A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies: Alternative Firing Regimes of Environmental Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners
Abstract
I juxtapose a story of Aboriginal landowners demonstrating their firing strategies with a story of environmental scientists elaborating their regimes of burning. The firings are profoundly different, and maintaining those differences is crucial for both Aborigines and scientists. Yet it is also important for both these groups to develop links between the forms of firing. I argue for understanding both firing regimes as expressions of collective memory which embed evaluative witness. This sameness enables modest yet sufficient connection. Acknowledging this translating form of ‘sameness’ would have scientists and Aborigines engaging an alternative form of generalizing, promoting a transformative moment in both knowledge traditions. This alternative form of generalizing embeds a politics different from the politics embedded in orthodox scientific and Yolngu forms of generalizing. I claim the tension made in articulating these alternative forms of generalizing as a ‘postcolonial moment’.
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I am grateful to members of the Ngaymilclan for introducing me to their country, and to all participants in the 1996 Wathawuy WorrkWorkshop. The Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation and the Garma Cultural Studies Institute provide an institutional location for my work, and make a significant contribution to it. I presented earlier versions of this paper in the History of Consciousness Program, University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1998; the Postcolonial Institute, Melbourne, in 1999; the Social Theory Program Seminars, Department of History & Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne, in 2000; and a Workshop sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Center, in 2001. In each case, I gained important insights from the responses of my audience.
1. This way of understanding the term ‘postcolonial moment’ links up with Hall’s observation that the term postcolonial points to ‘a notion of a shift or a transition conceptualised as a reconfiguration of a field, rather than as a movement of a linear transcendence between two mutually exclusive states. Such transformations are not only not completed but they can not be best captured within a paradigm which assumes that all major historical shifts are driven by a necessitarian logic towards a teleological end’ [Hall (1996): 254].
2. For an account of another of these workshops, see Verran (2002). These hybrid workshops were invented by a group of Yolngu teachers and teacher-educators as part of an innovative school curriculum in this Aboriginal community in the late 1980s: see Marika-Munggiritj (1990).
3. The Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation is established through a board comprised of clan elders, and set up according to protocols of Yolngu governance (see http://www.octa4.net.au/dhimurr).Dhimurru employs several Yolngu men as rangers and an environmental scientist as administrative officer. At the time of the workshop, several employees of the Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife Commission were located at Dhimurru: see Ayre (2002).
4. The Garma Cultural Studies Institute was established in 1994 by the Yothu Yindi Foundation, which in turn grew from an internationally famous rock band, YothuYindi. The Foundation grew from the success of the band, in that the band established an Education Foundation (legally, a charitable organization) with its profits. This was a way of promoting community development, and of recognizing the collective nature of the intellectual property rights that either directly constitutes their music, or inspired it. The Institute aims to become an accredited provider of tertiary level instruction in Yolngu philosophies within the Australian academy. With the Yothu Yindi Foundation, it stages the annual Garma Festival at Gulkula in Northeast Arnhem Land. In 2002, the forum focus is Indigenous Environmental Knowledge. The Institute acts as a broker in many educational and research activities in the region (see http://www.garma.telstra.com/ index.htm).
5. This goes back to the original invention of ecology in the 1950s by the Odum brothers [Odum (1971)], but the ‘na®ive’ paradigm is restated in a recent textbook [Ricklefs (1990)].
6. This recently developing strand in ecological theory, which abandons notions of a single, natural climax, has become necessary ‘with the increasing recognition that natural disturbances are a feature of most environments. Whether originating in animal, wind or fire effects, they keep the ecosystem from ever reaching a stable equilibrium in any place. Instead, ecosystems come to be imaged as a patchwork or mosaic or ages of recovery from localised disturbances’ [Fairhead et al. (1996): 281]. This controversy has recently been usefully summarized [Baker (2000)].
7. The existence of the mine, and the fact that the Yolngu Aboriginal clans now have freehold title to their clan lands under the 1976 NT Land Rights Legislation, are consequentially linked [Williams (1986)]. The fact that they have undisputed ownership of their lands is what enables the Yolngu clans to continue their traditions of land management, and generously invite scientists to witness episodes of that management.
8. Reserved lands in Australia are generally National Parks, or State Parks. Mobilizing the IUCN definition that indigenous resource use and customary land management contribute to biodiversity conservation, the Australian Government opted to meet some of its IUCN treaty obligations through an Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) scheme.
9. The Garma Mathematics curriculum of Yirrkala Community School is elaborated in a series of four videos entitled Living Maths. These videos were produced by Merle Thornton, and published in 1996 by Boulder Valley Films. The four-video set, and an accompanying book, are distributed by the Australian Film Institute, in Melbourne.
10. The Dhimurru website explains the Yolngu cosmos this way: ‘The Yolngu (Aboriginal people of Northeast Arnhem Land, Australia) universe is divided into two halves or sections, called Yirritja and Dhuwa. This includes people, plants, animals, land... everything’: http://www.octa4.net.au/dhimurr
11. ‘Balanda’ is a term Yolngu use to refer to non-Aboriginal Australians. They identify it as a Macassan word, and claim it is a form of ‘Hollander’. Yolngu developed extensive links with fishermen from the island of Macassar (now part of Indonesia) over the 18th and 19th centuries. The Australian Government intervened to stop contact early in the 20th century.
12. A Burning Issue: Management of Vegetation Using Fire, Producer/Director Francis Treacey, Research/Script by Robyn Adams and Peter Box (Geelong, Victoria: Department of Environmental Assessment and Land Use, Faculty of Applied Science, Deakin University, Burwood Campus, 1985). This video was produced for the Department of Environment Assessment and Land Use by the Course Development Centre, Deakin University: ‘An account of how and why controlled “cool” burning can be used to maintain and develop the bush environment’. It is distributed by Video in Education Worldwide (Melbourne).
13. Claire Waterton describes being inducted into these routines and rituals [Waterton (2002): 183].
14. A similar sort of description of the functioning of a field-site, far richer in detail than the one I give here, is found in Latour (1995).
15. I am taking up ‘micro-world‘ from Rouse (1987): 105, who names laboratories as ‘micro-worlds’, elaborating the notion as a Foucauldian site of interrogation, normalization and tracking. Rouse confines his use of micro-worlds to laboratories. I am extending it not only to include laboratory-like field-sites, but further, to the most banal and ordinary sites of getting on in collective life. My alternative account of generalizing [Verran (2001): 159–62] develops Rouse’s notion further. My notion of ‘evaluative witness’ derives from Shapin & Schaffer (1985).
16. ‘The collective’ is a crucial analytic unit in actor-network theory. It is seen as the outcome of translations. See Callon, Law & Rip (1986), Callon (1986), Latour (1987) and Latour (1999).
17. I am drawing on a notion of memory which recognizes the ways habitual actions become sedimented in disciplined muscles: see Connerton (1989): 102, and O’Shaughnessy (1995).
18. Shapin & Schaffer (1985): 76–79, point to ‘three technologies’– social, material and literary – as reconstituting the nature of assent in the emergence of the ‘experimental life’ in 17th-century England. They also constitute technologies of collective memory.
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