Shadows of Song: Exploring Research and Performance Strategies in Yolngu Women's Crying‐songs

This paper provides an argument that research on women's crying‐songs in north east Arnhem Land can be effectively analysed as a series of shadow‐dances between the researcher, the singer and the performance context. Within this framework, it explores the processes of transmission and reception of a selection of crying‐song texts from one of the most highly regarded female performers in the region. As singing is a powerful force in the making of Yolngu social, spiritual and political life, music making is shown to play a crucial role in authorizing, describing, teaching and controlling social and ancestral knowledge between men and women and by extension the place of the researcher within the community. Through the regulation of knowledge the making and remaking of the singer and researcher is danced out in a web of mutuality, reciprocity and obligation in which processes of ‘strategic formation’ and ‘strategic location’ emerge. Thus, one woman's melodies of mourning are shown to be a musical gift exchange of various shadow‐dances between learning, receiving, performing and mutually engaging in Yolngu ways of knowing and coming‐to‐know.     

Cunning Histories: Privileging Narratives in the Present

Examining contemporary British witchcraft necessitates representing its historical context, currently a highly contested arena. Both magical practitioners and scholars have heavily critiqued the “orthodox” histories of unbroken lines of tradition reaching back to the distant past that were prevalent in the early to mid‐twentieth century. However, continuities of knowledge and skills based on the practices of rural cunning folk and folk magic continue to be mobilized by some practitioners as a way of connecting to ideas about the past, a narrative that is also critiqued by others. What is at stake is not only the conflicting foundational histories for contemporary witchcraft, but the ways in which the same textual and material evidence is deployed to substantiate competing accounts: they hinge on the ways evidence is contextualized. Interrogating “context” is not limited to the histories we aim to represent, but is embedded within anthropological writing and knowledge.     

Histories of anthropology

Timothy H. H. Thoresen, ed. Toward A Science of Man: Essays in the History of Anthropology. The Hague and Paris: Mouton Publishers, 1975. Distributed in North America by Aldine Publishing Company, vii + 232 pp. Biographical notes and indices. $14.95.     

Review Article: Metanarratives in Global Histories of Material Progress

WILLIAM R. THOMPSON. The Emergence of the Global Political Economy. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xi, 252. $25.99 (US), paper; DEREK H. ALDCROFT and ANTHONY SUTCLIFFE, eds. Europe in the International Economy, 1500–2000. Cheltenham and Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1999. Pp. xi, 289. $90.00 (US); KENNETH POMERANZ. The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. x, 382. $39.95 (US).