Shimmering
Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal
Community
by Jennifer
Deger
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
MN, 2006
267 pp. Paper, $22.50
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4922-7.
Reviewed by Jonathan
Zilberg
jonathanzilberg@gmail.com
Mululuarrgalarrnga, Yuduryuryudur, Yirrgirinydjingur,
Gamadalalanguriya . . . these are the
song names of the source of the sacred
waters of the Gularri river that snakes
through northeast Arnhem Land and empties
into the Arufua Sea. With these
"inside" words, the film Gularri
begins. Onomatopoeic, reserved for sacred
rituals, and used here in the profane
public context of the mass media, for
a television documentary, their naming
sets both the tone and the problematic
nature for all that follows. Thus Gularri
begins with Charlie Ngalambirra, a
dhalkara (ritual specialist) intoning
the names of the Yirritja moiety clans
and the ancestral places they are connected
to and through along the river. The synaesthetic
effect is enhanced by the subsequent blurring
of the images of dancers performing the
secret Yirrita Yolngu ngarra revelatory
rites, partly recognizable but blurred
by the effect of shimmering water
the central metaphor and key Yolngu symbol
explored in Shimmering Screens: Making
Media in an Aboriginal Community.
Indeed, as the late Bangana Wunungmurra,
the Aboriginal consultant for the film,
declaimed: "When they hear that they
know we are not mucking around."
Little wonder then that after the unexpected
death of a woman featured in the video,
the program was no longer allowed to be
shown and that Banganas subsequent
sudden death was widely perceived as the
consequence of a sorcerers revenge.
Shimmering Screens is at the leading
edge of a disciplinary paradigm shift
in which anthropologists are taking into
account the role of media in daily life
and how individuals and communities use
media to make sense of their lives. Drawing
as would be expected on Benjamin, and
more so on Heideggers lesser known
work on technology and imagery, Deger
conveys a deeply sensitive understanding
of the power of images and transmission
of sacred Yolngu knowledge. Above all,
Shimmering Screens is a reflective
account of a collaborative film project.
Throughout, Jennifer Deger is concerned
with relating what it means to be Yolngu
and ultimately what the imagery of shimmering
waters conveys and conceals. It is in
great part an account of the production
of a documentary film in which she and
her key informant Bangana Wunungmurra
sought to strengthen local culture and
knowledge through the mass media. The
explicit aim was to convey a sense of
indigenous sacra while sufficiently protecting
its secrecy and carefully negotiating
and respecting different clans ownership
of particular places along the river,
the ownership of ancestral knowledge relating
to these sites and thus their relationships
to each other. It reveals a great deal
about the importance of the restrictions
placed on the circulation of knowledge
and yet how Bangana was able to successfully
convey the sense of the sacred and the
power of ancestral heritage or
in the short life of the film and in his
death the very opposite. In this,
Shimmering Screens raises as many
ripples to explore in the future as its
presentation would otherwise suggest.
This is
a classic example of what the ethnographic
study of media has to offer in terms of
understanding the complex bi-directional
production and reception of indigenous
media but more importantly perhaps for
critically assessing the future analytic
value of the self-reflexive phenomenological
turn. The lasting contribution of this
work may well turn out to be that it could
provide a watershed mark for assessing
the evolution of interpretive anthropology
as it has developed since the mid 1980s.
Above and beyond its fascinating ethnographic
insights into Yolngu aesthetics, particularly
relating to water, it provides an excellent
example for social scientists at large
to critically assess the now medium term
results of the post-modernist interpretive
turn in anthropology. The question that
occurs to me to ask is whether the subjective
self-reflective aspect of the interpretive
quest in anthropology has gone too far.
In this Shimmering Screens ultimately
raises unintended and unsettling questions
about the future of the discipline itself.
While it is a fascinating case study which
deftly engages and advances the study
of ethnographic media what has been left
out about modernity, popular culture and
connection to new media forms is intriguing
despite the obvious caveat that there
is only so much territory an ethnographer
can cover. Nevertheless, the intensity
of the role of popular culture and the
mass media, which Deger refers to here
and there in passing, signals a critical
blind spot. Future researchers might thus
be well advised to take note of a trail
worth exploring in the Australian outback,
no doubt less romantic, but no less revealing.
This is an important issue as the central
premise of the study is about understanding
the influence of modern media on Aboriginal
society particularly television, music,
radio and video, yet we learn exceedingly
little about such popular culture. This
observation is not intended to diminish
the fundamental ethnographic contribution
of the work in terms of what it does reveal
about Yolngu aesthetics but to call attention
to studies such as Buried Country
by Clinton Walker (2000) such that future
ethnographers might return to such communities
and revisit the larger cultural context
from which Shimmering Screens emerged
so as to arrive at a more complex understanding
of the large media environment. Such ethnographies
will have to document the drug use, the
drinking and the violence, the depression
and the innumerable premature deaths,
the dark side - but all this alongside
the potencies of the pleasures the youth
take in lives half-lived. That is the
other side of the story that urgently
needs to be told in order to better understand
this video and Banganas life and
sudden death believed by many to be an
act of sorcery.
To return to the wider significance of
this study to social science, the critical
reader might in the end be left wondering
whether it is time for anthropology to
re-evaluate not the phenomenological turn,
nor the interest in imagination and the
role of media in daily life, but the value
of such transparent and constant self-reflexivity.
How much stronger could such a study be
if the self-reflection was implicit rather
than explicit? Should not the process
of introspection simply inform a richer
analysis of Yolngu aesthetics in and of
itself or has this particular
tributary of interpretive media anthropology
become as much a confessional form of
understanding the self as the other?
Ultimately perhaps the strongest aspect
of the work lies in its elucidation of
the shimmering revelatory aesthetics relating
to water and generalized as a metaphor
for ancestral knowledge in the arts of
Arnhem land. Indeed, for those interested
in the ways in which different cultures
relate to water specifically and to nature
and each other more generally, this will
prove a fascinating study. This will be
especially the case for the Leonardo community
as it will stimulate us to reflect back
upon Leonardos project "Le
Pouvoir de la Genie" in 2000 which
combined the arts and science in order
to better understand rivers and water
in Africa. In this era of climate change
and global warming, we might do well then
to look to the future value of indigenous
knowledge relating to water but now in
the context of an emerging humanitarian
and economic crisis already well underway
in the drier areas of Australia.