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On Hermeneutics, Ad’s Antennas and the Wholly Other
- Edited by Jean Kommers, Eric Venbrux
- Dave Lyddon, Kurt Vandaele
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- Book:
- Cultural Styles of Knowledge Transmission
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 21 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 14 February 2009, pp 49-53
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Ad Borsboom's De clan van de Wilde Honing, i.e. ‘The Sugarbag Clan’ has as its subtitle Spiritual Wealth of the Aborigines. In the context of an orientalist world-view, this title would certainly appeal to the imagination while positioning the Western subject and the Aboriginal object in two distinct worlds. The cover layout with its illustration of barefoot prints underneath the subtitle, and a picture of a blue sky with dark-skinned children looking into the bright light of the sun, seems only to underscore this interpretation. We, the post-industrial Western readers, are pursuing our ever-increasing material needs in our murky wasteland. They, the ones under scrutiny, are following the path charted by their spiritual ancestors in their bright and unblemished southland. The actual text of the book confirms the dichotomy already expected:
As an outsider, you do not really notice it at first, but slowly it starts to dawn on you: you can no longer escape. Everything around you is alive: the ground you sleep on, the grass you walk on, the woods and the water where you search for food. There is movement everywhere; there are sounds everywhere. The nights are quieter, but that tranquillity is no less penetrating. Very soon you are no longer aware of the countless mosquitoes that become active after sunset. But, unnoticed, their buzzing sounds are always there in the background; it even makes the tranquillity vibrate with life. […] Is it surprising that people who have lived for centuries in such an environment experience the world around them as a spirited one (117)?
My own world is so different. Ninety percent of our environment consists of lifeless matter and implements that we have made ourselves. Apart from a drooping plant, the room in which I am putting my experiences in writing consists of lifeless matter: a computer, furniture, stone walls, and books. To a large extent, our daily environment has been created by ourselves. There is no mystery, no higher power. The lifeless matter does not invoke any feelings of spiritual connectedness and dependence at all (119-20).
The culture, which Ad Borsboom describes, that of the Djinang people, is of the type that was particularly popular subject matter in the heyday of ethnography.
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