Frontiers of Visual Anthropology’’ workshop in Oxford, 2005, and also to the Division of Society, Culture, Media, and Philosophy at Macquarie University, which funded my attendance. I am also grateful to Jennifer Biddle, Annette Hamilton, Faye Ginsburg, Laura Marks, Howard Morphy, Felicia Hughes-Freeland, and the wonderfully insightful Jane Sloan for comments on various drafts of this material, which represents the reworking of several chapters from my book Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community [2006]. (Text and images reproduced with the permission of the press; images from Gularri reproduced also with permission of CAAMA productions and Yolngu djungayarr from Gapuwiyak.) Thanks also to Charlie Ngalambirra and the team from CAAMA. Most of all, I am profoundly indebted to the generous brilliance and robust enthusiasms of Bangana Wunungmurra, without whom there would have been no drafts, no articles, and no book chapters. 2. See, for instance, Fabian [1983], Clifford [1988], Rony [1996], and Russell [1999]. 3. I have borrowed the term ‘‘looking relations’’ from Jane Gaines [2000]. 4. Although local media production has not continued in Gapuwiyak in any sustained way since that time, Bangana’s enduring influence as a media innovator is acknowledged by many other Yolngu. For instance, Dhukal Wirrpanda, a key collaborator on the award-winning documentary Dhakiyarr vs the King (Film Australia 2004; directors Allan Collins and Tom Murray), cites Bangana as the direct source of inspiration for his own film work (personal communication). 5. See especially Ginsburg [1994, 1999, 2002], Michaels [1986, 1994], Meadows and Molnar [2001], and Turner [1992, 2002]. 6. This paper is a condensed version of arguments presented in Shimmering Screens: Media, Mimesis and a Vision of a Yolngu Modernity [Deger 2006]. 7. This term has been adopted from a statement made by Kurt Japanangka Granites in an early Warlpiri media video [Michaels 1986: 36]. 8. See further Deger [2006, chapter 3]. 9. Both Yirritja and Dhuwa moieties have their own separate sacred waters, and due to relationships through the matriline and the clan patriline an individual will have close connections with both. 10. My understanding of this ontological assertion is derived from Yolngu, who often stress this point directly and unequivocally as ontological fact in statements to me such as ‘‘I am my country’’; or ‘‘That water, that design, that rangga (sacred object)— that’s me. Same.’’ 11. See especially Fiona Magowan [1998, 2001, 2005]. 12. Warner [1969: 382] describes the way that a neophyte would keep his head down while the old men lectured him about adhering to ‘‘the code of Murngin [Yolngu] morals,’’ prior to being shown ‘‘the sacred totem.’’ 13. All quotes from Bangana are transcriptions from taped conversations in English between 1995 and 1999. Certain important nuances are lost because of his use of English, as when he uses the term ‘‘mind’’ rather than the Yolngu mulkurr, which carries a much stronger sense of an embodied site of the intellect, but I have left these statements in their original form rather than unpacking them, at the risk of overburdening what already feels like an overly ambitious paper. 14. I have described this in more detail in Deger [2006, chapter 4]. 15. Since the making of Gularri, the ontological status that Bangana attributed to the photographic or video image as the ‘‘same’’ as its subject has shifted markedly, most
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notably in relation to taboos regarding viewing photographs of recently deceased people [Deger 2006, chapters 5 and 6]. 16. This is also partly due to the repetitive nature of the video’s structure in which basically the same thing happens in each location. 17. See Morphy [1991: 75–99] for a fuller discussion of the constitutive dynamics of secrecy, revelation, power, and knowledge in relation to Yolngu art.
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Meadows, Michael, and Helen Molnar 2001 Songlines to Satellites: Indigenous Communication in Australia, the South Pacific, and Canada. Leichhardt, NSW: Pluto Press. Michaels, Eric 1986 The Aboriginal Invention of Television. (The Institute Report Series.) Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. 1994 Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morphy, Howard 1989 From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power among the Yolngu. Man, 24(1): 21–40. 1991 Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000 Inner Landscapes: The Fourth Dimension. In The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture. S. Kleinert and M. Neale, eds. Pp. 129–136. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rony, Fatimah Tobing 1996 The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press. Russell, Catherine 1999 Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press. Tamisari, Franca 1998 Body, Vision, and Movement: In the Footprints of the Ancestors. Oceania, 68: 249–270. Taussig, Michael 1993 Mimesis and Alterity. New York and London: Routledge. Turner, Neil 1998 National Report on the Broadcasting Communities Scheme. Sydney: National Indigenous Media Association of Australia. Turner, Terence 1992 Defiant Images: The Kayapo Appropriation of Video. Anthropology Today, 8(6): 5–15. 2002 Representation, Politics, and Cultural Imagination in Indigenous Video: General Points and Kayapo Examples. In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Faye Ginsburg, Leila AbuLughod, and Brian Larkin, eds. Pp. 75–89. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. von Sturmer, John 1987 Aboriginal Singing and Notions of Power. In Songs of Central Australia (Oceania Monograph 32). M. Clunies Ross, T. Donaldson and S. A. Wild, eds. Pp. 63–76. Sydney: University of Sydney. Warner, W. Lloyd 1969 A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith.
VIDEOGRAPHY Collins, Allan, and Tom Murray 2004 Dhakiyarr vs. the King. Video. Produced and distributed by Film Australia. Mulcahy, Shane, and Bangana Wanungmurra 1997 Gularri: That Brings Unity. Video. Produced by CAAMA Productions and Wankwarrpuyngu Yolngu Media (Australia).