Re: <documenta X><blast> home-affect
Jordan Crandall (xaf@interport.net)
Thu, 10 Jul 1997 14:24:14 -0400
According to Donna Haraway's account of Watson-Verrran's research on Wik
Aboriginal Austrailians, "Wik spatialization practices involve recursive
layers of stories and metaphors that tie land and people together in
interconnected networks, which certainly have to do with ownership of
the land but not with exclusion and possession in the same ways that
would make sense to European geographers, lawyers, and leaseholders."
Watson-Verran write: "As the Wik see it they 'own' the land in the
strongest possible sense, and they confidently expect the High Court to
ratify this ownership. Their clans, distributed across the area, came
into being with the land itself... Owning the land is owning and
publically articulating stories through which the land is meaningful as
ontic interconnected place. And in the stories are the multiple and
complex metaphors which comprise the stuff of negotiating in Aboriginal
Australia. In contrast to the pastorialists, on the Wik side it is
likely that there are far too many who have ideas on how to negotiate."