Reflexive Ethnographic Practice

Three Generations of Social Researchers in One Place

Amanda Kearney, John Bradley, Amanda Kearney, John Bradley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030348984
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Putting the anthropological imagination under the spotlight, this book represents the experience of three generations of researchers, each of whom have long collaborated with the same Indigenous community over the course of their careers. In the context of a remote Indigenous Australian community in northern Australia, these researchers—anthropologists, an archeologist, a literary scholar, and an artist—encounter reflexivity and ethnographic practice through deeply personal and professionally revealing accounts of anthropological consciousness, relational encounters, and knowledge sharing. In six discrete chapters, the authors reveal the complexities that run through these relationships, considering how any one of us builds knowledge, shares knowledge, how we encounter different and new knowledge, and how well we are positioned to understand the lived experiences of others, whilst making ourselves fully available to personal change. At its core, this anthology is a meditation on learning and friendship across cultures.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. Kearney, J. Bradley (eds.)Reflexive Ethnographic Practicehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34898-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Scene for a Reflexive Practice

Amanda Kearney¹ and John Bradley²

(1)

Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

(2)

Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

Amanda Kearney (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

John Bradley

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

EthnographyStorytellingIndigenousSettler colonialReflexivityChange

End Abstract

The Start of a Story

This book is a story of relationships. It is a story of intersecting lives and experiences, as they have taken place in a remote township in northern Australia, between local Indigenous residents and a group of researchers who have long visited and collaborated with them. We write here as anthropologists, an artist, archaeologist, and literary scholar, each of us having shared in the documenting of Indigenous people’s lives through the interface of ethnography, relational encounters, and knowledge sharing. Presented as six discrete chapters, this book should be read as a “big story,” revealing the complexities that run through these relationships. It is, at its core, a story of learning and friendship across cultures. Ruth Behar (2003: xvii), an anthropologist, and humanist scholar of substance, whose work inspires much of this book’s intentions and hopes, reminds us that

We cannot live without stories. Our need for stories of our lives is so huge, so intense, so fundamental, that we would lose our humanity if we stopped trying to tell stories of who we think we are. And even more important, if we stopped wanting to listen to each other’s stories.

The context for these stories is essential to how the narrative unfolds. The scene is Yanyuwa Country, a remarkable part of northern Australia, located throughout the saltwater limits of the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria (see Figs. 1.1 and 1.4).

Fig. 1.1

Yanyuwa sea Country, southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia

(Source Authors)

There is scarcely a creek, a hill, a river, a stretch of sea, a reef, a bay, or peninsula of land in Yanyuwa Country that does not have a name, a story, or even a song. Similarly, there is not a bird, a fish, a mammal, or an insect that does not have a place in the multidimensional mythological and social web that forms the narrative map of relationships between members of this language group and their homelands. “Country” is a term used by many Indigenous Australian language groups to refer to their homelands as made up of land, sea, bodies of water, kin, and resources. It is a holistic term. Rose (2014: 435) describes it further as an “Aboriginal English term,” an

area associated with a human social group, and with all the plants, animals, landforms, waters, songlines, and sacred sites within its domain. It is homeland in the mode of kinship: the enduring bonds of solidarity that mark relationships between human and animal kin also mark the relationships between creatures and their Country.

Country is a “nourishing terrain” (Rose 1996: 7). Even now, abused as it might be, by a heavy colonial presence, the land and sea of Yanyuwa Country is thick with knowledge and meanings that are beyond the reach of history and which are undergoing transformation in a new world where young Indigenous people are finding their own pathways toward identity affirmation and cultural strength. This is the world into which we (the contributors), have entered and stretched “the sinews” of our minds, to understand and write of Indigenous experience, and Yanyuwa culture, as academics (Stanner 1968 in Manne 2010: 204). Yet the academic engagement is only one part of the story, made richer by the interspersing of our personal narratives and the relational bonds that have been cultivated, in this place, over decades of collaboration.

What we hope to achieve with this book is a generationally nuanced and revealing account of ethnographic fieldwork, set against the distinctive backdrop of this one Indigenous community, in Borroloola, northern Australia (Figs. 1.2, 1.4). Accounting for the generational differences and similarities in how social researchers establish and undertake their ethnographic fieldwork reveals much about how the lives of our collaborators and teachers in the field determine the very nature of the ethnographic encounter. A distinctive feature of the book lies in the fact that each contributor has a long-term connection with this one community and yet offers a different account of ethnography, as aligned with different research commitments, disciplinary backgrounds, and individual identities, as a negotiated and personally rewarding and challenging encounter.

Fig. 1.2

Arriving in Borroloola, southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia

(Source Authors)

Of the contributors to this book, we must write, in particular of how they found their way to Borroloola and into the relational encounter that has become long-term collaborations with Yanyuwa families (see Fig. 1.3). It begins with John Bradley, an anthropologist and linguist who arrived in Borroloola in 1980. Entering the scene first as a young school teacher, John has spent his entire adult life living and learning with Yanyuwa, documenting their saltwater culture, and collaborating on language maintenance efforts, land claims and a whole suite of Yanyuwa determined projects including film, and digital animations of Ancestral narratives and songs. He expands on these efforts and the lingering discomfort he feels on matters of translation, translatability, knowledge sharing, and writing in this chapter. He has dedicated his career to working with Yanyuwa and advocating for the need (if not imperative) to be in better relation with other, in this case Indigenous, ways of knowing.

Fig. 1.3

Timeline of ‘arrivals’ in Borroloola, and the start of collaborations with Yanyuwa families

Amanda Kearney was introduced to members of the Yanyuwa community in 1999. Never resting in their commitment to safeguard knowledge, and to fight for the rights to their lands and waters Yanyuwa agreed to begin working with her in an effort to document the emotional geography of their Country. Their working with Amanda leads to a Yanyuwa narration of the effects of alienation from Country through the forces of cultural wounding. Recalling the experiences of violence that Yanyuwa and their Country have lived through, has been a step toward redressing the national silence on the prevailing impact of loss of rights to lands and waters for one Indigenous Australian community. Amanda has now spent two decades documenting the generationally nuanced commitment within this community to healing actions in the face of cultural wounding. In Chapter 3 she explores the impact this has had on her “epistemic habit” and reflects on the extent to which we might be challenged and changed through sustained ethnographic encounters. In collaboration with Bradley, she now turns her attention to the Yanyuwa experience of fighting for legislative land rights, an undertaking that now enters its 44th year for this community.

Introduced to Borroloola and Yanyuwa families in the mid 1980s as “Bradley’s wife,” Nona Cameron recounts in Chapter 4 her own journey of collaborating and working with Yanyuwa as a visual artist. Her relationships with this place and its people are tied not only to her linkages with John, but also her undertaking to visually document Yanyuwa culture in the formidable text, Forget About Flinders: An Indigenous Atlas of the Southwest Gulf of Carpentaria (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley and Cameron 2003). An Indigenous atlas, this work was commissioned by Yanyuwa, to reinforce their linkages to Country above and beyond a white settler colonial ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Scene for a Reflexive Practice
• 2. Writing from the Edge: Writing What Was Never Meant to Be Written
• 3. Mobility of Mind: Can We Change Our Epistemic Habit Through Sustained Ethnographic Encounters?
• 4. Mapping the Route to the Yanyuwa Atlas
• 5. “Invisible Things in Nature”: A Reflexive Reading of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria
• 6. Encounters with Yanyuwa Rock Art: Reflexivity, Multivocality, and the “Archaeological Record” in Northern Australia’s Southwest Gulf Country
• 7. “So Did You Find Any Culture Up Here Mate?”: Young Men, “Deficit” and Change
• Back Matter