Space and Place, 7. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012. xii, 275 pp. (Figures, maps.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-85745-508-6.
Being in place in the world could be assumed to be so simple and yet Rosita Henry brings into clear focus the complexities of place as lived experience in her valuable ethnography. She draws deftly on diverse theoretical and methodological strands in her exploration of the dynamic relationship between people and place that perpetually reconstitutes and vivifies what is now commonly known as Kuranda, the tourist-focused “village in the rainforest” and its surrounds in tropical north Queensland. She draws us into the conflicts, contestations, contradictions and ironies of culture, identity, memory and politics, made and revealed in the social dramas through which the performative struggles and affirmations for being in place are enacted. In the process, Henry has produced a highly engaging and topical work that makes an original and eclectic contribution to understanding the transforming nature of being in place and elucidating a myriad of contemporary issues concerning the environment and development; local communities, politics and interventions of the state; tourism and Aboriginal being in place; and much more.
The book is peopled by those who might have remained as iconic groups—Aboriginal peoples, “old” settlers, hippies, environmentalists—but a primary concern for Henry is not to take these categories for granted but to explore how they are brought into being through the perpetual negotiations of performance, which articulate and renegotiate identity and community, in and of place. Her focus is on the lived body engaged in the discursive social dramas, which she identifies and explores in their manifestation as performance through a series of case studies. Acknowledging the origin of this approach in the work of Victor Turner and the extended case studies produced through the Manchester School of Anthropology, Henry makes these approaches her own through a conceptualization of social dramas not merely as reflective of human interactions in place, but as constitutive of being in place.
The chapter titles illustrate the thematic link of human agency in the bringing into being of place and the nature of being in place that run the course of the book: dancing place, commodifying place, protesting place, etc. Chapter 1, “Colonising Place,” unlike other chapters, relies heavily on the use of primary and secondary historical sources, but it provides a rich contextualization that is vital to an appreciation of the nuances of the social dramas and performance that follow in subsequent chapters, particularly with respect to the disruptions and continuities of Aboriginal being in place.
Although the ethnographic focus is decidedly local, the perpetual external interventions—waves of new types of “settlers,” hippies, tourists, environmentalists, developers, and the impositions of state and neo-liberal agendas for the management and commodification of difference—provide the diverse mix through which local being in place is perpetually made, contested and negotiated. This approach permits Henry to make an important and original contribution to what she acknowledges is an already prolific field dealing with the “relationship between Indigenous peoples, environmentalists and developers” (218). The development of Kuranda’s tourist industry is a key locus across a number of chapters and Henry elucidates the vortex of need it creates for various protaganists to shape their place and their own being in place through performance. The broader context of native title claims in the 1990s resonates strongly in this sense with more immediately localized pressures on Aboriginal people to define their identity and “perform” their relationship in place.
The pernicious potential of this “cultural project” for Aboriginal people is canvassed further as Henry identifies the increasing demands of the bureaucratized order of government and a growing global desire for cultural alterity sought through tourism. She explores the manifest effects of this in the requirements for Indigenous authentication that so often creates an imperative for a static fixing of culture and identity in order to affirm veracity through historical continuity. The staged cultural performances by Djabugay people in their Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park are raised in light of these circumscriptions but, she asserts, cultural performance is also embraced as an opportunity by Djabugay people to actively engage with dominant forces: at once, conforming through expected cultural performance, and resisting through the production and propagation of their own narratives. It is in this sense both cultural and political production that in dance works through a “body memory”; making meaning from their own pasts of dispossession, and resisting their obliteration through the reclamation and rejuvenation of their traditions.
This blurring of the cultural and political manifests again in her focus on the strategic relationship between Aboriginal people and environmentalists/“tree-sitters”/“greenies” in opposition to the development of the cable car or “Skyrail” development linking Kuranda to Cairns through the Barron Gorge National Park and the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area. Any presumption of this as a purely natural alliance made in common cause is challenged through her dissection of the varying performances of protest; roles are explored, revealing variant motivations and ambiguities of moral positioning.
Henry is an insider of sorts: her family, having had a long association with Kuranda in her childhood, moved to the area in the late 1970s as part of the wave of “alternative lifestylers.” Her portrait of “hippies” is sympathetic but nonetheless highlights the ironies arising from their communalist agendas that are so reliant on individual libertarianism. This contradiction is at the heart of her explanation as to how the original Kuranda barter-based markets initiated by this wave of counter-culture settlers outside of the town, were so quickly transformed into capitalist commercial entities and some original hippie settlers became “upstanding members of the Kuranda Chamber of Commerce” (157). This sets the scene for numerous other dramas played out both onstage in formal productions and offstage in committee rooms, community meetings and public confrontations as the struggle to enact competing visions continues.
The descriptive and intellectual depth of this book, shaped by Henry’s empathetic but critically aware insight, makes this a highly readable and valuable book for a diversity of readers.
Lorraine Towers
The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
pp. 373-375