Page 204 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

so that by punishing him or her the tear in the fabric of social reproduction
can be repaired. . . . [T]apes and broadcasts reach forward and backwards
through various temporal orders, and attempt somehow to bridge the Dream-
ing and the historical.
—Eric Michaels, For a Cultural Future:
Francis Jupurrurla Makes TV at Yuendumu 6

In 1983 the American researcher Eric Michaels arrived at the Warlpiri com-
7
munity of Yuendumu in Australia’s Central Desert, the place he chose as his
¤eld site for a study he had been hired to carry out on the impact of ¤lm and
television on this and other remote communities. The set of assumptions that
undergirded the production of ¤lms on Aboriginal ceremonial life from the
1970s had been overturned, as Aboriginal activists—both remote living and
urban—began to demand control over their own media representations (Lang-
8
ton 1993, 9). In part because of a more activist zeitgeist, as well as his train-
ing with the prescient media scholar and ¤lmmaker Sol Worth (1997 [1972]),
Michaels became far more interested in working with local people to help them
create their own forms of media. Rather than simply studying what they thought
about the dominant forms of television being imposed on them, the project re-
sulted in the formation of the Warlpiri Media Association, a locally based group
that produced video for and about Yuendumu, and narrowcast to the commu-
nity. Appropriately Michaels called his study of that process the Aboriginal In-
vention of Television: Central Australia, 1982–86 (1986). One of his key ¤ndings
was to see how quickly the practice of making video was socialized into Warlpiri
ritual practice. Central to the social organization of ritual (and video) was the
division of people into mutually dependent semi-patrimoieties that are each
necessary to all ceremonial matters: kirda (owners of the land and active per-
formers of ritual) and kurdungurlu (managers of the land who observe and
serve as guarantors that rituals are being carried out properly). In the initial
translation from orality to electronics, video making quickly was assimilated
into the tasks assigned to kurdungurlu whose primary role is as authorizing wit-
nesses who af¤rm the truth of religious activities carried out by kirda ritual ac-
tors (Michaels 1986, 65).
While working at Yuendumu, Michaels familiarized himself with the ¤lms
made with Warlpiri people under an earlier paradigm, in which native reli-
gious life was documented on ¤lm primarily as texts for Anglo-European con-
sumption and study. To his surprise, the version of the Warlpiri Fire Ceremony,
Ngatjakula, captured with such drama on Sandall’s 1977 ¤lm, apparently had
not been performed since that time, despite the fact that it was considered an
important part of Warlpiri spiritual life and “law” (the word used in English to
designate Jukurrpa, the cultural rules that govern Aboriginal society and cos-
mologies, also referred to by some as the Dreamtime, because of the ancestral
9
temporality it evokes). At that time Michaels wrote,
the Fire Ceremony seemed little more than a memory. This is despite the fact that
it is one of the great traditions of the Warlpiri and was once widespread through-

Rethinking the “Voice Of God” in Indigenous Australia 193