‘… dans quelques centaines d’années, en ce même lieu, un autre voyageur, aussi désespéré que moi, pleurera la disparition de ce que j’aurais pu voir et qui m’a échappé. Victime d’une double infirmité, tout ce que j’aperçois me blesse. Et je me reproche sans relâche de ne pas regarder assez’.1
Claude Levi-Strauss tells the story of a reality that is literally vanishing before his eyes. He meets the last representatives of tribes of the Amazonian rain forests, about to give-up their way of life. He recorded their stories as an anthropologist being concerned about their disappearance. But were the tribes unknowingly sharing? Lindqvist2 tells the story of Ted Strehlow and Geoffrey Bardon whom both managed to win the trust of aboriginal elders in the Australian dessert. In Lindqvist’s view they were; ’chosen to be the instrument for their (the aboriginals) survival’. They both did the same thing, but employed very different approaches.
Strehlow turned ritual songs into written text that could be published and distributed (and a very large archive of 40 years worth of notes, film and sound recordings towards which he developed a proprietary mentality). These ‘texts without their melodies’, like his Aranda Traditions (1947), were years ahead of their time in posing that the intellect of the ‘primitive’ was in no way inferior to that of the modern man. A message largely lost on Anglo-Saxon readers, but taken up by Claude Levi-Strauss, who incorporated these insights into La Pensee Sauvage (1962). Bardon in turn, transformed body painting and sand stories into permanent (mobile and tradable) paintings, starting an artistic and creative explosion including many aboriginal artist that still continues today.
Let us return to the opening quote from Levi-Strauss (1955) Tristes tropiques, and read it in a lager context:
‘The paradox is irresoluble: the less one culture communicates with another, the less likely they are to be corrupted, one by the other; but, on the other hand, the less likely it is, in such conditions, that the respective emissaries of these cultures will be able to seize the richness and significance of their diversity.
The alternative is inescapable: either I am a traveler in ancient times, and faced with a prodigious spectacle which would be almost entirely unintelligible to me and might, indeed, provoke me to mockery or disgust; or I am a traveler of our own day, hastening in search of a vanished reality. In either case I am the loser - and more heavily than one might suppose; for today, as I go groaning among the shadows, I miss, inevitably, the spectacle that is now taking shape.
My eyes, or perhaps my degree of humanity, do not equip me to witness that spectacle; and in a few hundred years, in this very place, another traveler, as desperate as I am, will mourn the loss of what I could have seen and escaped me. Victim of a double infirmity, everything I see hurts me. And I constantly reproach myself for not looking hard enough.’
If in many past and present pre-literate societies rock-art has been used to communicate ideas, believes, ancestral knowledge, traditions, identities, rules, stories, social behaviour or laws. To what extent can this information be understood (decoded) by an outsider? Can a modern archaeologists (or should even try) ‘read’ the hidden cultural information? We might have clear indications that Rouffignac finger fluting patterns were ‘a form of recognizable, efficient communication’ (see Rouffignac prehistoric cave art post), but will we ever understand them?
‘As any form of communication rock-art requires a sender (the person who encodes the information, which in this case will be the artist/s), a message (the information or content to be shared), a channel (the art forms) and a receiver/s (who decode/s the message). For the transmission of information to have maximal effectiveness the interacting agents (sender and receiver/s) need to share a common set of signs, symbols or language. But what happens when there is no common cultural background among the interacting agents?’3
To answer this question a series of experiments was conducted in Australia. Aboriginal rock-art was first researched within its archaeological context to gather information on potential function and symbolic meaning. The outcomes were then compared to the versions of Indigenous elders and artists in the Arnhem Land and Barunga regions. The results showed that it was sometimes possible the derive the function of the art, but rarely the symbolic meaning.
Confronted with ice-age rock-art we look for clues in pre-literate societies. Australian aboriginals, north and south American Indians, southern African bushmen, central African Pygmies or Siberian hunter gatherers are sometimes invited to European caves to record their interpretations. Clearly, none of these could be expected to accurately interpret each-others art, let alone the specific cultural background of ice-age Europe. But can it reveal the inner workings of La Pensee Sauvage, a way of thinking that our modern fragmented minds finds difficult to grasp (more on that in a later post).
‘The Ancients sang their way all over the world. They sang the rivers and ranges, salt-pans and sand dunes. They hunted, ate, made love, danced, killed: wherever their tracks led they left a trail of music. …
It struck me, from what I now knew of the Songlines, that the whole of Classical mythology might represent the relics of a gigantic “song-map”: that all the to-ing and fro-ing of gods and goddesses, the caves and sacred springs, the sphinxes and chimaeras, and all the men and women who became nightingales or ravens, echoes or narcissi, stones or stars – could all be interpreted in terms of totemic geography.’4
Chatwin was reading Strehlow’s (1971) Songs of Central Australia, and seems to have bought into the idea that every aspect of Arboriginal song had its counterpart in Hebrew or Ancient Greek literature, having grasped the connection of song and land. Chatwin writes; ‘He was, I am convinced, a highly original thinker. His books are great and lonely books’. And was upset by the ‘attacks of the “activists” who accused him of stealing the songs, with a view to publish, from innocent and unsuspecting elders.’ The ‘dismissive biography’ he found in a local bookstore struck him as being beneath contempt.
So how about those ‘innocent and unsuspecting elders’ victims of history (written by the self-motivated victors) without agency?5 Ted Strehlow was born (6 June 1908 ) at Hermannsburg (Ntaria), southwest of Alice Springs on the Finke River. His father, Carl Strehlow, had been a Lutheran pastor there since 1896. Carl studied and documented the local languages, work on which Ted would built. He was raised trilingually, speaking, in addition to English, also Arrernte with the Aboriginal maids and native children, and German with his immediate family.
Ted started his fieldwork with a journey north from Alice Springs into Anmatyerr country in the winter of 1932. He found the Anmatyerr people eager participants in his recording and documentation work which opened his eyes to the storied landscape: the inherent connection between mythologies, people, landscape and ancestral beings across linguistic or cultural divides. In September 2006, Gibson played film materials and sound recordings (1965) to some of those originally involved in their registration, some now in the 80s and 90s.
They remembered him as a ‘privileged documenter’, a akiw-arenye, meaning someone belonging to or inhabiting the ceremonial ground, not someone leading or controlling it. They had been aware of Strehlow’s aim to detail the connections between dreaming stories, estates, people and sites. Mick Werlaty (Wolatja), an Anmatyerr elder in his 70s had asked Strehlow for help in protecting a culturally important site from the construction of a road.
Ted filmed its ceremonies and recording its songs over a five-week period documenting over 28 separate performances. ‘The Akurrpele films, along with 225 recorded verses, the hundreds of pages of fieldnotes, 140 photographs and the 32 ceremonial objects collected, constitute what is possibly the most complete document of a single estate ever produced in Australia’.
Later on Strehlow claimed to be the ‘sole heir and possessor’ of the documentation and the ritual objects presented (given) to him. Participants recalled this differently: ‘the ceremonial cycle had been presented to Strehlow for documentation purposes’. The elders had shared this material recognizing ‘a new and changing context in which this symbolic labor could be organized and legitimated’. Today local researchers are completing some of Strehlow’s work. Using his extensive descriptions (field diaries), recordings and their own first-hand knowledge.
Ted might not have realized the changes in attitudes the decades of de-colonization were bringing (especially on the side of the colonized). His European notions of ‘spirituality and sacredness’ might have been guided by a ‘nostalgic search for rootedness in the past’, overlooking the social realities in the present that were looking for a way forwards. His views were eurocentric, with an undeniable fascination for the primitive, but these failings do not seem to dominate Anmatyerr memories of Strehlow. ‘Instead, he is discussed as an ethnographer of exceptional skill, particularly when documenting song’.
It does contain a warning though, even today seemingly overlooked, about the same nostalgic and primitivist attitudes towards indigenous people. (Un)Consciously connecting them to ice-age relics, we might forget they share the same present with us. We should leave the notion of the ‘noble savage’ behind, investigating, recognizing and making space for our own Pensee Sauvage in the inner workings of our, still human, mind.
Published English translation: ‘... and in the centuries to come, when another traveller revisits this same place, he too may groan aloud at the disappearance of much that I should have set down, but cannot’. Not very satisfying, so I give my version above. Originally in:
Lévi-Strauss C.1955. Tristes tropiques. Terre Humaine Plon. Presses pocket, 2008. ISBN:978-2-266-11982-5 (= Tristes tropiques English translation 1975; accessible through the internet archive.
Lindqvist S., 2007. Een reis door niemandsland – Hoe de Aboriginals Australië verloren. ISBN: 978 90 445 0867 3. (= in original Swedish; Lindqvist S., 2005. Terra nullius - en resa genom ingens land. ISBN: 9100105996.)
Inès D., Sally M. et Claire S., 2014. Communicating through rock art: an ethnoarchaeological perspective. (p. 9-26 ). In: Buchsenschutz O., (dir.), 2016. Signes et communication dans les civilisations sans paroles. Nouvelle édition [en ligne]. Paris : Éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques ISBN: 9782735508709. Accessible through OpenEdition books.
Chatwin B., 1987. The Songlines. Vintage publishing (1998). ISBN 0 09 076991 3.
Gibson J. 2017. ‘Only the best is good enough for eternity’: Revisiting the ethnography of T.G.H. Strehlow. Chapter 10. (pp.243-271) In: Peterson N. et Kenny A. (Eds.) German Ethnography in Australia. ISBN: 9781760461317. Accessible through Australian National University.