Uncanny Austrlia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation

Abstract

"Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation" by Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs is reviewed.

Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), xvii + 163 pp., $24.95, ISBN 0 55284816 8.

It is a masterstroke for the authors to have gone back to Durkheim's 1915 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Here the father of modem sociology was taking what he thought was some quintessential primitivity in Aboriginal religion-the sacred-to be one of the social forces making up any society, and potentially lacking in modem ones. The sacred is a force which unites a community. It is an energy released in ritual practices which are designed to create feelings of social belonging. We always knew that European civilisation was defined against the barbarians, now we realise that the forging of modem social theory also needed its primitive, and again, with Gelder and Jacobs, a modem 'postcolonial' nation seems to be in need of a valorising concept of the sacred.

The thesis of this book is that the sacred has reappeared in Australia with the reassertion of the cultural force of the Aboriginal cultures which have survived colonisation. This sacred is not just in Aboriginal ritual practice, it is coming from all sorts of directions with all sorts of unsettling effects. Emerging first in the 1960s with the notion of the 'sacred site' and land rights lobbying, the sovereignty and history of Australia have been strongly contested ever since. Amid feelings of sympathy, guilt, anxiety and anger, New Age cultists, humanitarians, mining companies, the government and multicultural lobbyists have all pitched into a debate which has been high on the media agenda for a long time.

In the tradition of the best cultural studies, Gelder and Jacobs map real events and their media amplifications on to a theoretical grid: Coronation Hill, Wik, Hindmarsh Island, and even the Swan Breweries site, all familiar to those who have followed Australian land rights cases. They go from quasi-ethnographic 'on the ground' description to what the prime minister had to say about it, so we never lose sight of the importance of these events and how they tie into nation building and nation changing agendas.

The notion of the uncanny is from Freud, and while it fits in nicely with a lot of talk about uncertainty (as if land rights arguments had not only made people uncertain about who might own Australia, including pastoralists who had begun to make ambit claims for their 'rights'), it tends to take over as a methodological aim, spreading to an ethical principle of 'unsettling'. The authors conclude that they have tried to build an 'uncanny experience of democracy' into their 'postcolonial narrative'. This, of course, captures the processual, anxiety-ridden nature of the debates in question, and goes against the current of the positivism of those who would like to solve problems (once and for all), move towards reconciliation and greater certainty of policy.

I would nonetheless recommend the book to those bureaucrats, anthropologists and other experts involved in land rights negotiations. It will remind them of the particular histories of key cases and events, it analyses the positions of those involved and the discourses they use to make their arguments. It provides considerable philosophical background to those arguments while also capturing the emergence of a new cultural phenomenon: the sacred in Australian modernity.