Lines and Criss-Crossings: Hyperlinks in Australian Indigenous Narratives

Abstract

The issue of an ethical approach to pleasure does not imply a religious or moral order, but a constant re-evaluation of how each image or representation of any contemporary culture (Indigenous, musical, professional, digital, etc.) impacts on social justice, equity, tolerance and freedom. Two attempts of anthropological restitution developed with Aboriginal peoples for a mixed audience are presented here. The first is a CD-ROM (Dream Trackers: Yapa Art and Knowledge of the Australian Desert), focused on one Central Australian community (Lajamanu in the Northern Territory), while the second is an interactive DVD (Quest in Aboriginal Land) based on films by Indigenous filmmaker Wayne Barker, juxtaposing four regions of Australia. Both projects aim to explore and enhance the cultural foundations of the reticular way in which many Indigenous people in Australia map their knowledge and experience of the world in a geographical virtual web of narratives, images and performances. The relevance of games for anthropological insights is also discussed in the paper. Nonlinear or reticular thinking mostly stresses the fact that there is no centrality to the whole but a multipolar view from each recomposed network within each singularity, a person, a place (a Dreaming in the case of Aboriginal cultures), allowing the emergence of meanings and performances, encounters, creations as new original autonomous flows. Reticular or network thinking, I argue, is a very ancient Indigenous practice but it gains today a striking actuality thanks to the fact that our so called scientific perception of cognition, virtuality and social performance has changed through the use of new technologies.