Page 205 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

out Central Australia. . . . There seemed to be some recognition among the Warl-
piri that the Fire Ceremony was essentially incompatible with the expectations
of settlement life, and the impotent fantasies of dependency and development
they were required to promote. The Fire Ceremony was an explicit expression of
Warlpiri autonomy, and for nearly a generation it was obscured. (1987, 59) 10

In 1984, while at Yuendumu, Michaels was invited to join a meeting of male
elders in the video studio. At Michael’s urging, they had written to the anthro-
pologist Nicolas Peterson, asking for a copy of the Sandall Fire Ceremony ¤lm,
narrated by Peterson (on whose research it was based). They had received a copy
and now were there to review it. Michaels describes the scene:
I set up a camera and we videotaped the session. As it was clear that many of the
on-¤lm participants would now be dead, how the community negotiated this fact
in terms of their review was very important. . . . Following a spirited discussion,
the men . . . came to the decision that all the people who died were “in the back-
11
ground”: the ¤lm could be shown in the camps. Outside, a group of women
elders had assembled, and were occasionally peeking through the window. Some
were crying. They did not agree that the deceased were suf¤ciently backgrounded,
and it made them “too sorry to look.” These women didn’t watch the ¤lm but
didn’t dispute the right of the men to view or to show it. (ibid., 61–62)

Soon after the screening of the earlier ¤lm, it became clear that the virtual view-
ing of the ceremony had been catalytic. Remarkably the decision was made
to perform another version of the Fire Ceremony, the Jardiwarnpa (or snake
12
dreaming) again for the ¤rst time in a generation. As preparations proceeded,
the Sandall ¤lm played an increasingly important role. Rather than seeing it as
a patronizing relic of an earlier era, the ¤lm was unexpectedly resigni¤ed and
actively appropriated as authoritative by certain senior men. When the Warlpiri
Media Association ¤nally made their own video recording of the Fire Ceremony
in 1986, the male elders insisted that they tape the same scenes in precisely the
same order in which they were seen in the ¤lm made by Sandall a decade before
(ibid., 62): “The question arises,” Michaels’ commented at the time, “as it does
also in accounting for the ceremony’s recent revival: what role did introduced
media play in this history?” (ibid., 60). 13
The resulting new tapes that they made circulated quickly around Yuen-
dumu; within twenty-four hours they were presented to members of the nearby
Warlpiri-speaking Willowra community. Eventually, because of the death of
one of the central ritual leaders, the tapes were removed from the archive be-
cause of the prohibition on viewing images of those who have passed away
(Michaels 1987, 64). In 1987, shortly before Eric Michaels died, he speculated
on the “cultural future” of those tapes and Warlpiri ritual practice:

When the mourning period for that old Japangardi is passed, his relations will take
the Fire Ceremony tape from the “not to look” shelf and review it again, in regard
to the presence or absence of recent performances of the ceremony. . . . They might
declare this a “proper law tape,” and then go on to perform the ceremony exactly

194 Faye Ginsburg