Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community (review)

Mululuarrgalarrnga, Yuduryuryudur, Yirrgirinydjingur, Gamadalalanguriya . . . these are the song names of the source of the sacred waters of the Gularri river that snakes through northeast Arnhem Land and empties into the Arufua Sea. With these "inside" words, the film Gularri begins. Onomatopoeic, reserved for sacred rituals, and used here in the profane public context of the mass media, for a television documentary, their naming sets both the tone and the problematic nature for all that follows. Thus Gularri begins with Charlie Ngalambirra, a dhalkara (ritual specialist) intoning the names of the Yirritja moiety clans and the ancestral places they are connected to and through along the river. The synesthetic effect is enhanced by the subsequent blurring of the images of dancers performing the secret Yirritja Yolngu ngarra revelatory rites, partly recognizable but blurred by the effect of shimmering water—the central metaphor and key Yolngu symbol explored in Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community. Indeed, as the late Bangana Wunungmurra, the Aboriginal consultant for the film, declaimed: "When they hear that they know we are not mucking around." Little wonder then that after the unexpected death of a woman featured in the video, the program was no longer allowed to be shown and that Bangana's subsequent sudden death was widely perceived as the consequence of a sorcerer's revenge.

Shimmering Screens is at the leading edge of a disciplinary paradigm shift, in which anthropologists are taking into account the role of media in daily life and how individuals and communities use media to make sense of their lives. Drawing, as would be expected, on Benjamin, and more so on Heidegger's lesser-known work on technology and imagery, Deger conveys a deeply sensitive understanding of the power of images and transmission of sacred Yolngu knowledge. Above all, Shimmering Screens is a reflective account of a collaborative film project. Throughout, Jennifer Deger is concerned with relating what it means to be Yolngu and ultimately what the imagery of shimmering waters conveys and conceals. It is in great part an account of the production of a documentary film in which she and her key informant, Bangana Wunungmurra, sought to strengthen local culture and knowledge through the mass media. The explicit aim was to convey a sense of indigenous sacra while sufficiently protecting its secrecy and carefully negotiating and respecting different clans' ownership of particular places along the river, the ownership of ancestral knowledge relating to these sites and thus their relationships to each other. It reveals a great deal about the importance of the restrictions placed on the circulation of knowledge and yet how Bangana was able to successfully convey the sense of the sacred and the power of ancestral heritage, or—in the short life of the film and in his death—the very opposite. In this, Shimmering Screens raises as many ripples to explore in the future as its presentation would otherwise suggest.

This is a classic example of what the ethnographic study of media has to offer in terms of understanding the complex bi-directional production and reception of indigenous media but more importantly perhaps for critically assessing the future analytic value of the self-reflexive phenomenological turn. The lasting contribution of this work may well turn out to be that it could provide a watershed mark for assessing the evolution of interpretive anthropology as it has developed since the mid 1980s. Above and beyond its fascinating ethnographic insights into Yolngu aesthetics, particularly relating to water, it provides an excellent example for social scientists at large to critically assess the now medium-term results of the post-modernist interpretive turn in anthropology. The question that occurs to me is whether the subjective, self-reflective aspect of the interpretive quest in anthropology has gone too far. In this, Shimmering Screens ultimately raises unintended and unsettling questions about the future of the discipline itself.

While it is a fascinating case study that deftly engages...