W.E.H Stanner: The Dreaming - The Anthropologists

Chapter 3: The Anthropologists

3.3 W.E.H Stanner: The Dreaming

W.E.H. Stanner was not just a consummate anthropologist, he was also a gifted writer of prose which at times becomes poetic. In his essay “The Dreaming” Stanner writes: “A central meaning of The Dreaming is that of a sacred, heroic time long ago when man and nature came to be as they are …”194 There can be no question that “The Dreaming” that Stanner is presenting purports to be the Altyerre of the Arrernte. Later in the essay Stanner will explore the many components of the concept but at the outset he tantalises the reader: “The Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past …”195 By alluding to the “sacred” nature of his topic the reader is alerted to an emerging theme. “The Dreaming” (Altyerre) is not just a description of culture, kinship, language and custom; it has deeper religious/numinous resonance. Stanner notes that “The Dreaming” (Altyerre) cannot be fixed in time: “it was and is, everywhen.”196_{The idea of eternity is immediately conjured.}

And he says “The Dreaming” (Altyerre) has “an unchallengeable sacred authority”.197

Stanner notes the dualistic thinking patterns of non-Aboriginal people where they separate “mind” and “body”, “body” and “spirit”, “spirit” and “personality”, “personality” and “name” as in some sense separate, even opposed entities. In comparison, “the blackfellow198_{does not}

seem to think this way”.199_{The summary of his observations bears quoting in full: “The truth}

of it seems to be that man, society and nature, and past, present and future, are at one together within a unitary system of such a kind that its ontology cannot illuminate minds too much under the influence of humanism, rationalism and science.”200

Recognising the prevailing prejudice within non-Aboriginal Australian thinking, Stanner’s intention is to balance the scales back to a more respectful and correct understanding of the genius of Aboriginal thought. Rather than being deficient, the Aboriginal way of thinking

194_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 57.}

195_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 58}

196_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 58.}

197_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 58.}

198_{“Blackfellow” was a word commonly in use in Stanner’s discourse to describe his Aboriginal friends and}

informants and would not have been seen as offensive in his day. Today “blackfella” remains commonly used by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory along with “whitefella” to describe non-Aboriginal people. However, users of these terms usually assess their interlocutors before using either term. In a sense, they have become terms of endearment used between friends. Of course some “whitefellas” are black, coming from Africa etc!

199_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 59.}

provides great benefits to an Aboriginal person living in her own environment and not challenged or dominated by westerners with a dualistic mindset.

One of the special characteristics of Aboriginal thinking, according to Stanner, is that “The Dreaming” [Altyerre] manages to provide a satisfactory solution to two questions facing all people: where did humans come from; and how is society to be organised? He writes: “[I]t is a cosmogony, an account of the begetting of the universe, a study of creation. It is also a cosmology, an account or theory of how what was created became an ordered system.”201

“The Dreaming” [Altyerre] is not just thinking but transmitted thinking, told and retold faithfully over timeless generations. There are stories that tell of how hills are formed or rivers gouged into landscapes and there are stories of how people came to live in groups with rules. Stanner summarises this most famously when he says that these tales are “a poetic key to reality”.202_{This provides a principle according to Stanner of “not only what life}_is_{but also}

what it can be”.203 Importantly, Stanner recognised in the 1950s, when the Aboriginal Art movement was still to emerge, that the Aborigine “holds his philosophy in mythology, attained as the social product of an indefinitely ancient past, and proceeds to live it out ‘in life’, in part through a ritual and an expressive art, and in part through non-sacred social customs”.204

Stanner has thus established an analytic framework depicting the Aboriginal world-view using markers that would also describe any of the systems of belief that we would call religions. Yet he states that “[t]he Aborigines have no gods, just or unjust, to adjudicate the world”.205_{He continues, “no notion of grace or redemption; no whisper of inner peace and}

reconcilement; no problem of worldly life to be solved only by a consummation of history; no heaven of reward or hell of punishment. The blackfellow’s after-life is but a shadow replica of worldly life.”206_{There can be no question that Stanner was one of the Aborigines’}

greatest friends and advocates. He achieved more than most to advance a better understanding of their world. Yet he may have done them a fatal disservice.

201_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 61.}

202_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 61.}

203_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 62.}

204_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 62.}

205_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 64.}

The problem with Stanner’s conclusion is the contrast between a Judaeo-Christian world- view and the Arrernte world-view. On the one hand, the Judaeo-Christian tradition presents a transcendent God responsible for creation. All humanity and all creation are subject to God’s omnipotent power. Since the story of Adam and Eve, Jews and Christians have been educated to suspect a human capacity for fallibility, labelled as sin. Salvation then is the gift of an incomprehensibly generous and omnipotent God who saves despite human weakness.

Conversely, Altyerre teaches that the creation itself is the source of being. Creation is seen as ultimate and complete, fully satisfying all human needs. By establishing a known world, known through a form of human consciousness that encompasses a form of dreaming, the Arrernte feel no need to reach out for Eden behind the veil when paradise is before their eyes. In a sense transcendence is replaced by immanence in the Arrernte world-view. Recognising that humans err, error is thought to be inherent in being. Human error is not seen as fallibility or sin, but as normal. It is laid down in Altyerre. Normalcy is living out the Altyerre by adhering to its precepts of kinship, marriage and reciprocity or “loving” as M.K. expresses it. While Stanner’s description of “The Dreaming” intimates a Platonic world of ideas known only in shadows, Altyerre, for the Arrernte, is in fact fully alive and vibrant, always wheeling around another sustaining cycle of life.207

Stanner is correct in his comparison. A world-view based on Heaven and Hell, reward and punishment, a vale of tears compared to a Garden of Eden, is vastly different from the predictable, constant, consoling Altyerre world-view of the Arrernte Voices. A Garden of Eden found in apmere is worldly and heaven is not. Heaven in another place, not apmere, does not seem relevant, whereas Eden might be. But what both world-views seek to do is to provide meaning in a challenging world. For the Arrernte, Altyerre provides predictability, certainty, familiarity and mystery wrapped in a seamless garment. It will be the later task of this thesis to demonstrate how this worldview can include divine grace without demanding the abandonment of the comfort of Apmere.

Stanner himself notes that “The Aborigines are not shamed or inspired by a religious thesis of what men might become by faith and grace.”208_{He concedes that “they have a}_{kind of}

religiosity [emphasis added] cryptically displayed in their magical awareness of nature, in

207_{Therese Ryder believes that Altyerre is like a big wheel or circle.} _{Therese Ryder, personal communication,}

March 21, 2017.

their complex totemism, ritual and art, perhaps too even in their intricately ordered life”.209 In the light of the description provided by the Arrernte Voices, as noted above in Chapter 2, this is a grudging admission, too easily absorbed by outsiders, implying that even if there are inklings of religiosity among Aborigines, their religion does not meet the high standards of the rest of the more developed peoples of the world.

Stanner then moves to an analysis of the social world of Aborigines where he says their “creative ‘drive’”210_{has been concentrated. Their social structures and totemism, all focusing}

on relatedness, are the signs of their genius. Stanner notes how time is “in a sense ‘bent’ into cycles or circles”211_{producing generation classes which flip or skip succeeding generations}

so that parents and children are in different classes and grandparents and grandchildren are in the same class. Stanner sees this as the high achievement of Aborigines marooned in a natural environment of varying degrees of hostility equipped with a “very meagre”212_{tool kit. He}

argues that the Aborigine has been able to do this because he is “able to transcend

himself”.213_{It appears that Stanner is suggesting that the Hebrew tradition conceived of an}

omnipotent God meting out justice on the basis of good or bad behaviour of the Israelites, while the Aborigine developed “a philosophy of assent”214_{and was able to “‘defeat’}

history”.215

Stanner recounts the admirable strengths of the Aboriginal philosophy: “They do not fight over land. There are no wars or invasions to seize territory. They do not enslave each other. There is no master-servant relation. There are no class divisions. There is no property or income inequality. The result is a homeostasis, far reaching and stable.”216

Stanner is a friend to the Aborigines. He wishes them no evil. He admires and extols their “abidingness”,217_{so much so that, when seeking to evaluate the power of “The Dreaming”}

(Altyerre), he states that in the end “I should think that we are more likely to ennoble it than

209_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 64.}

210_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 66.}

211_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 67.}

212_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 70.}

213_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 67.}

214_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 68.}

215_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 70.}

216_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 72. Stanner’s views here were based mainly on his ethnography of the Murrinhpatha}

at Wadeye/Port Keats.

not”.218 Here is the critical issue. Stanner’s analysis leads to the conclusion that the success of traditional Aboriginal life was based upon “continuity, constancy, balance, symmetry,

regularity, system, or some such quality as these words convey”.219_{But are these enough?}

One gets the impression that, for Stanner, the Aborigines he is writing about so elegantly are now not marooned on an isolated continent but marooned in time. He says as much: “What defeats the blackfellow in the modern world, fundamentally, is his transcendentalism.220 So much of his life and thought are concerned with “The Dreaming” that it stultifies his ability to develop.”221

In 1968 Winifred Hilliard, a deaconess of the Presbyterian Church, wrote a book which she titled People in Between. She had lived for many years at Ernabella in the Musgrave Ranges in the far north-west of South Australia as a missionary to the Pitjantjatjara and

Yankunytjatjara people gathered there. The Mission, founded in 1937, was a progressive one, being based on the enlightened principles of the former moderator of the South Australian Presbyterian Church, Dr Charles Duguid,222 who admonished the missionary staff to interfere as little as possible in the cultural and religious life of the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people. Yet Hilliard, who was a Pitjantjatjara speaker, a close friend of the people, especially the women with whom she worked in the Art Room, and who wanted to represent them in the best possible light, still represented them as trapped “in between”.223_{It is significant that}

T.G.H. Strehlow wrote the preface for Winifred’s book. He was also a believer that the Arrernte particularly, and by implication all the Aboriginal groups of the Central Desert, were trapped between two worlds with only one possible escape – change through adopting Christianity. Stanner seems to support Hilliard’s and Strehlow’s conclusion. “They have to

218_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 72.}

219_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 70.}

220_{In light of my comment above on the difference between a transcendent God and an immanent God it would}

be interesting to be able to ask Stanner what he means by “transcendentalism”. Perhaps he merely intends a focus on the process of fabricating a meaningful and satisfying world-view – which in Stanner’s view is an all- encompassing fascination.

221_{Stanner, The Dreaming, 68.}

222_{Charles Duguid’s medical inspection of the plight of Aborigines in the far north-west of South Australia and}

across the Northern Territory was to have a powerful effect upon the Pitjantjatjara and Arrernte people.

223_{Winifred Hilliard, The People Between: The Pitjantjatjara People of Ernabella (New York: Funk &}

Wagnalls, 1968). This book was a seminal text in my journey into Aboriginal Australia. I read it in 1977 when I was teaching an Australian History Unit to Year Twelve students in Mildura, Victoria. Quite by accident in 1984 I was employed as Community Adviser of Pukatja Community at Ernabella where Winifred was still living.

change their way of life, or their philosophy, or both, or live unhappily somewhere in between.”224

It appears, in this reading of Stanner, that in the end the essay “The Dreaming”, with all its admirable qualities – such as providing the graceful phrase “the poetic key to reality”, and in regard to Time, “it was and is, everywhen”225_{– concludes that adhering to the principles of}

“The Dreaming” is fatal to its adherents. This is an outcome that Stanner would deplore, but ironically the elegance of his conclusions could well have provided the subtle continuing justification for so many, who also care for the well-being of Australia’s Aborigines, and for the Aborigines themselves, that to rely on “The Dreaming” (Altyerre) is insufficient for their viable future in the modern world.226

Stanner’s findings echo many aspects of the Arrernte Voices discussed in Chapter 2. His coverage is exceptional. It leads to the conclusion that Aboriginal life was based upon “continuity, constancy, balance, symmetry, regularity, system …”.227_{None of the features}

revealed by the Arrernte Voices is omitted. He recognises the interweaving, interlocking nature of a world-view that is held by every member of the group, firmly gluing them into a culture and a community that shapes and preserves their lives. And as he says, “[t]he result is a homeostasis, far reaching and stable”.228_{But unlike M.K., Wenten and Kathleen}_Kemarre,

he ends fatalistically: “What defeats the blackfellow in the modern world, fundamentally, is his transcendentalism. So much of his life and thought are concerned with The Dreaming that it stultifies his ability to develop.”229_The_Arrernte_{Voices, on the other hand, see}_Altyerre_as

the springboard for their cultural revival, while Stanner sees it as the cause of their demise.

In document Searching Altyerre to Reveal the Cosmic Christ: A contribution to the dialogue between the ancient Arrernte imaginary and Christianity (Page 64-69)