Yolngu Culture

, both remote and urban, and have the potential to impact upon the design of built environments. The intersection of Indigenous spiritual beliefs and non-indigenous place making and architecture can create 'intercultural' products. Merlan, an anthropologist, uses the term intercultural to describe the character of interrelational processes between different groups or individuals not merely outcomes or products. 1 She draws our attention to the mutually constitutive nature of those interrelationships. In this paper the creation of intercultural places and housing, in Arnhem Land and Brisbane, Australia, are explored. While some SAHANZ authors such as Austin, Brown and McKay have looked toward biculturalism in examining contemporary Maori and Pakeha architectures, relatively little analysis has been conducted in Australia for Indigenous architectures. 2 In Arnhem Land, housing has been created in the past decade that attempts to synthesize Yol!u cultural beliefs, such as avoidance relationships and sorcery, with non-Indigenous building technologies and project delivery. In Inala in Brisbane, parks and houses have been enculturated by Indigenous community members in ways which create a dialogue between Indigenous beliefs in spirits and place meanings, and non-Indigenous spaces. Although these case studies differ in cultural context and history, they both constitute intercultural products through a dynamic relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural values, which are expressed through spatial manifestations.

This paper focuses on a water management project in the remote Aboriginal community of Milingimbi, Northern Australia. Drawing on materials and experiences from two distinct stages of this project, we revisit a policy report and engage in ethnographic storytelling in order to highlight a series of sensing practices associated with water management. In the former, a working symmetry between Yolngu and Western water knowledges is actively sought through the practices of the project. However, in the latter, recurrent asymmetries in the research work continue to appear: a bilingual diagram of water usage is displayed, but produces confusion; measuring a waterhole for salinity, a member of the scientific team throws in a water meter while a Yolngu Elder prefers the telling of an ancestral story; a collaborative 3D mapping exercise invites participation from community members but struggles to develop an outcome that differs from existing maps used by scientists and government staff. Focusing on these moments as subtle points of rupture, we suggest that attending to “seeing,” “telling,” and “mapping” in both stages of this water management project offers a way to explore the political work of crafting climate futures and beginning to interrogate differing means for “doing difference” within them.

The concept of emergence brings to the fore issues of scale and level of analysis. As ‘fully modern humans’ – something completely new on the planet – it applies to all of us. Current Western ideology argues for the primacy of individual creativity. Anthropologists were once focused on something in between – cultures, societies, and the similarities and differences between them. Today many anthropologists have become uncomfortable with difference because all they see around them is an interconnected world that seems to challenge any concept of boundary. And yet we continue to see all around us groups that resist incorporation within larger entities. Our focus is on one of those societies, Yolngu society, showing how people can create new institutions that face in two directions – inwards to their ‘world’ of difference and outwards from it. We argue that humans can do this because of the complexity of social worlds that are characterised by the relative autonomy of their components – such as language, kinship system, hierarchy, mode of subsistence. Continuing societies are particular articulations of these relatively autonomous components, and these articulations may shift over time – coherence is always emergent. In periods of stability the structures that keep these relatively autonomous components in place and adjusting to one another create the coherence, the predictability, the intersubjectivity that makes it possible to exist and to act socially in the world. In times of rapid social change the property of relative autonomy allows groups the space to remake themselves, and fit into and influence newly emerging contexts out of which new bodies of practice emerge. We will illustrate this process with a concrete example of a new institution that has emerged out of a trajectory of change in mortuary practices as Yolngu society adjusts to the impact of European colonisation.