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Engaging Relations: Ethnography withan Aboriginal OrganisationMartin PréaudPublished online: 12 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Martin Préaud (2013): Engaging Relations: Ethnography with an AboriginalOrganisation, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 14:2, 149-160

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Engaging Relations: Ethnography withan Aboriginal OrganisationMartin Preaud

This paper seeks to locate and discuss the production of ethnographic knowledge in the

intercultural field of Indigenous Australia. While issues of personhood and relatedness,

identity and exchange, have been well documented, they have rarely been considered

from an intercultural and relational perspective where individuals (including the

researcher) are the outcome rather than the premise of relationships. I describe the site of

ethnographic research as a field of relational possibilities and discuss naming practices

that occur during fieldwork. I argue, in the light of the relationship developed with an

Aboriginal grassroots organisation, that the constitution of the researcher himself and his

description of a social reality as an objective system are but two aspects of the same

process of ethnographic knowledge production. I attempt to draw the epistemological and

ethical consequences of such a relational paradigm.

Keywords: Ethnography; Australia; Relatedness; Names; Relational Analysis; Intercul-

tural Field

Perception is not the capturing of a form, but the solution of a conflict, thediscovery of compatibility, the invention of a form. (Simondon 2007 [1989], 76, myemphasis)

The emergence in the Australian academic sphere of an ‘intercultural’ paradigm to

describe the situation in which Aboriginal cultural difference is (re)produced

(Langton 1988; Merlan 1998; Hinkson and Smith 2005; Sullivan 2006) has important

implications for the ways in which we conceive of society and culture, but also of

ethnographic fieldwork. Because it invites us to follow the ways in which particular

configurations of the social are objectified as instances of cultural (or another form

of) difference, it raises the issue of the manner in which we are able to describe these

processes as ethnographers. How can we, from the field in which we work, account

for the practices, discourses and representations that are generative of social realities

Martin Preaud is a postdoctoral researcher. Correspondence to: Martin Preaud, c/o LAIOS, 190�198 avenue de

France, 75244 Paris Cedex 13, France. Email: mpreaud@ehess.fr

# 2013 The Australian National University

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2013

Vol. 14, No. 2, 149�160, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2013.768693

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of which we are an integral part? What are the theoretical and pragmatic

consequences of acknowledging Fabian’s (1983) ‘coevalness’*the sharing of space

and time with the people we work with and learn from in the field*in our

ethnographic writing?

In this article I discuss aspects of fieldwork with an Aboriginal organisation in

northern Western Australia. My aim is to develop a relational understanding of the

role that ethnographic knowledge and products, as unfolding from interpersonal

relationships, play in the objectification of our ethnographic field. I attempt to

address the epistemological consequences of this relational perspective, adopting a

position that edges the intercultural dimension of contemporary ethnographic

practice in Australia. Although well discussed in the ethnographic literature of

Australia and the Pacific (Strathern 1988; Weiner 1992; Myers 1993), the intertwining

of issues of exchange and personhood have seldom been discussed in their

intercultural dimensions. The article begins with a discussion of the ‘field’, framing

it as a relational space, before discussing the role that naming practices may have in

conceptualising ethnographic practices. It concludes with a discussion of ethno-

graphic products as performative attributes of ethnographic relationships, participat-

ing in the constitution and production of the individual terms those relationships

engage, in this case, the researcher and the organisation. Simondon’s (2007) notion of

individuation is used to account for the relational unfolding of their objectified

existence that allows their analysis. Throughout the article I argue that the discipline

can and should draw on all the consequences of a ‘relational’ turn by recognising the

primacy of relationships and their status as quasi-subjects.

The Field of an Organisation

Participating in a wider critique of bounded conceptions of ethnographic sites within

anthropology, and hence of essentialist notions of society and culture, Henry (1999)

reframes the concept of the ethnographic field where researchers come to work as a

‘field of sociality’. She argues that ‘doing fieldwork simply means placing oneself

within a field of sociality generative of an understanding about social situations, and

about how places, cultures, societies, communities come to be ‘‘fixed’’ as objective

systems at all’ (1999, 59). Such a perspective roots the object of ethnographic study

not in geographical coordinates but in the social realities arising from particular

configurations and practices of relatedness. Henry thus proposes that researchers

should not ‘start with a given totality, either real or conceptual, but. . .explore the

practices which generate them’ (54).

This current article arises from doctoral fieldwork conducted between 2005 and

2007 with a regional grassroots (non-statutory) Aboriginal organisation, the

Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture Centre (KALACC). Established in 1984

during a regional cultural festival by a group of ritual leaders, the organisation aims

to support ritual activities in the Kimberley and promote awareness of and respect for

Aboriginal Law and Culture in the wider Australian society. My aim was to study,

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from the point of view of practice, the (re)production of Aboriginal cultural politics

and the underpinnings and dynamics of indigeneity in this particular region. I had

chosen to work with such an organisation precisely because it was a construct,

seeking to represent and embody Indigenous cultural authorities, which did not fit

into any preconceived social or cultural unit or category, such as a particular

community or language group. It offered the possibility to explore the making and

reproduction of an Aboriginal collective and of Aboriginal cultural difference within

the Kimberley and the Australian socio-political situation as a whole.

Doing fieldwork meant placing myself within KALACC, in physical as well as

formal terms. While in Fitzroy Crossing, where the organisation has its office, I

usually resided within KALACC’s compound on the southern side of the Great

Northern Highway. This was largely due to housing shortage in the town and

surrounding communities and my limited financial means, but also because it offered

me an incomparable vantage point to observe who was in relation with the

organisation, whether coming for a meeting or just for a chat and cup of tea. On

presenting my research project to the chairman and coordinator, I had been invited

to participate in KALACC activities, especially meetings, which happened on a

regular basis with all sorts of interlocutors, whether it be the local police, funding

agencies, executive members of the organisation and so on; I was equally invited to

participate in the different projects that the organisation oversees, such as the

Yiriman project for youth-at-risk, or the repatriation of human remains and cultural

objects program. This association with the organisation was formally sanctioned by a

collaborative research agreement signed in August 2006, well after my first association

with KALACC the year before for the 2005 Majarrka festival, held near the Ngumpan

community to celebrate the twenty-first anniversary of the establishment of the

organisation.

Through these activities, and research in the organisation’s archives, interviews

with staff members and work on other ethnographic accounts, I was progressively

able to describe KALACC as a site of multiple articulations, in both meanings of the

term outlined by Clifford (2001): as vocal expression and the joining of different

elements into a coherent system. Indeed, KALACC is a site for the articulation of the

diverse and heterogeneous Kimberley Aboriginal field, dispersed into a multiplicity of

self-identified groups and communities, into a unified collective voice at the regional

level. The organisation brings together around thirty distinct self-identified groups,

each of them inscribed in a particular cultural landscape, that share a common

history of colonial displacements as well as common cultural references (such as the

Kriol language or the subsection system).

Advocating that ‘old people are our government’ (KALACC 1995), the organisa-

tion purports to represent the views and will of male and female ‘cultural bosses’ on a

wide array of subjects ranging from cultural to social and economic matters,

corresponding to a holistic perspective enshrined in Aboriginal Law (LRCWA 2006).

As such, KALACC is also a site for the articulation within the ‘Indigenous sector’ of

administration (Rowse 1992) of the Aboriginal concept of ‘Law and Culture’. In my

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thesis, I analysed it as an indigenous concept describing processes of cultural

creativity such as those deployed, for instance, in colonial institutions (pastoral

stations and missions in particular) to reconfigure patterns of ritual alliances and

modes of exchange between groups (Akerman 1979; Kolig 1981). As this concept

does not have a ready translation in administrative English, it leads to productive

misunderstandings and miscomprehension, in the sense that it offers ‘room to

manoeuvre’ (Chambers 1991) for the organisation. The ambiguity stemming from

the absence of translation (visible in the funding pattern, see below) creates a

possibility for KALACC to constantly redefine and negotiate its position in the social

and administrative realms of the Kimberley (Preaud 2009).

Fieldwork, then, consisted of placing myself within KALACC, that is within the

wider system of relations that is both generative of and generated by the organisation

as a singular entity*a system rendered visible through attending the many and

various meetings to which KALACC is a party. Ethnographic work meant actually

tracing and mapping out the relations that make KALACC: those binding the

members of the groups that it federates and those it entertains with external agencies

in order to reproduce itself as a viable organisation. It is possible, to consider the

organisation not so much as an object of study or as a mere enabler of research but as

the field of research itself. Its office is situated in a given place, but the prolonged

experience of such a place*extending into the various organisations, communities

and persons affected by or involved in its activities*blurs its topographical

boundaries into topological connections. From an experiential point of view,

KALACC is a networked place, a hub connecting various social realms and agencies,

‘an unbounded field of sociality’ (Henry 1999, 59), constituted through specific

patterns of relationships developed from the heterogeneous ground of the Kimberley

social, cultural and political landscape.

From this perspective, the intercultural field emerging in Australianist scholarship

is better understood as a relational field perceived through the prism of the

production of cultural difference. How could an intercultural perspective produce

anything other than cultural entities? Displacing the ethnographic gaze towards the

production of objective systems or individuals (communities, organisations, persons)

avoids presupposing their nature or quality. This is rather an outcome of the research,

identified precisely because it is a defining element of the relationships mapped

through ethnographic description, rather than their terms. The funding of KALACC

mainly as an ‘arts and culture’ organisation, for instance, reveals an administrative

bias of seizing indigenous issues through cultural paradigms, projecting its own ideas

about what culture is (Cowlishaw 1988), and preventing any institutional recognition

of the political dimension of the organisation, thus constraining the agency of its

members. In this view, the concept of ‘Law and Culture’ carried by KALACC is as

much its own production as it is that of the meaningful others with whom the

organisation negotiates its place. Within a relational perspective*a methodological

as well as a theoretical perspective enabling the description of the production of

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singular positions within systems of relations*otherness or cultural difference is an

outcome rather than a premise.

Dwelling in the Field: Names and Relations

In a recent demographic survey of the Fitzroy Valley, Frances Morphy (2010)

underlines how statistical categories such as ‘statistical family’ or ‘household’ used by

the Australian Bureau of Statistics prevent any relevant assessment of Indigenous

sociality in the formulation of public policies. Describing the organisation of

Aboriginal population in terms of the articulation of three components or

subsystems*place, kinship network and core individuals*she argues that ‘Indigenous

sociality can only be adequately modelled in terms of anchored networks’ (2010, 7).

While such a model draws on Australian ethnographies (e.g. Myers 1986), it should

also be linked to the introduction in the Australianist debate of concepts such as the

rhizome or existential territory, coined by French intellectuals Deleuze and Guattari

to describe networked forms of sociality (e.g. Rumsey 2001; Glowczeski 2011).

Following Morphy, KALACC can be understood as a place constituted through the

historical and political agency of core individuals*ritual leaders or ‘old people’*the

place for the anchoring of ritual authorities and networks into a distinctly political

vehicle. KALACC is a node in a wider network of collectives*regional and local

organisations, communities*a place through which to anchor in the administrative

and political realms the agency of Kimberley Aboriginal authorities.1

While Morphy’s (2010) model of mobile Aboriginal sociality cannot capture the

movement between the different scales of organisation that KALACC operates*capturing local diversity into a regional voice*it is nonetheless relevant to discuss

what follows entering into a relational field, namely socialisation and, possibly,

‘personal acquaintance’ (Tamisari 2006). In the following section, I discuss my

socialisation into a particular mob2 of people centred on an elderly couple attached

to KALACC through various dimensions such as employment, nearby residence and

recognition as cultural authorities for their desert country. Being socialised by this

particular mob effectively meant my being socialised into KALACC’s field as well, an

element I will return to after a discussion of naming practices.

My entering a particular ‘field of sociality’ goes back to a ‘back-to-country trip’

under the aegis of KALACC, when KALACC’s field officer, Lawrence,3 chided some

children who were calling me Kartiya (a generic term designating non-Indigenous

people throughout the Kimberley). He told them sternly that I had a name, Martin.

This recognition of my having a name I understand retrospectively as my recognition

as a person, that is as someone with whom a relationship, and productive exchange, is

possible. The trajectory that this initial recognition opened was one punctuated with

the bestowal of further names by members of the field officer’s kin group: first a ‘skin

name’ situating me in the local subsection system (given by the aforementioned core

elder, Lawrence’s classificatory mother’s father), then a ‘bush name’ situating me in

relation to a particular country through which we travelled together (given by

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Lawrence’s biological mother). These names are but two in the total sum of names

and nicknames that I have been called while in the Kimberley by the people with

whom I have been working or journeying (see Figure 1). But they bear a particular

significance in that, inscribed as they are in a trajectory of intensive relationships,

they reveal something of what is at stake in terms of knowledge, exchange and

personhood in the ethnographic relationship.

In the anthropological literature, names and naming practices have generally been

analysed along two lines: either as means to identify and classify individuals within a

socio-cultural system or as signs and symbols referring to a specific system of value

and representation (Bromberger 1982; Zonabend 1980). Naming practices, on the

other hand, have received relatively less attention, and are generally analysed in terms

of relations of power or coercion, albeit with an intention of socialisation (Vom

Bruck and Bodenhorn 2006); indeed, there are enough stockmen named ‘Hitler’ or

‘Staline’ by their white bosses in pastoral Australia to testify to this dimension.

As for the names received in the field, especially in the case of skin names, they can

certainly be understood as acts of socialisation (Glowczewski 1989) or, following

Tamisari (2006), as opening the possibility of further socialisation and acquaintance

with specific persons. Equally, nicknames can be seen as a first step in a process of

mutual acquaintance, similar to the initial recognition of my name by Lawrence. But

what, then, of further names; how can we understand that after having recognised my

having one, Lawrence and members of his kin group thought it appropriate to give

me more names?

Figure 1 A diagrammatic representation of the constellation of names received while

doing fieldwork; underlined names are terms of address in the local kinship system, skin

names are indicated in italics.

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Certainly, there is a power dimension at work, in the sense of claiming a particular

relationship to myself and the resources I could command, limited as they might have

been (a lift, the daily cup of tea or bit of food and similar small services). But there is

simultaneously a dimension of care in the act of bestowing a skin name: exchange

relationships within Aboriginal sociality far exceed the sole dimension of ‘demand

sharing’ (Altman 2011). For in a social situation where kinship provides the main

framework of reference for social behaviour, being out of the system and without

relatives is not synonymous with autonomy but with vulnerability: lacking both

affective and economic resources, being, as it were, out of the field of possibility. This

holds true even if naming may also be used, as Tamisari (2006, 19) points out, to

maintain distance. Finally, my receiving names was also linked to my being associated

with KALACC, an organisation to which the people who gave me names were tightly

linked; there was certainly a sense that, in return for my receiving names and being

socialised, it was expected that I pursue the work I was doing with and for KALACC.

Importantly, those names received while in the field did not come to establish a

relationship but were bestowed a posteriori, after a shared experience such as

travelling together on country or participating in a particular event, both involving

living together for several days or weeks.4 Similarly, Lawrence’s recognition of my

having a name only occurred a couple of months after my first return to Fitzroy

Crossing in March 2006. These names, then, may be seen as something arising from

an already established relationship, an attribute thereof rather than their condition. In

that sense, their bestowal appears to indicate stages or thresholds of relational

intensity: they do not signal a change in me or in the people giving me the name, but

a qualitative change in the relationship itself, an expression of our becoming together.

The fact that names may change over time, that relatedness needs to be maintained

and tested, that it might bifurcate towards other individuals following shared

experiences, is yet another testimony to this dynamic of relational intensity revealed

through names.5 Here again, the relationship is conceptually anterior to the

individual realisation of its terms.

Names received in the field can thus be considered ethnographic products as they

unfold and are produced through ethnographic encounters, an outcome of

ethnographic relationships and conversations. They can also be seen as ethnographic

knowledge in that they explicitly draw the researcher receiving them into a different

way of perceiving, knowing and acting in the world: through relationships. In the

words of Vernon Gerard, Kwini executive member of KALACC: ‘I got no blackfella

name, but they just call me by Jangari, by my skin, you know, in the Law? Well, that’s

all they call me by that. And then I know, see? I understand.’ (V. Gerard, Kwini elder,

cited in La Fontaine 2006, 20, my emphasis). Indigenous scholars have long expressed

the fact that working with Indigenous people and communities requires working and

researching through their own structures and processes of knowledge and decision-

making; in fact, this is what they invite us to do when they give us skin or bush

names, although we sometimes fail to recognise this gift and fully accept its

consequences.

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Description and Relations: Reciprocal Individuation

Gilbert Simondon’s (2007) concept of individuation underwrites much of my

discussion of relatedness and the production of ethnographic knowledge. Individua-

tion designates the process and operation whereby, from a heterogeneous field of

potentials, individuals take form or, in the words of Henry (1999, 59), ‘come to be

‘‘fixed’’ as objective systems’. Simondon’s ontology, which really is an ontogenesis

(being-as-becoming), not only affirms that the individual is never given in advance,

but also that it is never final either: ‘unity and identity only apply to one phase of

being, which is posterior to the operation of individuation’ (Simondon 2007 [1989],

14).

While it is not the place here to provide a full account of Simondon’s theory, I seek

to draw attention to the resonances it entertains with ethnographic practice as

defined by Henry (1999). Henry’s suggestion that we explore the practices generative

of dynamic social realities is challenging and has important methodological,

epistemological and ethical consequences, because one of the ways that an

organisation such as KALACC, and the notion of cultural difference it carries, may

be ‘fixed as an objective system’ is precisely through ethnographic description.

My association with a range of people and mobs through my working with

KALACC allowed me to develop a relational description of the organisation and the

ambiguous position it occupies at the articulation point between the administrative

sector of Indigenous affairs and the unfolding of Aboriginal ‘Law and Culture’ into

political practice. It is this very ambiguity that not only underscores the reproduction

of the organisation and the cultural difference it asserts but also allows for its

redefinition. Here, the production of ethnographic material and knowledge becomes

strategic and performative.

During fieldwork, I produced a number of different kinds of ethnographic

material*such as photographs, meeting minutes, genealogies, stories, short films

and so on. These and other materials*such as field notes, ethnographic and

anthropological literature*formed the basis on which I then developed my

dissertation, scientific articles, seminar and conference presentations*that is,

instances of description and analysis. All of these were sent to KALACC in

accordance with the provisions of our collaborative research agreement (in itself an

ethnographic document informing the field of Australian Indigenous research). It

was also part, as I mentioned earlier, of the expectations put on me in exchange for

my naming and socialisation. A number of documents and interventions*summaries, submissions and reports*were produced at the request of KALACC’s

coordinator with whom these exchanges had mostly been taking place (himself not

identifying as an Indigenous Australian person).

All these documents participate in drawing a certain picture of KALACC, in fact in

‘fixing’ it as an objective reality by cutting into its relational field; ‘the invention of a

form’ according to my disciplinary formation, academic expectations, as well as those

of the organisation. Central to my argument in the thesis, for instance, was the notion

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that KALACC identified as ‘the government of old people’ (KALACC 1995). This idea

was mobilised in order to account for the move of religious authorities into the

political realm of contemporary indigenous affairs, a move belonging to an

indigenous political history not entirely defined by the constraints of colonisation

and settlement. Although the idea originally emanated from the organisation

archives, it was my interpretation that was then used by the coordinator in

correspondence with funding and other agencies, submissions to public inquiries

and so on, all actions aimed at asserting the organisation’s nature and usefulness,

raising its profile and securing a place for it through funding streams, thereby

displacing or transforming the definition, role and place of the organisation in its

administrative environment.6

Thus, the ‘invention of a form’ (perception in the opening quote), or the ‘fixing’ of

an objective reality unfolding from ethnographic observation, participates in the

transformation of both the situation observed and of the observer. In the case of

KALACC, my work represents a particular moment or phase in a longer trajectory

of becoming and asserting its role and relevance in the arena of Indigenous public

policy in the Kimberley. It has also had an effect in terms of establishing me

professionally as an anthropologist. The relation between the organisation and the

researcher, formally materialised by a collaborative research agreement but pursued

through personal engagement, is the ground on which both parties establish

themselves as meaningful in their respective domains. In that sense, the relationship

between KALACC and myself is, conceptually prior to our being fixed as individual

entities in the shapes that we bear today, which are subject to further similar

transformations or, to use Simondon’s (2007) vocabulary, individuations.

Conclusion

In this article, I have attempted to explore some of the consequences of adopting a

relational paradigm for the way we conceive of ethnographic practice and knowledge

products. It implies, firstly, that we think and experience our research sites as fields of

possibilities rather than as bounded places. Here, KALACC appears as a node within

a larger field, a particular dimension of Kimberley Aboriginal mobile sociality; it is

both generative of and generated by manifold relationships, within and outside its

structure; describing it as an individual entity implies an operation of cutting it out

from the field it arises from and nurtures.

Secondly, ethnographic practice is redefined as one of producing relatedness,

which is simultaneously a production of the individual terms in relation. By

discussing naming practices and the relationships developed with a particular mob, I

have shown how they were inextricably linked with processes of caring and claiming,

of learning*being ‘grown up’*and exchanging, all of which attach ethnographic

knowledge to the experience of relatedness. Ethnographic products and knowledge,

in this light, can be considered attributes of the relationships that generate them

rather than their mere result.

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Finally, drawing on Simondon’s (2007) concept of individuation, I have pointed to

the performative nature of ethnographic description, sketching how it fitted within

larger trajectories of becoming for all the terms involved in ethnographic relation-

ships. We are not merely engaged in relationships of exchange and knowledge

production; they simultaneously produce us. As ethnographers, our describing social

forms shapes us. These descriptions are but phases in an ongoing process of

becoming that is reactivated whenever we step into a particular field. To take this idea

seriously, to its fullest theoretical and practical consequences, might just contribute to

giving anthropology a different name.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Dr Cecile Leguy at Universite Paris Descartes who first suggested

that I devote more attention to names and naming practices. I am also thankful for

the precious comments and suggestions made by participants at the Cairns Institute

colloquium, including the editors of this volume, as well as for the thoughtful

comments by the two anonymous reviewers. Funding for my doctoral fieldwork was

secured through a Lavoisier co-tutelle grant from the French Department of Foreign

Affairs as well as two research grants from the Graduate Research School at James

Cook University. The SOGIP research project (ERC 249236) provided funding for

attending the workshop as part of initial fieldwork.

Notes

[1] On the notion of anchorage with reference to Aboriginal networks, see Lacam-Gitareu 2011.

[2] I use the term ‘mob’ to reflect local use and understanding of mobile social organisation. For a

discussion of mobs in Aboriginal Australia, see Sansom 1980.

[3] Names have been changed.

[4] It is equally the case for the second bush name appearing in Figure 1, Marnjan, received after

having accompanied a group of Bardi people to a cultural festival.

[5] This issue warrants development that cannot be done here; but see Tamisari 2006 and Myers

1986 for examples of negotiations of relatedness through time in the indigenous Australian

context.

[6] Of course, such transformative capacity is not the sole property of ethnographic products, nor

is my work the only ethnography used by KALACC to assert its role*far from it. The

establishment of the Yiriman project, for instance, by leaders from four southern Kimberley

Aboriginal groups to provide cultural alternatives to incarceration illustrates how the field of

relations that KALACC commands contains potential for the transformation of the

organisation’s inclusion and role in the Australian social situation, in this case allowing for

a move in funding patterns towards the Australian Department of Corrective Services.

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