Page 203 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

creating a spectacular and almost out of control con®agration, which, in one
Western observer’s words, “satis¤es the most extreme European appetite for
savage theatre, a morality play of the sort Artaud describes” (Michaels 1987, 58).
As I watched the ¤lm, absorbed in the scenes of ¤re, I gradually became aware
of the distinctive odor of overheated celluloid. The projector had jammed,
and the smell of ¤lm on the verge of burning ¤lled the tiny room. In a panic,
and with considerable effort, I managed to retrieve the ¤lm from the projector
and put it back in its box. However, I could not get the projector to work again.
Chastened by what I regarded as the destructive results of my hubris, I have
5
never reopened those ¤lm cans. This moment still stands in my memory as a
visceral recognition of the limits to and particularity of knowledge under cer-
tain regimes of value, in contrast to the model of the Habermasian public sphere
that presumes the transparency, rationality, and free ®ow of communication as
an ideal (Habermas 1989). And while that position has been critiqued for its
bias toward the historical circumstances it attempted to theorize, even the pro-
ductive discussions of counter public spheres (Fraser 1993) are not able to en-
compass the epistemological vertigo produced when quotidian Western media
technologies are taken up in profoundly different cultural circumstances.
Far from simply being about different content, the ¤re in the projection booth
brought home to me the ways in which the very “looking relations” (Gaines
1988) embedded in media practices around different cosmological worlds are
far more epistemologically complex than I had imagined. In an effort to gain
some grasp on how these encounters between ¤lmmaking, revelation, and se-
crecy have been negotiated, in this chapter I examine the legacy of efforts from
the 1970s through the 1990s to use moving image technologies to document
Warlpiri ¤re ceremonies, during a period when ethnographic ¤lmmaking was,
to some extent, being displaced by indigenous media production. What un-
intended consequences emerged through this historically changing encounter
between indigenous Australian religious practices and the use of media such as
¤lm, video, and television to document them?

Re-enchanting the Archive

When some archivist [in the dystopic future] wandering through the ABC
¤lm library chances on an old undocumented copy of the Peterson Fire
Ceremony ¤lm . . . [imagine that] something truly momentous happens. In
pursuit of a moment of “primitivism,” the tapes go to air, via satellite, to
thousands of communities at once, including those of its subjects, their
descendants, their relations, their partners, in ritual exchange, their chil-
dren, their women (or men). One more repository guarded by oral secrecy
is breached, one more ceremony is rendered worthless, one more possible
claim to authenticity is consumed by the voracious appetite of the simulacra
for the appearance of reality. At Yuendumu, this already causes ¤ghts, verbal
and physical, even threatened payback murders, in the hopeless attempt to as-
cribe blame in the matter, to ¤nd within the kin network the one responsible,

192 Faye Ginsburg