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Narrative Traditions of Space, Time and Trust in Court: Terra nullius,‘wandering’, the Yorta Yorta Native Title Claim, and the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Controversy
... But, the evidence produced by Williams and Myers and many other anthropologists, shows that Australian Aboriginal groups had a highly articulated understanding of their own territory and kinship and had a well developed form of social organisation reflected in boundary practices and protocols governing the ways authority and ownership should be acknowledged, and how permission should be sought and granted. This system of norms and signs that made negotiated boundary-crossing permissions possible reveals a spatialised form of politics and territorial distribution and also provides the conditions for the possibility of trust and the movement of knowledge along networks or 'strings of connectedness' (Hallam 1983;Mulvaney 1989;Keen 1995;Turnbull 2000;Turnbull 2003). ...
... Telling stories is a primary way of making meaning and creating an identity, of ordering our interactions with each other and the environment (Turnbull 2003;Turnbull 2004). To tell a story is to organise things in space and time and vice versa; to reference or factor events and people temporally and spatially is to construct a narrative. ...
... However, the orthodox ethnography of the 18th century claimed Aborigines as mere`wanderers' with no form of social organisation (Turnbull, 2004a). Fidelis in the Sydney Gazette 1824 argued:`A ny doubt, therefore, as to the lawfulness of our assuming the possession of this Island must arise from the opinion that it was the property of its original inhabitants. ...
... Telling stories is a primary way of making meaning and creating an identity, of ordering our interactions with each other and the environment (Turnbull, 2004a;2004b). To tell a story is to organise things in space and time and vice versa; to reference or factor events and people temporally and spatially is to construct a narrative. ...
This is a story about the boundaried nature of stories and the storied nature of boundaries. It concerns a modern 'scientific' boundary: the West Australian border. In the process of trying to locate Aboriginal boundaries in a native title claim, this border is revealed as problematic and bent, and as rooted in the colonial history of the last 500 years. The tensions between Western and Aboriginal conceptions of boundaries open up a space for the exploration of the hidden social and narratological dimensions of land and knowledge, ownership, and authority.
... The term "territorialization" captures a point of difference in a double sense; one as used by archaeologist Diego Salazar and his coauthors (2018) in describing the early socio-cultural dynamics of human occupation of the Atacama desert in coastal Peru, and the other in the politico-economic dynamics of colonization described by Deleuze and Guattari (2004), Mignolo (1995), Escobar (2008) and others (Turnbull 2004(Turnbull , 2013. Salazar proposes that territorialization be understood as processes of connection to land that are produced through social practices in which the environment, resources, mobility, subsistence, technology, memory, knowledge, and beliefs are continuously enacted and reproduced. ...
South American rock art and prehistory with all its controversies is a rich site for exploring the processes of territorialization through which humans shape their understanding of the world in their earliest movements through the environment, and also for examining how narratives of prehistory are woven. The paper examines the debate over the Cerutti Mastodon and why Serra da Capivara, one of the largest rock art complexes in the world, remains in analytic limbo. It suggests that rethinking these two examples may offer a possible way out of some of the analytic difficulties in South American prehistory through a decolonizing approach to understanding the reasons for the rejection of the Cerutti Mastodon, and the lack of recognition of Serra da Capivara’s most important site – Bocqueirã da Pedra Furada (PBF).
... 55 51 Marsh and Onof (2008). 52 Turnbull (2002 b);Turnbull (2004);Briggs (1996); Law and Singleton (2000). 53 Baskin (2008). ...
The paper develops a performative account of the ways in which knowledge and space are co-produced as humans move, develop social networks, and extend their cognitive practices. Such an account enables alternative ways of conceiving what counts as knowledge and as modernity to be held in tension, thus allowing the emergent generative effects of the Argentinean philosopher Enrique Dussel's concept of 'transmodernity'. Working with differing knowledge traditions requires, as Walter Mignolo recommends, thinking " with, against and beyond the legacy of Western epistemology. " What is at issue is the capacity to move beyond the point of 'colonial difference' explored by Mignolo in which Western knowledge gets authorised as universal and the rest get classified as 'people without history'. Only then can we enable differing knowledge traditions to work together without subordinating them and absorbing their differences in the western panopticon. This is not an easy task since the Western knowledge tradition in the form of science is hegemonic, and all other traditions are rendered as incommensurable, but to commensurate them is by definition to subordinate them and rob them of their cultural specificity. Equally, simply seeing them as different interpretations or different world views is too weak in the struggle for authority. To flourish, to have autonomy in the face of hegemony, indigenous knowledge traditions have to have an effective voice and construct their own identities. What is offered in this paper is a performative framework which is strong enough to destabilise the hegemony of western epistemology and generative enough to allow for real difference and the growth of cultural diversity.
... Diagrams and maps are likewise stories. In science, just as in all knowledge producing traditions, the processes are inherently narratological; they involve the creation of knowledge spaces in which people, practices and places are discursively linked (Turnbull, 2004;2005a). ...
If maps are conceived as representations of reality or as spatially referenced data assemblages, a dilemma is raised by the nature of Indigenous knowledge traditions and multiple ontologies. How can differing knowledge traditions, differing ways of mapping be enabled to work together without subsumption into one common or universal ontology? The paper explores one way of handling this dilemma by reconceiving mapping and knowing performatively and hodologically. It is argued that one way in which differing knowledge traditions can interact and be mutually interrogated is by creating a database structured as distributed knowledge and emulating a complex adaptive system. Through focusing on the encounters, tensions and cooperations between traditions and utilising the concept of cognitive trails- the creation of knowledge by movement through the natural and intellectual environment – the socially distributed performative dimensions of differing modes of spatially organised knowledges can then be held in a dialogical tension that enables emergent mapping.
Recent critiques of participatory mapping point out the degree to which, as a practice, it has become disciplined by legal prospects for recognition often adopted as part of neoliberal reforms. Yet while neoliberalism certainly disciplines the practice of mapping, they are not reducible to expressions of its dominance. Through a discussion of a participatory mapping project in the Mosquitia region of Honduras, I show how the practice of producing and using maps involves negotiating a spatially complex terrain shaped by multiple and overlapping forms of territory and authority. Insofar as mapping involves movement through this terrain, it engages multiple spatialities that inform assessments of the potential for legal recognition and critically awareness of its constraints. Questions of what to map and how to go about doing it are thus never merely technical concerns. Instead they are diagnostic of broader relations of power that position participants in mapping projects. Rather than producing an authoritative account of that process, my argument here is aimed at learning from it, developing the prospects for a critically-informed, collaborative approach to mapping.
Bacteria, pigs, rats, pots, plants, words, bones, stones, earrings, diseases, and genetic indicators of all varieties are markers and proxies for the complexity of interweaving trails and stories integral to understanding human movement and knowledge assemblage in Southeast Asia and around the world. Understanding human movement and knowledge assemblage is central to comprehending the genetic basis of disease, especially of a cancer like nasopharyngeal carcinoma. The problem is that the markers and trails, taken in isolation, do not all tell the same story. Human movement and knowledge assemblage are in constant interaction in an adaptive process of co-production with genes, terrain, climate, sea level changes, kinship relations, diet, materials, food and transport technologies, social and cognitive technologies, and knowledge strategies and transmission. Nasopharyngeal carcinoma is the outcome of an adaptive process involving physical, social, and genetic components.
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