Science and Other Knowledge Traditions

DATES: 23-27 August 1996

Venue: James Cook University, Cairns, North Queensland

Conveners: Henrietta Fourmile, Bukal Consulting Services, Queensland; David Turnbull, Centre for Science in Society, Deakin University; and Paul Turnbull, Department of History and Politics, James Cook University of North Queensland.

CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS

Michael Dodson
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Social Justice Commissioner

Indigenous knowledge receives little if any protection in existing international human rights instruments. And domestically, the situation is even worse, with scant regard given to knowledge, ideas, and other aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander societies. But passive disregard is one thing. It is even more untenable when knowledge and ideas—which go to the heart of our collective identity as Indigenous peoples—are openly slandered and abused. Such discrimination amounts to violation of cultural rights.

This paper examines the nature of Indigenous knowledge within a human rights framework; it identifies some of the constraints upon adequate recognition and protection, and offers suggestions for more appropriate systems for realising Indigenous rights to knowledge.

John Merson
Science and Technology Studies
University of New South Wales

This paper deals with the implications of the Gatt Tripps agreement and the efforts of developing countries to adapt to this new international system of intellectual property rights, particularly in regard to the exploitation of local biological resources and traditional knowledge. It will review the role of agencies such as the US National Cancer Fund in international bioprospecting, the recent Merek/Imbio bioprospecting agreement in Costa Rica, as well as the Smokebush Case in West Australia.

Hori Parata
Ngati Trust Board
with Shane Wright and
Mere Roberts
University of Auckland

Community-based research has its origins in a project carried out in the late 1940s early 1950s involving University anthropologists working with local reserve Indians in the USA (Ryan 1992). Further refinement of this approach has led to an essentially social science-based methodology with the following definitive characteristics:

* the proposal originates in the community
* the research involves the full and active participation of the community at all stages
* both teams ('academic' and 'community') learn from and teach each other
* the community retains full control of the research and its outcomes.

Although Participatory Action Research (PAR) as it is currently known (McTaggart 1989) is now well established in both Australia and in Canada, it is only in its infancy in Aotearoa/New Zealand, particularly in the field on the biological sciences.

In 1994, at the request of the Ngati Wai Trust Board, scientists from the University of Auckland working alongside a team drawn from the local Ngati Korora hapu commenced a flora and fauna survey of a tribally-owned island preparatory to the subsequent re-introduction of kiore (Polynesian rat, Rattus exulans). Ngati Wai and Ngati Kuri have also been asked to participate in managing a Foundation of Research, Science and Technology funded project involving research on the genetics of the kiore and the kuri (Polynesian dog), aimed at elucidating Polynesian migration routes and relationships.

The progress, problems and future possibilities of these and other similar initiatives in Aotearoa/New Zealand will be discussed in this paper.

Dr Mariana Jaimes-Guerrero
College of Humanities
San Francisco State University

M. A. Jaimes-Guerrero has a paper in progress on the theme of 'Indigenous Dialectics of Indigenism,' which is working towards 'a Ecocultural MetaScience in Biodiversity,' as a contribution to the discourse on 'Science and Culture.' Its interdisciplinary and cross cultural comparative approach is in the context of the Philosophy of Ecology, Technology, and Culture, including Native Traditions from religio-cultural perspectives and world views. A conceptualisation of what she terms 'Ecocultural dialectics' is in terms of the theoretical integration by reconciliation of 'opposites' and dualities in the comprehension of pre-columbian indigenous knowledge spheres in the environment and ecosystem.

In this comparison, a dichotomisation of Qualitative research with Quantitative research is explored ideologically and intellectually, in both theory and praxis (examples will be given). The quantitative mode is predicated on the empiricism of the 'profit motive' goals for materialism/consumerism and production/development from conventional 'masculinear canons of authority,' and evident in socio-economic positioning and situational politicising. This post-modernist orientation is also intended to engage a discussion on what is meant by 'representative government in western democracy,' which emphasises its establishment of triangular institutionalism, megabureaucracy, and corporate transnationalism. There is also attention made to the ruling elite in Nationalism, as it pertains to the western canon of Sovereignty in the euroamerican colonialist legacy. A main premise of paper is that there is a need for a sociopolitical agenda to this concept of a 'metascience' that espouses organic agronomics and ecocultural sustainability, as well as deriving indigenous values from qualitative research.

The work also addresses the need for land based cultures that advocate communal-based agrarianism and nature-centered development that is reproductive, regenerative, and restorative. The integration of these two conflicting modes of research works towards a concept of Reciprocity in the building of Nationhood, which is premised on traditional roles in kinship societies, and that includes matrifocal as well as patrifocal spheres of authority. Indigenism, therefore, advocates 'participatory democracy' (meaning governance by councils of elders and gender consensus), as well as other concepts and values found in indigenous knowledge spheres and manifested in ecocultural practices. Indigenism is also associated with a global ecology movement for the right to decolonisation, and that espouses biodiversity among third world peoples and their respective landbased cultures worldwide. Exemplars, and with Native women in the vanguard, are among these traditionally-oriented peoples to derive a sense of place with a sense of identity within a particular bioregional homeland. It is also being espoused as a sociopolitical orientation in post-industrial liberation movements active in inter-American and international arenas, and in the context of human rights with the goal of a quality way of life and health.

RESISTING VALUE-BIFURCATION: INDIGENIST CRITIQUES OF BIO-PROSPECTING AND OF THE HUMAN GENOME DIVERSITY PROJECT

Laurie Anne Whitt
Humanities
Michigan Technological University

The long-standing Western philosophic practice of value-bifurcation, wherein the realm of ethics is demarcated and sharply distinguished from the realm of politics, has not been 'merely' academic. It has enabled the Western knowledge system, particularly in the form of science, to ignore the dynamics of power that have mediated the relations between Western and indigenous cultures. Political values are reduced to ideological biases, and science is held to be neither ideological nor particular, i.e. 'Western'. Value-bifurcation also serves to mute or deflect charges of material oppression and conceptual domination by shielding science from direct involvement in moral debate. Ethical values become subjective biases, while objectivity and universality are extended as both the desiderata and the preconditions of science. In short, value-bifurcation has been of very strategic, pragmatic benefit to the dominant knowledge-system; it has facilitated the positivist and neo-positivist programs of value-free science, and has been central in undermining and dismissing radical critiques of Western scientific projects.

I hope to demonstrate and document the foregoing claims in this paper. After brief reflection on the historical case that can be made here, I illustrate the nature and consequences of value-bifurcation by focusing on two issues:

* The current efforts of pharmaceutical and agricultural industries to discover and patent new products by drawing on indigenous scientific and medicinal knowledge.

* The patenting of the cell lines of indigenous people in connection with the Human Genome Diversity Project. These research initiatives are the offspring of Euro- American science. They are ongoing instance of the deep involvement of western science (corporate, governmental and academic) in projects of cultural imperialism. I focus on the legitimating rationale invoked to defend such projects, the role of intellectual property law in sustaining that rationale, and the force of indigenist critiques of such 'extractive' initiatives of western science.

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE, INDIGENOUS LAND ETHICS AND MODELS FOR SUSTAINABILITY

Dr Thomas Heyd
Philosophy
University of Victoria

Land ethics, understood as sets of explicit and implicit principles of right action that concern the natural environment, are key factors in anthropogenic changes in the natural environment.

This paper proposes that indigenous knowledge acquired through firsthand and long term acquaintance with land/environment as found among people indigenous or native to particular localities, may be a fundamental condition for the development of a sustainability- supporting ethic. Given an understanding of the internal relations between indigenous knowledge and ethics a better understanding of the basis for environmentally sustainable practices may be obtained.

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CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE POETICS OF SYSTEM

Warwick Anderson
History and Philosophy of Science
University of Melbourne

When Australian biomedical scientists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries considered the natural knowledge of Aboriginal people, they generally represented it as metaphor and superstition. At best, parts of it might serve as raw material for European systematising.

This was a strategy of silencing and selective translation. Even now, most scientists would find it hard to give knowledge that has not been scientifically validated the same status as their own knowledge. Biomedical scientists generally do not view knowledge production with anthropological detachment (or with anthropological engagement). Understandably, they protect their investments in graining and career structure.

Recently, some anthropologists and sociologists of knowledge have tried to valorise 'indigenous knowledge traditions' or 'systems', and thus treat different natural knowledges even-handedly or symmetrically. This approach offers to enrich our understanding of the ways in which culture and power shape our knowledge of the world, and how ideas and assumptions ('scientific' or 'traditional') may be reconfigured through social contact.However, there is a risk that this enhanced cultural sensitivity will perform its own systematising of knowledges. Anthropologists and sociologists may inadvertently resort to essentialist typologies of knowledge production and reductive accounts of culture contact, though without the element of disparagement that previously characterised these stories. In other words, I wonder whether talk of 'disparate knowledge systems' is another poeticizing strategy, a sequence of equivalence and opposition that might erase the relations of these knowledge practices to a history of political practices both between and within social groups. In as much as this poetics of authenticity, identity and difference expresses a figure outside of time it works indirectly as a modernising strategy. The structure of this 'system' must be discomposed by a recognition of historical and geographical specificity, by more finely grained histories and ethnographies that challenge structuralist and typological assumptions.

COMPETING KNOWLEDGES?: INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS AND WESTERN SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSES

Michael Davis
Canberra

Current debates concerning intellectual property and Indigenous peoples are informed by assumptions about cultural relativities. One such assumption turns on the question as to whether there is commensurability between Indigenous knowledge systems, and non Indigenous ('Western') knowledge systems. Common ground is often sought by equating Indigenous knowledge with Western 'scientific' knowledge systems.

By seeking to model Indigenous knowledge systems on the rational instrumental and 'objective' Western scientific mode of discourse, I suggest we are at risk of imposing a particular, desired interpretation on Indigenous systems, in order to make sense of these within our own culturally determined frameworks.

My paper questions whether the 'scientific' mode of discourse is an appropriate model for interpreting Indigenous knowledge systems, or whether it might be one of many such models. My central concern is to inquire into the variety of representations of Indigenous knowledge systems in European discourses.

TECHNOLOGIES OF VISUALISATION: SEEING OURSELVES AS OTHERS SEE US

Associate Professor Wade Chambers
Social Studies of Science
Deakin University

An important achievement of recent scholarship in the social and cultural studies of science and technology has been to render problematic, and to demonstrate the culture-bound character of, images produced by historically emergent technologies of visualization. For example, we have learned how, beginning especially in the 19th century, these technologies, deployed in both the arts and the sciences, have operated as colonizing tools of domination.

Constituted by conventions of technical practice and cultural usage, these technologies produce an iconography of cultural difference which contrasts science with myth, culture with nature, rationality with spirituality, centrality with marginality, universality with ethnicity, knowledge with belief, and growth and improvement with stagnation and decline.

The computer revolution, including especially the digitization of visual information, seems only to strengthen the dominant culture's ability to manipulate images in its own interest, but these innovations may also act to destroy the cognitive authority of the machine produced image. The proposed paper will examine this historical development and will suggest some of the ways in which practitioners and custodians of indigenous knowledge may be advantaged and disadvantaged by the new technologies of visualization and representation.

AN ECOLOGICAL MODEL OF KNOWLEDGE DIVERSITY

Kai Hahlweg
Humanities and Social Sciences
Bond University

That science is but one of many 'indigenous knowledge traditions' will be questioned by many. Science, so it is commonly thought, is more than a cultural tradition because its method generates universally valid truths. Other traditions contain such truths only to the extent that they can be confirmed by means of the scientific method. Knowledge claims which are incompatible with those of science ought to be abandoned.

The opposition against these absolutist claims has been growing during recent decades. Sociologists of knowledge in particular have been emphasising that science is a product of culture, and thus akin to other knowledge systems. This relativist position holds that all knowledge is socially determined, that it is not the external world which affirms or denies a knowledge claim but that all standards are internal to a particular culture.

In my paper I will offer a third alterative which is neither absolutist nor social relativist. Instead it affirms the plurality of knowledge traditions but denies that they are exclusively socially determined.

I argue that the world is far too rich to be captured by one conceptual framework alone. Different indigenous knowledge systems, expressed in different languages, capture different aspects of reality. Cultural and linguistic diversity are manifestations of the different niches within which people live in the same way as species diversity reflects the various environments which biological species inhabit.

Adaptations are the result of the interaction of a species of organisms with its surroundings. In the biological realm it leads to functional organisation which reflects the nature of the environing world. The mechanism which encodes the information into the organisms is necessarily social because only populations evolve.

Different species inhabit different niches and show different adaptations. The environment shapes the organisms and the organisms shape the environment. In a similar vein different cultures experience different realities, are shaped by them as well as shaping them. The cultures are intertwined with their environment, the social and the cognitive cannot be separated.

This ecological model of knowledge diversity has many advantages. I will show that it can deal with such a long-standing issue as the Feyerabend-Kuhnian incommensurability thesis. Likewise it sheds new light on the relationship between the cognitive and the social aspects of knowledge. Perhaps most significantly it can imbue the knowledge claims of different indigenous traditions with a sense of equality which is absent in the other alternatives.

The absolutist model denies that there can be any knowledge which is incompatible with accepted Western theory and practice. The social-relativist conception acknowledges equality but in doing so divests knowledge from reality, and makes it purely conventional.

The ecological model on the other hand asserts the absurdity of claiming a special status for one particular knowledge tradition. We have learnt the hard way that no species is more significant than any other in the scheme of things. They are all needed, and the greatest diversity constitutes the greatest good. I hold that the same is true for species of knowledge and that the maximisation of knowledge diversity is as important as that of biodiversity.

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ANTHROPOLOGY (NOT) AS AN INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE TRADITION

Sarah Williams
Evergreen College

What is at stake for whom when the traditions of anthropology are sustained relative to anthropology's historical construction as a modernist science of 'western man' studying 'non-western cultures?' This presentation, which draws on field notes from my cultural studies of contemporary anthropologists and their disciplinary traditions, explores various ways in which the politicization and currency of cultural knowledge inform the symbolic economy of anthropology itself. Precisely because anthropology as a human science derives from a knowledge tradition in which science, by definition, is objective, neutral, and culture-free interesting dilemmas emerge when it is itself the object of a cultural study (as in this presentation/performance). For when scientists of human culture are themselves contextualized within the terms of ongoing cultural politics the distinctions between science and culture, between indigenous and western become matters of symbolic value and economy that embody the conditions through which anthropological science produces its knowledge of other, indigenous knowledge traditions.

ASTRONOMY OF THE ABORIGINAL PEOPLES OF AUSTRALIA

Ragbir Bhathal
Faculty of Business and Technology
University of Western Sydney
Macarthur

The astronomy of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia is different in nature, purpose and content from that of modern scientific astronomy, which is based on the hypothetico-deductive method. This paper explores the relationships between the physical entities as represented by the stellar objects in the sky and the social, cultural and religious systems of the Aboriginal peoples.

The astronomical knowledge of Aboriginal people was an extention of understandings of country refined over 60,000 years. Aboriginal people developed an astronomical folklore for the transmission of moral values, codes and culture to future generations of Aborigines. Like the ancient peoples of China, India, Greece, and South America they saw patterns in the sky and gave them meanings - meanings that were imbued with their own unique traditions. They projected their stories and folklore from the earth to the sky. Each Aboriginal tribe had their own story and fixed it in the night sky. This has made their astronomical folklore both diverse and rich. The various astronomical objects and constellations also served as markers for their food gathering habits and nomadic existence in an environment which was both harsh and friendly.

Aboriginal astronomy is more concerned with the social and moral relationships between the members of the Aboriginal community. It is also concerned with cosmic mythology and with the practical application of observational astronomy.

THE TIMELESS PEOPLE: COLONIAL PERCEPTIONS OF ABORIGINAL TIME IN 19TH-CENTURY AUSTRALIA

Maureen Perkins
History
University of Western Australia

European portrayal of Aboriginal understandings of time have varied from the Rousseauian picture of a society at one with the natural rhythms of the land to a disapproving perception of inability to plan for the future or to grasp the significance of successive tomorrows. In Eleanor Dark's novels of the early twentieth century, The Timeless Land and The Storm of Time, the author renders a glorified heroic timelessness as part of her portrayal of the stereotyped 'noble savage'. Other commentators, especially in the early colonial period, noted a carelessness about time that could endanger life, as when one tribe left a sick old man without food or shelter, intending to return for him, but neglecting to do so for over a week.

Whether the observer is approving or disapproving, the European reader is left in no doubt that the measurement of time is a major cultural difference between colonised and coloniser. Yet what is there to say on this subject: that the invaders had clocks and watches and that the invaded did not? I do not believe that the measurement of time is a simple binary opposition between being able to do the thing accurately and being free from all care about it. There is a strong tendency in histories of timekeeping to chronicle the technology by which civilisations have attained a more and more perfect measurement of the passage of time. In contrast to this tendency, I am not claiming to explore the techniques by which Aboriginal people in Australia measured the movement of the planets or the passing of the year. What I am suggesting in this paper is that there is a more intangible aspect to the cultural importance of time, in the creation of the 'other', those who do not measure it or do not regard it in the same way.

I am concerned, then, with the role played in the construction of 'the Aborigine' by European settlers' perception that Aboriginal society did not value timekeeping. In the early nineteenth century the measurement of time was becoming increasingly important in European culture. Clocks and watches were more widely and cheaply available than ever before, a more regulated industrial economy promoted dependence on precise factory schedules, and evangelicalism was placing increasing emphasis on the need to steward time carefully and to use it productively. Concepts of time were crucial to the formation of nineteenth-century knowledge, both in its professional, scientific forms, and in the less explicit construction of common-sense. When unravelling settler attitudes to indigenous populations, it is important to examine what Europeans believed indigenous attitudes to time to be, since a challenge to European time was a challenge to the very base of what constituted knowledge and therefore 'civilization'.

COLONIAL SCIENCE, SPECIES PRESERVATION AND THE 'AUTOCHTHONOUS PEOPLE'

Jennifer MacCulloch
History
Research School of Social Sciences
Australian National University

From the 1870s onward a large number of influential preservationists (the name given to early conservationists) were drawn from the miscellany of burgeoning specialty areas within the 'sciences', including ichthyology, entomology, ornithology and conchology. Not surprisingly, Australian preservationists stressed the need to protect species from extinction in order to ensure their survival for further study.

Early scientific investigation relied heavily on the collection and display of actual dead animals and birds, eggs, plants and so on. It was in the collection of these specimens that Aboriginal people played a crucial role. They had significant impact on the outcome of expeditions, depending upon whether they were welcoming and willing to share information or were hostile. Further, their intimate knowledge of locations of rare species made them a crucial part of scientific investigation. Aboriginal people also provided scientists with a legal loophole. Game legislation prohibited the killing of certain native species during the 'close' or breeding seasons. However the legislation provided an exemption for tribal Aborigines. In this way, scientists could secure specimens without risking prosecution.

This paper examines the interaction of scientists and Aboriginal people in securing specimens. It also examines the controversies which erupted in the early C20 about these practices and the changes which resulted following public debate and prosecutions.

CULTURE. PHARMACOLOGY AND INDIGENOUS MEDICINE IN AFRICA

David Okpako
Pharmacology
University of Western Cape

Traditional African medicine (TAM) is based not on generally accepted scientific principles, but on beliefs, such as that disease arises as a result of antisocial behaviour and sins against gods or ancestors leading to interpersonal or spiritual imbalance. Plant (and animal) preparations are frequently used in the treatment regimen as well as (especially in life-threatening illnesses) other rituals such as divination, confessions and sacrifice. Biomedical scientists assume that plant remedies play a role in TAM comparable to drugs in biomedicine, and therefore give dominant emphasis to the former's importance in the healing process.

From a critical examination of the way in which traditional healers in Ughievwen Clan of the Delta State of Nigeria prepare and apply plant remedies, I concluded that the plant product is not used in the first instance for its pharmacological properties. For example: (i) poisonous plants (the sources of many drugs used in biomedicine) are largely excluded from the traditional healers' pharmacopoeia. The use of toxic substances as drugs in biomedicine is consistent with the principles of pharmacology which is a theory of selective poisoning for therapeutic purposes. (ii) Common items in traditional herbal mixtures are household aromatic food spices valued for their nutritional properties. (iii) Hence, even for medicines prepared for oral administration, no particular attention is paid to quantities. In contrast, strict adherence to quantities is imperative for drug therapy in biomedicine. Here, the use of poisonous substances as drugs is possible because of the availability of technology to measure weight, volume and time in absolute units. These measurement concepts also exist in African cultures, but not the technology to translate them into absolute units. Understandably therefore, poisonous plants do not, as a rule, feature in TAM. (iv) Plant remedies may be used to treat internal ailments in ways in which pharmacodynamic or pharmacokinetic explanations cannot be offered for their efficacy; the products may be tied in a bundle and worn round the waist, neck or ankle. The bundle may not even come in contact with the patient's body, being considered effective when placed across the lintel of a door or under the sleeping mat or pillow.

Taking this pharmaceutical evidence together with the healers' perception that serious illness has its roots in social and spiritual disharmony, it can be argued that the natural products used in TAM, do not serve the same purposes as drugs in biomedicine. A major therapeutic goal in TAM is to activate the body's own defences against disease by a combination of culturally potent rituals in which plant remedies feature. Placebo and immunomodulatory effects of the plant constituents may contribute to this goal. In biomedicine, the therapeutic objective is to selectively poison the cause of the disease. Selectivity is difficult to achieve, therefore all drugs have unwanted side effects.

TAM emerges from this study as a distinctly unique system of health care based on African intuition and accumulated experience. Its contribution to health care should be evaluated holistically in the context of the cultures in which it is practiced, and not simplistically on conventional principles of biomedicine.

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READING THE RIVERS: ABORIGINAL AND EUROPEAN KNOWLEDGE OF WATER AND LAND IN THE MURRAY-DARLING BASIN

Jeannette Hope
History
University of Western Australia

The Murray-Darling system, whose rivers rise in the highlands of south-eastern Australia and then wind westwards across dry plains, has always been crucial to human existence in this arid continent. Aboriginal people have lived here for a very long time. Some of the oldest known archaeological sites are along the Darling River and Willandra Creek. By 1860 Europeans had appropriated most of the land in the Murray Darling Basin (MDB), and the region is now vital to the Australian economy, containing half of Australia's cropland, sheep population, orchards and the majority of irrigated farmland. By world standards, the river system is erratic, unpredictable and carries an extremely low amount of water considering it drains a seventh of the continent. After a mere 150 years of pastoralism and agriculture, the river system and adjacent lands are badly degraded and we have yet to see how effective recent government and community conservation programs will be.

Yet the Murray-Darling supported some of the densest Aboriginal populations, in stable societies that persisted for thousands of years. We know a lot about this, from archaeological sites, especially the substantial and ancient cemeteries along the Murray, from historic records and from Aboriginal oral history. Clearly, Aboriginal people understood how the system worked.

In spite of our modern perceptions about climatic unpredictability, even variable river regimes contain elements that are highly predictable. While it is not possible to know exactly when a major switch in regime will occur (ie. when a flood cycle will start), when that regime is initiated, a predictable cascade of events follows—the sequence of flood peaks down the system (predictable to the day over hundreds of kilometres), the filling of flood plains and anabranches, the succession of vegetation onto recently flooded areas and the related breeding cycles of fish, birds and other animals. Such knowledge of the system made possible major public works such as the Brewarrina Fisheries, a kilometre long network of stone fish traps in the Barwon River. For the Fisheries to function as a ceremonial centre, where large numbers of people could meet and be fed, the ability to forecast the river regimes and the response of fish populations would have been necessary.

European exploration and settlement of the MDB was dependent on Aboriginal knowledge. Early historic records are explicit about the Aboriginal contribution: as guides, shepherds stockmen, fishermen, and in surveying the land and charting the rivers. Towns are located on central Aboriginal places, homesteads on Aboriginal wells, stock routes and roads follow Aboriginal routes along lines of watering places, and local Aboriginal terminology, especially for waterways, has been adapted by Europeans. While credited less as time went on, Aboriginal people remain an integral part of the rural economy and knowledge system.

In this paper, I explore the nature, history and interrelationships between Aboriginal and European knowledge of the river system, including the processes by which Aboriginal knowledge survives, or can be reconstructed from western sources. Finally I look at the challenges facing Aboriginal communities today as they take an increasingly active role in land and water management in the MDB.

COMPARING GIS WITH KNOWLEDGE ASSEMBLY IN OTHER TRADITIONS

David Turnbull
Centre for Science in Society
Deakin University

This paper explores the monocultural mapping techniques like Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with the ways in which knowledge spaces are created in Australian Aboriginal and other traditions. It considers the apparently irresistible hegemony of modem cartographic monsters and the ways in which cultural diversity can be sustained through the counterpoising of other knowledge traditions whilst recognising that all such comparisons are as much sites of betrayal and appropriation as they are sites of resistance and autonomy.

THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF THE CAMBRIDGE TORRES STRAIT EXPEDITION

Anita Herle
Cambridge University Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology

The 1898 Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait was the most comprehensive anthropological expedition of its period. Led by A C Haddon, the members of the expedition (W H Rivers, C S Myers, W MacDougall, D G Seligman, S H Ray and A Wilkin), included scholars distinguished in the fields of ethnology, natural science, psychology, medicine and linguistics. During seven months' intensive fieldwork, these men researched and recorded detailed ethnographic information (sociological data, religious beliefs, genealogies, medical anthropology, linguistics, art and musicology). They took physical measurements, conducted experiments in the psychology of the senses, made a large collection of artefacts, took hundreds of photographs and produced one of the earliest ethnographic films. As such, the Expedition and its resulting documentation is of immense ethnographic and historical importance, marking a turning point in the emerging disciplines of social anthropology and psychology.

A central concern of the members of the Expedition was research methodology, how to collect ethnographic 'facts', and they pioneered the integration of intensive field research with scholarly interpretation. It is because of this focus on research methodology that the Expedition has acquired its canonical status. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of material culture. Haddon's vision was very object oriented and throughout his professional life he had a close relation to museums. His interests in material culture and art can be directly related to his training in natural science, and his scientific approach influenced the knowledge which was created. Haddon stressed the importance of large collections and their subsequent classification. He plotted the development of specific designs geographically and over time using techniques which he applied to zoological specimens . Of particular interest are the zogos, stone figures or 'charms', which Haddon collected in great number and believed were crucial to understanding Islander religion and social organisation.

Using object-based research, the Reports of the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait, unpublished notes and correspondence, recent ethnographies and contemporary Islander accounts, I will look at the changing meaning ascribed to objects by different patterns of interpretation and knowledge. In addition to the importance of these artefacts within the history of anthropological thought, a crucial element is their relation to contemporary cultural identity or Island Custom.

ABORIGINAL CRAFT: POLITICAL ABSENCE/MATERIAL PRESENCE

Dr Sylvia Kleinert
Archaeology & Anthropology
Australian National University

There is general acceptance that the emergence of contemporary Aboriginal art over the past few decades to national and international acclaim has successfully displaced earlier ethnographic stereotypes. However the conceptualisation of Aboriginal visual culture through the twin paradigms of ethnographic artefact and fine art object is problematic because these binary constructions imply rigid, mutually exclusive, hierarchical categories. This paper aims to politicise and unsettle these bounded categories by focussing attention on a third, more elusive and ambiguous term—Aboriginal craft. The paper first considers the historical context in which these anthropological and historical categories have emerged and the omissions, ambiguities and misunderstandings they have produced in the critical response to Aboriginal visual culture. In the second section of the paper, I draw upon research from south east Australia—where a diverse and continuous history of Aboriginal cultural production has, until now, largely been overlooked—to productively redeploy the rubric of Aboriginal craft as a way of securing recognition for this cultural heritage.

Initially the paper focuses on the disjunctions which operate between the anonymity of ethnographic artefacts—as markers of traditional Aboriginal culture—and Western artistic hierarchies that privilege the unique art object produced by an individual artist over utilitarian and skill-based craft practices. The conflict between these categorisations becomes even more potent and divisive when considered against the various discourses of primitivism that have informed colonial relationships and mediated constructions of Aboriginality. I show that the ambiguity surrounding Aboriginal craft emerges at the points of tension created by the intersection between Western assumptions regarding the linear progress of civilisation and its own deep-seated ambivalence toward the radical changes of modernity. As a result, Aboriginal craft is marginalised as a site of acculturation both by the strictures of tradition and authenticity invoked by ethnography and the expectation of individual creativity imposed by art world imperatives.

My research focuses on the period from the turn of the century to the 1960s when Aboriginal cultures were under siege from government polices aimed at denying a contemporary Aboriginal presence. The evidence reveals that the production of boomerangs. carved emu eggs, feather flowers and baskets helped maintain links with kin and with the land in ways that promoted a sense of cultural heritage and thereby resisted the effect of government policies aimed at assimilation. In the multiple roles these objects fulfil, produced and displayed within Aboriginal society as family heirlooms or toys, or exchanged as gifts and commodities with the majority culture, they articulate social relationships between individual and communal identities, and contest the imaginary formations of national identity of concern to settler-colony societies. The more varied and flexible constructions of Aboriginality that emerge through this focus on Aboriginal craft, disrupt the homogenising stereotypes perpetuated by existing categories, highlighting instead the creative processes of adjustment, incorporation and transformation initiated by Aboriginal people in response to their locally particular and historically differentiated colonial experiences.

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NATURAL KNOWLEDGE AND MUSEUM CULTURE IN THE PACIFIC: THE 'NEWER' MUSEUM MOVEMENT IN TRANSITION

Roy Macleod
History
University of Sydney

The museum is no longer, if ever it was, an institution innocently engaged in the processes of the collection, conservation, classification and display of objects. On the contrary, it is one among many components in a complex array of cultural and leisure industries, no longer certain of its role, no longer secure in its identity, no longer isolated from political and economic pressures or from the explosion of images and meanings which are, arguably, transforming our relationships in contemporary society to time, space and reality.

Thus Roger Silverstone has described the modern Western museum—a familiar cognitive and representational space, but also a contested space, whose meanings are negotiated by a spectrum of interests. Far from being cultural constants, museums are today in a constant state of change, in their management, motivation, and in their capacity to attract visitors, engage attention, and mediate between what their objects 'say' and what the vernacular expects to hear.

What is true of European and American museums is also true of museums in the Pacific—with certain important differences. European museums of art, of natural objects and man-made artefacts have a history dating from antiquity, reformulated in the Renaissance. Their origins are classical, ecclesiastical, and plenipotentiary. In the last fifteen years, several new Pacific island nation museums have begun, not as private or corporate institutions, but as popular, and frequently nationalist expressions of regional art, trade, and craft. Among these, new institutions are being created, and former colonial institutions are being recast, in an exciting, if fragile attempt to make public statements about the diversity and varieties of expression among the living peoples of the islands. Their work is opening a new dimension in museum discourse. In assimilating models from indigenous initiatives—some from the United States, others from Southern Africa—and in inventing culture-specific alternatives, Pacific island museums are writing a new chapter in the history of cultural representation. At the same time, they are offering the student of colonial history an important object lesson in cultural affirmation and self-determination.

This paper has two dimensions, First, it will present information on the history of museum collections, recent museum developments, and current cultural policies in approximately twelve countries in the Pacific south of the equator, in areas of historically anglophone and francophone spheres of interest. Second, it will discuss contacts and interpretations dealing with the history and development of this movement, both in the context of Western museum history, and in relation to contemporary indigenous museum activities elsewhere in the world.

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PRESERVING TECHNIQUES: INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS AND THE BIODIVERSITY ARGUMENT

Michael Bravo
History and Philosophy
University of Cambridge

Today there are widespread efforts to preserve the knowledge systems of indigenous peoples around the world. The value of these projects is frequently justified on the grounds that greater cultural diversity amounts to a richer human heritage and that the threat of cultural extinction is a loss for all humanity.

This concern with extinction and preservation is part of a tradition which stretches back to the first half of the nineteenth century when philanthropists and evangelicals fought to abolish slavery. These groups laid the foundations for the Victorian discipline of ethnology, whose practitioners played a role of advocacy to protect aboriginal peoples from colonial abuse and ultimately extinction.

Similarly anthropologists today struggle to preserve cultural diversity. However unlike mid-Victorian ethnologists, many current projects also aim to preserve knowledge systems, languages and skills. Indigenous peoples, themselves, are now harnessing video, film and sound recording techniques both to preserve and redefine their changing ways of life.

I conclude by suggesting that the metaphors of preservation, extinction and biodiversity, though significant as historical terms of reference, are seriously inadequate for understanding contemporary cultural change.