Disturbances and Dislocations: Understanding Teaching and Learning Experiences in Indigenous Australian Women’s Music and Dance (review)

Elizabeth Mackinlay, a lecturer in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland, documents her unique pedagogical approaches and ways of thinking about the teaching and learning of music and dance in her book, Disturbances and Dislocations: Understanding Teaching and Learning Experiences in Indigenous Australian Women’s Music and Dance. A university-level anthropology course dealing with the music and dance traditions of Australia’s Yanyuwa women was the setting for this “ethnographic case study” (p. 17). Through this course, Mackinlay sought to help students connect Indigenous Australian performance practices to social and political issues while fostering awareness of gender issues and learning processes within Indigenous Australian music and dance performance contexts. These objectives were met through a distinctive approach—by disposing of the strict lecture class format and bringing the field into the classroom. Disturbances and Dislocations documents the experiences of Mackinlay, her students, and several Yanyuwa women who come together as part of the course to engage in hands-on, authentic music and dance exchanges that bring the Yanyuwa women’s voices to the fore.

From the very beginning of the book, Mackinlay highlights her unique point of view as author of this work. She is a “white, middle class, educated woman” (p. 15) researching the experiences of and teaching university-level courses relating to Indigenous Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples, a cultural background that is not her own. She is a political, educational, and ethnic outsider to the groups of peoples she studies. The wife of an Aboriginal man and mother to Aboriginal children, she is afforded links to the Yanyuwa people that provide her with a measure of status as a family member within the community. The dichotomy of being at once an insider and an outsider in the Yanyuwa community lends a fascinating level of complexity to Mackinlay’s exploration and analysis of the presence and impact of Yanyuwa culture-bearers in her classroom. The warmth, honesty, and openness with which she addresses her unique role in this learning exchange is engaging to the reader, and allows her personal situation to add humanity and life to the words on the page.

The eight-chapter book commences with an introductory section that reflects upon her personal experiences in engaging in scholarship relating to Indigenous Australian issues. Additionally, the reader is introduced to the site of the ethnography, her classroom, in which her personal and professional lives intertwine. The next chapter further establishes the context of the ethnography by discussing a pilot project that laid foundations for the main study presented in the book. In this 1999 pilot project, a group of Mackinlay’s students, largely white women, participated in hands-on music and dance workshops under the guidance of Mackinlay and several Yanyuwa women. Student responses from this pilot project indicated that they felt awkward at times, but valued the time spent with the Yanyuwa guests and wished for more of these types of class sessions. Mackinlay determined that this cultural exchange could be even richer if more class time could be dedicated to it, an important observation for her own work, and also for others who seek to furnish cultural encounters for students.

The fourth chapter delves into a theoretical discussion of the meanings of the inclusion of the study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in contemporary classroom settings. Issues of political positioning, representation of Indigenous voices, identity, and “speaking from and of in-between spaces” (p. 64) as one with a foothold in both white and Indigenous worlds are all addressed, engaging the reader in Mackinaly’s own complex journey of coming to terms with her own teaching and scholarly pursuits. It is refreshing to the reader that Mackinlay acknowledges her unique viewpoint as facilitator of this course and this research study. While she is an authority in this realm, she highlights her own backgrounds and biases, her individual lens...