Locations of Spirituality: ‘Experiences’ and ‘Writings’ of the Sacred

Venue

Humanities Research Centre, Old Canberra House, ANU.

Dates

Date: 26-27 October 2002

Convener

Minoru Hokari
Email: mhokari@hotmail.com

Jennifer Badstuebner

“Red Subjectivities: Blood, needles and the ethnographer’s body”

Abstract:
Spirituality in the context of bewitchment in South Africa is an embodied arena. Thus how the body and its substances are conceptualised is critical in understanding witchcraft. This paper is an exploration of the experiences of blood, in witchcraft, healing and biomedical diagnosis. I follow how the cut body bleeding across boundaries changes the subject positions of ethnographer and interlocutor.

Over a period of several months stories arose in the townships of a red taxi that carried a creature that would steal the blood of female passengers, sometimes by sucking, sometimes with a syringe. In South Africa cutting people’s bodies in order to free them from bewitchment is a common practice, through my close involvement with patients and healers (amagqira) in their surgeries I came into physical contact with a lot of blood, upon my return to Australia the results of a series of tests for blood borne diseases seriously challenged my relationship with my body.

In the context of my changing relationship to my blood and to stories of blood loss I suggest one way we can move into a ‘post-secular’ position is to destabilise and re-contextualise the ways biomedicine and witchcraft shape the way we think about our selves, our bodies and blood.

Biography
Jennifer Badstuebner is a doctoral student in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at ANU. After two years fieldwork in the townships surrounding Cape Town and in the rural areas of the Eastern Cape she is now based in Canberra writing her thesis on issues of bewitchment, witchcraft and healing in post-Apartheid South Africa.
 

Linda Rae Bennett

“What's Spirituality got to do with it?”

Abstract:
What’s spirituality got to do with it? A plausible response to this enigma has been percolating in my consciousness for almost ten years - since my earliest experiences of life on the Eastern Indonesian island of Lombok, a location renowned for the mysticism, sorcery and unusually devout Islamic adherence of the Sasak people. In this paper, I discuss the significance of spirituality in relation to childbirth, its influence on women’s choice of birthing and on how local people make sense of their interactions with the bio-medical health system. I draw upon a case study of a cesarean birth, to describe local constructions of the human body and spirit and their significance in the context of invasive medical procedures. I demonstrate how physical well being cannot be divorced from spiritual well being for the Sasak.  I also discuss the religious right of passage associated with the birth of Muslim child and how this ritual is negotiated in the seemingly secular location of the operating theatre. My discussion of spirituality transgresses the boundaries of religion; it incorporates the mystical, the supernatural and the divine, as they are encountered on a daily basis, often overlapping, sometimes conflicting, but ever present.

Biography
Linda Rae Bennett is a medical anthropologist who has recently joined the Australian Research Centre in Sex Health and Society at La Trobe University as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Linda is currently deepening her research into the relationship between Islam and women’s reproductive and sexual rights in Southeast Asia and Australia, with a specific focus on Islamic education.
 
 

Roland Boer

“Secularism, Utopia and the Discernment of Myth”

Abstract and Biography TBA
 

Fiona Crockford

“Travessia: Re-siting and re-citing East Timorese lived experiences of the sea”

Abstract:
For East Timorese refugees living in western Sydney and for myself as an Anglo-Australian researcher, locations of spirituality are neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’ in any spatial or temporal sense, but fluid and unsettled.

The sea is a potent location in East Timorse spiritual and lived experience. In exploring how the strands of history, Indonesian atrocities, cosomology, and the presence of crocodiles I suggest that binary divisions such as sacred and secular, secular and post secular are difficult to maintain. Thus a more fluid way of writing seeing and thinking through experiences of East Timor and especially the experiences of displaced people is critical if we are to avoid such terms as lost or forgotten. In the sea nothing is lost and nothing is forgotten things places peoples memories and experiences both spiritual and secular are entangled.

In this paper, I use the term Travessia (Crossing), a metaphor deployed by the East Timorese writer-in-exile Luis Cardoso, with particular reference to both East Timorese and my own lived experiences of the sea, to tell stories that traverse and combine both real and imagined geographies. Our mutual movement between and across Sydney and East Timor provide sites of ‘meeting’ of crossings, offering possibilities of destabilising demarcations of the secular/sacred.

Biography
My professional background in Aboriginal education and Teaching English as a foreign Language has led to a range of academic interests including the interplay between discourses of youth; nationalism and ethnicity; collective trauma and community bereavement. I am currently completing my doctoral thesis on East Timorese youth identities at Manning Clark House where I am Visiting Scholar.
 

Franchesca Cubillo

 “Politics of the Secret - Aboriginal mythological warrant”

Abstract and Biography TBA
 

Richard Davis

 “Dead Men Walking”

Abstract:
This paper deals with dreams and power in northwestern Torres Strait and their implications for conceptualising different ideas of the self by reversing a common anthropological situation; that of ethnographer reporting the dreams of others.  In doing so I will suggest that many dreams, at least in this part of the world, parlay the interior self into a broadly defined public arena and in so doing create conditions for intersubjective actualisation

Biography TBA
 

Greg Dening

 “An Archaeology of Believing or The Self as Another Country”

Statement of Intent (I hate abstract):
I have a soul. I think. Not a soul that is "saved". Not an ethereal, wispy, "ghost-buster" sort that eventually escapes this body and this vale of tears. A soul. A place of reflection where one knows oneself as is and would be. A place of commitment, of guilt, of love--and hate, of truth--and lies, of certainty, of doubt, of believing. If I write an ethnography of others, it is of souls, mine and theirs, looking at one another, that I write about.

In May 1968, in a time of spiritual crisis, I spent thirty days alone looking at my soul. I kept a journal. If Iam brave, I will read something of it. If I am not brave enough, I will dig into the strata of my believing/writing self.

Like May 1990: ". . . The thousands of communions in my life, for all their scruples and arithmetic, have been sweet. Not mystic, I think, but sometimes moments of discernment, of cleared vision, occasionally even of a little breathless love. Why should I laugh at that? Why should I turn it upside down and say it is the effect of something else? Of deluded ambitions? Of subliminal class and sex? I have said to myself and to anybody who would ask, that I would like to describe religious experience as it is, not in terms of something else. It is an arrogance and sometimes a bore to begin with oneself. But I do not know where else to begin, where else to find the same, where else to find the different. Perhaps I should write a poem and by that be true to my particularities. But then again, I do not think my narratives of what it is to believe and hope, to be guilty and sad, to be sure and doubting--in different space and different time--is something less than a poem. Or should be." ( 'Soliloquy in San Giacomo'. Performances. P. 272)

Biography
Greg Dening is a believer. Of what and why, he is not sure.
 

Jo Diamond

“Hinenuitepo: a Goddess, a calling, and me.”

Abstract:
Hinenuitepo is a deified personification of death in Maori cosmology, though She is also closely inter-related with birth and life. This paper begins with a brief outline of Her ‘triple’ persona. It then interprets Her spiritual role on marae (Maori community centres) that intertwines with notions of after-life, perpetual connections to land, tribal identity and belonging. Artistic manifestations and influences of Hinenuitepo in this marae context are also briefly discussed. Linkages are then made between this Goddess and the karanga, a ‘call’ performed exclusively by Maori women on marae that precedes all further interactions between visitors (manuhiri) and marae hosts (tangata whenua). Finally I comment on Her significance to my own sense of spirituality and belonging that is embedded within my efforts to acknowledge and support Maori women’s artistic and social contributions

Biography
I am a Maori woman of Ngapuhi descent. Born in Aotearoa New Zealand, I have also called Australia ‘home’ for many years. My interests include Maori culture, particularly Maori Women’s weaving (raranga) and other art forms, Trans-Tasman and Pacific Maori identity, Indigenous Australia, postcolonial and feminist politics and theories. I am a qualified and experienced reference librarian and have recently extended this and other academic training into a Research Consultancy for the National Museum of Australia. My publications include articles about the internationally recognised Maori woman artist Robyn Kahukiwa and various Maori cultural concepts. These articles at least in part feature female Maori deities who remain important, despite heavy Christian counter-influences, to Maori women’s spirituality and social interactions. Very shortly, I expect to complete a doctoral thesis concerning raranga in Trans-Tasman Maori contexts based on official ‘fieldwork’ and life experiences in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia.
 

John Docker

“Scenes of Death, Hopes of Eternity: Socrates, Jesus, Spinoza”

Abstract:
It is now clear that the predictions of modernist sociology, that secularisation is humanity's future, are egregiously wrong. And wrong not only because of the persisting vitality of polytheism and animism in non-Western societies and cultures, but, ominously for history - for the disastrous and frightening state of the world - because of the protean strength of the Abrahamic monotheisms. In postsecularist postcolonial theory, the story of Exodus in the Old Testament is increasingly recognised as a foundational narrative in modern European settler-colonialism, in the histories of the United States, South Africa, Israel, Australia. I have written about this in my 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora.  Today I wish to muse about the New Testament and the Koran as foundational narratives in world history. I will think about the Gospel of John, held to be a key text in stimulating the long history of Christian anti-semitism, its high moments of disaster the medieval massacres of the Jews and the death camps of Nazi Germany. I will also offer some very very tentative thoughts about the Koran in terms of a possible tension between plurality in relation to other Religions of the Book, and exclusion in relation to paganism.

Biography
John Docker is a visiting fellow in the Humanities Research Centre. Since the publication of '1492' in 2001, he has explored questions of monotheism and polytheism, and most recently, questions of genocide in relation to colonialism.
 

Debjani Ganguly

“Buddha, Bhakti and Superstition: A Post-Secular Reading of Dalit Conversion”

Abstract:
There are a group of ex-untouchable castes* called Mahars who live in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. In 1956 this community converted en masse to Buddhism. In this they were led by their charismatic leader Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. In the public debates that both preceded and followed the Mahar conversion, debates to which Ambedkar himself contributed in no small measure, there was a broad consensus about the aim and purpose of the event. The conversion would, it was hoped, empower the oppressed untouchables to fight the tyranny of a “pre-modern” Hindu casteism too mired in religious superstition. It would do so by enabling them to embrace a way of life given to rational choice, equality, human dignity, self reliance, rejection of God and the supernatural, development, modernization and democracy. The social sciences and, to a great extent the Marxist-modernist dalit literary movement of the 60s and 70s, contributed in no small measure to this secular, total-break-with-the-past reading of the Buddhist conversion. For the dalits to become a Buddhist was to finally come into modernity. It was all about being politically conscious of their rights as individuals and asserting those rights. It was their “democratic revolution”, as one Ambedkar scholar put it.

In this paper I examine what such relentlessly secular/modernist/historicist readings of the dalit Buddhist conversion leave out. Underlying my analysis is the premise that such sociological readings of religious events are incapable of opening out towards a phenomenology of faith by which I mean a certain orientation of the human to God and to the non-secular that is not underpinned by conscious thought and political-cultural calculations in the first instance. Some of the specifics of dalit Buddhism that I look at in this context are the following: Ambedkar’s shift from a social scientific to a mythographic register in his writing of Buddha’s life and message, the absorption of Ambedkar and the Buddha into the pantheon of Hindu deities by Mahar worshippers and the prevalence of the Bhakti idiom and modes of worship in the dalit religious everyday.

The paper as a whole argues for ways of conceptualising life-forms generated by caste on the subcontinent that are not available to the rational, systemic, disembodied, public self of the modern social scientist.

* The generic term for ex-untouchable castes in contemporary South Asia is “dalit”.

Biography
Debjani Ganguly is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, ANU.
 

Minoru Hokari

“Locations of spirituality: where stories come from”

Abstract
When one of the Gurindji elders told me that Dreaming brought me to their country all the way from Japan in order to ‘wake up (my) brain’, the project of ‘locations of spirituality’ first came to my mind. Based on my cultural background in Japan as well as my spiritual experience in the Gurindji country, I want to raise following questions. Is it possible to ‘write’ about people’s spiritual experience in ‘academic’ languages? If no, why? If yes, how? And also, how do I (and the Gurindji elder as well as the others) understand such ‘cross-cultural’ spiritual experiences? The former question can be widened in the context of the ‘limits of secularism’. And the latter leads us to the ‘postcolonial conditions of writing spirituality’. Furthermore, if we aim to articulate these two questions, what kind of visions are we able to see?

My talk is not a ‘keynote speech’ in any sense. There should be many different ways of exploring the questions of ‘locations of spirituality’ according to one’s cultural and spiritual background. Likewise, there would be many different ways of (not) accepting my/your/our/their/ ‘locations of spirituality’ according to one’s positionality in the global-yet-local world. I am sincerely hopeful that we, people of the different backgrounds, can jointly create a cross-cultural, inter-disciplinary and trans-national arena in which we can meet each other to exchange and ‘connect’ ideas and spirits in an open and supportive manner.

Biography
Minoru Hokari is a JSPS postdoctoral fellow in Japan, and a visiting fellow at HRC, ANU in Australia. He currently maintains two projects. (1) ‘cross-culturalizing history’ by learning ‘what is history?’ from the Gurindji people, and (2) ‘de-nationalising Aboriginal historiography’ by studying the Aboriginal-Asian relationship. The former challenges the conventional academic history which tends to ignore or deny spiritual agencies in Aboriginal history, and the latter challenges the common idea that ‘indigenous issues are domestic problems’. Moreover, both jointly challenge the ‘Westernised’ and ‘nationalised’ version of the universal(ism).
 

Diana James

‘How can we sing our own songs in a strange land?’

Abstract:
One early morning I was driving west along a familiar dirt road through sand dune and desert oak country. The sky ahead changed gradually from dark blue to pale as light seeped in. When the first spears of the sun shot the spinifex with gold, I stopped and jumped out of the car.  My face turned to greet the sun, the eternal fire burning on the rim of the world between earth and sky. Then I knew the sun was the Son, the light of the world. Born of the union of mother earth and father sky. The young desert oaks stood still in reverence as new initiates, while their elders intoned a hymn played by the wind of dawn.

I thanked my mothers, Aboriginal and white, for their intuitive knowing that spirit is not confined by the boundaries of religious law. I thanked my fathers, white and Aboriginal, for their affirmation that personal experience of the mystical is real. The realm of the sacred must be entered and understood in it’s own terms. The tools of rationality are clumsy and inappropriate in this non-material dimension of reality. Sacred space is alive with paradoxes, mystery and magic. Whether it be a cathedral well or a rockhole in the desert, it contains the water of life.

This land of vast horizons invites us to expand our ways of knowing not to be fenced in by fear of the other.

Biography
PhD candidate, CRES, ANU / PhD topic :“Ngura Walytja, Indigenous Kinship with Country”.

Since 1975 I have worked as an anthropologist, bi-lingual educator, community adviser, the NYP Women’s Council coordinator, oral history recording, cross-cultural tourism manager, writer, poet and collaborative artist with the Pitjantjatjara people of Central Australia. I have had the privilege of being included into their extended family system and have learnt the rights and responsibilities this entails. Many people over the years have patiently taught me Pitjantjatjara language and culture, a journey into the subtlety and complexity of their world.

I worked with Nganyinytja and Ilyatjari, from 1988 to 2000, establishing and managing their cultural tour business Desert Tracks. They designed these tours to promote greater understanding of Aboriginal culture by inviting people to stay at their homeland and share their knowledge of country. This work has been extended through the Spirit of the Land Foundation dedicated to building bridges of understanding and respect between peoples of different cultures.
 

Andrew Jones

“Locating Passion - Melancholy Wonder and the Enigma of Be-longing”

Notions of the sacred and religious discourses have been and still remain [despite the protestations of secularism] a central component of cultural?experience and identity, and must be examined in order to comprehend the power relations at play in colonial and postcolonial histories. The sacred is an experience that can't be easily pinned down and popular religious?expression is an act of cultural translation and negotiation, it is a dynamic and creative process.

In my research I draw on representations of sainthood in the catholic tradition: their hagiographical representations, their place in local votive economies, the culturally specific significance of symbolisms in religious representations, and the inventive performance of mimesis and incorporation as tactics of local resistance. The practice of Catholicism?in Latin America points to a hybridisation of cultural activity; one that?expresses local indigenous belief systems and simultaneously the (already?syncretic) Spanish traditions of the Catholic faith - a religious expression that has neither submitted entirely to the colonial imperative, nor remained in some kind of pristine stasis.

There is a correspondence between fear and desire that empowers cultural/physical miscegenation with a radical ambiguity.  A lust for wonder at the precipice of knowledge, an uncertainty that can subvert, elude and liberate. While miscegenation has been manipulated for political purposes in Latin America, and its incidence acknowledged in the recognition of people of mixed descent, Anglo colonialism has tended to be based upon a more binary understanding of race which informed policies of segregation and later assimilation. Although atrocities and subjugation were rife in the Spanish versions of colonial expansion, as Michel Foucault has pointed out, power is a site of both repression and resistance.

I wish to take the opportunity this forum/conference provides to dwell on the personal experiences and motivations which have brought me to this particular convergence of academic enquiries.  What marks my interest is the intersubjective nature of identity, which is often underexplored in conventional colonial histories. I am endeavouring to develop this field of enquiry via the tropes of melancholy and wonder as they are expressed in colonial/postcolonial conditions. My intention is to suggest that passion and emotion live in tension with reason - they are not mutually exclusive, and that there is a need to re-evaluate passionate expression as part of the project of expanding the horizons of subjectivity.

Agitated by radical difference, wonder is an exuberant emotion – an enchanted gaze - an exaltation that liberates us from the mundane.  It ravishes us with unmediated joy, an experience of ecstasy - indeed a displacement of the mind.  This feral emotion, this 'passion called wonder', is in constant flux refusing containment - delighting in detours. Wonder denies certainties, and cultivates an elusive and ambiguous?vitality; it is a space for the arrival of new desires and the opportunity?for new departures.  Melancholy's meter is intensity - it slips poignantly?between despair and exaltation cultivating a cultural eros of longing and?suffering; an?inter/subjective space that renders the opportunity to?examine the creative activity identity construction.

Despite the growing awareness of cultural theorists to the agency of?marginalised peoples, the tendency to essentialise questions of identity and difference has often confined analysis of forms of social division in a way that has reduced acknowledgement of their mutuality. This absence presents a challenge, which suggests new questions for cultural studies,?historiography and epistemology, and points toward a new conceptualization of identity, which defines itself in?relational terms. There is, I am arguing, a certain urgency and necessity to rethink cultural theory within?a cross-cultural, international framework which takes into account the?historical specificity of a particular locale, the political juncture of postcolonial agency, and the discursive contexts which shape analysis.
 

Biography
Andrew Jones is an Associate Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Media and Cultural Studies at Southern Cross University. He teaches into the Media program and is currently doing a PhD in Cultural Studies and Media entitled: In/appropriating Sainthood - the Unbecoming Cause: Melancholy, Wonder and Colonial Experience.

Andrew comes from a background in photography and film, moonlighting for many years as a turnstile operator. His particular academic interests are in: postcolonial studies,the politics and practices of popular culture,film and Latin American studies.
 

Caroline Josephs

“Sacred Storytelling: Braiding Personal, Presentational and Experiential Modes”

Abstract:
A short storytelling performance (bring your cup of tea) will help to demonstrate and introduce the power of oral story in the sacred realm. Sacred story binds the Universal (ubiquity) and the particular. Our personal stories have their important place here. Questions arising from my own doctorate research work on sacred oral storytelling will be touched on to taste the range of layers we are invoking in this shape-changing, discipline-blurring work, where Reality may be transformed and we dance through poetics, ritual, theatre, education, anthropology, philosophy. Where we are invoking the ancient, the contemporary and the future, where the oral and the text are in tension. How can we transfer presentation and experience for listeners to text for readers? How can we write this within the academic genre? How do we respect the cultural complexity and contexts of sacred storytelling?  Can we blur the boundaries of story as idea (the discursive) and story as presentation (the expressive, or presentational) and weave this with the particular, the personal?

Aboriginal Story will not be told; however, it presents special circumstances when we as non-indigenous Australians seek to write out of this landscape.  Some of the questions are becoming clearer; I have only provisional answers.  I hope we can open up fruitful dialogue.

Biography
Caroline Josephs has a Jewish ancestry, a practice in Zen Buddhism over many years, and a deep love of this country where she was born.

She holds Masters degrees in Education, and in Creative Writing, is a storyteller, writer and artist. With a passion for the arts, learning, and the country we inhabit, she has designed and led courses from pre-school to postgraduate, for schools, TAFE, universities, community groups, corporate and government, and across non-government schools, and state and commonwealth agencies. She has worked in innovative projects for the Human Rights Commission, for community radio, for Catholic schools, for summer schools, and in linking up women in rural Australia. She worked for many years in cutting edge research and development in arts education on a national level.

Currently she has taken time out from professional work to complete a Ph.D. on oral sacred storytelling, covering a number of ancient traditions including Judaic, Zen Buddhist, Inuit and Australian Aboriginal. No Aboriginal story will be told but questions and protocols surrounding this are being explored.
 

Lyn McCredden

Commentator

Biography
Dr Lyn McCredden is a senior lecturer in literary and cultural studies at Deakin University, Melbourne. Her publications include James McAuley (OUP, 1992), Bridgings: Reading Australian Women's Poetry (OUP, 1996) and Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions, edited with Frances Devlin Glass (OUP, 2001). She also writes and publishes poetry.
 

Ann McGrath

Commentator

Biography
Dr Ann McGrath is Director of the Society & Nation Program at the National Museum of Australia. She has published widely on gender and frontier. Publications in press include an article on the visual representation of 'white brides' on the Australian and North American frontiers and on Asian/Aboriginal relations on the north Queensland frontier.
 

Stephen Muecke

 “Something Wrong? Oh, Must be Ghost”

Abstract:
Certain experiences in Aboriginal Australia have led me to seek categories other than social scientific ones, which is why in earlier papers I have referred to the ‘sacred’ and to ‘magic’ in cultural studies.  In this expansion of vocabulary, I have been influenced by Favret-Saada, Chakrabarty  and Taussig, as the writing and narrating of these experiences seems to call for a poetic which carries some of the force of the experiences themselves.

Despite all this, I want to signal theoretical limits, for I do not consider it a matter of allowing the domain of the spiritual to bleed into the secular, or vice versa, the spiritual is destined to remain, I feel, a very ‘rich and rewarding’ domain, but ultimately one that is personal rather that public in its effects.  The precarious domain of secularity (assaulted now on all sides by renewed fundamentalisms) has to be preserved, especially in the domain of the law.  In what ways then, in our humanities, can the spiritual be located in a relevant fashion?

Biography
Stephen Muecke is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. His  books include (with Paddy Roe and Krim Benterrak) Reading the Country (Fremantle, 1984, 1996); a co-edition of an anthology of Black Australian writings, Paperbark,  (University of
Queensland Press, 1990); Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies, University of NSW Press, 1992; No Road (bitumen all the way), (1997); a translation of José Gil’s Metamorphoses of the Body (Minnesota University Press, 1998), and About this little devil and this little fella edited for Albert Barunga (children’s story, Magabala Press, 1999). He recently edited (with Adam Shoemaker) David Unaipon's Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, University of Melbourne Press, 2001.
 
 

Djon Mundine

“You can be the President, I’d rather be the Pope!”

Abstract and Biography TBA
 

Janet Phillips

“Computer Rejected Me!”

Abstract and Biography TBA
 

Kaye Price

Commentator

Kaye Price will present a paper, “TOO OBVIOUS TO SEE: Aboriginal Spirituality and Cosmology” written by Penny Tripcony. Penny is currently Chair of the Queensland Indigenous Education Consultative Body (QIECB) and has been Manager of the Oodgeroo Unit (QUT) and Deputy-Director of the UQ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit. The rest about her is in the paper. I have not yet edited it appropriately for Canberra.
 

Peter Read

“Foreign spirits in an Aboriginal landscape”

Abstract:
In this talk I will describe some of the area in which I have been working, including the variety of ways in which non Aborigines (including, and especially, non Anglo-Celts) perceive or recognise enspirited Australian landscapes.

Not all Aboriginal people are happy with this kind of research.  I shall briefly touch upon some of these objections.

Biography
Peter Read is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Cross Cultural Research.  As part of his continuing work on the attachment of Australians to certain areas of land, he is currently researching the meaning of magical or enspirited places.
 

Deborah Rose

“Calling Out: Shades, Shadows, and Intersubjectivities”

Abstract: TBA

Biography
Deborah Bird Rose is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at The Australian National University. She is the author of Nourishing Terrains, Australian Aboriginal views of Landscape and Wilderness (1996), Dingo Makes Us Human (winner of the 1992/3 Stanner Prize), and Hidden Histories (winner of the 1991 Jessie Litchfield Award). Her most recent book Country of the Heart is published by Aboriginal Studies Press and will appear in late 2002. Writing in the fields of anthropology, history, environmental ethics and religious studies, her work is focused on social and ecological justice. Her current work in progress is a book entitled ‘Dreaming Ecology’
 

Adam Shoemaker

“The Spirituality of the Memorial”

Abstract and Biography TBA
 

Ann Thomas

Commentator

Biography
Ann Thomas is a Biripi woman from the Manning River area of the mid north coast of NSW near Taree, whose totem is the white pointer shark. Her father taught her to read and write before she went to school. After her mother's death in the late 1950s she trained as a Christian missionary for three years at the Minimbah Bible Training Institute in Singleton, and then worked with Stolen Generations children at the United Aboriginal Mission children's home in Bomaderry, where she met her future husband, Gabu Ted Thomas. They married and settled down at Wallaga Lake, and had five children.

In 1986 Ann began organising women's Dreaming camps for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women. In the following year, through her work with the Uniting Church Board of Misions, she travelled to Singapore for a conference of Christian women. At that time she had a vision of Gulaga women's mountain near Wallaga Lake, in which the mountain was strewn with the suffering and broken bodies of people from many different nations. This vision inspires her to continue teaching and supporting women. Since 1986 she has led an annual pilgrimage to Gulaga, as well as regular three-monthly camps in various parts of NSW and recently in Victoria in conjunction with local women elders. In 1995 she was accepted as a Biripi elder in her own right. Gabu passed on to spirit in May 2002.
 

Jinki Trevillian

“Talking with Ghosts: a meeting with Old Man Crocodile on Cape York Peninsula”

Abstract:
Lately I have been spending a lot of time talking with ghosts; I have been engaged in conversations with my own ancestors and with those of other people. Communicating between worlds is both a personal and a cross-cultural project. I believe it is important for us to become familiar with that which haunts us.

Reconciliation, between people and with the past, is at the heart of many of the debates on History which have recently raged in Australia, as well as internationally. Often these debates get caught up in legalistic arguments of ‘proof’ and empirical fact, yet they are motivated by emotion and experiences which exist outside of these terms of discussion.

The exclusion of spiritual concerns, as a motivation and inspiration for understanding ourselves and others, would appear to me as weak-hearted. My research has never been clearly separated for me from the rest of my life. Because I see life itself in the nature of a spiritual journey, permeated with divinity, the division of secular and sacred has always appeared to me as suspect.

Ghosts and supernatural beings have been excluded from modern western history as causes because they cannot be ‘known’. Forces that are ‘unknown’ none-the-less act upon us and within us. This work is engaged with what Dipesh Chakrabarty describes as translating life-worlds, what Richard Rorty and Homi Bahba call bringing newness into the world; I focus on images, chase metaphors, respond to language and look for ways to relate the stories I was told to other stories so that I might understand them better.

In this paper I relate some of the ways we might engage with our ghosts, as preparation for meeting with other ghosts. Old Man Crocodile is not a ghost but he has some of the same characteristics. Old man crocodile lives in hidden places, but even when you can’t see him his presence in the Cape country is pervasive and powerful. When the crocodile emerges his impact on humans is disruptive, uncontrolled and even devastating.

Biography
Jinki Trevillian is a Phd canditate at the Australian National University, she is currently writing a thesis on the history of Cape York Peninsula. The research for her doctoral project took Jinki to Cape York to ‘talk with the old people’, her aim to learn about history as told by the people who lived through it. Jinki first became a student of History and Literature in 1992, she wrote her Honours thesis on Czech writers and politics, but her passion for learning draws on many disciplines and traditions of thought, and perhaps (it is to be hoped) some undisciplined innovations.
 

Christine Watson

“Reassurance, Fear and Laughter: Faces of Cross-Cultural Spiritual Experience”

Abstract:
Spiritual experience is one aspect of living which is beyond conscious human control: although we can wish to experience certain things, we can never determine what will actually happen. Cross-cultural spiritual experience has the potential to challenge, dramatically affect, destroy or re-fashion our enculturated world view.

Two incidents have caused me to reflect on the need to come to terms with the varying layers of cross-cultural spiritual experience in Australia. The first took place in late 1993 in the Balgo area of the Great Sandy Desert. On that occasion I was immensely reassured by dreaming of Ancestral women when our party of women travelling down the Kanaputa Dreaming Track was in trouble. A second experience, of travelling in Queensland in 1998 in company with a Stolen Generations friend, instantiated a seemingly magical world of intimate relationship with the land, sky, and waters, and the physical and spiritual life they contained. While some of these entities were benign and helpful, others appeared to be quite enormous and, to me at least, frightening.

The similarities and differences between this time engaging with the very local, place-based spirituality of Aboriginal Australia, and experiences from my more universalist meditation path, has led to a period of extensive personal, professional and theoretical self-questioning, particularly as the friendship broke, and much of the violence and pain of colonial Australia came under my skin along with the spiritual experience. How do these spiritual realities and realms (as well as Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism and Islam) relate to and articulate with each other in contemporary multi-cultural Australia? Is experience dependent on spiritual beings inscribed in place, on the enculturation and sensitivity of the experiencer, or on the nexus between them? If a person brought up in one culture can undergo classical spiritual experience from another tradition, should we, as Hinduism might recommend, emphasise the power of the deity or deities behind the manifestation, or, as Merleau-Ponty counsels, the openness of the experiencer and whatever empathy can be brought between human beings as a result?

Given the fraught nature of European occupation, dispossession and continual negation of Aboriginal people and knowledge in Australia, as Langton warns, the moral aspects and responsibilities of such cross-cultural engagements are not to be taken lightly, and an unproblematic Levi-Straussian bricolage of selves cannot be encouraged. Yet, if individuals like William Buckley, and Olive Pink were unusual in their day for crossing over into Aboriginal culture, thousands of Aboriginal people in ex-mission centres throughout remote and rural Australia (not to mention those in other colonised nations around the world) have had cross-cultural spiritual experience forced on them as part of everyday life. As scholars of the twenty-first century who are beginning to have cross-cultural spiritual experiences, we can join the cosmic dance with other hybrid and composite selves, and enter a much deeper engagement of practical love based on a shared experience of both the joy and pain of human existence in a mysterious and multiple world.
 

Biography
Christine Watson is now undertaking a PhD on indigenous knowledge of water and sound through the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at ANU. Raised in Methodist Christianity, she moved from suburban Sydney in the mid 1970s to join the Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs, where life broadened considerably under the Whitlam government administration and exposure to Aboriginal co-workers and political leaders. After deciding that she was not a career public servant, she undertook further study in art, anthropology, and philosophy, and moved back to Sydney for training in museum studies. After co-curating one of the first exhibitions of urban Aboriginal art, 'Urban Koories', she went on to work with Boomalli Aboriginal Artists' Co-operative as their first coordinator, and as the curator and gallery manager of Coo-ee Aboriginal Art, which at that time had an Aboriginal partner. A third stage of her working life began as a result of falling in love with Balgo painting, and deciding to undertake a research degree on Balgo women's art. Her book, Piercing the Ground: Balgo women's image making and relationship to country, is to be published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press in mid 2003. Christine has been following a Hindu meditation path, Siddha Yoga, since the mid 1980s.
 

Margo Weir

‘Articulating Spirituality: Fundamental Problems and Considerations’

Abstract:
This paper offers one Australian Aboriginal’s perspective on the cultural/spiritual implications of researching and articulating “lived experiences of spirituality”. Four themes are discussed: Defining Spirituality; Cultural Realities and the Spiritual; Life Paths and Teachings; and The Implications of Theorizing about Spirituality and Potential Socio-cultural and Socio-political Ramifications. Both inter-cultural and intra-cultural considerations including culturally/spiritually relevant and culturally/spiritually appropriate methodologies and ways of writing are discussed. Practical examples are drawn from the author’s M.Curr.Stud.(Hons) thesis “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Pedagogy and Lists of Cultural Differences” and, also, her PhD thesis “Indigenous Australians and Universities: A Study of Postgraduate Students’ Experiences in Learning Research”.

Biography
Dr. Margo Weir PhD Curriculum Studies, Aboriginal Education and Cultural Studies including Spirituality, works as an independent Consultant researching Education, Cultural Studies, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Military issues.
 
 

Michael Williams

“Journeying with Respect”

Abstract:
This presentation will be a ranging commentary on my life's journey - reflecting on how I came to this point.  It will be my attempt to make sense of things as I see them and how they have come to be in my life.  It will draw on my families stories and the way that the several generations of my family have been touched by an insistence on/of the efficacy of our old ways, our law and how respect for all these things have influenced my own life and the affairs of other things - how things, people, places and broader have been affected by a 'taking a care' approach to responsibilities.

Biography
Michael Williams is Director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.  An Aboriginal man from Goorang Goorang people of South East Queensland.  His academic background is in history and anthropology and his research interests are in the areas of cross-cultural communication, cultural heritage management and Indigenous Knowledge traditions.

Enquiries

Leena Messina, Programs Manager, Humanities Research Centre, ANU
Email: Leena.Messina@anu.edu.au