Sobrepresiones

The conceptual space of traditional culture in contemporary Australia is bounded by a creation period, often referred to in popular writings as ‘The Dreamtime’. During the creation period, indeterminate possibilities became determined through the actions of heroic beings who left their mark upon the landscape and gave society its structure. Choices were made between death and regeneration, social obligations were established, upheld or denied, with perpetual consequences. The events of the creation period are retold in legend. In analysing how novel structures were created within this apparently fixed, encompassing space, I shall draw on Margaret Boden’s ideas (Boden 1994), as well as on my own work on creativity in art (Layton 1981: ch. 5, 1992:115ff.).

A common theme in northern Australia is that the ancestors left the spirits of unborn children in pools of permanent water along their track. Such places along creeks and billabongs are now sacred sites, protected by the clans who ‘own’, or are responsible for looking after, each stretch of country (or clan ‘estate’). At death, the clansperson’s spirit returns to the water from which it came. The travels of the totemic ancestors are re-enacted in rituals at which living members of the clan take on the personae of the ancestors. The participant’s distinctive body paint conveys the dual human—animal essence of the ancestor and, like the heraldic devices of medieval Europe, asserts the actor’s right to membership of the clan and its estate. In central Australia, traditional ceremonies are performed around ground paintings that depict the ancestors’ travels. Frequently, the ancestor’s footprints are shown passing from site to site.

Each telling of a legend, each fresh realisation of a painted composition and each performance of ceremony necessitates creative decisions by the narrator or the managers of the performance. The ambiguity inherent in attitudes to the dead can be resolved in more than one way, depending on how immediate

experiences are likened to prototypical events. In the 1920s, for example, Lloyd Warner described how the Yolngu of Northeast Arnhem Land gave conflicting accounts of the nature of a dead person’s spirit. While believing, in principle, that each person left two spirits, the ancestral birimbir and the trickster mokoi, some said that the spirit’s identity was in doubt until his or her clan song cycle had been performed (Warner 1937: 413–415). The mokoi is sometimes said to hang around the burial platform, so people usually pass at a distance. As they pass, ‘the men, when they are with the women, sometimes tease them by grunting and coughing like mokois, and laugh when the women jump. The women laugh too, but usually not until later’ (ibid.: 433). In the 1980s, Morphy showed how the series of songs performed by the Yolngu to transport the deceased’s birimbir back to the clan well are put together anew for each funeral, depending on the place of death, the possible routes the spirit might take across other clans’ countries to reach its clan waterhole, and which of these clans are represented at the funeral (Morphy 1984:87ff). Venbrux has recently published a detailed analysis of a funeral on Melville Island, off the coast of Western Arnhem Land. He writes,

In the rituals the performers or narrators fit their own stories within the overall framing story…. The stories ‘told’ by the performers…[are] related to current happenings in their social life. As these stories run through the lives of the narrators, they help them shape their culture and adjust to new situations

(Venbrux 1995:141) Elsewhere, I have quoted examples of different tellings of the same legend from the Kimberley region of Northwest Australia, and argued that such creative retelling is inherent in the structure of Aboriginal cognition (Layton 1992:40–45, 116). Although Margaret Boden describes the novel combination of familiar ideas as the simplest and least original form of creativity (Boden 1994:520–521), there is no doubt that the grammars of Australian myth and ritual routinely enable the creation of new, but always possible, ‘sentences’.

Aboriginal politics also have an essential strand of creativity, resolving indeterminacy in how the ancestral law should be upheld. If a clan is threatened with extinction through the failure to bear children, others must be trained to succeed to their responsibilities. Decisions must be taken about the most appropriate successor, and who should train them. Social identity is acknowledged to be an arena for indigenous political contestation, and any individual’s claims to knowledge of the ancestral order are subject to political assessment. The ancestral framework within which these negotiations are conducted is, however, considered to be unchanging. Marriages that fail to follow the prescribed pattern also necessitate negotiation of the children’s status. Among the Alawa of the Gulf Country, those who inherit membership of the group responsible for an estate or country through their fathers are termed miniringgi. Those who inherit membership through their mothers are termed junggaiyi. Those who stand in the relationship of miniringgi to a ceremony celebrating creation of the country during the ancestors’ travels must ask for it to be performed, but it is the junggaiyi who decide on timing. Junggaiyi prepare the ceremonial dance ground and equipment, they decorate the miniringgi and sing the songs tracing the ancestors’ routes from place to place. The interdependence of miniringgi and junggaiyi facilitates consistency in performance as knowledge is passed on from one generation to the next.

Intra-moiety marriages are strongly discouraged. If a man’s father and mother come from the same patri- moiety, he is potentially both miniringgi and junggaiyi to the same ceremonial complexes. The two roles are absolutely opposed. Junggaiyi must perform duties forbidden to miniringgi. A decision has to be made as to which role will be chosen before the individual can take on ceremonial status. Alawa discourse provides alternative propositions. Conventionally, children of wrong marriages are assigned the semi-moiety and

subsection status they would have received had their mother married correctly. If the father’s family are powerful, however, they can insist that the children ‘follow the father’. Whichever course of action is taken, one group will lose potential members. The outcome of any case will be a matter for negotiation (see Bern 1979a), and powerful arguments can be mounted on either side. Where a person’s spirit originates in a water outside their father’s estate, it is also possible to negotiate their membership of the group owning the estate of conception. The cultural system thus provides a syntax of social relationships. Ambiguity is eliminated by assigning persons to positions specified by the system mapped out upon the landscape by the ancestors’ travels (for an example from central Australia, see Layton 1995:223–230).

While this process might not be considered truly creative, it demonstrates the way in which Aboriginal people can move around in, and explore, their conceptual space, a skill that Boden argues is a prerequisite to transforming that space (Boden 1994:523). Linguistic evidence suggests that the kinship system used by the Alawa and many neighbouring communities was developed by combining two simpler systems (McConvell 1985). This transformation doubled the number of kinship positions in the system and made possible a third ritual role, that of darlnyin, which one plays toward the clan of one’s mother’s mother and her brother. Under the simpler systems, these roles would have been indistinguishable from those of father’s father and his sister. Darlnyin are particularly charged with ensuring that miniringgi wear their own clan’s body painting, and do not inadvertently appear to claim another clan’s land by bearing their painting.