The Australian Dominative Medical System: A Reflection of Social Relations in the Larger Society

Hans Baer                                                                                                                                                              

252-271

This paper posits a working or tentative model of medical pluralism, a pattern in which multiple medical sub-systems co-exist, or what I term the Australian dominative medical system. I argue that whereas the Australian medical system with its various medical sub-systems was pluralistic, that is more or less on an equal footing, in the nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century it became a plural or dominative one in the sense that biomedicine came to clearly dominate other medical sub-systems. This paper also explores the growing interest of biomedicine and the Australian Government in complementary medicine to which Australians have increasingly turned over the course of the past three decades or so.

Language out of Music: The Four Dimensions of Vocal Learning

Nicholas Bannan                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

272-293

A growing consensus drawing on research in a wide variety of disciplines has, over the last fifteen years or so, argued the need to revisit Darwin’s conjecture of 1871 that language may be descended from an existing, musical medium of communication that developed from animal calls. This paper seeks to examine, in an extension of Hockett’s analysis of the design features required for linguistic communication, the nature of the acoustic information produced and perceived in human vocalisation, and to consider the anatomical and neural mechanisms on which these depend. An attempt is made to sketch an evolutionary chronology for key prerequisites of human orality. Cross-species comparisons are employed to illuminate the role of four acoustic variables (pitch, duration, amplitude and timbre), viewing the potential for human vocal productivity from the perspective of animal communication. Although humans are the only species to combine entrainment to pulse with attunement to precisely-tracked pitches, we also depend both for musical interaction and the production and perception of vowel sounds on precise and conscious control of the property of timbre. Drawing on, amongst others, Scherer’s analyses of emotionally triggered sounds in a variety of species, and Fernald’s presentation of the similarities of infant cries and adult production of infant-directed speech in a variety of cultures and languages, a case is made for the instinctive components of human communication being more music-like than language-like. In conclusion, historical and comparative data are employed to outline the adaptive and exaptive sequence by which human vocal communication evolved. The roles of selective pressures that conform to different adaptive models are compared¾natural selection, sexual selection, group selection¾leading to the proposal that all of these must have played their part at different stages in the process in a ‘mosaic’ model consistent with the development of other human traits.

Art, Culture and Ambiguity in Wilcannia, New South Wales

Lorraine Gibson                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

294-313

The claim of most town whites that Aboriginal people of Wilcannia make art but have no culture and the claim by Aboriginal people of the town that their art work and art designs demonstrate their culture and cultural traditions opens up the powerful and productive dimensions of art and culture for closer scrutiny. In so doing, the ambivalence and ambiguity which saturates these categories is ethnographically revealed. How can the presence and production of artworks in Wilcannia and the white denial of culture be considered? Why indeed do these questions matter, in what ways do they matter, and to whom do they matter? How do the categories of traditional/remote, urban/settled and their avatars intersect with black and white notions of Aboriginal art and Aboriginal culture discursively and experientially?

Outside Points of View in the Construction of Balinese Ethnicity and Religion

Scott Johnsen                                            

314-330

The ‘outside points of view’ of Muslims, Indian Hindus, tourists and other non-Balinese towards Balinese culture and religion are often invoked by Balinese religious leaders and urban intelligentsia. This has been described in the literature as ‘defensiveness’ related to the process of gaining state acceptance for Balinese religion as Hinduism. I argue for a more subtle reading of the importance of assumed outside points of view to transformations of Balinese practices and to the construction of Balinese identities, by analysing examples from fieldwork (2001-2003) and from Balinese media relating to current debates over cockfighting, the Balinese language, and Balinese religion. One must differentiate the importance of outside points of view to differently positioned Balinese, determine what specific practices are called into question by such assumed points of view, and clearly distinguish between the flow of cultural categories and concepts in a globalised world and the phenomenon of perceived interactions between religions and cultures. Furthermore, a wider cross-cultural perspective reveals the limitations of understanding these processes as uniquely postcolonial or postmodern.

Gratuitousness: Notes Towards an Anthropology of Interiority

Nigel Rapport                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

331-349

Interiority¾an individual’s inner consciousness, the continual conversation one has with oneself¾remains an anthropological terra incognita. Literature has been less circumspect in this regard; fiction might be said to be ‘truer’ than social science in its efforts and intent to deal with how individual consciousness feels in the everyday and is immanent in social life. In this article I argue for recognising interiority as a crucial focus of anthropological endeavour, and I outline a possible way in which interiority might be evidenced as irrupting onto the social scene. Interiority makes its paradoxical appearance in social settings in the form of a strangeness, an individual purity and integrity, for which the term ‘gratuitousness’ is apposite. The language of individuals’ interior conversation is routinely contained within the language of public exchange; on occasion it bursts these bounds. In both cases, I contend, interior conversation is an existential norm, which holds a key to understanding social life. The course of the article is to review, briefly but critically, disciplinary tendencies which have rendered individual interiority an impossible or irrelevant anthropological theme. A method of interiority is then outlined by way of an anthropological reading of two literary texts. The article ends by reconsidering the potential of an anthropology project that has a concern for interiority.

Obituaries

Michael William Nihill, 1953-2008                                                                                                                                     

Book Reviews

Brenda Johnson Clay. Unstable Images: Colonial Discourse on New Ireland. [Robert J. Fisher]                  

352

Sanjukta Dasgupta and Malashri Lal (eds).  The Indian Family in Transition:Reading Literary and Cultural Texts [Goldie Osuri]          

354

Sverker Finnström. Living with Bad Surroundings  [Justin L. C. Hancock]                                                               

355

David K. Jordan, Andrew D. Morris and Marc L. Moskowitz (eds). The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan [Siumi Maria Tam]                                                                                              

R. H. Mathews (ed. Martin Thomas). Culture in Translation: The Anthropological Legacy of R. H. Mathews [Marina Gold]                                                                                                         

Andie Diane Palmer. Maps of Experience: The Anchoring of Land to Story in Secwepemc Discourse [Helene Demers]                                                                                                      

Michael W. Scott. The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Island  [Lamont Lindstrom]                                                                     

Mark P. Whitaker. Learning Politics from Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lank  [Rohan Bastin]