From Dust to Ashes: The Challenges of Difference

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Notes

1. For their helpful comments on earlier drafts, I thank Myrna Tonkinson, Nils Bubandt, Victoria Burbank, Gillian Hutcherson, and Lamont Lindstrom.

2. Working in both locations ensured that I did not wrongly impute changes in the Efate village to the effects of relocation when similar changes may have also occurred back on Ambrym in that time; see 1968, 1977, 1979a, 1985b.

3. For example, in the New Hebrides, this entailed my having to learn two new languages: the national lingua franca, a creole called Bislama, and the previously unrecorded language of Southeast Ambrym, as well as refreshing a third (French).

4. The view, shared by the Berndts and Elkin, that one generation's ‘innovative concentrations’ are the detritus of the next, whereas the ‘threads of basic anthropological knowledge and interpretation’ are constants, was more strongly represented in Australian anthropology than preoccupation with theory (Tonkinson & Howard 1990:30; see also Acciaioli, Robinson & Tonkinson 1999).

5. Like Beidelman (1998), writing in the Key Informants series, I have long been grateful for this foundational knowledge.

6. Decades later, it was gratifying to know that the genealogies I had collected and charted proved to be a valuable resource for Aboriginal native title claimants whose traditional lands include the area where I worked.

7. The Western Desert was the last area in Australia where ‘first contacts’ were still possible, so it was exciting to take part in five expeditions, between 1963 and 1969, most of which were aimed at locating the remaining nomadic groups and assisting the evacuation of those wanting to join relatives already living in settlements. The longest trip, three months in 1965, was as anthropological advisor and stills photographer to Film Australia director, Ian Dunlop. He and cameraman Richard Tucker recorded elements of ‘traditional’ subsistence pursuits while this was still possible. See Tonkinson (1991: 197–8) for information on Dunlop's desert films.

8. ‘The Law’ denotes the totality of their religion and culture, encompassing jural rules and moral evaluations of customary behaviours that they believe were bequeathed them by the creative beings of ‘the Dreaming’ era (Tonkinson 1974:7; 1991, Ch. 1). See Stanner (1966, 1979) for definitive accounts of Aboriginal religion and the Dreaming concept, respectively.

9. For some reflections on the colonial context of research in the New Hebrides, see Tonkinson (n.d).

10. Jonah had volunteered his yard as the site for my hut, and his family became, and remains, mine. I was present at his death-bed in his natal village, Utas, in Southeast Ambrym, and helped support his widow, Sarah, throughout the subsequent mourning and burial period in November 2006.

11. Working from the same set of basic variables was essential to the project's ultimate goal: to amass enough comparable date to enable some well-grounded anthropological theorising about social change. Regrettably, Barnett was unable to synthesise the studies before he died, but a valuable overview was later provided in a volume of papers edited by Michael Lieber, to which I contributed (Tonkinson 1977b).

12. Student critics at the time claimed that the failure of Anthropology at ubc to graduate PhDs was due to the impossibility of satisfying the often divergent wishes of so many supervisors.

13. Myrna, a Jamaican by birth, moved to Chicago at the age of 20 to work, and began university studies there. She commenced fieldwork with the Mardu people in 1974 and completed her PhD the following year. We have returned to the desert many times since, and she continues research and writing on the Mardu.

14. I also became a fan of Marshall Sahlins, initially for his innovative work on Polynesian social stratification (Sahlins 1958), his witty demolition of ‘vulgar sociobiology’, and later for his important contributions to cultural theory. For me, an excellent example of symbolic analysis in action was Sherry Ortner's Sherpa volume (Ortner 1978).

15. When an extensively revised, expanded and updated second edition was published in 1991, I altered ‘Mardudjara’, the original collective term I had coined, to ‘Mardu’, which by this time had become the people's common term of self-reference. I also addressed some contentious issues (gender, hierarchy and politics) debated in Aboriginal anthropology since 1978 (see also Tonkinson 1984a, 1988c, 1988d, 1988c, 1990a, 1988c, 1988d, 1988c, 1996, 1988c, 1988d, 1988c, 1990a, 1988c, 1988d, 1988c, 2000b). The monograph is currently published by Thomson Wadsworth.

16. Another very impressive volume incorporating much historical detail is Robert Levy's Tahitians (1976), a penetrating psychoanalytic-anthropological study, clearly influenced by Gregory Bateson (to whom the monograph is dedicated).

17. In the 1970s, Government policies proclaiming greater Aboriginal community self-management coincided with a burgeoning Aboriginal political consciousness, and the advent of regional land councils; various kinds of gate-keeping arose that made entry to the field for thesis research increasingly difficult.

18. The Berndts were also founding members of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now aiatsis, since the addition of Australia's other ethnic minority, the Torres Strait Islanders) in Canberra, and Ron was a major presence on its Council. My association with the Institute dates from the early seventies when I became a grantee, and later an elected member of Council. Currently its Deputy Chair, I continue the Western Australian connection begun by Ron.

19. My reactions to the field and Ambrymese reactions to me are contained in an account of the lighter side of field research in the islands (1979c; 1990b).

20. In 1988, I was more thrilled at receiving a uwa inaugural Distinguished Teaching Award than being elected to the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

21. Since Perth is not on the way to anywhere, in the earlier years, particularly, I invited overseas anthropologist colleagues, who were also friends (among them Jane Goodale, Roberta Hall, Judith Huntsman, Michael Jackson, Hank Lewis, Mervyn Meggitt, Mark Mosko, Eugene Ogan and Richard Scaglion) to extend their Australian visits to our Department, for seminars and talks to our postgraduates on doing fieldwork.

22. The Mardu claim was granted in 2003 but, regrettably, minus an important area that had become a National Park and was thus ineligible for claim.

23. Also, distances have shrunk enormously since the 1960s: for example, the mining town of Newman, where many Mardu live, is now 90 minutes by jet from Perth, and two hours by road west of Jigalong.

24. These sentiments were unhelpful, since they impeded my ability to see the usurping Presbyterianism as the structural equivalent of Mardu religion; that is, as a symbolically rich institution to be mined analytically for its many resonances with the rest of the culture.

25. The volume edited by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) appeared the following year, and soon became the main reference work for the ‘invention of tradition’ phenomenon in anthropology and history.

26. A special issue of the journal Oceania on the same topic included a fine overview of the politics of cultural construction by Jocelyn Linnekin (1992). See also Lindstrom (n.d.).

27. The phenomenal rise to prominence of ‘traditional’ Aboriginal art is a good example. Art production has proved to be a dramatic way of explaining ‘traditional’ Aboriginal culture to White Australians and the world. It is one of many manifestation of the rise in recent decades of a new and positive national identity being forged by Aboriginal Australians (Tonkinson 1989, 1998).

28. Firth (1951) saw in this tension the basis for differentiating social structure, with its emphasis on continuity and ordered relations between part and whole in social systems, from social organisation, embodying concrete activity, the exercise of choice and the making of decisions. His conjoining of structure and process prefigured by decades that of Giddens (1976), who gave it a name: structuration.

29. As Appadurai (1997) aptly notes, we live in an era of ‘moving populations, multilocal social worlds, displaced allegiances, and circulating meanings’ (p. 115) … yet human social life still unfurls through ‘the practices of intimacy — the work of sexuality and reproduction, the webs of nurture and of friendship, the heat of anger and violence, the nuance of gesture and tone’ (p. 116). See also Hirsch et al. (2007) on anthropology and globalisation.

30. They label their homeland simply ut nar ‘our place’ and their language sepinien nar ‘our talk’.