Cairns and Cambridge: an Australian anthropologist's ...

Cairns and Cambridge: an Australian anthropologist's view of the Cambridge Expedition's centenary Maureen Fuary

Since intersubjectivity is inescapably ambiguous, an anthropology that makes intersubjectivity its focus forfeits the search for ahistorical and determinate knowledge, describing instead a forcefield of human interaction in which the contending needs, modes of consciousness, and values are forever being adjusted, one to the other, without any final resolution. (Jackson 1998:14)

Introduction The Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait in 1898 was in many ways a watershed for anthropology, for psychology, for Cambridge and for Torres Strait. Its centennial commemoration between 1998 and 2000 was also a watershed, highlighting continuities and ruptures in anthropology from the late 19th to the dawn of the 21st century. In this paper, I focus on just three events in which the centenary was publicly marked. These are: the art exhibition, 'Ilan Pasin'; and two Cambridge University events: the 'Torres Strait Exhibition' and an academic conference, 'Anthropology & Psychology: The Legacy of the Torres Strait Expedition'. Speaking from my position as an Australian anthropologist living and working in Far North Queensland, where the Torres Strait is never far away, I highlight a certain tension between Cairns and Torres Strait, and Cambridge and Torres Strait, so beautifully articulated in distinctive ways in each of these commemorative events. I suggest this tension is productive and that it provides us with a window into understanding what the expedition has come to signify for a number of interested parties. I suggest that in these two exhibitions and one conference, we can identify a number of contributing components that make them very different events from each other and identify others that create a resemblance between them. Some of these components involve the play and tension between the projected audiences, the intention behind each commemorative event, the participants, the event itself and its location. Understanding the significance of the location of each event provides a useful starting point for evaluating both the differences and the similarities between them. In this paper

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Cairns and Cambridge - Fuary

I am suggesting that a close look at place, sentiments of ownership, and insideroutsider positioning may give us a good understanding of the shape that each of these commemorations took, as well as some of the contemporary meanings of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait. I have selected these three events primarily as a means to explore key issues in the practice of anthropology in the late 20th century, which are reflected and refracted in these commemorations. Especially significant are the issues of representation and the social relations of production of anthropological knowledge. Each of these events can be seen to represent the particular endeavour of its organising group and audience to address the relation between the Torres Strait, knowledge and knowledge production. In particular, this paper dances around this central theme of the social relations of the production of anthropological knowledge by focusing on the representations of the Torres Strait in these three commemorations. Fundamental to how we produce knowledge are the ways in which we engage with, or fail to engage with, the subjects of our study. While these are on the one hand political and moral issues, they are also intrinsically epistemological concerns. One of my central points in this paper is that when we are able to engage actively with Torres Strait Island people more or less on their home territory, we are able to be in place and time with them. Having positioned ourselves thus, the sorts of knowledge that we then produce are inherently different from the knowledge that emerges from a relationship based on temporal and spatial distance. In the latter case, creating and maintaining socio-political distance ('distanciation') by seeing others as non-self ('othering') typify the social relations of knowledge production. The degree to which Torres Strait Island people appear as active subjects in these three events differs dramatically. In all three, however, we see that the relationship between Torres Strait Islanders and 'experts' underpins each event, either as a critique or as an un-problematised given. In most of the events, Torres Strait Islanders' representations of their own heritage and identity are addressed, albeit to markedly different degrees. I suggest that the degree to which Torres Strait Island people's interests appear as central or peripheral to each of these events, not only relates to issues of engagement and othering but also to questions of 'ownership' and to degrees of relative insiderness-outsiderness of the organising groups.

Torres Strait Islanders representing Torres Strait Islanders: Cairns The exhibition Ilan Pasin attempts to give Torres Strait Islanders their history and their voice. It shows where we have come from and where we are today by uniting the objects collected in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century with artworks by contemporary Torres Strait Islanders. I congratulate Tom Mosby, Brian Robinson and Cairns Regional Gallery for their belief in the people and the art of the Torres Strait and for revealing the existence and strength of Torres Strait cultural traditions. (Lui 1998:7)

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Part 2 - Identity, performance and kastom

The 'Ilan Pasin (This is Our Way): Torres Strait Art' travelling exhibition constituted a Torres Strait Islander celebration of their own art, art history, tradition and identity. It was opened in November 1998 and toured Australia in 1999 and 2000. The exhibition combined the display of a small number of 19th century Torres Strait objects, paintings of culture heroes and events, some religious art of the mid-20th century and contemporary Torres Strait artworks, including screen prints, linocut prints, weavings, mixed media, scrimshaw, carving, sculpture, pottery, painting and installation art. It featured the works of Ellen Jose, Harry Nona, Destiny Deacon, Tatipai Barsa, Patrick Thaiday, Rosie Barkus, Kala Waia, Ngailu Bani, Vic McGrath, Alick Tipoti, Ephraim Bani, Mary Betty Harris, Segar Passi, Brian Robinson, Janice Pillsworth, James Eseli, Ceferino Sabatino, Kebay Mau, Jenny Mye, Andrew Williams, Clinton Nain, Annie Gela, Locky Tom, Charles Warusam, Edrick Tabuai, Richard Harry, Dennis Nona, Joseph Dorante, Richardo Idagi, Freddie & Gada Nai, Ken Thaiday (Jnr), Lisa Martin, Michael Banu, Asou Omey, Frank Wapau, Abia Ingui, and Ken Thaiday (Snr). Hundreds of Torres Strait Islanders participated in the official, outdoor opening of the exhibition in Cairns on Saturday 7 November 1998. The five-hour opening was a quintessentially Torres Strait affair at which Islanders resident in Cairns, along with those who had travelled there for the opening, exhibited an impressive sense of pride and joy in celebrating their shared identity. In the mixed group of several hundred Islander and non-Islander participants, the Islanders confidently asserted their centrality to the event and this was most evident in their dance performances, singing and speeches. Formal speeches were given by: Mr George Mye; the local Federal Member of Parliament; the Director of the Cairns Regional Gallery; a local Aboriginal elder; Mr Getano Lui (Jnr); and the State Attorney General and Minister for Justice and the Arts. The speeches were followed by dancing, singing and modified 'feasting'. Over several hours people retreated to shady spots to eat, relax, watch the dancing and singing and share news with others. They were in familiar territory: the grounds of the Cairns Regional Gallery had been temporarily transformed into a familiar, Islander domain. The Islander performers and audience alike exuded a confidence and ease which comes from being in a familiar place, of being in it with like others and enjoying a sense of 'ownership' of both the place and the event. One of the least dramatic yet nevertheless significant demonstrations of Torres Strait Islander centrality and representations of themselves was when their sense of 'ownership' was challenged by non-Islander speech-givers consistently mispronouncing the word 'Ilan'. The frustrations of the Islanders were vented at hearing 'Han' (as in Island) pronounced as 'E-Ian', with some annoyed Torres Strait Islanders saying loudly that this was not the way to pronounce it. They pointedly pronounced the word loudly enough for others nearby to hear but not loudly enough to insult the formal speech-giver. Had they interjected more forcefully they would have been guilty of bad form in Islander etiquette. On the other hand, they needed to demonstrate that these

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'outsiders' were unable to get their tongues around this most basic term, one fundamental to the whole tenor of the exhibition. In so doing, a number of Torres Strait Island people remonstrated with the speakers through addressing the audience while at the same time affirming amongst themselves their intrinsic shared identity and 'insider' knowledge and status. They were able to carve out a position of authority for themselves in the mixed crowd, asserting their centrality to the event vis-a.-vis nonIslander participants. This was, after alt their culture that was being showcased and their performance: it was about them, for them, and by them. What is more, they were in Cairns, as much an Islander place in some senses as any of the islands in the Torres Strait. The exhibition itself was structured around diverse Torres Strait artworks. Refreshingly, the small number of 19th century sculptural and woven works on loan from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge, Glasgow Museum, the Australian Museum, the Queensland Museum and the Museum of Victoria were not characterised as 'artefact'. Rather, all pieces were presented in a way that emphasised the dialogue between these 19th century artworks and those of this century (see Mosby and Robinson 1998). The exhibition was an innovative expression of how some of these 19th century items can be incorporated within a broader representation of Torres Strait Islander art and culture. In having been given the status of art as opposed to artefact, the items could be seen in the context of breaks and continuities between the past and the present, of a new dialogue opening up between these pieces which have been hitherto largely unseen by Torres Strait Island people. Their placement with later Torres Strait artworks exemplified their continuing significance (despite their long-term physical absence from Torres Strait) and the dialogue between the past, present and future within which Torres Strait Island people continue to forge strong and positive, yet sometimes ambiguous, senses of themselves. Central and unique to the exhibition was the expression of Torres Strait Islander impressions of non-Islanders' impressions of them. This was in terms of both what has been published and of how some Islanders currently see themselves (Tom Mosby, July 1998, pers. comm.). This would seem to refute Nakata's (1993:341) somewhat essentialising Foucauldian accusation that the concept of culture is a totalizing disciplinary practice in which the Islander has been constructed by the non-Islander. 1 Ten of the fourteen chapters in the catalogue for the exhibition were written by Torres Strait Island women and men: Mary Bani, Ephraim Bani, Tom Mosby, Bishop Ted Mosby, Vic McGrath and Ellen Jose, along with prefaces and introductions by Getano Lui (Jnr) and John Abednego of the Island Coordinating Council and Torres Strait Regional Authority respectively. The remaining chapters and prefaces were written by non-Islanders: an anthropologist, a musicologist, a museum curator, an art teacher, the Director of the Cairns Art Gallery, and the Queensland Minister for Justice and the Arts.

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Essentially, the text is Islander-driven, and writers were invited to contribute a piece to the catalogue within the following terms: Ilan Pasin ultimately seeks to overcome the faceless and voiceless existence of Torres Strait Islanders in contemporary society. Through the work of Tom Mosby (Curator) and Brian Robinson (Assistant Curator) the exhibition gives Torres Strait Islanders a level of empowerment. It represents the face that Islanders have been denied in Australian history. This catalogue is a voice for that face. (Anon. 1998:14)

From its inception, curation and opening performance, this exhibition reiterated Torres Strait ownership. They were the 'insiders' par excellence and took charge of the ways in which they represented themselves and were represented by others-specifically in Australia as a whole and by the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait in particular. For the Torres Strait Island people and invited 'others', the centennial celebrations presented a unique occasion to move Islanders out of and beyond the texts and artefacts of the 19th century, onto centre stage. The centenary commemorations of the Cambridge Expedition did not so much signify an amazing event in their history but rather provided an amazing opportunity to look at the ways in which they have been represented by 'outsiders', how they understand their past and present and how they express their identity as Torres Strait Island people of the late 20th century. Indeed, it allowed Torres Strait Islanders to enact the tension between Torres Strait and Cambridge and between Torres Strait and Cairns. In reacting to the ways in which they had been represented, and in bringing forth their own representations of themselves and their past, Torres Strait artists and writers worked with and against the tension, characterised by distance, between Torres Strait and Cambridge. Likewise, the tension between Cairns and Torres Strait was brought into play. At the time there was no gallery in the Torres Strait at which the exhibition could have been launched and the Cairns Art Gallery provided the perfect venue precisely because of the blurred boundaries between Cairns and Torres Strait, the mutuality of place and people and the lack of social distance between these two places. Here, Islanders were able to give voice and face to themselves in ways that were not possible in Cambridge, a very different place.

Non-Islanders representing Torres Strait Islanders: Cambridge In July and August 1998, two commemorations of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait were held at Cambridge University. As the source and owner of the 19th century expedition, the contemporary meanings of the expedition resonated in two quite different, yet, at some levels, similar events. These were a three-day academic conference and a museum exhibition. At the conference, the socio-spatial and temporal distance between Torres Strait and Cambridge was remarkably acute and generally unproblematised; it was neither theorised nor rendered as an issue needing attention. In the exhibition, however, attempts were made to bridge this gap of space, time, ownership and representation, with varying degrees of efficacy.

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The conference 'Anthropology & Psychology: The Legacy of the Torres Strait Expedition' was the title of the conference held in August 1998 at St John's College, University of Cambridge. Attendance at the conference was quite small, about eighty people. The majority of participants were psychologists, a sprinkling of anthropologists and a number of academics from the field of the history and philosophy of science. The stated intention of the meeting was to explore the ongoing disciplinary impacts of the expedition to Torres Strait. There was a discernible sense of Cambridge's authority and ownership expressed at this Cambridge event, particularly by the psychologists. From the pre-conference advertisements and electronic mail discussions in 1997 it was apparent that Torres Strait Islander involvement, or indeed the involvement of anthropologists experienced in working in the Torres Strait, was not a priority for the main organisers. This conference categorically constituted a form of non-Torres Strait Islander academic representation of the Torres Strait. It only became obvious to me some time after the conference that there was a powerful expression of Cambridge'S ownership of the expedition and many of its products in the form of knowledge, texts and artefacts. The conference signified the centrality of Cambridge to the expedition and the subsequent development of psychology and anthropology, and this was what was being celebrated. The social relations of production of knowledge about the Torres Strait and its people was not a focal concern of the conference and it was against this lack that I most strongly reacted. While I actively participated in this conference, I was acutely aware, as always, that 'speaking for Islanders' is a particularly tricky space to occupy. I was concerned not only about the absence of any Torres Strait Islander voices but also the basic indifference towards recent (that is, 20th century) anthropological work in the region. This was particularly alarming since the marking of the centenary of the Cambridge expedition to Torres Strait could have provided a unique and potentially exciting opportunity to demonstrate that anthropology, as practised in the late 19th century, had been transformed dramatically throughout the 20th century, and was now discursively quite different. Or was it? What the centenary signified to me was quite different from what it signified to the conference organisers and to the majority of speakers. There were only three Australians present at this gathering-a Torres Strait Island student, a Cambridge-based anthropologist, and myself. This is significant in terms of how we felt ourselves to be positioned, and in the ways in which we actively positioned ourselves. The Torres Strait Island student and myself were definite outsiders to Cambridge, and the other anthropologist was caught between being an insider and an outsider. She had one foot firmly in Cambridge and the other in Torres Strait, where she conducted fieldwork. Beyond this, I can only speak of my own experience of being at this conference. My position as an outsider-insider in the Torres Strait, an insider in

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Cairns and an outsider in Cambridge strongly influenced my conduct at the conference. Despite Cambridge's insider status in relation to the 19th century expedition, its selfrepresentations at the conference involved essentially outsider perspectives on Torres Strait, if we take Torres Strait as the centre rather than the periphery. However, Torres Strait and its people were not central to the conference, Cambridge was, and so the way in which Torres Strait became peripheral to the commemoration had a powerful effect on me. Ultimately, all three Australians were uncomfortable with the conference, our places in it, and with the startling absence of Torres Strait Islander voices. Not only was lout of place, in a phenomenological sense, but so too were Torres Strait Islanders in their absence. It became readily apparent that it was only for we three women that this absence of Torres Strait Islander self-representation was inherently problematic. 2 For the majority of conference attendees, there was no perceptible awareness of the Torres Strait other than it being the site at which Rivers, Haddon, and others conducted groundbreaking psychological and anthropological research at the close of the 19th century, and that this was a Cambridge achievement. Indeed, only a very small section of the conference was concerned with the Torres Strait and its people at all. The Strait remained exotic, Cambridge'S historical and phenomenological 'Other'. This could happen because the Cambridge-Torres Strait distinction is more absolute than the Cairns-Torres Strait relationship; the distinction between 'here' and 'there', 'us' and 'them', 'we' and 'they'3 is facilitated by, and to some degree is an effect ot spatial and temporal distance. Fundamentally, the conference pivoted on exammmg the contributions of W.H.R. Rivers (and thus Cambridge) to the development of psychology, psychiatry and, to a lesser extent, anthropology. The majority of papers and discussion dwelt on the legacy of the expedition to anthropology and psychology in their respective methodological and theoretical trajectories. A short afternoon session on Day 2, paradoxically called 'The continuing significance of the expedition for Torres Strait Islanders', was the only session in which Torres Strait Islanders as sentient human beings were addressed. This was in stark contrast to their being immortalised and invoked as 19th century psychological and anthropological objects in the remainder of the conference. Interestingly, the session was organised by Anita Herle, the Canadian Senior Assistant Curator of Anthropology in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge (CUMAA). Herle had been to Australia and the Torres Strait, had met with and communicated with Torres Strait Island people, and had ensured that a number of Torres Strait Island people were actively involved in the centennial exhibition at the Museum (discussed below). She was aware of Torres Strait Islanders as people and of some aspects of the social relations of the production of anthropological knowledge in Australia. She had literally shared both limited time and place with Torres Strait Island people, in Australia and in Cambridge, and as such was not prone to imagining and representing Torres Strait Islanders as objects of the Cambridge Anthropological

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Expedition, or simply through the objects collected on the expedition. And yet, there were no Torres Strait Island speakers to represent themselves. It was in this session that I delivered a paper, 'Delight and frustration: some Yam Island

people's responses to the products of the Cambridge Expedition, 1898-1899', in which I explored the legacy of the expedition to a particular group of Torres Strait Island people and to anthropologists working in the region. It concerned a multiplicity of responses of some Yam Island people to their increasing familiarity with, and awareness of, the products of the expedition in the form of photographs, material objects, drawings, published works (including genealogies), diaries, field-notes, unpublished manuscripts and research correspondence. The main thrust of my argument concerned what I understood to be the contemporary responses of the Yam Island people. I began by acknowledging my self-consciousness about speaking on this topic at the Cambridge venue. In so doing, I attempted to convey something of the contemporary dynamic between Torres Strait Island people and anthropologists and of the inherent problem of my venturing to speak for Yam Island people. In a more general sense, I critiqued the contemporary dynamic between Torres Strait Island people and a whole panoply of 'others' for whom the Torres Strait, either itself or as represented in material form, continues to be the locus and focus of our / their gazes. Nevertheless, I made the point that I might be better placed to appreciate the diversity of Torres Strait Islander people's attitudes to these important cultural materials in ways in which researchers who live in other parts of the world find it difficult to do. Rather than dwelling on the object positions accorded Torres Strait Island people, I conveyed a sense of the variety of subject positions they occupy and have indeed created for themselves. In so doing I attempted to propel the audience forward to the late 20th century, thereby disrupting and unsettling their supremely confident notions that Torres Strait people were those they knew from the Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition, or indeed from their material productions housed in numerous international museum collections. In so doing I tried to reposition Torres Strait Island people at the forefront rather than allowing them to remain as a mere backdrop to this conference. My paper represented a shift away from some earlier papers in the conference in which the prime research materials from which the psychologists and anthropologists drew their knowledge were purely textual and/ or visual. These participants had confidently affirmed their knowledge of the Torres Strait (with little mention of people) through regular references to the published works of Rivers and Haddon and by their familiarity with the Torres Strait collection held in CUMAA and elsewhere. My paper, however, was based on long-term engagement with some Torres Strait Island people and with some texts, objects and other materials concerning the Torres Strait. It drew upon the experiential dimensions of having come to know a number of Torres Strait

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Island people over a period of twenty years and, in the process, of having become acutely aware that doing anthropology in Australia is a supremely political act. The social relations of the production of knowledge in my work as an anthropologist living and working in northern Australia were fundamentally different from the ways in which knowledge was being produced and presented at the Conference. I was motivated to convey the absence of a singular, undifferentiated Yam Island voice and position; indeed, the absence of any singular Torres Strait Islander voice or position. Like all people, Yam Island people occupy multiple subject and object positions and express a variety of opinions about anyone issue. There is, after all, no one Yam Island response to the products of the Cambridge Expedition, let alone a unified Torres Strait Islander response. In making this point I was challenging the Cambridge view of Torres Strait, the problematic notions of centre-periphery and object-subject relations (Cambridge-Torres Strait), purposefully embracing and using the role of 'outsider' to do so. Yet what I failed to acknowledge was what this conference and, more precisely, the Cambridge Expedition signified for the majority of the participants. It is only now, with the distance of time and place, that I am able to see that the strength of my reaction was based on the presumption that what the conference meant to me was what it should necessarily mean to others. I suspect that my experience of giving a paper at this conference was markedly different than for the other speakers. It was with a sense of unease that I gave this paper-of speaking, as it were, for Torres Strait Islanders, of knowing that I remain answerable to Yam Island people in terms of what I say or write about them as a people, about how I represent them. From the very beginning of my work in Torres Strait, Yam Island people have insisted and expected that I respect their privacy as people, that I work ethically while in the field and in the representations I continue to make about them. Their very early directives cast the die, as it were, as to the ongoing nature and expectations of our respective interactions and for my overall practice as an anthropologist. While the work of the Cambridge Expedition has constantly served my research interests, those texts have remained just that: texts. These texts have remained a very important backdrop to the rich texture of life as it is lived by Torres Strait Island people. These texts and artefacts have never come to life to me in the ways I suspect they have for academics who have not had the experience of actively working and interacting with Torres Strait Island people. 4 They have impacted on me, and have at times moved me, but only when they resonate with what I have come to know in the company of Islanders. As I live and work in Cairns, in which a significant number of Torres Strait Island people live, the anthropological distinction between 'doing fieldwork' in another society and culture and 'returning home' to one's own society, at a remove from the 'field site', remains blurred and mutable. This may not happen to the same degree for other researchers who focus on the Torres Strait yet live far from the region, such as in

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other parts of Australia or indeed overseas. Doing anthropology close to home shares some of the effects of doing anthropology at home, or 'among friends' (see Jackson 1987; Peirano 1998; Okely 1996). While some anthropologists have made this move for political reasons, a question of ethics, the crisis of representation in anthropology and/ or for economic reasons, nevertheless its implications for the discipline and the practice of anthropology have been profound: 'In a few years we may assess the twentieth century as characterized by a long, complex movement, with theoretical and political implications, that replaced the ideal of the radical encounter with alterity with research at home' (Peirano 1998:105). It is not that one form of practice is necessarily better than the other, but rather that they may produce quite different effects. This, I argued at the conference, has very important implications for the ways in which we practise anthropology and for our positioning vis-a.-vis Torres Strait Island people: we both place ourselves and feel ourselves being placed at various positions along the insider-outsider continuum. My engagement with Yam Island people has fluctuated from being active, episodic, and dormant. As Yam Island people reside in the not-sodistant Strait, and in Cairns itself, the distinction between the 'Being There' of fieldwork and the 'Being Here' of one's own society regularly collapses (see Geertz 1988). I also specifically applied this Geertzian distinction to myself giving a paper at Cambridge, in which, for me, the everyday reality of the Being Here of Australia, the Being Here of Torres Strait, and the Being There of Cambridge was momentarily transformed. In shifting sites from Cairns to Cambridge, and in entering a time zone different from Eastern Standard Time, I found myself in the Being Here of Cambridge: Cambridge as centre and Australia and the Torres Strait as peripheral, as There, and as object. Here, I was an 'outsider', talking about outsiders with many people who appeared to be institutional insiders of Cambridge, people in the imaginary 'centre'. The point I made was that for many researchers, the absence of meaningful interaction with Torres Strait Islanders as people of the Here and Now, and their lack of ongoing engagement with places as geopolitical and cultural domains, facilitates this unfortunate stance in which Torres Strait people were generally being objectified and invoked as mere anthropological artefacts at this conference. Yet how could it be different? While texts and artifacts do speak to us, there cannot be a full-bodied, indeed embodied, dialogue with them, especially when they are not 'of us'. Without engagement between people, without intersubjectivity (see Jackson 1998), it is impossible to mediate between subject and object. The subject in the Cambridge conference, in this case Torres Strait Islanders, remained object, distant and lifeless in the body of texts and artefacts. I then argued that, in at least one sense, a strong case could be made for Yam Islanders and myself being seen to occupy the same spatial, geopolitical and temporal domains (see Okely 1996). This coevalness (Fabian 1983) and co-spatiality impacts on the ways in which I represent Yam Island people, and myself. While Geertz (1988:10) argues that

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anthropologists move from 'Facing the Other' while doing fieldwork to 'facing the page' in the production of texts, he assumes that the people with whom the anthropologist works do not influence the text, and certainly that they neither respond nor react to it, nor to the anthropologist. While this may adequately describe the social production of anthropological knowledge in situations in which the anthropologist and the people with whom she/he works live in different parts of the world, it does not come close to describing the practice of anthropology near home, or with friends. Consequently, to Geertz's distinctions between 'Facing the Other' and 'facing the page', I added two of my own: that of 'Facing the Other again',S and 'Facing the Self'. It is this dynamic of regularly facing Yam Island people specifically and Torres Strait Island people in general, and of facing myself as anthropologist and person, that underpins my work, and in a more diffuse sense, underpins my personhood. Thus, in daring to speak for Yam Island people at the Cambridge conference, I brought a specific understanding to the session: that it was not Yam Islanders' responses per se to the products of the expedition which I could discuss, but rather my responses to what I understood to be their responses to their increasing awareness of these material forms of their cultural heritage (see Fuary 1998). For some Torres Strait Island people simply acquainting themselves with these objects represents a major emotional, political and symbolic achievement. The objects are stark and stunning reminders of all that has changed in the Torres Strait in the last century, all that has been damaged, lost, destroyed or even disregarded on the island itself, some of the things that are feared, and also of all that has been retained. As such, they constitute threads of connection as well as rupture between the distant past, the recent past, the present, and the anticipated future. At the same time, the very existence of these objects serves as a powerful reminder of the colonial legacy and of the continuing rights of others to represent Torres Strait Islanders and their societies through the holding of objects and the telling of narratives. This conference, I would suggest, fulfilled a similar role. By affirming difference through spatial and temporal distance, it, too, served as a very powerful reminder of the colonial legacy and of the continuing rights of some psychologists and anthropologists to construct and represent people and their societies as objects, not necessarily as an intended means to dehumanise Torres Strait Islander people but as an effect of the ways in which their knowledge of the Torres Strait has been produced.

The museum exhibition On 1 July 1998, the 'Torres Strait Islanders: An Exhibition Marking the Centenary of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition' opened in Cambridge. I was not present at the opening but visited it briefly as part of the conference (see above) activities in August 1998. This was a small, static exhibition displayed in one room of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Although some

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Torres Strait Island people were involved in curating this exhibition and were present at its opening, it nevertheless remained a fundamentally non-Islander representation of Islanders and of the team of Cambridge researchers who went to the Torres Strait in the 1890s. There was something anomalous about this exhibition. While it brought to light much background material to the expedition in the form of letters, diary entries and Haddon's beautiful line drawings, and incorporated recent Torres Strait Island productions in the form of T-shirts, dancing dresses, some artwork, and videos (see also Bani 1998), it lacked the feel and breath of Torres Strait. Perhaps it was because of this, because of the integral role of Cambridge in the expedition, that its role in the exhibition manifested itself in this way. Indeed, how could one erase the deep historical and disciplinary immersion of Cambridge in Torres Strait? As such, this exhibition spoke more to the Torres Strait Expedition of 1898, and to Cambridge's ownership of it, than did 'Ilan Pasin', the exhibition launched in Cairns in November 1998. The Torres Strait represented here in Cambridge was largely that of the expedition. This was essentially an exhibition about the expedition and its researchers, the knowledge they produced and the artefacts now held in the custody of Cambridge. Not surprisingly, this exhibition essentially showcased Cambridge and Cambridge's 'achievements'. It represented the curators' well-intentioned attempts to put together a relatively comprehensive and representative sample of the vast collection of Torres Strait 'artefacts' housed in Cambridge, alongside some contemporary Torres Strait artworks. Nevertheless, the temporal, organising thematic of the exhibition, and the fact that it was, of necessity, housed so far away from Torres Strait Island people, placed severe limitations on its ability to achieve anything more than to display some of the pieces housed in the Museum. This exhibition remained essentially static and, as such, disappointing. Despite the fact that a small number of Torres Strait Island people managed to see the exhibition, and even fewer had been involved in helping curate it, the possibilities for active and dynamic interaction between Torres Strait Islanders and the exhibits were severely constrained. Taking into account the fact that very few Torres Strait Islanders saw the material with their own eyes,6 the curators of the exhibition published a small catalogue 'intended to provide information for Islanders and others who are unable to visit ... ' (Herle and Philp 1998:5). The curators demonstrated an awareness of Cambridge's isolation from Torres Strait and, to their credit, attempted to consult with a number of Torres Strait organisations and individuals. Indeed, Mary Bani, Assistant Curator of the Gallery of Aboriginal Australia, National Museum of Australia, spent a short time working on the exhibition, and the respective chairmen of Mabuiag and Mer islands, Terence Whap and Ron Day, opened the exhibition, on the significant date of 1 July. To work with a very small number of people, however, placed untenable burdens on them as representatives of the Torres Strait and failed to recognise the diversity of opinion within the

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Torres Strait. While Herle and Philp are to be commended for attempting to involve Torres Strait Island people in the exhibition, there were inherent problems in imagining that the endorsement of a tiny section of the Torres Strait population represented generalised approval and constituted adequate and proper consultation. Nevertheless, it would seem that those Torres Strait Island people who were involved with the exhibition experienced strong emotions towards it. Not having been privy to more than one of these responses, I cannot discuss them; however, I would suggest that individual Torres Strait Islander responses must have necessarily involved a sense of 'being out of place', while at the same time being surrounded by objects which were both familiar and alien-'of them' but 'other', echoes of a ruptured yet continuous past and present. The exhibition was partly about them, partly by them, and only partly for them: primarily it was about the 1898 expedition, about Cambridge, by Cambridge and for Cambridge. Conclusion It is indeed tempting to suggest that underpinning these three commemorative events

were absolute oppositions and that it was fundamentally because of oppositional relationships that these three public events in Australia and England took the forms they did. I have in mind here the simple binary relations between Islander: nonIslander; academic: non-academic; Australia: Britain; insider: outsider. It is too simplistic and indeed too essentialising, however, to think that it was only a matter of oppositional relationships which gave rise to these public events. Rather, what we have seen at work here was a complex set of relations between diverse categories of people, places, objects and the events themselves. Thus, I would like to suggest that while these binary pairs are indeed significant, we need to consider them as inter-penetrating rather than antithetical sets of relations. As such, interpreting the ways in which these relations may be seen to cross-cut and flow into the other may give us purchase on why some of these events differed markedly from each other, and yet, at the same time, better enable us to understand why all three commemorations shared a degree of resemblance. Central to my argument is the premise that with the anthropologist's geopolitical and spatio-temporal distance from the people with whom she/he conducts research, the greater their propensity for objectification and 'othering', and thus the less likely they are to regard this practice as being essentially problematic. Hence, the absence of a generalised awareness of the objectifying practices inherent in the Cambridge conference and, to a lesser extent, in the Cambridge exhibition? Conversely, I argue that with anthropologists who share a familiar and similar geopolitical and spatio-temporal landscape with Torres Strait Island people, the desire to 'other' and to create for oneself an authoritative stance of 'anthropological expert' is problematic. What is more, a keen sensibility to the inappropriateness of 'speaking for Islanders' goes with the territory. 136


Unlike Cambridge's naIve yet confident celebration of itself as the central font of knowledge about the Torres Strait in the conference and, to a lesser degree, in its museum exhibition, the 'Ilan Pasin' exhibition in Australia was so obviously a Torres Strait Islander project. It marked the centenary and Torres Strait artists' continuing dialogue with their past and present in a dynamic and exciting way. Jackson's (1998:9) appraisal of 'being' and intersubjectivity is enlightening here: 'Because Being is never limited to human being, the field of intersubjectivity includes persons, ancestors, spirits, collective representations, and material things'. Contrary to the Cambridge exhibition, the dynamic interaction between the people for whom the artworks and objects have so much meaning, and between them and the works, was central to this particular exhibition. They were in a familiar place with familiar others, intersubjectively engaged at multiple levels. Nevertheless, there was an acute awareness by the curator of the fundamentally constrained nature of the 'Ilan Pasin' exhibition. In one of his chapters in the catalogue, 'Art is an act of bringing truth into being', Tom Mosby critiqued the ways in which Indigenous artwork has been conceptualised and categorised. He argued that even within this exhibition, put together by assistant curator Brian Robinson and himself, the decontexualisation and reconceptualisation of artifact as art, and the placement of pieces within the essentially sterile domain of art gallery, must necessarily undermine their intention of de-exoticising the works: It remains, however, that there is no ready solution to the question of affinity and

the 'other'. Even exhibitions such as Ilan Pasin continue to contextualise Torres Strait art within Western art precepts. From the curatorial rationales through to the actual methodology behind the division of the exhibition space, the transformation of primarily functional communal objects into sterile objects within sterile rooms, and the display of objects behind glass, all serve to reinforce the exotic and therefore the 'otherness'. (Mosby, 1998:81)

We can apply Tom Mosby's argument equally to the Cambridge exhibition, while acknowledging that the curatorial intent of the Cairns and Cambridge exhibitions was markedly different. I would argue that this 'otherness' and sterility necessarily remained in the Cambridge exhibition, yet was very much ameliorated in 'Ilan Pasin' by the whole rationale of the exhibition: the way it had been conceptualized and brought into being. This remained very much a Torres Strait project, albeit one constrained by and contained within non-Torres Strait Islander precepts of art, artifact, exhibition and representation. It was also constrained by the desire and intention to bring objects back into the Torres Strait Islander experience, into their being, from where they have been housed and re-cast as objects, in places far from Torres Strait. Nevertheless, this exhibition by Robinson and Mosby threatened to escape the confines of these precepts. Seen in the context of the static exhibition in concert with the dynamic, fluid opening, the total performance event of the 'Ilan Pasin' opening in Cairns demonstrated that, far from being passive recipients, Torres Strait Island people are active producers of their own practices. 137

Part 2 - Identity, performance and

kastom

Throughout the history of the Torres Strait, Torres Strait Islanders have faced numerous social, political and religious changes. It would have been easy to succumb to these changes, losing in the process the cultural traditions that define our identity. Instead we have adapted these changes ... This is the strength of Torres Strait survival within the new global community. Torres Strait Islander art represents the evolution of our material heritage through the ability of our artists to explore concepts outside the cultural framework. Our traditions inform our identity today as they did prior to colonisation. (Lui 1998:7)

As anthropologists permitted to conduct research in Torres Strait Islander communities, there are a number of questions which we must necessarily address. As I have argued in this paper, it is in attending to issues of representation, meaning and the production of knowledge that we not only affect or reflect our own sense of who we are and what we are doing in the world, but more specifically affect and reflect our anthropological selves. Moral and political issues and values are embodied knowledge which make us act in the world in ways that render the separation of fact and value-subject and object-especially difficult (Howell 1997:11). The ways in which we imagine and represent the Torres Strait and our own disciplinary history and practice can be productively critiqued through a focus on place, insider-outsider positionings and differential senses of ownership. In these three commemorations of the centenary of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait (that is, the Torres Strait Islander art project, the psychology-anthropology project, and the anthropologymuseum project), which I have discussed here, we can see that an examination of the interplay of organising group, intention, participants, and location may give us some purchase on the complex dynamics involved in the practice of anthropology at the dawn of the 21st century. In their Introduction to Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Expedition, Herle and Rouse (1998:1) set the following agenda: On the eve of the 1898 Expedition to the Torres Strait, British anthropology was in search of self-definition .. .In the 1990s, after a century of practice and professionalism, anthropology again finds itself in a state of intellectual and disciplinary selfdoubt. The centenary of the Expedition seems then an apt occasion for a reexamination of its place in diSciplinary history.

Indeed. However, if the whole discipline, as opposed to a significant part of it, is to move beyond the mere categorisation of peoples and practices typified by the work of our 19th century anthropological ancestors, we do need to continue critiquing those practices which propel us back a century, and laud those in which we can see our discipline engaging with itself and with others in reflexive and ethical modes. In so dOing, we may do better justice to the major theoretical and methodological overhauls within anthropology in the last forty years.

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Recent anthropological explorations on 'situated knowledges' argue that one's immersion in a society is crucial to the apprehension of meaning: 'those of us who study societies in which we have preexisting experience absorb analytic categories that rename and reframe what is already known' (Narayan 1993:678). As an anthropologist with long-term associations with a number of Torres Strait Island people, I am more able to access and understand these 'situated knowledges' than a researcher with little or no familiarity with the place and its people. Likewise, the meanings I have suggested were in play for the two Cambridge events are from the perspective of an outsider without 'situated knowledge'. This may help explain the frustration I experienced at these events-reacting against them rather than being able to fully understand. It has only been with the distance of time, and space, that I have begun to see what they may have signified to the majority of participants. It is through my subjective involvement with Torres Strait Island people as 'locals' rather than as 'exotics', however, that I am prone to elicit, explore and recognise certain meanings and identities (Abu-Lughod 1993; Hastrup and Hervik 1994; Narayan 1993). To this end, I have viewed all three commemorations of the centenary of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait through lenses trained by Torres Strait Islanders-lenses particularly sensitive to the ways in which we represent Torres Strait Island people and to the ways in which Torres Strait Island people train their gazes on themselves and on us. For ultimately, I think it is in having a 'sense for the other' (Auge 1998) and for the self, that anthropology comes closest to appreciating and critiquing its own practice.

Notes

Indeed it could be argued that Nakata's overly-simplistic rendering of anthropology from the outside, itself constitutes an essentialising discourse.

1

2 To this end, the Torres Strait Island student chose to remain silent, to not represent herself or Torres Strait Islander interests in this environment. She refused to be cast in the role of 'token Islander'.

See Ricoeur's Oneself as An Other (1992), Schutz's conceptualisation of 'we' and 'they' relationships (1972), and Fabian (1983) on 'othering' and coevalness.

3

This is not to say, however, that very worthwhile insights cannot be gained by close textual and visual interpretation. The work of Liz Williams (1998) on the expedition's photography is an excellent case in point. 4

S

See Auge's discussion of the 'proximal other' (1998).

On Yam Island, for example, some people attempted to raise funds in 1999 so that members of their local Community Heritage Committee, at least, could travel to Cambridge to see the exhibition before its dismantling in July 2000. This did not eventuate. 6

'Othering' and its critique is a central organising principle to the non-anthropological project, the Ilan Pasin exhibition.

7

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