Kay Weiner									2/5/07
Computing and Its Consequences					Blumberg

Chapter 8: Virtualities

Eric Michaels

For a Cultural Future

Introduction:

Michaels studied the impact of the introduction of TV, VCRs and satellite into the Australian Aborigines community of the Warlpiri (particularly the Yuendumu community). The Warlpiri are an oral, kin-based people that exchange information on a face-to-face basis. He examined the differences between the old and new knowledge systems, and how they can best work together. 

“Knowledge is the social, economic and political glue that holds societies together. Some people have the right to know, others may have the right to use and still others the right to hear or see or perform.” Puoskari (page 395)

Social Diversity:

-Warlpiri identify themselves by their relatedness in the community (i.e. brother, sister, brother in law, etc.) called totemic groups by anthropologists. The community is then divisioned into 'two sides' engaged in reciprocal obligations.

-Expressive labor and particular relations of ritual production reaching into social life and action

- Warlpiri 'nation' is comprised of over 5,000 people, of the north, south, east and west of the Yuendumu. +Social Matrix+

Fight Fire With Fire:

-In 1983-84 Francis Kelly aka Jupurrurla trained and worked with all the male subsections of the community to work on the video project. This was in response to to prospect of satellite television.

	Differences Between Aboriginal and European Creative Practices:

" Ideological sources and access to inspiration;
 Cultural constraints on invention and imagination;
Epistemological bases for representation and actuality;
Indistinctiveness of boundaries between authorship and oeuvre;
Restrictions on who makes or views expressive acts." (page 415)

- European art practices - "the artist as an independent producer/inventor  of original products for the consumption/ use of public audiences." (page 415)

- European inclination to appropriate Aboriginal media to promote the ideal of the 'primitive' fantasies of evolutionary sequences.

- Video taping by Jupurrurla = cultural broker, to resolve political, theological, and aesthetic contradictions in contemporary circumstances.

A New Technology to Fit a Particular Information-based Culture

-In 1972 Nicolas Peterson and Roger Sandall met with the Warlpiri to videotape the Fire Ceremony (a very important community event). The event symbolizes the resolution of conflict, a "pressure valve for the community as a whole". 
	The Fire Ceremony consists of one side of the community arranges a dancing ground , with great columns of brush, and highly decorated poles. The other side paints themselves and dances. After several days and nights of dances, they dress up in costumes made of dry brush. At night they dance with towards the fire and are beaten by the side that has been watching the festivities.(page 416)

- By the time Michaels was there in 1983, the ceremony was only a memory. It had been banned after one of the owners had died, the ceremony had been traded to another community and the church had suppressed it.

 What role did the new media of recording it have in the history of the ceremony?

- The community decided to preform the Fire Ceremony after the 1983 film crew arrived. As preparations proceeded the video influenced the ritual in many ways.

- The original video made by Peterson became the 'number one law'. (Though the new video was not exactly the same, no one noticed.)

- Some of the material in the video was sacred to the Yuendumu and when it was shown to the nearby Willowra community, some information about the ceremony was not supposed to be shown and runners had to intercept the tape and replace it with one that had been edited. 

- In oral societies information is more valued than material sources and ceremonies and ritual information is learned slowly and can take many years.

- To assure security of the original copies they were motivated to broadcast the tapes to establish political intent.

How will the Yuendumu cope with this new technology?

- Alien producers do not know what they take away from the Aborigines and they must be careful. Copyright plays into all kinds of contexts.

- "Many Aborigines do wish to be identified, recognized, and acknowledged in modern media, as well as to become practitioners of their own. They recognize the prestige, the political value, the economic bargaining position that a well placed story in the national press can provide. They attempt to evaluate the advantages - and what they are told is the necessity - of compromising certain cultural forms to achieve this." (page 419)

- The practice of cultural reproduction is essential.

Will video make our community strong or will we lose our law?

- Continuity of modes of cultural production across media. Ways of using the medium to conform to their traditional oral form.

- Ability of the culture to construct itself and it's image for themselves and the world.

Lifestyle (assemblages of commodified symbols, operating in concert packages which can be bought, sold ,traded or lost) vs. Culture (a learned, inherited tradition)

Cultural Future vs. Lifestyle Future

- Traditional modes of cultural production but also for the political survival of indigenous people there is a dependency on their capacity to continue reproducing these forms.

vs.

- Loss of the Yuendumu community to a commercial rationale for a lifestyle economy, in which they will have a very different interaction with media. They become a piece of the construction of a national, multi-cultural image. 

"A cultural future can only result from political resistance. It will not be founded on any appeal to nostalgia for a past whose existence will always be obscure and unknown, nor a nostalgia we project into a future conceived only in terms of the convoluted temporalities of our own present." (page 422)