https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4559-0660
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ABSTRACT
The main argument presented here is that in cultural contact zones, such as the Australian settler state, there can emerge violent tendencies in dominant patterns of thought, as both epistemic habits and systems of value. The logic of coloniality is one of war, destruction and inequality, and this is expressed through attempted erasure and actual ambivalence towards Indigenous peoples, their lands, waters, Laws and cultures. This is supported by habits of epistemic violence and axiological retreat. This paper examines such habits, through an ethnographically informed and localised case study of the destruction of an ancestral Dreaming site on Yanyuwa country in the Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia. In this instance the body of Yulungurri, the ancestral Tiger Shark, manifest in a large cycad palm, was cut down. Read through the lens of axiological retreat, and coloniality’s ambivalence towards Indigenous presence, the discussion considers the dispositions which lead to and support violence in such forms and how these might become naturalised or concealed in everyday life.
Acknowledgements
My gratitude goes to all Yanyuwa families who have shared their knowledge and experiences with me over the last two decades. I also wish to thank the three anonymous peer reviewers for their thoughtful commentary.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Yanyuwa kinship is defined by four lines of descent, traced at the grandparental level (Bradley Citation1997, 140). These are Wuyaliya, Wurdaliya, Rrumburriya and Mambaliya-Wawukarriya. In the Yanyuwa lifeworld each form of being, human and non-human, place and natural phenomenon occupies a unique intersectional node within the kincentric order, and this is derived of a clan-based (or semi-moiety) structure to life (Avery Citation1988, 82; Kirton and Timothy Citation1977; Reay Citation1962). People use the expression clan to speak of their father’s and mother’s country (whilst semi-moiety is the anthropological term, Yanyuwa do not use this expression themselves). Rrumburriya Dreaming ancestors include the Tiger Shark, Dugong Hunters, Hammerhead Shark, Hill Kangaroo, Cycad Palm and White-bellied Sea Eagle to name but a few. The Yanyuwa kinship system enables a continuum of links between the being and essence of a person, a place, and the Dreaming ancestors which are all found in the same clan group.
3 For an overview of the neighbouring southern Gulf of Carpentaria, see Robins, Stock, and Trigger (Citation1998).
4 Yulungurri is a personal name also given to senior Rrumburriya men of the Manankurra patriclan.
5 W.E.H Stanner, Australian anthropologist and author of White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938-1973, documented the expression ‘whiteman got no Dreaming’ and enshrined it in national and anthropological discourse. Stanner recorded Indigenous man Muta, of the Murinbata (Murinh-Patha) language group of the Daly River area of the Northern Territory, who stated: “White man got no dreaming. Him go ‘nother way’. White man, him go different. Him go road belong himself” (Stanner Citation1979, 24). Dinny McDinny Nyilba’s sentiment conveys the same meaning.
6 In 2007 John Bradley and Amanda Kearney launched the Yanyuwa animation project with a team of digital animators, including Tom Chandler, Brent McKee and Chandara Ung. The project began with a 5-minute digital animation of the Tiger Shark Dreaming narrative. This was led by Yanyuwa families, who to date, and under the directorship of Bradley have produced a further ten animations of their ancestral narratives and song lines. These can be viewed on the Wunungu Awara website (Wunugu Awara ND).
7 To contextualise the Lock the Gate movement and community uptake of anti-fracking sentiments in Borroloola, see https://www.lockthegate.org.au/borroloola.
8 Formanack presented a conference paper on the repugnant self at the American Anthropology Association Annual Conference in San Jose, December 2018.
9 I acknowledge that I too, as a non-Indigenous Australian, encounter the repugnant self. To accept this position as inflected by the dysfunction of ongoing coloniality is not a discomfort that should be shaken off. It might prove to be useful to be so deeply uncomfortable, and from this might come a stripping back of the exceptional quality of the settler, through responsive reflexivity (Kearney Citation2020b; Kearney Citation2021).