“Enaction and Complexity”, 3 rd International Conference on Enactive Interfaces Montpellier (France), November 20-21, 2006
Anthropology of perception
Sand drawings, body paintings, hand signs and ritual enaction among Indigenous Australians
Barbara Glowczewski
Next to words and images, some interactions in ritual performances and various Aboriginal media of expression (dancing, singing, body painting or sand drawing) relate not only to symbols and icons, but also to a direct, intuitive and motor perception.
Bradd Shore, in Culture in Mind- Cognition, culture and the problem of meaning (1996) writes for instance about the ritual adaptation of myth among the Yolngu people of Northern Australia :
«As ritualized performances, the story becomes schematized as a general and foundational set of patterns, with very strong kinaesthetic associations. They become «grounded» as an aspect of procedural memory, in some sense a «deeper» and less conscious kind of memory than the episodic memory of particular events».
This kind of proposition is intending to question the narrative as a simple representational discourse. The issue here is what is the effect of words as a direct kinaesthetic impulse which would reveal what some Aboriginal groups themselves call the “secret” and “magic” link between the power of a word and action.
