Almost eight years after our first meeting, Edith Nakkamarra and I sat
in her backyard on Smith Street watching an iPhoto slide show on my
PowerBook G3.1
Edith Nakkamarra is a
Warumungu woman and one of my main collaborators in Tennant
Creek.
Photo after photo—nearly 1,000 in all—prompted
discussions of several years' worth of trips to locations in and
around the remote town of Tennant Creek in Australia's Northern
Territory.
2 Tennant Creek is located five
hundred kilometers north of Alice Springs in Australia's Northern
Territory. The population is approximately 2500 people—roughly half
are Aboriginal. The town is situated in the traditional country of the
Warumungu; however, Warlpiri, Alyawarr, Kaytetye, and Warlmanpa people
live there along with non-Aboriginal people. With sustained contact
beginning in the late 1870s and the incorporation of the town in 1934,
Warumungu people were forcibly removed and alternately placed on reserves,
government settlements, and Christian missions. For a history of
successive Warumungu displacements, see Stanner, “Report on Fieldwork,” Nash, “The Warumungu's Reserves,” Davison,
The Manga-Manda Settlement, Edmunds,
Frontiers, and Christen, Properly Warumungu.
The photos
served as an inventory of sites, stories, and shared memories for
Nakkamarra and me. Since 1995, I had collaborated with Nakkamarra and a
group of Warumungu women to compile a community history
text—
Anyinginyi Manuku Apparr: Stories from Our
Country—based on their individual and shared experiences of
both traditional life and contemporary displacement and resettlement at
the hands of the Australian government.
3 British settlement of Australia is usually dated from February
7, 1788, when the British flag was raised at Sydney Cove. Successive
claims in 1824, 1829, and 1879 solidified British Crown sovereignty over
the continent. Claiming terra nullius (empty land) from its
inception, allowed British colonists to ignore the fact that indigenous
peoples had occupied the land for some 40,000 years prior to their
discovery. Australia's center was opened to white settlers in 1862.
In 1872, the overland telegraph was complete, and with it, Aboriginal
people in the Central Desert, including Tennant Creek, became an obstacle
to a new nation's emerging frontier. See Reynolds, Frontier and Aboriginal Sovereignty, Peterson and Sanders,
Citizenship, Hardman, Explorations, Madigan, Central Australia and Murgatroyd, Dig Tree for overviews of this
history.
It was during my visits between 2001 and 2003 that our catalogue went
digital, allowing me to record and reproduce images and events more
easily. Because our trips usually involved 8 to 10 women, each wanting
photos of particular places, my digital camera served as an impromptu menu
of photos. During our trips I could transfer the images from my Nikon
CoolPix 9000 to my PowerBook for nightly slide shows. As I took
“orders” for photos, the women made their own lists of places
we hadn't been to, sites they wanted photographed, and new
opportunities to travel to another “country” (ancestral
homeland).4
Aboriginal people throughout
Australia use the English term country as a referent for their territorial
homelands. Fred Myers's ethnography Pintupi
Country provides a rich documentation of the territorial
relations Central Desert Aboriginal people share with land and kin. The
Warumungu term manu, translated to country, for example indexes a
range of territories from specific sites on the land to extended tracts of
land. One's country is both personal and part of a larger kin network
populated by human and other-than-human actors. Used as a translation
term, country also resituates national claims over indigenous
territory.
In addition to the digital photos, I used a digital
video camera to record people talking about country, documenting their own
and collective experiences, and performing songs and dances associated
with those countries.
The images and audio in this emerging archive are of many varieties.
Some are self-conscious narrations of Warumungu life that speak to a
non-Warumungu audience whose own Australian history lacks an Aboriginal
component.5
Since the early 1980s, there has
been a conscious effort by Australian historians, Aboriginal and not, to
address the gaping whole in standard Australian contact history that
relates to Aboriginal people. Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner
called the national forgetting of its colonial past and present “the
great Australian silence.” He framed the situation as
“something like a cult of forgetfulness practiced on a national
scale,” After the Dreaming, 214.
Beginning with sustained land-rights movements in the 1970s, Aboriginal
people have gained a formidable foothold in national politics. There were
several events that marked this shift nationally: the Aboriginal tent
embassy in 1972, the massive antibicentennial gatherings in 1988, and
Australia's commitment to reconciliation in 1991. To be sure, there
has also been significant backlash and renewed racism. See Hamilton, “Fear and Desire,” Gelder and Jacobs,
Uncanny Australia, Cowlishaw, Rednecks and Hage, White Nation for details on the resurgence of
racism linked to newly visible Aboriginal projects.
These are
open—there are no limits placed on their viewing. Other
selections are aimed at younger Warumungu generations whose territorial
instruction is culturally mandated but often undermined by town life.
Children who spend their days in the local primary school or young adults
who maintain households in town camps are often less able to travel to
their ancestral countries or spend extended time with elders who hold
cultural knowledge. These images are meant for the children of specific
kin groups who share both ancestral lands and family histories. Other
images are restricted based on more specific territorial and kin
affiliations; their availability is limited by criteria such as age,
gender, and one's own ritual knowledge and performance history within
a group. Another set of tapes contains popular events such as the local
Eagles footy games, Tennant Creek Aboriginal bands playing their own
music, and the women's grandchildren playing at my house. These can
often be reproduced with permission of those in the recording—they
are
partially closed. And finally, there are recordings that
contain intimate ritual materials such as songs and dances that are
closed—only to be viewed by people with proper ritual
standing as dictated by those who are bosses for the specific
knowledge.
6 The English terms owner/boss
and manager are often used by Aboriginal people to articulate the
complementary relationships and sets of responsibilities they share with
particular kin in maintaining their ritual responsibilities to their
country. For Warumungu, bosses are owners of country and knowledge in the
sense that they have a responsibility to maintain and care
for—extend and police—its use. Managers often stand in a
secondary relationship in that they must aid in sustaining country and
knowledge but are directed by the owners. At the most basic level, this
complementary separation is expressed in the division of Warumungu society
into patrimoieties: Kingili and Wurlurru. See Bell, Daughters, Dussart, The Politics of Ritual, and Myers, Pintupi Country for useful discussions of
land ownership complexities in Aboriginal societies.
In addition to our own growing visual and aural catalogue, we
collected photos, documents and audiotapes from several of the national
archives. In fact, after one trip to the National Archives in Darwin, we
returned to Tennant Creek with over 600 pages of photocopied documents
about Warumungu people—some still living, others deceased. This
paper history, as Nakkamarra labeled it, evoked ambiguous emotions. It was
invigorating for the women to find documentation concerning relatives and
friends. But it was also hard to ignore the stream of dehumanizing
descriptions that filled the papers. Warumungu people's lives on
cattle stations, at missions, and in town camps were monitored,
catalogued, and measured by their “progress” towards
assimilation into white Australian society.7
These
documents were off-limits to Aboriginal people until very recently. But
with the nation's recent attempts at reconciliation
8 Australia's 1991 national pledge of reconciliation with
its indigenous population was the catalyst for much of this recent
openness by government organizations. See Tickner's Taking a Stand, a detailed study of
Australia's bitter battle to legislate reconciliation policies. As
the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs during these years, Tickner documents
the ambivalence of the government's commitment to Aboriginal social
justice issues. Reconciliation continues to be a fraught terrain in
Australia. For discussions of reconciliation's ambivalent path, see
Gelder and Jacobs, Uncanny Australia,
Langton, “A New Deal?” and
Povinelli, The Cunning of
Recognition.
with its indigenous populations, many
Australian archives now have memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with
Aboriginal communities. These agreements allow community members to access
previously sealed government files. Along with access comes the potential
for Aboriginal communities to repurpose these records by setting them
against their own rememberings. These recovered documents, although public
in the sense that they are available to large groups of Aboriginal people,
are also inserted into Warumungu protocols for information distribution.
When we returned to Tennant Creek with the files, for example, I sorted
them by place (Banka Banka station, Phillip Creek mission, etc.) and then
listed family names on the top of each set to make identification easier.
Family members could then determine who could and could not view, copy,
and exchange the newly recovered information.
A public/private opposition lacks specificity and erases the
vibrant nature of informational practices embodied in and recorded by an
always-changing set of technologies. Warumungu notions of open and closed
knowledge sets are not either-or propositions. Instead, these English
equivalents gesture to a set of standards by which differently situated
community members monitor responsibility, accountability, and
acceptability in relation to knowledge of country and kin. Age, gender,
ritual knowledge, and territorial affiliations: these combine to limit and
produce nodes within the open-closed network. Community
practices, national policies, and various collaborators cooperate to
continually redefine how objects, people, and information interact. The
system is always in negotiation.
Digital technologies offer mobility—new ways to access and
extend territorial networks necessary to maintain and produce cultural
practices and products. They also provoke paralysis and end negotiation
when their trajectories seem only future-oriented and fast-paced,
when they are seen as a cultural threat, invasion, or the inevitable
catalyst for the erasure of tradition.9
In this article, I examine the
management of Warumungu cultural knowledge, specifically its reproduction
and creation in relation to digital technologies, cultural tourism, and
recent national and international legislation relating to intellectual
property rights. I suggest that, at their discursive and material
intersection, local knowledge regimes redefine national and global debates
concerning the preservation and production of indigenous traditional
knowledge in the cultural commons. If the colonial idea of the archive was
to collect and store the world's treasures for the betterment of
mankind, this emerging Warumungu archive is part of an intimate set of
kinship relations and a dynamic socioterritorial network that rubs up
against national territorial boundaries and legal structures aimed at
protecting indigenous culture.
ALLURING PROPOSITIONS
The allure of studying indigenous uses of new technologies lies in the
juxtaposition of two seemingly contradictory elements: the past-oriented,
romantic notion of indigenous peoples who are somehow in modernity but not
of it, set against the future-oriented, equally romantic notion of new
technologies as the signifier of a progressive, fast-paced, global
modernity. Images of indigenous people using new technology conjure this
supposed opposition. Intel, IBM, and Compaq are only a few technology
giants who have fed this cultural juxtaposition in their advertisement
campaigns.10
For a contradiction to be imaginable, it
must function in a given set of standards and practices: this one says
that indigenous people cannot be simultaneously traditional and modern,
technologically savvy and politically astute, materially oriented and
authentically indigenous. That logic is wrong.
Over the last two decades, indigenous uses of new technologies have
been part of the emergence of a global politics of indigeneity, a boom in
cultural tourism, and the increased debates over what
constitutes—and who owns—intellectual property and cultural
knowledge.11
Indigenous communities' integration
of digital technologies into cultural tourism ventures, language
revitalization programs, cultural heritage projects, and land-management
schemes foregrounds the multiple layers of connection between
technological innovations, economic sustainability, and cultural
production.
12 In Australia, as in other settler nations, the complex convergence of
traditional cultural materials and digital technologies has produced a
tangible shift in archiving practices and their attendant assumptions
about cultural preservation, distribution, and reproduction.13
14 These
shifts have been part of an ambiguous state policy of self-determination
for Aboriginal populations since the late 1970s. See Rowse, “Indigenous Citizenship,” Cowlishaw, “Erasing Culture,” and Tickner, Taking a Stand for accounts of Aboriginal
self-determination policies and the state. Digital technologies, of
course, are more recent additions to radio, television and satellite
communications systems used in local communities. For histories of new
media and Aboriginal communities see Michaels, Bad
Aboriginal Art, Tafler, “The Use of
Electronic Media,” Hinkson, “New
Media Projects” and Ginsburg, “Indigenous Media” and “Screen Memories.”
Readily
available digital photos, CDs, DVDs and VHS tapes as well as digital video
recorders, digital cameras, scanners, and database software are part
of—and at least partially responsible for—institutional and
organizational shifts in modes of archiving and remembering. The
archive's history, Diana Taylor argues, is tainted by its association
with “supposedly enduring materials”—documents,
buildings, bones—assumed to be “resistant to change”
(
2003, 19). Colonial salvage projects and the
destruction and erasure of cultural materials and practices they provoked
haunt contemporary archiving practices and products.
But not all haunting inspires fear. Indigenous-run museums, heritage
projects, and cultural centers are now infused with, and grow out of,
explicitly political and economic indigenous practices.15
As James Clifford suggests:
A symptomatic critique of heritage work may see it as
occupying a comfortable niche in postmodern “multicultural”
hegemonies: every identity gets their exhibition, Web site, coffee-table
book, or film. I have argued that this view, while partly correct, misses
a great deal of indigenous cultural process and politics. The old/new
articulations, performances, and translations of identity are not enough
to bring about structural socioeconomic change. But they reflect and to a
real extent create new conditions for indigenous solidarity, activism, and
participation in diverse public spheres. When they are understood as part
of a wider politics of self-determination, heritage projects are
open-ended in their significance (2004,
17).
In Clifford's view, heritage work and the cultural negotiation it
entails are part of a wider set of indigenous politics that should not be
assumed to privilege tradition at the expense of emergent articulations
and collaborations. The ideological and conceptual residue of colonial
assemblages that once haunted archiving work are being appropriated by and
mixed in (up) with indigenous sets of motivations.16
As I collaborated with Warumungu community members to produce the
Anyinginyi Manuku Apparr book, we used a range of digital
recording equipment to collect, store, and archive stories, songs, dances,
and photos. Like most Warumungu cultural projects, our book work was a
catalyst for traveling. Going to and maneuvering through country is a
crucial part of maintaining community and kin relations and their material
and social benefits. “People gotta keep moving,” Edith
Nakkamarra is fond of telling me. As we traveled, on foot and by Toyota,
we traced histories of personal and communal displacement and replacement,
loss, and suffering as well as happiness and hope. As stories were told,
the community history retraced ancestral dreaming tracks and settler
circuits.17
The dreamtime or
dreaming is a colonial (mis) translation of Aboriginal relations with and
connections to land and ancestors, including other-than-human relatives.
People are related to specific tracts of land as well as
tracks within larger territorial circuits, based on many factors:
birth site, marriage, parents' homes, ritual affiliations, work
patterns. The Warumungu term wirnkarra is translated as dreaming
and law in English. The choice of law as a translation term signals a
desire to imbue ancestral-territorial networks and contemporary practices
with the same seriousness given to Australian national law. See Morphy,
“Empiricism,” Swain, “Dreaming” and Wolfe, “On Being” for accounts of the development
and history of the dreaming/dreamtime.
The intersection and
importance of both ancestral territories and settler sites on the
landscape marks a refusal by Aboriginal people to neatly divide their
lives into traditional (before colonization) and modern (everything
after). These mobile and placed narratives are self-conscious reflections
on a history of contact: both ancestors and uninvited guests constitute
this community's legacy.
After dozens of country trips, a mounting stack of MiniDV tapes, and
numerous requests for copies of tapes, I realized that a DVD might be one
way to package our growing country catalogue. As I packed up a box with
stacks of photos and PAL VHS tapes for return to Tennant Creek, my son
Jakob clicked through his Lord of the Rings DVD; the making
of portions were his favorite parts. He maneuvered through the menu,
past the play movie screen to the appendices, where he
scrolled through a list of choices: costume design, script, J. R. R.
Tolkien, music, and so forth. It hit me. Perfect—a medium that
allows viewers to choose their entry points and path through the data
while also personalizing their relation to the data strings. DVD
technology could account for the multiple concerns expressed by Warumungu
women: monitoring access, preserving cultural knowledge, and reinforcing
existing kinship networks.
Aboriginal constituencies—or mobs in Aboriginal
English—have been concerned with the sliding line between
preservation and innovation, access and excess, loss and longevity in
relationship to cultural knowledge and cultural sharing for some time.18
The term mobs, commonly used by
Aboriginal people, undermines the more romantic connotations of Aboriginal
communities somehow existing as homogenous, bounded groups without
friction. See Merlan, Caging the
Rainbow and Christen, Properly
Warumungu.
Although the issues of access and
accountability are not new, the scale and scope have shifted. During the
1970s, Aboriginal people collaborated with lawyers, anthropologists, and
various government institutions to document their spiritual affiliations
to land. They did this for practical reasons: to get some of their land
back. The
1976 (Northern Territory) Land Rights Act mandated such
documentation, and thus collaboration, to determine ownership of land
(
Peterson and Langton 1983;
Merlan 1998;
Povinelli
2002). Proving ownership in Australian legal terms is not a new
type of cultural translation for Aboriginal people. But if the land claims
process demonstrated anything about Aboriginal modes of ownership, it was
that there are multiple constituencies within Aboriginal groupings to whom
singular ownership proves hard to determine.
19 The
law's standardization has provided some measure of empowerment for
those Aboriginal mobs able to prove their claims; others have been
dismissed and disavowed by the nation.
2021 From
their inception, indigenous land rights movements in Australia have caused
unfounded anxiety and fear from nonindigenous citizens believing that
somehow the “other” would reclaim
“their” land. Present legislation, however, doesn't allow
for any such reterritorialization. The 1976 Northern Territory
legislation, for example, allows Aboriginal traditional owners (defined by
the legislation through spiritual terms, see Maddock, “Owners”) to lodge a claim over vacant
Crown land only. (See Merlan, Caging the
Rainbow and Povinelli, Labor's
Lot for cases in the N.T. specifically). Similarly, the 1993
Native Title Act delineates who can claim title based on
Aboriginal tradition and its continuity in the present. For accounts of
Native Title cases and the legislation's history, see: Strelein and
Muir, “Native Title,” Gelder and
Jacobs, Uncanny Australia, Povinelli,
“Settler Modernity,” and Merlan,
“Entitlement and Need.”
The women I work with were all part of the Warumungu land claims
process and continue to seek collaborative projects that maintain their
cultural integrity while also strengthening and extending their local
power and knowledge. While working on the book project, determining which
country sites to include, who would be invited to participate, and how
each place and story would be told meant consciously debating the
structure of cultural openness. The women's traditional
knowledge—of songs, territories, history, flora and fauna, and the
like—was open for recording, but there would be limits on its
reproduction and reception. Determining the lines
between women's business and men's business, family and
individual histories, and preexisting community tensions all played a part
in refixing lines of accountability.22
In
Aboriginal societies, gendered labor divisions are often referred to as
women's and men's business. While it is culturally true that
Aborigines distinguish between male and female knowledge and ritual
practices, practically speaking, much of this knowledge is held in common
(Dussart, The Politics of Ritual, 59).
The crucial factor is that although men may know about women's
business and women may know about men's, one group cannot and will
not speak for the other. See Povinelli, Labor's Lot, Merlan, Caging the Rainbow, and Dussart, The Politics of Ritual for detailed
ethnographic accounts of gender politics and Aboriginal
communities.
Negotiating what should be made open and how to
restrict access to the rest of the material was our starting point.
Permission would be required. Delineating the parameters for levels of
openness involved determining how to standardize the cultural protocols
that already sanction the viewing of territory- and kin-related materials.
Early in our work the women decided that the book should be open, that is,
available to both local community members and outsiders—tourists,
other researchers, government officials, and so on. But after years of
work, we had an excess of material, most in digital form.
In the summer of 2003, I suggested the idea of producing a DVD to the
main group of women involved in the book project. The idea was well
received, although, like many types of cultural translations, a tangible
object was necessary to test the concept's logic. In July 2004, after
working with my partner Chris Cooney on a prototype, we returned to
Tennant Creek with an initial version of the DVD's interface, links,
and content to give community members an idea of the proposed product and
its capabilities. If the DVD could provide a way to compile distinct paths
through culturally sensitive visual and aural materials, it could be used
by diverse members of the community and archived for generations to come.
Producing a user-friendly, culturally-appropriate DVD would provide
community members with various levels of literacy access to these digital
materials in a way that promotes cultural preservation and leaves open the
possibility for new cultural productions.
SOCIALLY NETWORKED INTERFACE
The DVD's dynamic form is well suited to incorporate and account
for Warumungu concerns over viewing practices based on multiple sets of
identifiers, such as age, gender, and land affiliations. Chris and I knew
the infrastructure, design, and interface needed to address community
networks of accountability. One of the women working on the DVD explained
viewing stipulations this way: “see, cause we're not supposed
to look for other families [country], like I should only look
for mine, not others.” Mundane practices such as the ways people
organized themselves at meetings or how people avoided one another during
the viewing of cultural materials articulated this system of restrictions
and served as a guide for the DVD's information architecture. The
main interface is not a map or replication of social networks onto digital
networks. It is a partial grafting—a selective process
whereby cultural standards are reworked within a digital domain.
This partial grafting was already in place. Warumungu social protocols
were evident in the organization and use of a shared iMac at the Nyinkka
Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre in town. The hard drive on this shared
computer is named wumpurrarni (Aboriginal people), the most basic
group identifier for Warumungu people. It is further partitioned into two
sections: kartti (man) and kirriji (woman). Hundreds of
files are placed within each of these categories, with the only unique
identifier being the file name. File names are often very long, for
example, “jampindrovingatrockhampton”—a conflation of
name (Jampin), experience (droving), and place (Rockhampton). The choice
of file names reflects community members' attempts to sort
information without using mutually exclusive categories or a standard
naming convention, either of which could imply singular ownership, which
no individual can claim within their extended kin network.
Instead of reproducing this standard file/folder “page
interface,”23
as the DVD's organizational structure, we thought that a
filter-inspired interface would allow users to sort and search based on
changing criteria. Although DVD technology does not afford dynamic
searching, it does allow one to manipulate material through directed
choices. Prompted by familiar images and culturally relevant categories,
users can then chart a path through the data on the DVD.
The first prototype tested this logic (see Figure
1). Main Menu Screen: Anyinginyi Manuku Apparr
image—painted by Edith Nakkamarra and reproduced digitally from the
front cover of the first version of the book. Half-circles painted in red
ochre—large and small—are surrounded by black and white dots.
In the middle, a dash of blue-green forms a circle.
Main page of the Anyinginyi Manuku Apparr DVD. The background painting
depicts the shared work of many groups who hold up the country.
Click in the circle. Audio: Edith explains the design, “We all
sit by a fire, nighttime. Talk about the old days, like one mob and then
another.”
Click. Enter the next screen: a series of country names, historical
events, and family names in Warumungu and English with graphical
representations. Click Kunjarra. Next screen. Another set of
choices: introduction, Kunjarra stories, Kunjarra songs, women's
dance.
(See Figure 2.) Click Kunjarra stories. More
choices: dates, personal names, events, place names. Click
Protest. Fade in. 31 July 2000: Kunjarra. We see: clear blue sky,
auburn-red boulders in the background, several women and children walk
about. Nappanangka and Nakkamarra stand in front of a white Toyota Land
Cruiser. Watch and listen. For ten minutes the women recount the way they
held off miners from their land in 1989. Fade out. Back to the previous
screen. Click photos (same day). Choose slide show.
Click show all. Watch: Nappanangka and Nakkamarra sit near the
old camp that served as their makeshift home for their two-month stand off
with miners. Fade out. And on, twenty-one photos to view from that day.
Fade back to the previous screen. Choose another entry point.
Kunjarra “country” page from the Anyinginyi Manuku Apparr
DVD. Country pages contain a variety of information, images, and audio
chosen by the custodians for each location.
A series of choices directs user movement. Each prompt has a cultural
protocol embedded: gender restrictions, country affiliations, social
relations, and the like. Community members direct their own movements
through a compilation of differing historical moments. In this way, the
interface works off an understood VCR logic—start, play, stop.
However, the DVD's format allows users to access multiple points of
entry and group existing data in variable presentations. The singularity
of the DVD—as one object—masks the multiplicity of cultural
work it allows. It can preserve as well as expand
knowledge practices. It is part of a cultural mandate to both properly
distribute knowledge and maintain its integrity along well-defined (but
not unchanging) social networks.
The work involved in production and the process of merging protocols
for distribution, both local Warumungu ones and those attached to the
DVD's technological format, is never easy or tension free. Those
involved in our project are also simultaneously workers for or
collaborators on other projects, including mapping country sites,
compiling Warumungu-language books, producing local compact discs (CDs),
and so forth. Conflict and collaboration were part of our negotiating
process. Individuals and groups have agendas—some overlap, others
don't. With or without digital archives, culture work is never
clear-cut. Disagreements over access and accountability are not thwarted
by this technology. Technological trade-offs are always inflected by
social networks, whereby people integrate their own mechanisms for control
and change into the technology. Use is not predetermined. Unintended
outcomes and uses are standard. Both technology and social protocols
shift.
Like other cultural negotiations (human-to-human and
human-to-technology), this one was part of an ongoing Warumungu dialogue
with others. Rather than see the technology as something that might lead
to what anthropologist Eric Michaels called an “electronic
invasion” (1994, 81), I suggest that these
collaborations are negotiated within a dynamic set of cultural protocols
that continually tack back and forth between innovation and preservation.
There are many gradients between what is assumed to be open—and how
it functions in that capacity—and what may be closed. These women
decided, based on their history together, their combined and individual
knowledge of country, and their own ritual obligations, how to share and
extend knowledge. Others in the community use a similar framework to make
their own decisions; neither the system nor the knowledge is static.
New technologies enter into and circulate within indigenous
communities in combination with tourists, researchers, government funding
agencies, and local community members.24
Seeing these as inherently disruptive
denies the capacity of local intellectual property regimes to integrate
emerging technologies and rework their attendant social relations.
Negotiations over access and appropriateness are based on changing sets of
conditions from the most hostile (colonialism) to the seemingly mundane
(new technologies). Neither technology nor tradition holds a trump card.
Existing and emerging social and technological relations function in
dialogue with one another; predicting how the conversation will end is
fraught. To be sure, compromise and collaboration will be part of the
mix.
SHIFTING MANDATES
One of the challenges we encountered in designing the interface for
the DVD was to link this seemingly contradictory mandate—to preserve
cultural knowledge and promote cultural
innovation/reproduction—with existing social networks as well as
the structure of DVD technology. When I previewed the DVD for the group of
women who are “bosses” for most of the material included, they
expanded their focus to include another constituency: tourists. In July
2003, the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre opened in Tennant Creek.
These same women had been intimately involved with the conception and
production of the centre. This new venue for Warumungu cultural products
brings with it the possibility of an expanded market for the DVD as well
as a place where interested community members can access repatriated
objects, digitally stored photos and video, and the digital technologies
that allow for their combination. With a resource area for local community
members as well as a museum area and gift shop, Nyinkka Nyunyu's
function is not only (or merely) tourism. Instead, the copresence of
repatriated objects and newly produced ones (like the DVD) points to the
already underway processes of cultural remix.
As we met with the community members involved, it became clear that
the complex structure of the DVD's interface, although necessary to
maintain cultural restrictions internally, was not enough to guarantee
that proper social etiquette would be followed by non-Warumungu people who
might view the contents. With a tourist audience, local children, and a
general Warumungu audience in their view, the stakeholders decided that
the initial DVD, like the book on which it is based, should be open for a
general audience. Like other cultural knowledge that remains open,
available to noninitiated community members and outsiders, the material on
the DVD is part of an extensive social network, one that continues to grow
and expand as it is reproduced and redistributed. Open does not mean free
as in no cost or free as in no restrictions. But open in this case signals
an assumption that transgressions or misuse might occur, but it limits the
reach of those breaches to only specific sets of knowledge and practices.
Thus, the DVD could encourage new partnerships and the extension of social
relations along a large, perhaps global, network at least partially
defined by community protocols.
To accommodate this new audience and viewing protocol, we reworked the
interface with three key identifiers suggested by the women: country,
history, and culture. Community members' choice of key words reflects
their position within this new tourist market, eight years of planning for
Nyinkka Nyunyu, and government-sponsored community projects aimed at
preserving culture.25
During my fieldwork,
Warumungu organizations offered cross-culture classes to out-of-town
consultants working on the Alice Springs-to-Darwin railway. They also
worked at the local high school and primary school giving culture lessons.
Part of this purposeful usage of the term “culture” spread
from nationally funded Community Development Employment Programs (CDEP) in
which local Aboriginal organizations were able to draw on government funds
to pay for traditional and cultural activities. See Bernardi, “The CDEP Scheme,” Rowse, “Rethinking Aboriginal Resistance,”
Sanders, “Citizenship and the
Community,” and Langton, “A New
Deal?” for discussions of CDEP schemes
nationally.
Country was never in question—it is the main way Warumungu
people identify. “Where's your country?” is a standard
greeting. That people are related to land, and land to people, is a given,
although romantic connotations given to this reciprocal relationship by
others distorts both the practicality and spirituality of these relations.
Here country functions as a meta-tag; it encompasses a large set of
relations built over intersecting networks.
History in this case refers to stories of contact with outsiders. As
we were searching for a key word, people latched on to history as a way to
distinguish stories told about relations with papulanji
(non-Aboriginal people).
Culture, on the other hand, is the categorical referent for local
Warumungu activities such as song, dance, and artwork. Culture,
specifically gained prominence in local usage during the last ten years in
conversation with the national boom in cultural tourism, the rise in
popularity of Aboriginal art globally,26
and as preparation for
the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre in town proceeded.
That these terms carry a colonial residue was obvious to both
Warumungu and non-Warumungu constituencies involved. But the Warumungu
people who chose these terms did so both to speak across
audiences—to foreign tourists, locals, and non-Aboriginal
Australians—and to speak back to the dominant national
assumptions associated with the terms. Their purposeful repurposing
indicates a reshuffling of historical relations and a counter-narrative,
but not one that rejects indiscriminately. Warumungu residents are
involved in an array of culture-making activities in which new
technologies, out-of-town collaborators, national and regional funding
agencies and various community interests mingle. In each case, these joint
ventures are scrutinized and negotiated by different mobs; there is never
total inclusion. Power dynamics within the community continue to change
and shift, with new community members taking on leadership and liaison
roles. Like other communities, the Warumungu community in Tennant Creek is
made up of several overlapping and contingent mobs, with a shared, but not
the same, history and vision of the future. In each case, just how
Warumungu law should be interpreted, preserved, and extended is discussed
and debated by insiders as well as outsiders.
Of central concern to all of us involved with the project was what
should be done with the closed material, the more personal, restricted,
and gender-specific media that would not be a part of the reconceptualized
DVD project. The solution is twofold: (1) a series of family-specific DVDs
and (2) a community media archive that can be password-protected. The
compact size and mobility of a DVD were its alluring
qualities—people in extended kin networks could share the disc or
make multiple copies for various family members without having to worry
about viewing someone else's country. These family discs, as they
have come to be called, are part of an emerging genealogical-historical
archive. The staff members at Nyinkka Nyunyu have been active in the
repatriation of cultural objects, including boomerangs, axes, and stone
knives, along with thousands of photos, as part of the centre's
visual displays and community resource center.27
The Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre's gallery
contains many of the objects that had been taken out of Warumungu country
by early explorers, anthropologists, and the like. Both the South
Australian Museum in Adelaide and the Museum of Victoria in Melbourne have
returned objects to the centre on a rotating basis. Displays in the
gallery portion of the centre mix returned objects with newly produced
ones in various media.
The DVD articulates with this local
archival logic as a mechanism to both hold and partition data that now
resides on the hard drive at Nyinkka Nyunyu and on dozens of CDs made by
the centre's staff. Mobility is necessary. Cultural knowledge that
remains static for too long can die—its owners are no longer able to
access its power.
28 The Warumungu women I
work with often remark in English that knowledge and country can die. The
English term signals only a partial ending, however, as knowledge can be
revived through ritual strategies. See Bell, Daughters, Dussart, The Politics of Ritual, Merlan, Caging the Rainbow, and Povinelli, Labor's Lot for accounts of Aboriginal
peoples' varied relations to land, including the ways in which
country can be refound and reinserted into ritual repertoires after years
of nonuse.
As with people moving across country, for knowledge to
remain powerful, it needs to travel. In Aboriginal sociospatial systems,
“a place,” Francesca Merlan reminds us, “must be
learned” (
1998, 214).
The idea for the family DVDs incorporates the cultural desire of
Warumungu people to physically travel very specific sets of country tracks
and remember personal histories, often from different starting points.
When people follow dreaming tracks in ritual performances, they do so from
a distinct but not wholly unique vantage point. They must consider the
possible interlinking tracks—where they cross and with whose
country. Newly dreamt sequences may be added; those that are affiliated
with people who have passed away may fall into disuse, and so on.29
This same dynamic sociality overlaid by
an exclusive, yet not static, set of territorial relations informs the way
people interact with images of country on computer screens as well.
Viewing strategies incorporate some elements from existing social
practices while also altering those same structures. The interface is
dynamic.
As the second part of this project then, the media archive will allow
people to search, sort, and shuffle various media and create their own
cultural objects. This will be an archive whose default is not
preservation. Leveraging Apple's iLife suite of tools, users will be
able to “rip mix burn,” but within a set of parameters
dictated by the community. The archive will be password-protected, each
data set tagged with a unique identifier and a range of keywords. The key
words will then allow people to sort through the various media to identify
relevant data. In addition to key words, a description field will be open
ended, allowing community members to add, delete, and edit a string of
text. As for now, just how to determine who will have the power to delete
is under debate. A possible technological solution would be to manage
multiple additions, Wikipedia-like, within the archive for each set of
data. In either case, what the community ends up with is a rich,
multilayered text for each image.
Community members we worked with decided family groups would be the
best way to distribute passwords. Each group will eventually decide who
will have access to the images and sounds and what is appropriate to
remix. Together, family groups will be able to compile their own
historical archive as well as create new cultural products from the many
stored digital images (see Figure 3).
Edith Nakkamarra, her daughter and granddaughter view, translate, and
decide on images and audio for their custom family DVD.
No doubt this emergent type of cultural production will be, like all
cultural change, a process of give-and-take between overlapping interested
parties. It is hard to predict where the lines will be drawn. My initial
assumption of a generational divide did not materialize. In fact, it was
some of the most elderly members of the community who pushed for the
innovative, generative aspects of the archive. Part of the inclusion of
new technologies in these ventures is about maintaining control, both
technological and social, over how cultural knowledge is catalogued,
circulated, and cultivated. A community-located digital archive means that
people do not need to travel thousands of kilometers to Canberra or
further to access (some) historical documents and photos. It also means
that local mobs—through their own decision-making channels—can
decide how to grant or deny access to a range of materials.30
Aboriginal constituencies in Tennant Creek
forge alliances based not only on kin and country but also on their
affiliations with certain Aboriginal organizations, outside researchers,
other local businesses, and government agencies. For more on local
Aboriginal organizations in Tennant Creek, see Lea, Government and the Community, Edmunds, Frontiers, and Christen, Properly Warumungu.
The Warumungu social landscape includes objects, people, land, and
ancestors that all comingle to produce and distribute knowledge. Not all
networks foster the same relations. National and international systems for
reckoning what counts as knowledge and property are defined as
intellectual property (IP) rights. But these international rights-based
systems are part of dominant histories of colonialism, neoliberal markets,
and specific corporate alliances. Their assumed global application
circumvents other systems. Warumungu cultural protocols concerning
authorship, ownership, viewing practices, and knowledge creation are an
intellectual property rights systems—a set of standards and limits
for the use, redistribution, and reproduction of knowledge in its tangible
and intangible forms. But the links between these Warumungu digital
dynamics and the national and international legal systems in which they
circulate are not stable. Both the commercial version of the DVD and the
family versions challenge IP systems that demand a rigid
public/private split and an author-centered notion of production.
Furthermore, Warumungu conceptual logics defined by a continuum of access
rights and layers of accountability complicate current assumptions about
the parameters of the cultural commons, the opaqueness of the
public domain, and the dynamics of indigenous knowledge-making
protocols.
UNCOMMON INTERESTS
Indigenous knowledge systems are often defined by communal ownership,
while Western systems are usually anchored to individual ownership. This
individual/communal view often masquerades as the inherent differences
between indigenous peoples and the West. But indigenous concerns do not
align neatly with any one agenda. In fact, attempts by the U.S. recording
industry to define file sharing as “online shoplifting”31
—especially in the prominent
peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing debates
32 The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the
Audio Home Recording Act are part of the U.S. government's
attempts to redefine its own legal notions of intellectual property rights
in relation to new digital technologies. See Lessig, The Future of Ideas and Free Culture and Litman, Digital Copyright for overviews and relevant
legal cases.
—resemble the highly visible agendas of some
indigenous leaders to protect their cultural heritage from the same types
of stealing.
The 2003 Indigenous Position Paper for the World Summit on the
Information Society (WSIS) states for example, that, “Our
collective knowledge is not merely a commodity to be traded like any other
in the market place. We strongly object to the notion that it constitutes
a raw material or commercial resource for the knowledge-based economy of
the Information Society.” Like some of their corporate counterparts,
international indigenous representatives want to limit the circulation of
particular ideas, (tech) knowledge, and cultural materials. In fact, they
“strongly reject the application of the public domain concept to any
aspect related to our cultures and identities” and further
“reject the application of IPR (intellectual property rights)
regimes to assert patents, copyrights, or trademark monopolies for
products, data, or processes derived or originating from our traditional
knowledge or our cultural expressions” (WSIS
2003).
The particular concerns articulated by indigenous leaders form an odd
synergy with corporate giants, such as the computer software and recording
industries, in their bids to excise certain types of digital materials
from the public domain, crack down on the virtual theft of property, and
redefine dominant intellectual property regimes. Both want to reroute the
neoliberal marketplace in which information circulates as a commodity. And
both use culture, creativity, and discrete knowledge claims to make their
cases. But the common interests between indigenous leaders and their
representational bodies and corporations do not suggest shared
motivations. There may be some. But attempts by both to limit and redefine
property, culture, and the public domain underscore their discrepant
economic and political locations within the global market. Both are caught
up in what legal scholar James Boyle sees as “a conceptual scheme
that portrays ‘intellectual property’ as a monopoly, and
‘the public domain’ as its conceptual opposite—a realm
of vaguely defined ‘freedom’” (2003, 8). That is, each must lodge concerns about
their cultural and intellectual property within a narrative defined by
exclusionary endpoints.
From UN documents to national legislation, in courtrooms and in
cyberspace, culture is quickly becoming the interface for maneuvering
through and mobilizing support for both indigenous and corporate economic
and political rights.33
But what happens when cultural property and
traditional knowledge become the basis for social justice and economic
redress? In his study of efforts to protect native heritage through
intellectual property rights, particularly copyright laws, Michael Brown
asserts that, “novel forms of cultural copyright come with
substantial risks. If we turn culture into property, its uses will be
defined and directed by law, the instrument by which states impose order
on an untidy world.” Brown's warning against embracing
“totalizing solutions to complex social problems” (
2003, 8) foregrounds both the contingency and the
specificity of connections between culture and property. If culture is
standardized and subject to strict legal conditions of use, the result may
be less room to maneuver, create, and repackage culture.
Assessing the range of interests and stakes involved in redefining
intellectual property, Rosemary Coombe argues that however contested the
concept of culture is in anthropological circles, in international law it
is “performing an ever-greater amount of complex ideological
work” (2003, 273). Part of this
ideological work is being done at the level of production: new cultural
objects that embody/contain intellectual property—digital
archives, DVDs, CDs, Web sites—are quickly becoming the site for
redefining notions of property, ownership, and the public.34
The rapid availability and ease of
distribution (legal and illegal) of copyrighted works and the exploitation
of indigenous cultural artifacts find company in these ideological
maneuvers. States that may want to reconcile with their indigenous
populations and appease corporate fears can use the rhetoric of preserving
culture, cultural rights, and cultural creativity as a way to legislate
more rigid standards for digital technological practices. In his
examination of national attempts to address historical injustices, Elazar
Barkan suggests that:
Ownership of cultural property has become a prime moral issue
in the international community. This includes discussions about
inalienable patrimony, about a possible statute of limitations on amending
historical injustices, and on the relationship between the individual and
the community vis-à-vis ownership of tangible identity. (2002, 17)
International debates, forged from various local concerns, have
aligned cultural property with human rights, morality, and economic
justice. Australia is no exception. In 2000, the Australian Parliament
passed two amendments to the 1968 Copyright Act: the
Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act 2000 and the
Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000. The Digital
Agenda Act extended the 1968 Copyright Act to “take
account of technological developments such as the Internet and Pay
TV.” The “most significant change” to the existing
legislation is the “creation of a new right of communication to the
public.” Essentially this gives copyright owners “the right to
control how their work is electronically transmitted to the public or made
available online.” (DCITA 2004). There are
exceptions to this amendment for educational purposes and for institutions
such as archives and museums. What the amendment does, however, is allow
copyright owners to pursue the producers of Web sites or broadcasts who
post or transmit their copyrighted materials without their permission.35
Sony Music Entertainment was one of the first
companies to put these new standards to the test (Australian Digital
Alliance, http://www.digital.org.au, accessed March 2004). Sony
sought to bring suit against University students at several universities
throughout Australia in an attempt to curtail websites that promoted
copying, transmitting, and downloading copyrighted materials.
Linked to the Digital Agenda Act, the Moral Rights
Act “wants to ensure that the original creators of works are
recognized and have some control over their work whether or not they are
also the copyright owners.” The Act includes “the
right of a creator of a work or maker of a film to: (1) be acknowledged as
the creator of the work or film (right of attribution); and (2)
object to derogatory treatment of the work or film (right of
integrity).” (DCITA 2004). Although
this legislation is not specific to indigenous materials, it is at least
partially a response to high-profile legal cases launched by indigenous
people over the unauthorized reproduction of cultural property, such as
clan designs, songs, and territorial images.36
Most notably, the Bulun Bulun case, in which an
Aboriginal artist filed a copyright infringement action against Flash
Screen printers, a large T-shirt design company that had reproduced
dreaming designs without consulting the Aboriginal owners.
Yet
the emphasis on original creators and individual works limits Aboriginal
claims that may emphasize a range of producers and/or nonsingular or
accumulated works.
In the years following these amendments, Aboriginal activists and
lobbyists scrutinized the moral rights agenda. After several years of
talks, on 19 May 2003 the federal government committed itself to amending
the original 1968 Copyright Act again, this time with
“Indigenous communal moral rights” (ICMR) in mind. In a joint
statement by the Attorney General and the Minister for Indigenous Affairs,
indigenous communities were promised “new protection for creative
works”.37
Seven months later, the first draft version of
the
Copyright Amendment (Indigenous Communal Moral Rights) Bill 2003 was
sent to reviewers. The ICMR amendment proposed to use copyright
legislation to protect the “traditional culture and wisdom” of
Indigenous communities.
38 Attorney General and former Immigration and Indigenous Affairs
Minister Phillip Ruddock, suggests that, “the protection of
Indigenous culture depends upon strong and effective copyright laws”
(
2003).
Even with these declarations, the amendment's efficacy is
questionable. After reviewing the draft version, legal scholar Jane
Anderson finds that “it is difficult to imagine any circumstance
arising where remedy [by indigenous communities] could be
attained for infringement.” Further, she argues that in the context
of a national indigenous rights agenda, the draft Bill erects more
barriers than it breaks down. The five formal requirements for a claim to
be filed are imprecise enough to make one wonder just how a community
could fulfill them all?—(1) there must be a work, (2) the work must
draw on traditions and customs of the community, (3) an agreement must
already have been entered into between the community and the creator of
the work, (4) there must be acknowledgement of the indigenous
community's association with the work, and (5) interested parties in
the work must have consented to the rights arising. In each case, the onus
is still (as it has been without legislation) on indigenous communities to
get agreements up front and to define their work in either familiar
author-centric terms or vague traditional ones. Effectively, if the ICMR
is passed, the government strategically avoids engaging with the extent of
copyright issues brought forth by indigenous communities—nothing
seems to have changed.39
Taken together, these amendments signal a shift in Australia's
legal understanding of intellectual and cultural property. The
slipperiness of the legal jargon, which aims at balancing “the
increased rights of copyright owners and the public interest in access to
information,” and the situations to which it will be applied will
tell a more detailed story. For now, lawmakers and some Aboriginal groups
hope that the new protocols will educate the public to the communal nature
of Aboriginal cultural materials and the moral necessity of consultation
prior to use. These agendas may also have the unintended consequence of
further entrenching the view of traditional Aboriginal culture as that
which is ancient, nonmodern, and certainly not for sale. Or it may be that
artists and cultural producers who defy the dominant cultural logic of
their communities are legally restricted from expressing their
aboriginality. Some may be too modern and others not traditional enough.
Or legal restrictions may actually keep Aboriginal-owned and produced
products out of commercial circulation by curtailing partnerships between
nonlocal companies and Aboriginal communities. None of these scenarios can
be addressed through stricter, or more vague, copyright laws.
Yet many nations, prompted by corporate fears over intellectual
property theft as well as indigenous concerns over misappropriate use and
distribution of cultural property, have sought solace in stronger
copyright laws and more rigid claims concerning the reuse of some
intellectual property. But the protection promised by these new legal
regimes has not been realized by indigenous communities.40
Instead, the rhetoric of communal rights
merges with another international movement challenging the reach of
intellectual property rights: the cultural commons.
THE COMMONS REMIXED
Michael Brown argues that “the economic injustice associated
with the imitation of indigenous music and art” is derived not from
the “taking” of material. Instead, it is the
“appropriators' social capital” that “leaves them
better positioned than their indigenous counterparts to reap financial
reward” (2003, 236). Markets are not as
blind as they are made out to be. The proposed amendment in Australia
maintains the social imbalance between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
cultural producers within the legal guise of equity. And others have an
interest in perpetuating inequity through moral agendas as well. For
example, where the public domain and the digital merge for the recording,
computer software, and book-publishing industries, there may be profit
loss.41
In this
scenario, those who download, share, rip, grab, or otherwise take
copyrighted digital information are misusing the technology and exploiting
protected information. Expanding copyright law, then, means less chance
for cultural innovation and sharing of the infamous
“rip.mix.burn.” sort promoted by Apple. But in the Apple
version, consumers are empowered to be creators, to rip information and
images from the Web, mix them with others using their iLife tools, and
burn a copy with their DVD/CD super drives standard on many Apple
computers. Here Apple promotes creation as a rotating set of
collaborations, but these are virtual alliances where responsibility and
respect are not always part of the code. Other systems of responsible
sampling and respectful remix are erased from each of these snapshots. One
is either a pirate or a purchaser.
It is clear that recent U.S. legislation expanding copyright terms and
limiting the reuse capabilities of digital technologies benefit media
conglomerates.42
For many
critics, market-driven protectionism is winning. To counteract this
presumptive victory, the commons is offered as an alternative.
43 Where the market is built on
exclusion, the commons is seen as inclusive. Working against the prevalent
economic notion of the tragedy of the commons
44—overuse and depletion of shared
resources—advocates have redefined the commons as a place where
innovation thrives because it is fueled by information, a
“nonrivalrous resource.” Information can be endlessly shared
without losing its value.
45 As perhaps
the most vocal champion of this position, cyber lawyer Lawrence Lessig
promotes the Internet as the “innovation commons” and uses it
as an example of a space where cultural remix produces knowledge,
innovative ideas, and democratic disobedience.
Focusing on this cultural commons, in his latest book, Free
Culture, Lessig argues that “free cultures are cultures that
leave a great deal open for others to build upon.” Free culture is
opposed to “permission culture—a culture in which creators get
to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from
the past” (2004a, xiv). “Ours”
he says, meaning the United States, “was a free culture. It is
becoming less so” (30). Arguing against the extension of copyright
laws and legal control over emerging digital technologies, Lessig wants a
return to a more balanced version of copyright within intellectual
property law. While Lessig concentrates on U.S. and European histories of
copyright, the multiplicity of local regimes are out of his view. Yet what
he clearly documents is the global diffusion of American property
values. That is, the hegemony of U.S. intellectual property
regimes downplays the fact that local intellectual property systems
function in conversation with, and in contradistinction to, these newly
implemented regimes.46
In their critique of the current “romance of the public
domain,” legal scholars47
suggest that the prevalent commons talk,
especially among the advocates of a digital commons, ignores the multiple
disparities between those assumed to make up the commons. Mainly they are
“concerned that the increasingly binary tenor of current
intellectual property debates in which we must choose either intellectual
property or the public domain obscures other important interests, options,
critiques, and claims for justice” (1334).
48 In his introduction to a volume of articles dedicated to
legal issues concerning the public domain, James Boyle details the range
of assumptions concerning the commons and the public domain by legal
scholars (to say nothing of anthropologists and cultural critics) involved
in these debates in the United States. Summarizing, he states, “The
terms ‘public domain’ and ‘commons’ are used
widely, enthusiastically, and inconsistently … [but] they
are generally used to refer to the ‘outside’ or
‘opposite’ of intellectual property.” Both terms, he
observes, are used in relationship to an “implicit fear or concern
about intellectual property” (Boyle, “Foreword,” 29). That is, they are aiming
to shift the way intellectual property is understood or defined in
relation to differing spaces.
In this sense, the
free-culture/permission-culture binary misses the seepage between the
two.
49 Lessig's insistence on this
binary is tempered by his legal solutions that include the “some
rights reserved options” for copyright holders spearheaded by
Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.com).
American intellectual property regimes overlap with these other social
systems, but misrepresent the not-wholly individual nature of knowledge
allocation and distribution within indigenous knowledge systems.
Romantic notions of sharing aside, indigenous knowledge networks are
often built on a type of “demand sharing,”50
where knowledge is distributed and created
within systems of accountability. In these networks, past producers must
be acknowledged and accounted for. The option of free doesn't exist
in either of Lessig's scenarios: where “one can use it without
the permission of anyone else” or where “the permission one
needs is granted
neutrally” (my italics
2001, 12).
In the Warumungu system of information circulation and production,
there is both cost (some form of payment/permission) and sets of
restrictions that are biased (i.e. not neutral)—that is, they are
applied differently according to multiple criteria. Elders and knowledge
owners who restrict and grant permission provide a framework for younger
generations and others to produce cultural products as well as preserve
older ones. “Creators of the past” are not necessarily
restrictive or hoarders of power. Their influence is not always
oppressive, it can be liberating as well. New visions and versions of
tradition are continually produced through this past-present dialogue.
Lessig is partially concerned with what he calls “cultural
lock-down”—where knowledge sharing in the public domain is
seriously curtailed by overzealous laws that limit how technology can be
used.51
When this
happens, the majority of creators are locked out—only a few have the
key (that is, the corporations that hold copyright). In this scenario,
remix culture is vital because it makes possible the spread of
counter-hegemonic ideas and ideally leaves open the space for innovation
and inclusion.
As much as it's hard to disagree with Lessig that this type of
remix is part of political disobedience and cultural production, his image
of the commons takes much for granted. Individual creators are privileged
even as they build on knowledge sets from the past and work from biased
(not neutral) technologies, knowledge practices, and economic structures.
The rhetoric of freedom—free of restrictions—replays the
structure of enclosure, open for some closed for others. Should we
perpetuate the logic that race, gender, and class aren't part of the
digital commons? That somehow technologies and the infrastructures of
design—the code—do not work to secure and structure moral and
political positions? That innovation is not socially and politically
inscribed? Or, that those who are “functionally absent” should
relinquish their place in this commons?52
That there should be limits on, and dialogues about, digital rights,
technological control, and the circulation of information is certain. But
the cultural commons solution buys into a mutated colonial logic that once
produced the museum of mankind ideal of cultural collection; innovation
and preservation for some, erasure for others. Instead of reproducing this
either-or debate (public/private, commons/enclosure,
pirates/purchasers), we should ask where the lines of this commons are
drawn and by whom.53
Revamping legal structures
maintains U.S. versions of property and progress as universal. Instead, as
Ted Striphas suggests in his study of changing copyright laws and e-books,
we need to do the “messier work of mapping more fully the
contemporary context and devising strategies for intervention specific to
it” (p. 22).
In this case, concerns expressed by indigenous representatives include
not just protection, but also the possibility of equitable collaborations.
The goal is not to shut indigenous cultural products out of the public
domain or the market but to maintain their integrity within several
coexisting domains. The Warumungu DVD is a commercial product, a
kin-based archive, and a platform for cultural innovation. It was produced
both out of and in spite of ongoing structural inequalities. As Rosemary
Coombe argues, “The demand of indigenous peoples and traditional
communities is not simply for compensation […] but for
authorial recognition as peoples, partners, and participants in the
preservation of cultural diversity to serve longer-term objectives for
greater distributional justice” (2003b,
7).54
This is clearly the case in Australia,
where indigenous communities have fought not only to regain control of
some of their territorial homelands but also to determine the range and
composition of joint ventures on those lands. When indigenous communities
who seek out mining and other projects assumed to be anti-indigenous
disturb the romantic version of the green or spiritual native, the
backlash can be deafening. For overviews of several high-profile cases in
Australia, see: Merlan, “The
Limits,” Tonkinson, “Anthropology
and Aboriginal Tradition,” Bell, Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin and Gelder and
Jacobs, Uncanny Australia.
Market spaces are not inherently anti-indigenous, and indigenous peoples
are not naturally antimarket. But the artificial and romantic division of
indigeneity and commercialism erases the concerns indigenous communities
have over negotiating with and at least partially determining the contours
of these (information and commodity) markets. Michael Brown suggests that,
“From an indigenous rights perspective, the public domain is the
problem, not the solution, because it defines traditional knowledge as a
freely available resource” (
2003, 237).
Legislation that extends copyright and expands the rights of creators is
only a partial answer to some indigenous claims. While some forms of
cultural property
may be protected, others will never stand up to
the test of originality or singularity mandated by the law. The problem
may be that opposing notions of the public domain—who and what
counts and in what ways—have been too easily divided into either
open and closed, only one or the other. Warumungu systems of knowledge
distribution, reproduction, and generation, however, rely on a
continuum between open and closed, where responsibility,
recognition, and regulation increase but are never total.
Interdependent, and shifting, sets of knowledge practices produce
a sociospatial landscape that is continually refracted through acts of
negotiation.
The public domain is not the problem because it assumes knowledge to
be free; it is the problem because it cannot assume knowledge to
be otherwise. Our impoverished understanding of the public domain comes
from its genealogy; its cultural and historical baggage is hard to
jettison. Rational, autonomous subjects, calmly debating and discussing
the common good is an historical conceit; the public domain has always
been a exclusionary proposition, a space to define who does not count:
women, people of color, primitives, and the like. Sampling the archives of
the modern ends up replaying the same sound track. We need a new
catalogue.
CREATIVE CATALOGS
This new catalogue could be produced at the intersection of digital
technologies and indigenous initiatives. The production of the Warumungu
DVD and the emerging archive, when taken seriously as viable cultural
productions, challenges the notion of the public domain as the primary
space for cultural reproduction and the creator as the primary agent in
cultural creativity. Instead, these objects are predicated on their
multiplicity, or their ability to continually reproduce. They circulate
within overlapping domains of sociality. These cultural objects, I have
been suggesting, offer a way to rethink the spatiality of knowledge in
relation to cross-cutting systems of accountability. Neither a generalized
notion of the public domain nor an unmarked commons can account for the
cultural dynamics of these interconnected networks. New technologies and
old cultural protocols merge and produce dynamic local solutions to
variously global issues. The DVD's digital storage capacities allowed
Warumungu concerns about preservation and access to be accounted for and
at least partially integrated. This newly produced digital artifact cannot
be accounted for in a cultural commons where technology and information
are viewed as neutral. It is, in fact, a testament to the inherent
sociality of technology.
The association of the digital age with a digital
divide—technological misappropriation and neocolonial
agendas—denies the managed mergers of digital technologies and
indigenous agendas across social, commercial, and political domains. Like
indigenous agendas, the digital implies a multiplicity of strategies,
technologies, and tools. Issues of access, audience, and the potential
circulation of cultural materials and knowledge cut many ways. The
Internet, digital archives, and DVDs all invoke divergent answers and
questions. In some cases, indigenous communities, or parts of them, may
want to restrict access; in others, they may want to create their own
products or collaborate with outsiders to encourage the circulation of
some cultural products over others. As with human-to-human collaborations,
digital partnerships continue to challenge and change the intercultural
landscape.
The intersection of digital technologies and indigenous initiatives
offers many scenarios; that is, “specific repertoires of cultural
imaginings”.55
Cultural repertoires are dynamic; they are continually being reshuffled.
The DVD's various incarnations, and the digital archive it postures
to, rely on digital technology to preserve and reproduce cultural
knowledge within extended networks that both include and exclude insiders
and outsiders. Distribution is limited and enhanced. Knowledge
preservation is the basis for selective viewing practices at the same time
as it encourages new linkages. Remix happens and is both challenged and
controlled by changing cultural protocols built from a traditional but not
unchangeable set of standards.
Histories and ongoing legacies of colonialism cannot be jettisoned for
the wish of a global commons. Neither the expansion nor the reduction of
copyright law can deal with the sociality of information encouraged by
indigenous protocols. Calling for a commons where culture is generalized
around first-world notions of public/private accountability denies the
multiplicity of both the objects/ideas under culture's umbrella
and the social modalities in which they circulate. Empowering local
communities to invigorate their own local information regimes means
recognizing that information, in fact, does not want to be free. Nor can
it.
In the 1970s, Aboriginal organizations in Australia emerged as a site
for self-determination politics. Although not an unqualified success,
these organizations do serve to merge local information/knowledge
regimes with commercial and noncommercial Aboriginal ventures.56
Many, if not all organizations, in fact,
already have structures for, and strategies aimed at, working with
businesses, researchers, and other outsiders. Researchers sign contracts
to “give back” or “return” information gathered.
Companies work within locally negotiated agendas for sustainability.
Governments must negotiate for the use of indigenous-owned land.
57 In these
emergent systems, power discrepancies cannot be ignored. Instead, the
potential circulation of digital information within overlapping
commercial/cultural spaces pushes us to recognize both the persistence
of inequitable resource distribution and the limits of legal solutions.
Cultural and intellectual property are managed and mediated within social
relations and produced through histories of ongoing political tensions. If
we detach digital culture from its material and social networks, then the
possibility for community content management and cultural redistribution
along the open-closed continuum loses its multiplicity; it becomes an
either-or decision instead of a string of if-then propositions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was assisted by grants from the Australian Institute
for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Grant #
G2001/6585), the University of California Pacific Rim Research
Pro-gram and the Digital Cultural Institutions Project (DCIP) of the
Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the Rockefeller
Foundation. Generous comments by the coordinators, fellows, and
participants at the DCIP workshop, particularly Shannon Jackson, William
Warner, and Geoffrey Bowker, helped ground this work. Sirida
Srisombati's enthusiastic support of this project in its early stages
and her editorial eye have been invaluable. Chris Cooney's
technological guidance, partnership, and tireless work to integrate
Warumungu protocols into the digital architecture of the DVD laid the
groundwork for this ongoing project. Jason Jackson's invitation for
me to be part of the Intellectual and Cultural Property colloquium series
at Indiana University prompted me to elab-orate on my initial research.
His suggestions in the final stages of revisions were much appreciated.
Finally, I'd like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for IJCP whose
comments helped me tighten the structure of the article. All quirks are,
of course, my own.
