Glowczewski, Barbara (2013) 'We have a Dreaming': how to translate totemic existential territories through digital tools. In: Ormond-Parker, Lyndon, Corn, Aaron, Fforde, Cressida, Obata, Kazuko, and O'Sullivan, Sandy, (eds.) Information Technology and Indigenous Communities. Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra, ACT, Australia, pp. 105-125.

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Abstract

At the closing plenary session of the 2010 Information Technologies and Indigenous Communities (ITIC) Symposium in Canberra, delegates decided to write a series of recommendations for improving Indigenous community access to digital technologies. 1 A young Martu filmmaker, Curtis Taylor, from Parnngurr (Cotton Creek), came to the microphone and said, 'We have a Dreaming like our elders: in the mind; digital technologies.' 2 This chapter shows some analogies between the cognitive mapping of desert Dreamings, the rhizomatic structure of the web, and the cultural and political contexts of the use of digital technologies. These are discussed using examples of films made and disseminated by Indigenous Australians so as to stress their messages on YouTube and similar sites created since the mid-2000s. Also discussed are technical and anthropological issues relating to the project of expanding into a pilot website a CD-ROM I developed in the 1990s with 50 Warlpiri artists from Lajamanu. The issue at stake is to analyse, amid the indifference and hostility of the public space as expressed by politicians, media and some scholarly discourses, the ways in which marginalised human groups, such as Indigenous peoples in many parts of the world, enounce and construct their subjective singularity and existential territories in the process of social transformation and displacement. In this sense, the web today is a platform to enhancing local expressions of agency and the politics of projected cultural claims as new systems of knowledge and collective intelligence for the future. Such a development challenges the responsibilities of anthropologists.

Item ID:	32523
Item Type:	Book Chapter (Research - B1)
ISBN:	978-1-922102-17-1
Additional Information:	Developed from papers presented at the 2009 AIATSIS National Indigenous Studies Conference and the 2010 symposium Information Technologies and Indigenous Communities
Date Deposited:	15 May 2014 05:38
FoR Codes:	20 LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE > 2099 Other Language, Literature and Culture > 209999 Language, Communication and Culture not elsewhere classified @ 100%
SEO Codes:	95 CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING > 9599 Other Cultural Understanding > 959999 Cultural Understanding not elsewhere classified @ 100%
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