Abstract
This article examines the ways photographs of the recently deceased have come to occupy a central place in Yolngu grieving practices. Harnessing the potentially traumatic ontological qualities of oscillating absence-presence that are inherent in such images, I show how Yolngu in Northern Australia use this affective force as a way to refigure and reconstitute embodied and sensuously mediated relationships between the living and the dead. With vision simultaneously allowing corporeal permeability and expansion, mourners impress the image of the deceased within them, through the eyes to the heart as the fleshly organ of affect, associative recollection, and lived intersubjectivity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 292-309 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Visual Anthropology |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jul 2008 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:I want to thank the many friends and colleagues who, by sharing the talking and the silences with me, have helped to give form to the elusive ideas and difficult feelings that originally prompted me to write this article. Susan Marrawa-kamirr and Shirley Nirrpurrandji and other Yolngu have given me permission to share their stories and to try to describe their experiences so that, as Nirrpurr put it, people might ‘‘understand our pain.’’ To these and other Yolngu kin I owe a debt beyond words. Conversations with Ben Smith, Richard Vokes, Tony Redmond, Diana McCarthy, Deirdre McKay, Barbara Glowczewski, Ian Keen, Nic Peterson, Jeremy Beckett, Ian Bedford, and Richard Sherwin have enriched my thinking in many different ways. Very special thanks to Jane Sloan, whose exquisite abundance and receptivity teaches me, again and again, how to think through feeling. An early version of this article was presented at the Bilan du Film Ethnographique Seminar: From Ethnological Films to Visual Anthropology, A Reappraisal: New Technology, New Fields of Investigation, New Languages, at the Musée de l’Homme, Paris, March 2006; and another version at the Australian Anthropology Conference in Cairns, September 2006. Thanks to the Division of Society, Culture, Media, and Philosophy at Macquarie University for funding my attendance.
Copyright:
Copyright 2008 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.