Mechanisms promoting Harmony

among the Aborigine

• Use of land (open range vs.. estate) = use rights, based on their using

• Ethics of foraging • Band exogamy ( matrilineal and

matrilineal) mobile, promote exchange and reciprocity

• Moiety concept (groups divided in half) = complementary opposition– male/female– all males– all females– Generations– A way of accommodating differences

within the society

Dreaming• Dreaming = time of creation

– Explanation– Charter: how things are and should be

• Unites humans, animals, plants, and features of the landscape in single totality

• Sacred/secret knowledge– male/female– revealed gradually through initiations

• Totems – sense of connection to Dreaming beings/spirits– Ancestral totems: man and his descendants

(patriline)– Conception totems – vary for each

individual

• Continual performances in different genres– unites past and present realities– Triggers “release of life-force” from spirits

Dreamtime: W.E.H. Stanner

"The Dreaming" is then a pluri-vocal term with a number of distinct though connected meanings.

Three aspects to dreaming:

• First, it is a narrative mythical account of the foundation and shaping of the entire world by the ancestor heroes who are uncreated and eternal.

Dreamtime• Second, "the Dreaming"

refers to the embodiment of the spiritual power of the ancestor heroes in the land, in certain sites, and in species of fauna and flora, so that this power is available to people today. Land is a kind of religious icon, since it both represents the power of the Dreamtime beings and also effects and transmits that power.

Dreamtime• Third, "the Dreaming"

denotes the general way of life or "Law" - moral and social precepts, ritual and ceremonial practices, etc. - based upon these mythical foundations. 

• Fourth, "the Dreaming" may refer to the personal "way" or vocation that an individual Aboriginal might have by virtue of his membership of a clan, or by virtue of his spirit-conception relating him to particular sites.

Dreaming, cont.• Myths: stories of journeys and

activities –– Dreaming Path = life-plan– Responsibilities and obligations =

The Law

• Rituals– Individual rituals – deal with weather,

local conditions, sustenance– Increase rituals – to insure fertility

and reproduction of resources– “big meetings” – major initiations,

burials– body painting, rock carving, bark

painting, acrylic painting– Offering food to the old ones– Community rituals- boys to men– Lifecycle rituals

Dreaming continued

• Song lines– Recount journeys mental Songs

actually work like maps guiding through a sacred landscape, connecting them with the dreamtime and their distant ancestors.

• Sacred Objects:• Art

• Body painting, animals, birds, clouds, water, earth, plants as ancestors

Mercia Eliade (1973: xvii)

• "Primitive man’s creativity is religious par excellence. His ethical, institutional, and artistic creations are dependent on, or inspired by, religious experience and thought.

Mercia Eliade

• Only if we take seriously these oeuvres - in the same way that we take seriously the Old Testament, the Greek tragedies, or the works of Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe - will the primitive find their proper place in the unfolding of the universal history, in continuity with other creative peoples of past or present."