THE AGE OF BRITISH MASTER NARRATIVES IS OVER.
In modern anthropology, formed in keeping with Western notions of how life should be, the role of people called kurtungurlu in some parts of Central Australia is typically considered - in some sense - to be secondary to others whose relationships are deemed in advance to be primary.
British Deeming has replaced First Peoples Dreaming!
Western notions are themselves wrought cultural products which take their 'modern' form as a result of all manner of struggles, power plays, schemes, machinations and manipulations etc. However 'natural' they may appear to those who have been socialised or enculturated into using them, these forms are 'culturally peculiar'.
In First Peoples Ways we find strong evidence of a very different notion of what is 'normal'. It often strikes me that an easy way of summing up the difference between these two 'normals' is that, amongst First Peoples a key message is that, if life is to be kept balanced, self-regulation is never to be trusted!
Where Western minds might struggle with issues as to whether kirda or kurdungurlu are primary, the sense to be detected in First Peoples Ways is that the relationship between the two complementary opposite parts is what is of primary importance. A both-and approach - necessary to keep life-as-lived balanced and in good order - stands in contrast to the intellectual exercises of fine minds seeking to make forensic use of the cutting edge of divisive either/or logic and, in some cases, to advance their own careers and reputations.
The alignment of personal interests and those of the life-formation which they belong to would make a fascinating study. It is clear that the interests of early 'non-professional' anthropologists in this country were more embracing than the harder-nosed no-nonsense approach which accompanied the 'professionalization' of anthropology.
It is taken for granted these days that anthropology should replicate itself from within the state education system. These universities are founded upon expropriated living country and funded by expropriated wealth from living country.
The message which such Departments of Anthropology transmit is not that which comes from the core of life in this country. Rather, the message is one relayed from remote sources.
Secular models of First Peoples and their Ways have been produced by modern conceptual craftspeople. These secular models may make nonsense out of the highest values of First Peoples.
For example, the act of completing the key life process of making a well-formed Being - a man who fits into life as it is - in those groups were circumcision is practiced cannot be presented as involving 'genital mutilation'. Yet this is the term used in a recent text, copyrighted in 2004.
First Peoples Ways are those which involve a comprehensive process of trans-signification for the whole of life. Any professional who seeks to describe these Ways as though dealing with objects has little chance of entering - however fleetingly it may be - into the cosmos of First Peoples.
And without that act of empathy, the conceptual craftsperson remains trapped in a Western conceptual prison-house as to how he or she will be positioned vis-à-vis First Peoples.
The close relationship between a discipline which aspires to represent the whole of human life and the modern nation-state has to be considered to be - not merely up for review - but out-of-date.
Early modern professional anthropology greatly underestimated the degree of difficulty in the challenge to craft representations of First Peoples which would do justice to First Peoples lives - in all their existential and transcendent dimensions.
The powerful 'gravitational' force of a modern Western episteme has prevented our imaginations from escaping for long enough and to enter into the worlds of First Peoples in order to grasp the insights necessary for restructuring whole fields of Western understanding.
But the signs are that that is changing. We are fashioning new forms of representation - forms which may contribute to the process of doing justice to Ways of life which are truly part of the living intellectual heritage of this planet, and not merely playthings of European intellectuals.
Too much of the craft of modern anthropology has served to fashion forms of representation of First Peoples and their Ways which uphold superior European notions of privilege.
One-sided forms of representation were substituted in place of two-sided modes of Being. Typically, the former were framed in terms of vertical metaphors and 'descent'. The latter, however, have a more 'horizontal' feeling, with the stress on maintaining relationships between complementary opposite hemispheres.
For this writer at least, the age of domination by British master-narratives is over.
WARUMUNGU REALITIES 1901
Based on their fieldwork in 1901, Spencer and Gillen recorded:
“In different tribes there are special individuals, or rather individuals belonging to special groups of the tribe, who have to provide blood for this (ceremonial decoration –R) purpose on different occasions.” (1969:597)
They contrast the practices of Arrente (Arunta) and Kaytej (Kaitish) with Warumungu (Warramunga). Having been present at a comprehensive number of Warumungu ceremonies, “over 80” (1969:299), they note:
“… (the) tribe is … is divided into two moieties called respectively Kingilli and Uluuru. When an Uluuru ceremony is to be performed the decorating must be done by Kingilli men, whose duty it is to provide down, ochre, blood, and everything else necessary, and the man who has the first right to do this is the performer’s father-in-law, though he may, if he cares to, waive his claim. In all cases, the blood must be provided by a man of the other moiety.” (1969:597)
They had noted the same thing earlier in their book, adding that there are ‘presents’ exchanged as part of the complex interplay of prestations and counterprestations. They also make explicit the reciprocal interplay between Wurlurru and Kingili:
“The Uluuru only preform their ceremonies when invited to do so by the Kingilli, and not only is this the case, but in addition no member of the Uluuru moiety, other than those who are being actually decorated for the performance, may be present on the ground during the preparation. Everything used for the ceremony – blood, down, and decorations of all kinds – must be provided and made by the Kingilli, to whom afterwards presents are offered by the Uluuru. In exactly the same way the Uluuru take charge of the Kingilli ceremonies and receive presents from them.”(1969:298)
The picture is one of mutual interdependence formed by the rich exchanges amongst Warumungu men. I think this picture of re-enforced solidarity, cemented in ongoing acts of exchange, is grossly distorted by those who seek to make Warumungu life comply with simple-minded notions of ‘descent’ – patrilineal, matrilineal, contextualised cognatic or otherwise – as providing some kind of basic social structural feature.
Life is much richer than that.
COMPLEMENTARY OPPOSITION WURLURRU-KINGILI
Warumungu life, taken as a whole, is formed by two complementary opposite halves – Wurlurru and Kingili.
Stanner noted:
"The two Warramunga moieties are named Uluuru and Kingilli. These names themselves were possibly totemic originally, since they refer to celestial phenomena." (Stanner 1935 1979:11)
Kimberly Christen reproduces the text written by Michael Jambin from a display at the Nyinkka Nyunyu cultural centre in Tennant Creek regarding the Warumungu punttu ('skin' or 'subsection' system):
"In the evening we see the dark and red glow. These were divided by the Dreaming into two groups of skin names: Kingili and Wurlurru. The red are the Wurlurru and the black are the Kingili. Each Warumungu person belongs to one of these two groups, and these in turn are divided into sixteen punttu." (in Christen 2009:248-249)
The colouring of the eastern sky at dusk is clearly seen in Warumungu country on many evenings - as it is in many places.
My understanding is that the whole cosmos is subject to the Wurlurru-and-Kingili means of categorisation, in much the same way as it is using a yin-yang approach.
For example, I was told by N. Jappanangka, an Alyawarra man (residing with his Warumungu siblings), that this distinction was to be seen in differences within the Milky Way.
There are clear associations between fire (Wurlurru) and water (Kingili).
Additionally, Spencer and Gillen record how Wurlurru gave fire to Kingili in the Wirnkarra (Dreaming). Kingili were cold and damp - clumped together like damp sugar. Wurlurru gave them fire.
On this basis, it is as though Kingili is - in some cultural sense - closer to a raw state of 'nature' than Wurlurru. Wurlurru may be (perhaps) more 'cooked'. (The Western myth of 'nature' is far removed from Warumungu cosmology.)
Country to the south-east of Tennant Creek associated with Wurlurru men - Warupunji (Fire-hill?) - carries the Wirnkarra story of how a form of terrestrial fire was originally brought into existence by two Hawks.
This fire quickly got out of hand and spread rapidly as a great conflagration - a great bush fire - which gave shape to features of the land. A white quartzite ridge, for example, might be the ash of the limb of a tree which burnt at that time.
Many other features can be read in relation to this great fire.
Adjoining Warupunji is country associated with Kingili men who are responsible to ensure that there is no great flood. These men are also associated with rainmakers. They may make rain for others.
Two of life's pole are represented by the Great Conflagration and the Great Deluge - a burnt world and a drowned world. The role of senior men is to ensure that the 'biozone' between the two extremes remains viable.
One can start to enter into Warumungu cosmology by tracing the relation between the fire story, the Moon-man story, Sun as woman … These stories are best told by those with the rights to them.
There are ongoing interactions and exchanges between members of Wurlurru and Kingili.
Like the human brain itself, which has two connected hemispheres, only when both are combined can there be any sense of a basic unity of some kind.
The late 1890s had seen a real tendency, amongst early Australian ethnographers/ethnologists, to understanding the importance of moieties in First Peoples Ways. The work of Mathews on “Eaglehawk and Crow’ and of Daisy Bates in recording similar features comes to mind.
The credit for the recording of this key feature of Warumungu Ways goes to Spencer and Gillen, having been mentored in these matters by senior Warumungu lawmen in 1901. There is every reason to believe that these senior lawmen – with their country having been rapidly occupied by cattlemen – took great pains to instil a sound understanding of Warumungu Ways into the two representatives of the foreign Ways.
There is a tendency in the Warumungu land claim report of the Aboriginal Land Commissioner to regard anthropological investigation of Warumungu Ways as commencing with the 1934 fieldwork of W E H Stanner. That is, after the arrival of Radcliffe-Brown as the founding Professor in Australian anthropology as a discipline within a university.
There is much to admire in the work of Stanner during his fleeting Warumungu fieldwork investigations. However, as he himself noted in his report of that fieldwork, it took place under very different conditions to that encountered by Spencer and Gillen in 1901.
Spencer and Gillen’s ethnographic picture is one obtained under very good circumstances (for the purposes of ethnography) if those circumstances were, for Warumungu people, extremely unfortunate – their sacred lands being trampled under the hard hoof of the beast.
The stress which Spencer and Gillen found on complementary opposition as a basic social fact in Warumungu life stands in stark contrast to the a priori notions of the primacy of patrilineal descent which accompanied the arrival of Radcliffe-Brown.
The earlier interest in forms of complementary opposition/moieties goes out of fashion when Radcliff-Brown’s newer fashion – for a science of society which harks to notions of success in biology – is empowered.
Descent is an icon of biology and there is almost a sense in which modern master anthropologists – like Church Fathers holding the Cross - have sought to draw on the mystical power of that icon when they invoke descent (with pride of place) in the forms of representation they come to fashion.
While Dutch anthropology made much by way of exploring the role of complementary opposition in shaping life, the influence of Dutch thinkers in Australian has always been minimal. (The work of New Zealander Ken Maddock being an important exception.)
For more material on dual organisation from Levi-Strauss see his references in the final chapter 'The Bipartite Ideology of the Amerindians' in "The Story of Lynx" and, see also, David Maybury-Lewis, and Uri Almagor (eds) 1989 "The Attraction of Opposites: Thought and Society in the Dualistic Mode". (Ken Maddock and Aram Yengoyan have a chapter regarding this country's First Peoples.)
As Levi-Strauss states, dual organisation is a means of solving problems - and with Warumungu use of it problems have been solved - even if those problems have not informed the thinking of most modern theorists.
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