Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Ad Borsboom
- Contents
- Maradjiri and Mamurrng: Ad Borsboom and Me
- Conversations with Mostapha: Learning about Islamic Law in a Bookshop in Rabat
- Education in Eighteenth Century Polynesia
- From Knowledge to Consciousness: Teachers, Teachings, and the Transmission of Healing
- When ‘Natives’ Use What Anthropologists Wrote: The Case of Dutch Rif Berbers
- The Experience of the Elders: Learning Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Netherlands
- On Hermeneutics, Ad’s Antennas and the Wholly Other
- Bontius in Batavia: Early Steps in Intercultural Communication
- Ceremonies of Learning and Status in Jordan
- Al Amien: A Modern Variant of an Age-Old Educational Institution
- Yolngu and Anthropological Learning Styles in Ritual Contexts
- Learning to Be White in Guadeloupe
- Learning from ‘the Other’, Writing about ‘the Other’
- Maori Styles of Teaching and Learning
- Tutorials as Integration into a Study Environment
- The Transmission of Kinship Knowledge
- Fieldwork in Manus, Papua New Guinea: On Change, Exchange and Anthropological Knowledge
- Bodily Learning: The Case of Pilgrimage by Foot to Santiago de Compostela
- Just Humming: The Consequence of the Decline of Learning Contexts among the Warlpiri
- A Note on Observation
- Fragments of Transmission of Kamoro Culture (South-West Coast, West Papua), Culled from Fieldnotes, 1952-1954
- Getting Answers May Take Some Time… The Kugaaruk (Pelly Bay) Workshop on the Transfer of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit from Elders to Youths, June 20 - 27, 2004
- Conflict in the Classroom: Values and Educational Success
- The Teachings of Tokunupei
- Consulting the Old Lady
- A Chain of Transitional Rites: Teachings beyond Boundaries
- ‘That Tour Guide – Im Gotta Know Everything’: Tourism as a Stage for Teaching ‘Culture’ in Aboriginal Australia
- The Old Fashioned Funeral: Transmission of Cultural Knowledge
‘That Tour Guide – Im Gotta Know Everything’: Tourism as a Stage for Teaching ‘Culture’ in Aboriginal Australia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 January 2021
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Ad Borsboom
- Contents
- Maradjiri and Mamurrng: Ad Borsboom and Me
- Conversations with Mostapha: Learning about Islamic Law in a Bookshop in Rabat
- Education in Eighteenth Century Polynesia
- From Knowledge to Consciousness: Teachers, Teachings, and the Transmission of Healing
- When ‘Natives’ Use What Anthropologists Wrote: The Case of Dutch Rif Berbers
- The Experience of the Elders: Learning Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Netherlands
- On Hermeneutics, Ad’s Antennas and the Wholly Other
- Bontius in Batavia: Early Steps in Intercultural Communication
- Ceremonies of Learning and Status in Jordan
- Al Amien: A Modern Variant of an Age-Old Educational Institution
- Yolngu and Anthropological Learning Styles in Ritual Contexts
- Learning to Be White in Guadeloupe
- Learning from ‘the Other’, Writing about ‘the Other’
- Maori Styles of Teaching and Learning
- Tutorials as Integration into a Study Environment
- The Transmission of Kinship Knowledge
- Fieldwork in Manus, Papua New Guinea: On Change, Exchange and Anthropological Knowledge
- Bodily Learning: The Case of Pilgrimage by Foot to Santiago de Compostela
- Just Humming: The Consequence of the Decline of Learning Contexts among the Warlpiri
- A Note on Observation
- Fragments of Transmission of Kamoro Culture (South-West Coast, West Papua), Culled from Fieldnotes, 1952-1954
- Getting Answers May Take Some Time… The Kugaaruk (Pelly Bay) Workshop on the Transfer of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit from Elders to Youths, June 20 - 27, 2004
- Conflict in the Classroom: Values and Educational Success
- The Teachings of Tokunupei
- Consulting the Old Lady
- A Chain of Transitional Rites: Teachings beyond Boundaries
- ‘That Tour Guide – Im Gotta Know Everything’: Tourism as a Stage for Teaching ‘Culture’ in Aboriginal Australia
- The Old Fashioned Funeral: Transmission of Cultural Knowledge
Summary
Since their early encounters with European settlers, Australian Aboriginal people have allegedly been on the brink of extinction. As was popularly assumed, their ‘cultures’ would not be able to deal with the onset of modernisation that the arrival of the settlers in 1788 had heralded. The trope of culture loss has persisted ever since, and continues to exert its influence into the present. A prominent frame within which a process of ‘losing culture’ is entertained and through which it may be countered today, can be found in forms of Australian cultural tourism. Invigorating culture in a tourism context ostensibly works to preserve a vital Indigenous ‘heritage’ as well as to educate younger generations in the value of that ‘heritage’. Furthermore, cultural tourism is presented as a key to providing non-Indigenous Australians and overseas visitors with a constructive introduction to the diversity of Indigenous Australian cultures.
Notwithstanding the appropriateness of this faith in certain benevolent effects of tourism as well as in the kind of knowledge that can be disseminated in such settings, the encounter between tourists and Aborigines has emerged as a significant context in which a conception of ‘Aboriginal culture’ is cultivated and performed in continuous reference to a non-Indigenous presence. Merlan (1989: 106) notes that an emphasis on ‘‘culture’ objectified as goods, products and performances’ has become increasingly prominent, as has the idea that ‘culture’ ‘as a distinctive repertoire… differentiates Aborigines in general from Europeans’ (106). The point I wish to develop in this paper follows onto Merlan's observations (1989; see also 1998). Seen from the Indigenous perspective, the presence of tourism, I argue, helps to forge and sustain a sense of identity and to gain recognition as an Aboriginal person in relation to non-Indigenous others in a valuable way. In a time in which much of Indigenous affairs and policy development is discussed negatively in Australia the value of an affirmative interface with non-Indigenous people becomes great. I suggest that the rather trouble-free nature of ‘Aboriginal culture’ in tourist performances provides an appealing notion, serving as a type of ‘antidote’ to the far more obstinate nontourist practice as well as the non-Indigenous scrutiny of the transmission and maintenance of knowledge in, for instance, issues of land rights and Native Title that continue to affect Aboriginal people's lives (cf. Merlan 1998; Povinelli 2002).
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- Cultural Styles of Knowledge TransmissionEssays in Honour of Ad Borsboom, pp. 154 - 160Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2009