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...with synchronic approach aimed at eliciting the kind of social systemics which, since the advent of functionalism, had distinguished our discipline from that of history (1973:36-37). (1) One of the inbuilt assumptions of the synchronic, integrationist approach is the idea of bounded cultural entities. That approach is exemplified in the enclosed 'culture garden' imagery endemic to cultural relativity. From this assumption of self-regulating social systems (organicism) follows (by logical necessity rather than from any ethnographic basis) the notion of an ever-increasing fragmentation or acculturation resulting from intrusions into the assumed internal interdependency of a bounded society's institutions or structures (cf. Burridge 1973:49; Clifford 2001:478; Fabian 1983:20, 39). This paper is an investigation of particular kinds of interactions which occur over the walls of these 'culture gardens' and, in the process, raises some questions about the nature of such walls.
In an earlier work I have shown how Ngarinyin people of the northern Kimberley, in Western Australia, articulate kinship relationships in both centripetal and centrifugal modalities, marking explicit sites of introjection of significant others onto the body in the process of constituting the self, and extending the kinship web indefinitely outwards towards the boundaries of the known world to make relative strangers into 'strange relatives' (Redmond 2001). The same fundamental patterns are employed to figure relationships with non-Ngarinyin and then with non-Aboriginal people, the 'strangest relatives' of all. Here I want to look at this extension of the imagery of kinship to consociates outside of what was termed, in recent Native Title proceedings, the 'cultural domain' of Indigenous people of the northern Kimberley. The concept of a distinctive regional cultural domain was used to describe a body of 'beliefs, laws and customs', shared amongst the members of a bloc of three language groups: the Ngarinyin, Worrorra and Wunambal people of the northern Kimberley. This notion of a distinctive cultural domain shared between these three language-groups is not intended to suggest that other neighbouring Aboriginal groups did not also share some of the same beliefs and practices even before colonisation. It is not a model implying hermetically sealed cultural worlds. The ethnography for the region makes it clear, for example, that concepts, beliefs and practices surrounding Wunggurr, the Rainbow Serpent, are variations upon creation beliefs across the continent (Elkin 1930). Indeed, the belief in the pervasiveness or ubiquity of Wunggurr is the most salient of its features in this region. Only against this 'sameness' is the distinctiveness of the local lifeworld held up for aesthetic comparisons (always favourable ones) by the people of the northern ranges.
While in the contemporary northern Kimberley, the technology for transport and communication has facilitated the transmission of people, goods, ideas and practices at a greater velocity than in previous eras, such transmissions appear to have always been central to social life. This is exemplified in the regional and inter-regional wurnan, the systematic exchange of ceremonial and utilitarian objects. As Thomson noted in Arnhem Land in the period before WW11, exchanged goods, ideas, and practices gained 'a halo of glamour and romance' (Thomson 1949:80) from the very fact of their transmission from afar, from across the margins of the known world to the heart of the local world. My point here is that the features of any particular 'cultural domain' are highlighted by its participants only as a result of the inter-cultural activity which is crucial to forging and sustaining a local sense of identity. (2) That this inter-culturality now extends to a greater or lesser degree to the encompassing non-Aboriginal world is not very surprising. (3)
A clear example of the adaptation of pre-colonial practices for dealing with 'strange relatives' to the present situation is shown in the assignment of 'skin' (moiety) categories to the children of non-Aboriginal fathers. These current practices derive their locally perceived legitimacy from similar processes enacted for the children of Aboriginal men from outside the local region where different 'skin' systems (sections and subsections) were, and are, employed. The facility with which older Ngarinyin people, particularly those brought up on the southern and eastern extremities of the northern Kimberley, can transpose the terms of neighbouring 'skin' systems, and point out the different origins of various beliefs and practices, is a source of pride and enjoyment for them. This ability to relativise cultural models is a highly motivated form of knowledge now that younger Ngarinyin people can travel much further afield on a regular basis, making the issues of marrying out and maintaining relative correctness, or not, ever more salient.
The violent European colonisation of the Kimberley region had no apparent precedents in terms of a lifeworld crisis, so I do not assume that modern engagements with non-Aborigines and non-local Aborigines unproblematically mobilise some kind of 'traditional' structural template acquired from the received cultural world for processing new relationships. Research in child developmental psychology makes it doubtful whether there is ever any such smooth reception of cultural models (Toren 1986). Nevertheless, many encounters with non-locals are heavily inflected by distinctive Indigenous regional ideas and social usages, enactments of social potential which suggest an attempt to incorporate 'matter out of place'. Marilyn Strathern's speculations about Indigenous Melanesian responses to strangers become pertinent here because, as in the Melanesian societies she refers to, Kimberley Aboriginal social processes also often assume that 'an agent or doer of an activity is often separated from the person (or happening) who compels the action' (1990:3). The extensive body of literature on owner/manager reciprocity in Aboriginal ritual life (e.g. Meggitt 1987:122; Morphy 1991; Myers 1987:103-105) attests to this kind of 'indirect action' in which the interdependence between owners and managers (or 'workers' in Aboriginal English) of country/ceremony defines the owners' role as recipients of the managers' attentions despite being themselves the prime movers of the activity. Kimberley Aborigines seem to place their own motivations and sense of agency at the heart of relationships with 'strange relatives' by employing methods of inducement which produce kin relatedness (as well as concomitant avoidance practices) with these strangers in everyday life situations. (4) This elicitation by local Aboriginal people of acts of social relatedness and reciprocity from people originally outside of the local kin network, especially from those who wield considerable political/economic power in the pastoral regime, seems to be congruent with that owner/manager interdependency whereby a group of social actors construe their own role as crucially productive of the labours of others, thus forestalling or diminishing the potential for domination. I will point to ways in which both of the groups interacting in the pastoral regime construct each other through such images.
This paper explores the tenor of some of these face-to-face relationships (which also enact locally aspects of relationships with the wider nation-state). It seems apt to apply here Strathern's argument that people conduct transactions in order to 'see what the further effects will be' (1990:37). (5) As Sahlins (1993:19) has suggested of colonised peoples in general, Kimberley Aboriginal responses to new social situations are far from being the 'knee-jerk reactions' determined by a tradition-bound 'cognitive stance' assumed by writers as diverse as Kolig (1996:274, 2000:20), Munn (1970), and Tonkinson (2002).
But is it adequate, as Sahlins would suggest, to say that Aborigines simply incorporate novel elements entering their social world into existing categories of thought and action, thereby responding within the parameters of what has often been characterised as their marked cultural conservatism? This proposition fits the kind of response to colonisation which Clifford recently described as 'processing the new through dynamic traditional...
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