Tasmanian Aboriginal Material Culture, Compensation, Belonging

Abstract

The Tasmanian Aboriginal people have historically been defined by their visible lack of stereotypical "Aboriginal" characteristics and their supposed nonexistence. This article examines how Tasmanian Aboriginal individuals are bridging such gaps through material cultural production. In thinking about how communities mobilize the past to produce themselves in the present, I argue that canoes, kelp water carriers, and shell necklaces are vehicles through which alterity and distinction are rendered concrete. As such, these processes are best understood in relation to Bell and Geismar's "materialization" and Ingold's "meshworks." Despite internal debates amongst practitioners over proper methodologies and styles, revitalized culture can be productively imagined as compensation for outward shortcomings and deficiencies. Efforts at revitalizing culture are willed connections to a deep ancestral past and represent the discursive enactment of a continuity that is often otherwise conspicuous by its absence. [material culture, cultural revitalization, Indigeneity, Tasmania, Australia]This article examines the resurgence of Tasmanian Aboriginal material culture and demonstrates how such practices compensate for cultural and racial elements that are viewed as irretrievable. I focus on the complex ways cohesion, difference, and belonging are produced alongside material things. My argument is informed by close to two years of ethnographic research in Tasmania, Australia, between 2007 and 2011, focusing on the rearticulation of Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestral culture following their perceived 1876 extinction.In engaging with how communities mobilize the past to produce themselves in the present, I am interested in how material things are the vehicles through which alterity and distinction are rendered concrete. Furthermore, I show how such things as baskets, canoes, and kelp water carriers signify broader connections into the deep past that are often conspicuous by their absence. As such, these processes are best understood in relation to Bell and Geismar's "materialization" (2009) and Ingold's "meshworks" (2012), both of which elucidate the co-formation of people and things. 1 An ethnographic vignette clarifies the sociopolitical context in which such revitalization takes place. On November 3, 2010, I attended a performance of Mathinna. Mathinna was an interpretive dance production by the Bangarra Dance Theatre, arguably Australia's preeminent Indigenous performing arts company. This production depicted the tragic tale of its namesake, a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman, and its first performance in Tasmania's capital of Hobart was both a homecoming and a cultural event for the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. Forever immortalized in Thomas Bock's 1842 portrait as the little girl in the red dress, Mathinna's life epitomizes the (often tragic and frequently forced) movement between cultures during the colonial period. 2 She was born in 1835 to her mother, Wongerneep, and father, Towterer, at the Wybalenna Aboriginal settlement on Flind...

MAKING KIN: Rawness, Porosity, and the Agencies

“…These perspectives help better attune scholars to the different ontologies and understandings of objects (see Basu 2017; Liboiron 2021). This comes out beautifully in Berk's (2022) discussion of the newly made kelp water carriers and stringybark canoes, Nicholas's (2022) discussions of the threads of textiles, Stuckey's (2022) commentary on the memory‐work around photographic albums and houses, and Cruz's (2022) examination of the different localities through which heritage is enacted in southern Mozambique. Taking meshworks or its analogue, kin‐making, seriously means attending to the lived realities of materiality—and working to keep these connections in view.…”

“…5 The emotional load of things, their histories and relations stir in all of the papers in this special issue, both above and below the surface. We see this most strikingly in Berk's (2022) paper, in which he discusses how his Tasmanian interlocutors, through their making of kelp water carriers, baskets, canoes, and shell stringing, are remaking their kin relations in contemporary contexts. Such activities help the Tasmanians involved make themselves anew, in a way that attempts to push through the long and painful history of settler colonialism and its accompanying violence (see Thorner 2022).…”

BEING CALLED TO ACTION: Contemporary Museum Ethnographies

“…As Berk (2022) cites in this special issue, Clifford (2001) argues that “cultural forms will always be made, unmade, and remade. Communities can and must reconfigure themselves, drawing selectively on remembered pasts” (2001, 479–80).…”

“…As Berk (2022) argues, Tasmanian Aboriginal objects were collected by early colonizers and mobilized in the production of knowledge of “primitive races” and discourses of the unilineal evolution of humankind beginning with the savagery of Tasmanians. Yet it was these collecting practices that now make objects available for resignification and creative uptake.…”

“…What does the privilege of stepping out of one's everyday life to consume something of someone else's in fact do ? In Tasmania, the performance of culture at a festival is imagined to validate both the object produced and its maker(s) as indices of real, contemporary Aboriginality (see Berk 2022). In Turkey, old mansions are fashioned into hotels as both an avenue of economic development and a vehicle for the production of narratives of the past.…”