Page 199 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

9 Rethinking the “Voice Of God”

in Indigenous Australia: Secrecy,

Exposure, and the Ef¤cacy of Media

Faye Ginsburg

Fire in the Projection Booth

Expository and observational ¤lms, unlike interactive or re®exive ones,
tend to mask the work of production, the effects of the cinematic apparatus
itself, and the tangible process of enunciation, the saying of something as dis-
tinct from that which is said . . . a disembodied Voice-of-God commentary . . .
[creates] the evasive lure of a narrative that seems to issue from nowhere, that
can simply announce, through an anonymous agency, “Once upon a time . . . ”
—Bill Nichols, Representing Reality

In 1988, shortly after returning to New York City from my ¤rst ¤eld trip to Cen-
tral Australia to study the nascent development of indigenous media in remote
Aboriginal communities, I went into the 16-mm ¤lm archive in the Department
of Anthropology at New York University (NYU) where I had just started work-
ing, to remove from the collection those ¤lms that had been made of Aboriginal
ceremonies. I wanted to carry out the rules that had been put in place in Aus-
tralian archives over the prior decade, out of respect for community protocols
that prohibit the viewing of restricted aspects of Aboriginal religious life by
people who had not been initiated, a prohibition that had been extended to ¤lm.
In Australia, ¤lm recordings of indigenous practices had been made by white
anthropologists and their fellow travelers, beginning with the work of Alfred
Cort Haddon with Torres Straits Islanders in 1898, who saw their work as “sal-
vage anthropology” documenting what were then looked upon as disappearing
worlds. While ¤lmmaking practices became more technologically sophisticated,
this epistemological approach still prevailed when the Australian Institute of
Aboriginal Studies, as it was then called, created an ethnographic Film Unit in
the early 1960s when the Institute was established. As the ¤lmmaker and scholar
David MacDougall (1987, 55) has pointed out: “The institute was founded in
the early 1960s primarily to carry out salvage anthropology, documenting what
was then often looked upon as a moribund culture . . . to record Aboriginal
ceremonies which it was thought might never be performed again.” The works