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Mixed Up with Trees: The Gadgur and the Dreaming

  • Stephen Muecke (author)
Chapter of: Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World(pp. 36–43)

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Metadata
TitleMixed Up with Trees
SubtitleThe Gadgur and the Dreaming
ContributorStephen Muecke (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0207.1.04
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/covert-plants/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightMuecke, Stephen
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2018-09-11
Long abstractfter talking to the Goolarabooloo people for a few years now, and thinking a bit about what they might mean by ‘living coun-try’ in the West Kimberley region of Australia, I want to venture the idea that they understand life as networked and sustained among humans and non-humans. This idea, which is hardly surprising among students of ecology today — who are push-ing back against the ancient Judeo-Christian concept of man’s dominion over nature — turns out it may be more than just an idea in Indigenous Australian cosmologies. It may well be struc-tural; built into what we used to call ‘cultural’ practices like cer-emonies, but now search for a new name for, because they are more-than-cultural precisely because they mix up ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ things. While each animal, tree and water source strives to persist in its own way, engendering its filiations, it is also a nec-essary mutually sustaining part of the heterogeneous network. Humans are not exceptional in this, because, like the others, they are ‘reproductive beings.’1 Living country is a whole network reproducing itself, and when the human communities organise to sing the country, to vitalise it and make it ‘stand up,’ they are performing what anthropologists call ‘increase ceremonies’ for animals or plants. And why not think of initiations of boys also as kinds of ‘increase’?
Page rangepp. 36–43
Print length8 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Stephen Muecke

(author)