Ontological disjunction

Sometimes the worlds made in Aboriginal method assemblages detach them- selves from – or are entirely apart – from those of Euro-America. Here is Geoffrey Bardon talking of the Aboriginal artist Tim Leurah Tjapaltjarri:

Tim often said to me that he did not really wish to know the white Australians, and the painting [Napperby Death Spirit Dreaming] is his perception of his own tribal lands and spiritual destiny in the Napperby cattle-station areas. He appropriates Napperby to himself as his own Dreaming, and by implication takes it away from its white owners.

(Bardon and Tjapaltjarri n.d., 46)

‘He did not really wish to know the white Australians.’ This kind of separation is visible to Euro-Americans in other places. For instance, there are four fenced- off areas around Uluru, sites of special significance, that are prohibited to ordinary visitors. Signs instruct those walking round the circumference of the rock not to climb over the fences. Again, the white visitor to Kata Tjuta who follows the elliptical curves of the road to that spectacular set of rock outcrops, domes and valleys, discovers that he is not allowed to stop his car in most locations along the way, and notes that he is authorised to walk on only very restricted paths once he arrives. The latter ruling is glossed in part as a matter of safety (the temperatures in the desert are indeed extreme in daytime except in midwinter), but something else is going on too. This is that the visitor is also being steered away, and avoidance is being practised:

Kata Tjuta is a particularly important area, managed only by initiated

men. For this reason there are no Tjukurpa stories that can be told to the casual visitor.

(Kerle 1995, 16)

Space is not, as it were, isotropic: the same everywhere, essentially neutral. It is (as we have noted above) being built differently. Analogous, but less successful, is the attempt (usually more or less vain) by the traditional owners of Uluru to persuade visitors not to climb to the summit of the rock:

Climbing Uluru... does provide a magnificent view and a sense of achievement, but it is against the wishes of the Aboriginal custodians because it ignores the spiritual importance of Uluru and can be dangerous.

(Kerle 1995, 165)

Notwithstanding this request and the strenuous character of the climb, something like 10 per cent of those visiting Uluru indeed choose to climb the rock. How many of the remaining 90 per cent take the request of the traditional owners into account is not clear – but there is much discontent amongst tourists when, as sometimes happens after the death of a significant person, Uluru is closed for a few days. But avoidance is not simply a matter of excluding people who are white. As the citation about Kata Tjuta above and the story of the Two Boys, the Wiyai Kutjara Tjukurpa, suggest, there are restrictions on who may know about what within and between Aboriginal groups. Indeed, such is an integral part of, and an enactment of, the meshwork of Tjukurpa, the patchwork of partially connected narrative, spatial, and sacred realities that make up Aboriginal Australia. Others may know in general about the stories, and may participate in some related practices, but they will not know the full extent of the enactments and their realities.

So there are secrets, but – crucial point – these secrets and restrictions are not simply epistemological. We are not dealing here with just another, if slightly more exotic, version of the fact that (for instance) you or I don’t know how to design nuclear weapons, or the size of someone’s bank balance. It is not simply that some knowledge is secret or confidential. It is not that we are being refused a particular and specific perspective on certain restricted parts of a world that is common to us all. Neither is it simply that we haven’t (yet?) put in the effort to master (say) the art of mass spectrometry that will (once we do so) open up parts of common scientific out-thereness that are currently closed off to us. Much more profoundly, it is that we are not a part of these worlds at all. Those who do not own the stories are not any part of the Tjukurpa. They do not belong to it. In a way that is very radical, and therefore somewhat difficult to appreciate from within Euro-American common sense, we do not exist to those worlds. Just as they do not exist to us.

What does this mean? One implication is that, from the point of view of the different Tjukurpas, those who are not narrated are non-people. If we exist at all, then we hardly exist. But it is important to try to get this right. It would,

for instance, be wrong to imagine it as another kind of racism dressed up in some exotic, Other-centred clothes. The analogy falls because it is not a matter of reclassifying people as non-people, for instance in the same way as did the Nazis when they described the Jews as vermin (Bauman 1989). Objectionable though it may be, the Nazi method assemblage was built on and enacted its own version of Euro-American cosmology. It assumed ontological singularity or universalism – and Jews as a definite category of (non-) people existed in this cosmology. Catastrophically, they did not count as people – and as we know, the Nazis were able to enact that reality on a genocidal scale.

But in Aboriginal enactments of the world something different is going on. It is ontological universalism that is absent, rather than the denial of universal human rights. The latter, as the phrase itself reveals, depends on, and enacts ontological universalism. The problems really arise when there is interaction or interference between different particular worlds which don’t have the wherewithal to recognise that they are different. For Aborigines in particular, this has happened in their disastrous encounters with Whites who, in addition to racism have also enacted Euro-American method assemblages which are committed to and presuppose universalism and singularity. As we have seen, the traditional owners indeed note with distaste that many visitors choose to ascend Uluru, while Tim Leurah Tjapaltjarri sought to avoid White Australians and reappropriate his people’s land. These encounters (and worse) suggest that Euro-Americans are not entirely invisible within Aboriginal realities – perhaps seeming like ghosts or empty shells (Verran, personal communication). But from the Aboriginal world, a question which is again difficult to imagine from within Euro-American method assemblages presents itself: is communication a good? The putative answer to this question is: no, it isn’t, not necessarily. Does it necessarily matter if there are enacted worlds that don’t know one another? The putative answer again is no. It may matter if the Tjukurpa and the relevant groups overlap with one another. But if they don’t, then it doesn’t. Ontological disjunction is a possibility that might be, and indeed often is, quite appropriate.

The problem, then, is not usually within and between the enactments of different Aboriginal realities (which is not to deny that people have disputes or indeed sometimes come to blows). But this is because, to repeat the more or less inapplicable terms torn from Euro-American enactments of reality, they don’t claim universalism, and whatever is enacted is specific and ‘local’ both to time and to place. The problem, instead, arises when Aboriginal realities overlap, as they have done for at least two hundred years, with those of Euro- America with its enactments of a passive version of spatial and temporal singularity. Leaving aside the self-evident abuses of force, the possibility of ontological disjunction is simply unavailable to the latter.

Thus as we have seen, if the traditional owners disappear and can no longer help to remake their particular worlds, then those worlds disappear. If Aboriginal children are forcibly separated from their families and their locations and removed to the Australian cities in order to enjoy the civilising

benefits of white adoption (which is what happened to the ‘stolen generation’), they too potentially become non-people:

By giving each individual a personal dreaming, the community constantly recreates the ancestral world. Past re-embodiments of a single ancestor fade into the collective image of that being; it is a tenet of the religion that on death a person becomes his dreaming. To die and be buried in one’s own country ensures this will occur.

(Layton 1989, 15)

Genocide is irreversible, but fortunately Aboriginal practice is otherwise flexible. The problem of the disinherited child (or the visiting anthropologist who is also a non-person) can be resolved by the simple process of adoption

– at which point the adoptee becomes real, is practised as real, and is able to participate in and carry the narratives and the realities of the relevant Tjukurpa.

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