Page 211 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

part of Aboriginal cultural activists to control their own traditions—and their
representations—within the changing context of Australia’s national narrative.
That narrative has been reshaped over the last half century with the (at least
partial) eclipse of the salvage paradigm of colonial social science that prevailed
during the early-twentieth-century period of European settlement of Australia,
and the assimilationist cultural policy that followed. As part of a widespread
movement for indigenous rights, local media production developed in response
to Aboriginal movements for cultural autonomy but continued to operate under
strict protocols through which rights to see and know certain forms of esoteric
knowledge revealed in certain rituals are negotiated. These negotiations are
particularly clear in tracking the various ¤lm and video versions of Warlpiri
Fire Ceremonies, beginning with the 16-mm ethnographic ¤lm, Ngatjakula,
in which the anthropologist’s voice stood in for “the Voice of God,” exempli-
¤ed in the work of Roger Sandall in the 1960s and 1970s, to the video of the
Jardiwarnpa version of the Fire Ceremony made by the Warlpiri Media Associa-
tion as part of local indigenous production in the 1980s. In the 1990s the crea-
tion of a documentary of the Jardiwarnpa Fire Ceremony for Australian na-
tional television as a co-production between traditional Warlpiri elders and
urban Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ¤lmmakers, became an occasion for ne-
gotiating secrecy as well as revelation of Warlpiri cultural knowledge. Indige-
nously made ¤lm and television productions have served as interventions into
the Australian national imaginary, and indeed onto the world stage as indige-
nous Australian ¤lmmakers and their work are seen at ¤lm festivals in Cannes,
Berlin, New York, Toronto, and elsewhere, linking them to transnational articu-
lations of indigenous identities.
In Aboriginal cosmologies, the circulatory reach of media can enhance the
cultural power mobilized through the “showing” or display of sacred sites, de-
signs, dances, songs, and other ceremonial practices. Their revelation helps es-
tablish local hegemony for particular groups by asserting the truth of their
dreaming stories and—signi¤cantly—demonstrating culturally sanctioned rights
to land to which the stories as well as political claims are inextricably linked.
Countering these bene¤ts of the media circulation of ritual practices either lo-
cally or more broadly are taboos and protocols against showing certain sacred
activities, sites, designs, songs, or dances to those who are uninitiated. Addi-
tional sanctions forbid the viewing of images of those who have recently died,
particularly in the vicinity of relatives, although these are increasingly nego-
tiable. Thus media forms such as ¤lm and video that can escape local control
are particularly problematic, even as they are highly desirable as a new aspect
for the reproduction of Aboriginal religious life. Even critics of Habermas’s ex-
clusionary and overly rational framework nonetheless concur in their accep-
tance of the presumed absolute good of the ever increasing free ®ow of infor-
mation. The Aboriginal case usefully complicates these ideas by making evident,
instead, that moving image media technologies carry within them contradic-
tory potentialities regarding the signi¤cance of revelation and secrecy for so-

200 Faye Ginsburg