The Religions of Oceania

Tony Swain, Garry Trompf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134928514
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

More than a quarter of the world's religions are to be found in the regions of Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, together called Oceania. The Religions of Oceania is the first book to bring together up-to-date information on the great and changing variety of traditional religions in the Pacific zone. The book also deals with indigenous Christianity and its wide influence across the region, and includes new religious movements generated by the responses of indigenous peoples to colonists and missionaries, the best known of these being the `Cargo Cults' of Melanesia.
The authors present a thorough and accessible examination of the fascinating diversity of religious practices in the area, analysing new religious developments, and provideing clear interpretative tools and a mine of information to help the student better understand the world's most complex ethnologic tapestry.

Part 1
Australia

1
Tradition

THE DREAMING

Many people would admit they know little or nothing about Australian Aboriginal religion, but even among them few would not have heard of the notion of the ‘Dreaming’ or ‘Dreamtime’. It is an evocative word which on the one hand we readily equate with the very essence of Aboriginal religiosity, and which on the other conjures up a host of inappropriate images from Western folk culture to psychoanalysis and the New Age. In brief, it is an important concept which is more often than not totally misunderstood.

To begin our discussion of Aboriginal religious life we will first clarify some basic features of the Aboriginal worldview and their conceptions of time and space. We can then ask just what kind of time is the so-called Dreamtime, and our answer will provide a point of departure for the remainder of this chapter.

Opinion on Aboriginal conceptions of time varies considerably. One school of thought, which has captured the imaginations of romantics and racists alike, is that Aborigines are a ‘time-less’ people. More recently, there have been those (mostly psychologists) who suggest that while Aborigines have a weak sense of historical time, the difference is a quantitative rather than a qualitative one. And finally, there are those who maintain that Aborigines have a different sense of time which is cyclical rather than lineal.

Each of these views attempts to grasp the same reality, but that reality is indeed elusive. We must be appreciative of those who have questioned the hackneyed image of the time-less Aborigine who is either invariably late for appointments or lost in an awareness of the infinity of existence. Such notions simply do not square with the very practical and worldly awareness of Aboriginal people. Nonetheless, it remains true that Aborigines in traditional culture did not recall events beyond about two generations back and did not have the means of reckoning events in terms of some measured calendar. It is important to note that Aborigines did not count (although they had words meaning ‘duality’ and ‘trinity’ as qualities rather than numbers) and so did not have a means of reckoning multiples of events (days, months, years, etc.). In this sense, it remains quite evident that they did not nurture a lifestyle based on a temporal philosophy.

While some scholars today are suggesting Aborigines saw time as looping back upon itself in ever-recurring cycles, it is vital to recall that Aborigines themselves do not speak of these occurrences as cyclical, and we should be most careful not to confuse Aboriginal outlooks with those, for example, from India, in which time is bent into gigantic (and measured) cycles which at the end of great spans of time return to the beginning. Indeed, insofar as cyclical and linear time are often, and wrongly, presented as the only possible contenders in an either/or choice, it is probably safest to attempt to locate another, more precise, term.

Following a suggestion of Paul Ricoeur, we will suggest Australian Aborigines have a rhythmic understanding of events, which really requires no reference to time. This way of understanding the world can be not only precise and most serviceable but also aesthetically pleasing. The Aranda of central Australia, for instance, could name at least thirty qualitative changes that occurred over what we would call a period of twenty-four hours. They included:

• The Milky Way is stretched out across the centre of the sky.
• Bandicoots back into their burrows.
• The shadows are variegated.
• The sky is aflame with red and yellow.¹

This is a precise and poetic means of ordering life, but insofar as it refers to concrete events it is not strictly speaking a form of time, and insofar as the patterns recur but are not said to go back to some beginning it is rhythmic rather than cyclical.

This discussion of time or its philosophical absence bears fruit when we turn to the Dreaming—called, so often, the Dreamtime. The latter, as the Aboriginal linguist Eve Fesl says, is ‘a compound word “dreamed up”, by an English speaker who couldn’t understand the Aboriginal language’.² One should not think of the Dreaming as a different type of time, but rather as a different class of events. In English, we might best call these ‘Abiding Events’ (abbreviated hereafter simply to Events), insofar as the word ‘Abiding’ on the one hand conjures up the idea of being eternal, yet on the other gives the connotation of being place-specific and belonging to an ‘abode’.

The English word Dreaming was originally employed as a translation of the Aranda root altjira, which signifies ‘eternal, uncreated, springing out of itself’. Altjira rama—literally, ‘to see the eternal’—was the evocative phrase used to describe sleeping dreams, but the so-called Dreaming was actually a different compound, Altjiranga ngambukala, or ‘that which springs from its inherent eternity’. Clearly the concept of eternity is not a time past, present or future, but only implicitly so; for in fact the real reference is not to time but to space or, more correctly, places.

Linguists who have cast a careful eye over the words translated as Dreaming have noted the term is used in two main contexts. One is when referring to certain Events which are embodied in stories, songs, emblems, etc. The other is when referring to the places which house the sacred power of which the stories tell. If we cling to the idea of Dreaming, then rather than Dreaming time we should speak of Dreaming Events and Dreaming places.

All the preceding discussion may at first appear to be over a semantic quibble, yet it is important in order to emphasize that Aboriginal peoples’ worldview is not one based on time and history but, at an absolute level, on sites and places—a theme which can now be developed throughout this chapter. Our enquiry into the Dreaming is thus one which will focus on a class of Events which are on the one hand beyond the normal rhythms of life and eternally unchanging, while on the other they are embedded in the land. They, as we have said, are Abiding Events.

It is inevitable that some will feel reluctant to concede, without qualification, that the Dreaming lacks some temporal qualities. After all, do not Aboriginal people themselves speak of it as residing in the past? The answer is yes, but they also say Dreaming Events exist now, and in this regard ritual performances do not so much perform a past Ancestral action as make manifest something eternally enduring. The seeming ‘pastness’ of the Dreaming might best be understood in terms of an analogy. If a view from a mountain is obscured by broken clouds below us in the foreground, we reasonably say in describing what we see that we see clouds and then, beyond them, land. Does this mean that there is no land close to us? Obviously not, as we not only know it must be there but can actually see it through the broken cloud. What we mean is that in the distance we observe land alone but closer to us it is overlaid by cloud. Likewise, it is true that the Dreaming is ever present, an eternal now, but its Events are overlaid by the day-to-day rhythms (and chaos) of life if we look at it from the perspective of an individual human. It is thus the Aborigines give the impression that the Dreaming is always about two or so generations behind people now living; in other words, it is most clearly manifest at a point just beyond the memory of specific human lives, yet insofar as (from a Western perspective) it advances behind each successive generation, it is not fixed in time but rather endures like that landscape with lives like clouds sweeping across it.

COSMOLOGY

Thus far we have merely attempted to ensure that the emphasis of our interpretation of Aboriginal religion is firmly placed on the enduringness of place rather than the passage of time. Having argued so generally, we must now consider more specifically how Aborigines envision the structure of their cosmos.

Aboriginal cosmologies are never systematized into some grand doctrine but are instead always implicit within a multitude of stories. This lack of centralized mythic co-ordination is essential to the nature of Aboriginal religious life, and thus anyone attempting to orchestrate a single unified cosmology, even within one Aboriginal community, will succeed mainly in obscuring the very fabric of their worldview. We simply cannot even consider the matter of specifying a primary Aboriginal Ancestral story. What we can do is take an example, almost at random, and try to generalize something from its structure.

A story which we collected from central Australia will suffice for our purposes. Our field-notes read:

Ngarlu is the name of a site and also the ceremonies performed, just south of Mt. Allan [a remote cattle station in central Australia]. Ngarlu is the name of the flower of the ngarlkirdi [witchetty grub tree].

There was a Dreaming man named Linjiplinjipi of the Jungari subsection at this site. He had adorned his body with Ngarlu and was spinning hairstring. The whirling sound of his spinning tool [made of crossed sticks] attracted a woman of the Ngapangardi subsection [and therefore his mother-in-law]. He climbed the hill and as he was watching her she stopped to urinate. Sexually aroused, he continued to attract her with the noise. Finally, he caught her, forced her legs apart and raped her. Upon ejaculation, however, she closed her legs and her tight vagina dismembered his penis.

Today, at Ngarlu her vagina remains transformed into rock and the severed stone-penis is still embedded in it. Linjiplinjipi himself, in agony went to the other side of the hill where he turned into a large boulder which has paintings upon it depicting his hairstring cross and his erect penis.

Yilpinji [‘love magic’] is performed modelled on Linjiplinjipi’s methods of attracting his mother-in-law, using sticks from Ngarlu and adorning the torso with the flowers of the witchetty grub tree.

While this story’s narrative, like all Aboriginal stories, is specific and unique, some of its underlying structure reveals something universally present in Aboriginal mythology. We should note that we do not intend to attempt to delve for the true latent meaning of myths (as generations of psychoanalysts and anthropologists have sought to do), for this at best yields disputable results, but rather we will be content merely to note something very basic yet significant in its pattern.

At a most elementary level, the Linjiplinjipi story has four elements. First, something exists. We are not told here or in other Aboriginal myths where the Ancestors first came from. In some accounts they are said to have been lying in a state of semi-sleep. In other words, all this potential to act is already present, waiting to be used. In many stories, like that of Linjiplinjipi, it is just stated that the Ancestor was there. Such openings are disconcerting to Westerners, but for Aboriginal religious thought the Ancestors’ existence is the base line. Second, that something becomes active. In a sense, Aboriginal myths deal with a passage in which inactive Ancestral potentials move and act and then become immobile again. Third, through the activity, certain aspects of life are given order and shape. There are several instances of this in the Linjiplinjipi myth, which embraces elements belonging to what we might consider as moral, economic, ritual and geographical domains. The story evidently is related to the issue of mother-in-law tabus, it establishes a model of activity of spinning hair, it introduces a ceremony for attracting lovers (but not, for rather obvious reasons, mothers-in-law) and it establishes the Ancestral presence which constitutes the sacred immanence of the site. This last matter leads on to our fourth point, which is that the myths invariably end with Ancestors taking on an enduring form, as a terrestrial or celestial place.

In all this it should be observed that cosmic order is derived from a multitude of events in which countless Ancestors travel and transform themselves into sites. This is markedly in contrast to cosmologies which focus upon a single Godhead or other ultimate principle of sacred authority upon which the universe was and is dependent. Strictly speaking, there is in traditional Aboriginal Australia no creation nor a first creator. The myths avoid questions of first origin and instead begin from the assumption that the life-potential of the Ancestors simply exists. Likewise, the issue of who made the Ancestors or world is not addressed. In other words, Aboriginal cosmologies do not regress in either time or structure to a single point (as monistic traditions do), but rather are in their very essence always pluralistic.

If we appreciate the fact that Aboriginal cosmologies avoid first origins and Supreme Beings, we are still left with the question of why their Ancestral pluralism requires that the very pre-existent sacred powers move and ultimately transform into places. There are at least two answers to this query. The first is that Aboriginal people did not develop a philosophy which accepted a distinction between mind and matter. Earlier generations of scholars have said that Aborigines projected human intellectual and social attributes on to an inanimate world, but from an Aboriginal perspective this actually inverts the truth. In their view, humans are the moral and intellectual beings they are because all existence, as laid down by Events, has consciousness. Ancestors must have a conscious intentionality revealed through their actions, so that all that exists might also be conscious.

The other important factor to be observed in the movement of Ancestors is that it provides for a plan of cosmological relatedness. While Aboriginal traditions are pluralistic and hence local religious Law has a high degree of autonomy and independence, they also contain networks of relatedness at both internal and external levels. Without some cosmological principle of relationship, the Aboriginal world might tend towards highly isolated pockets, but in reality the Australian continent is criss-crossed by a network of pathways which employ the pathways established by Ancestral beings. In this regard, it is worth noting that while the Ancestors move, they do not move from one place to another place. Rather, their essence remains simultaneously throughout the entire pathway, so that at a basic level Aborigines conceive of pre-established lines of cosmological relatedness permeating their world. In brief, then, Aboriginal cosmologies might be characterized as establishing a pluralistic pattern of semi-autonomous and conscious places which are related through pathways representing the movement of Ancestral Beings.

One final phenomenon we must now consider is so-called totemism. Throughout the history of this concept prominent anthropologists, not least of them E.B.Tylor and A.R.Radcliffe-Brown, have asked if the term has any true substance. It was the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, however, who in his Le Totém-isme aujourd’hui made a sustained attack on the notion of totemism, arguing it was but a ‘moment’ in Aboriginal (and other) mentalities. In this he was certainly correct, although his broader interpretation of Aboriginal mentality is questionable. Totemism can be understood as a consequence of the Aboriginal understanding of the potentialities of place. If all existence shares its essence with that of lands which are conscious, then obviously all existence is related. Thus, says Mussolini Harvey, a Yanyuwa elder from central-northern Australia, ‘No matter if they are fish, birds, men, women, animals, wind or rain… All things in our country here have Law, they have ceremony and song, and they have people who are related to them.’³ We must add, however, that insofar as Aboriginal cosmology is truly pluralistic it cannot portray each place as containing the full potentiality of all life-forms. The myths relate that sites are associated with specific species or natural phenomena and specific powers. Totemism can thus be thought of simply as an outcome of the fact that all existence has its place and those who share a site with other forms of life will naturally ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Religions of Oceania
• The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Australia
• Part II: Pacific Islands
• Select Bibliography