Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond (original) (raw)
Related papers
‘Monster Mash: What Happens When Aboriginal Monsters Are Co-opted into the Mainstream?’, 2019
Monster Mash: What Happens When Aboriginal Monsters Are Co-opted into the Mainstream? Christine Judith Nicholls Growing up in the 1950s at Mannum on the Lower Murray in South Australia, where our family home overlooked the river, I knew of the Mulyewongk, an amphibious monster inhabiting the southeastern sector of the River Murray, including its tributaries, lakes, swamps, and caves. Mulyewongk is the local Ngarrindjeri name for a close relative of the Bunyip, which, for the most part, are underwater dwellers camouflaged by mud, algae, or other subterranean fluviatile detritus and slimy plant life. Further downstream the creature was also said to emerge as a terrifying terrestrial monster at times—still swathed in aquatic slime (see Bell 1998; Karloan cited in Berndt et al. 1993: 423). This monster—best known today as the Bunyip—is a primary focus of this chapter. My main concern is to examine its status loss as a direct result of the British colonization of Australia. This discussion is contextualized by my consideration of another monster that I learned about in adult life: the Pangkarlangu from Central Australia (see also Musharbash, this volume). In the 1980s, I moved to Warlpiri country in the Northern Territory to take up a position at Lajamanu, working first as a linguist and then as the principal of the bilingual Warlpiri and English school. During that time, I was regaled with narratives about Warlpiri Kinki (a generic term meaning “monsters” in the hominid classification), especially the desert-dwelling Pangkarlangu. A giant cannibalistic hominid, characterized by the absence of a neck, grossly enlarged genitals, a hirsute body, and dangerous talons (as demonstrated in Figure 5.1), the Pangkarlangu preys upon, steals, and executes human infants. Toward the end of a successful “kidnapping” day, the Pangkarlangu builds an open fire on which he barbecues his kill. After feasting on chargrilled babies’ delicious, tender flesh, come nightfall he sleeps off his tasty repast. Pangkarlangu also roam in groups, wielding enormous wooden clubs and fighting one another in bloody battles. Warlpiri woman Molly (Jinjilngali) Napurrurla Tasman explained to me that from a Pangkarlangu perspective this is a form of recreation. Years later, in 2017, I had an uncanny encounter with an inorganic Pangkarlangu. It took place in an entirely different context: at a visual art exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia. There, I came across furniture designer and academic Trent Jansen’s Pankalangu [sic] Wardrobe—one piece among Jansen’s repertoire of aesthetically pleasing Pangkarlangu furniture (see Figure 5.8). To see the Pangkarlangu in such an entirely foreign mise-en-scène—represented as bespoke fine art and designer furniture destined to inhabit the domestic sphere— was for me an other-worldly experience, given its absolute disconnectedness from its epistemological and ontological places in the world. The Pangkarlangu’s realm is its vast desert homeland, where it roams unbridled. To encounter it in this haute- bourgeois, sandstone institution typical of colonial architecture was unheimlich and rendered me virtually speechless. These experiences in my early and later life have indirectly led to my exploration of the differing sociocultural and historical trajectories of the Bunyip and the Pangkarlangu. Both will then be discussed in relation to the Windigo, which inhabits the terrain of Algonquian-speaking North Americans, to compare the ways in which these different monsters are faring in the contemporary colonial context. Each of these three anthropophagous monsters occupies an extensive demesne, encompassing a range of different language and cultural groups. Differences in language use and how these monsters are represented as they traverse their vast terrain are important matters for the traditional owners of the narratives pertaining to each respective being. Furthermore, their terrains differ ecologically: the Mulyewongk/ Bunyip exists along a considerable stretch of Australia’s largest river system, the Murray–Darling, the Pangkarlangu cuts a swathe through the vast Australian Central and Western Desert regions, while the Windigo traverses the freezing North American tundra and boreal forests. As I will show, the Bunyip, a behemoth with a considerably lengthier postcolonial history than that of the Pangkarlangu, has been all but entirely divested of its original standing as a respected ancestral being, to the extent that it is now regarded by mainstream Australia as an imaginary, child-friendly fabrication. The fate of the Bunyip is discussed first in this chapter and then compared with that of the Pangkarlangu. The aim is to use these case studies to identify the reasons why and to what extent these Aboriginal monsters have lost traction over time and to explain their differing trajectories. The Windigo is then deployed as a Northern Hemisphere analogue for the Bunyip and the Pangkarlangu, in order to illuminate the processes that have led to their social transformation and perceived status changes in the wake of colonization.
Hunting for Monsters (and Gods): The Making of an Anthropologist
This chapter is about how hunting for monsters, and gods, has become part of how I do ethnographic fieldwork. The village of Vaduvur in Tamil Nadu, South India is where my family originates as well as where I was born and subsequently migrated from. Vaduvur is also my ethnographic field site. Beginning with how fieldwork for my dissertation on sacrificial rituals prompted memories about tales of uncanny fertility spirits called “Minis” told by my mother, this chapter considers how stories have framed the cultivation of an anthropological imagination and sensibility. Dwelling upon how stories constitute a particular village, its past, peoples and ambience, I am specifically concerned with how monstrous beings or at least the myths about them allow for mapping, inhabiting, and staking claims to a place. Drawing both on my memories of childhood stories and my experiences of doing fieldwork, this chapter relates how the different, manifold, and even contradictory stories about monsters represent competing stakes over a place. Monsters menace. However, they are part of the memories of and enduring moorings to a much-missed home. Monsters pulse with an uncanny charisma that fascinates across spaces, cultures, and time.
Monsters: Australian mythology, national identity and the design of Australian material culture
2017
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Places and Spaces of Monstrosity, edited by Craig Douglas and Rosalea Monacella , 2014
On many a night, Yuendumu, a central Australian Aboriginal town, and the location of the case studies in this chapter, is haunted by Kurdaitcha. They are a type of monster endogamous to the Tanami Desert, who are said to intimidate, threaten and sometimes kill local Warlpiri people. Kurdaitcha are on the prowl at night, lurking in Yuendumu’s shadows, on the margins of camps, behind trees, just outside the glow of firelight. This chapter is concerned with the fact that Kurdaitcha attacks, sightings, and reports are on the rise and examines the implications this has to understanding the nature of contemporary Aboriginal life in central Australia. At the centre of the chapter stand the historical, political and socio-cultural implications of a particular kind of spatial configuration, namely Aboriginal settlements in central Australia’s Tanami Desert. Yuendumu (for example) was set up in 1946 as a government ration station, and constitutes the first orchestrated step of the sedentisation of formerly hunting and gathering Warlpiri people. It is located 300 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs (central Australia’s major service town), with a current population of 400-800 highly mobile Warlpiri people, and roughly one hundred non-Indigenous service providers. Yuendumu, and other Aboriginal settlements like it, are icons embodying 21st century neo-colonialism through daily lived and starkly segregated inequalities. Indigenous Warlpiri people, locally called Blackfellas, and non- Indigenous service providers, locally called Whitefellas, live side by side but their lives could not be more different. The chapter approaches these realities by reading the monstrous on the margins as a threatening emergent force expressing not only racial and political tensions, but as literally embodying the threats of neo-colonial life to Warlpiri sociality, personhood, and space.