Knowing and Being Known. Approaching Australian Indigenous Tourism Through Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Politics of Knowing

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic research conducted with Bardi and Jawi people, two Indigenous groups from the Northwestern Kimberley region of Western Australia, the aim of this paper is to approach the complexities related to Indigenous tourism in Australia through the politics of knowing and not-knowing as embodied by Indigenous tour guides and non-Indigenous tourists. It examines the notion of knowing (or not-knowing) and its usages by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the context of their tourist encounter. ‘Knowing’ represents an important aspect through which Aboriginal people and their non-Indigenous guests negotiate their interactions. In particular, the paper shows how Indigenous and non-Indigenous expectations from tourism lead actors to adopt divergent positions and to assert renewed claims in relation to knowledge or knowing, casting new light on issues of self-representation and empowerment in the domain of Indigenous tourism.

KEYWORDS:

• Australia
• indigenous tourism
• knowing and not-knowing
• self-representation

Acknowledgements

This article has benefited from the comments of anonymous referees, to whom I am most grateful. I also want to thank the editors of Anthropological Forum for their work. Their insights on this paper have been particularly helpful and are gratefully acknowledged here. I am most grateful to the Bardi and Jawi people who participated in this research and welcomed me as yet another novice in the learning of some of their cultural practices.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 I will come back later in this paper on the notions of Bardi and Jawi. There are three main communities, or settlements, in Bardi country: Djarindjin, Lombadina and One Arm Point (also known as Ardyaloon).

2 Leach and Davis (2012) also outline how knowledge recognition processes are heavily influenced by the western definition of knowledge as something that has an effect on nature. Yet, the Indigenous guides I met tended to indeed use this western definition as a point for the recognition of their knowledge by the tourists.

3 For more information on how these two linguistic groups came together, see Glaskin 2002, 2018 and Robinson 1973.

4 This determination granted Bardi and Jawi people the ‘right of possession and occupation as against the whole world’, meaning, among other things, the exclusive right to refuse, regulate and control the use and enjoyment of their land by others on the mainland. The 2005 decision was appealed to the Full Court in 2010 to include exclusive rights on the islands as well as non-exclusive rights to the ocean (within the limit of three nautic miles) (see Sampi on behalf of the Bardi and Jawi people v State of Western Australia [2010] FCAFC 26).

5 See, for example, Urry (1990), for a discussion of power and the gaze in tourism.

6 Bardi and Jawi Rangers do not work as tour guides. However, they give talks at Kooljaman about once a week, with the aim to raise tourists’ awareness about Indigenous local practices and the restrictions that have been decided by the communities with respect to access to land. Their audience includes both participants and non-participants to Indigenous-guided tours.