Post on 24-Jan-2023
Contexts of Child
Development
Culture, Policy and
Intervention
Edited by: Gary Robinson Ute Eickelkamp
Jacqueline Goodnow Ilan Katz
Charles Darwin University Press
2008
Chapter 11Play, Imagination and Early Experience: Sand storytelling and continuity of being among Anangu Pitjantjatjara girlsUte Eickelkamp
Culture does not exist for adults alone. Rather, one might say that it is deeply grounded in experiences made in infancy and childhood that in turn help condition human imagination and a sense of self. In this chapter, I seek to explore how symbolic play in a natural social setting facilitates the process of becoming a self. The focus is on a particular narrativepractice of an Australian Aboriginal desert culture, namely the distinctive form of playful storytelling in the sand that Anangu Pitjantjatjara girls at Ernabella grow up with and that they call milpatjunanyi.
Ernabella is the oldest of 14 remote desert communitiesin the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands in the northwest corner of South Australia, located in thepanoramic rocky country of the Musgrave Ranges. It was established as a permanent settlement in 1937 by Presbyterian missionaries, who sought to interfere as little as possible with the Anangu way of life. In 1981, after the communities had become self- administered in the wake of a nation-wide land rights movement, Anangu gained freehold title over a large bloc of land. Today, the 3000-odd residents on ‘the lands’ have a strong sense of cultural continuity and relative separateness from ‘mainstream’ Australian society. The central role of family and kinship in all
parts of life (see also Fietz in this volume), the continuing use of their Western Desert language, a thriving intellectual heritage grounded in the cosmology of the Dreaming, high levels of regional mobility and ritual activity, and a range of adaptive practices such as the manufacture of art and craft for ritual use and for sale, all contribute to a distinctive contemporary Anangu culture. However, olderpeople in particular keenly feel the need to ensure their cultural survival as, along with many other Indigenous groups, they face the challenges of social and economic hardship and of demographic change towardsan ever younger population.
Sand storytelling, which also exists in other parts of Central Australia, is a living tradition belonging to women and girls. It combines the drawing of relatively simple shapes with the unfolding of a narrative. It is related to the Australian Aboriginal desert iconographythat now has attained such a striking presence through the modern Aboriginal painting movement and the anthropological literature. What has gained far less attention than these vibrant and marketable cultural productions by adults are children’s symbolic expressions. In part, this relative neglect may be accounted for by the small interest among scholars in applying and exploring developmental theories to socio-cultural analysis.
This chapter seeks to do precisely that: to pursue an understanding of culture, and more narrowly of symbolicrepresentation, in developmental terms, drawing on two main bodies of literature, the psychoanalytic-developmental and the anthropological, applied to an ethnographic study of play in the everyday life of children. Concretely, I will be exploring how sand storytelling forges a link between infancy and early
Child development and cultural imagination in Central Australia
138
24943 text.indd 138
24/6/08 3:36:53 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
childhood on the one hand, and cultural symbolism on the other. Particular attention is paid to the separation-individuation process as it is manifested incertain aspects of the play technique—the building of acontaining environment, the placing of body symbols into the sand that are then erased, and the progressiveadvancement into the social space of peers. Widening the perspective to include the larger cultural imagination, the discussion also brings together anthropological observations on the meaning of the ground and mark-making in Aboriginal desert cosmology and psychoanalytic insights on the formation of the boundaries of self. The aim is to thereby tease out howmilpatjunanyi facilitates the child’s separation from mother and entry into the larger social field by way ofembodying both personal experience and cultural imagination.
According to the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott, ‘... the live body, with its limits, and with an inside and an outside, is felt by the individual to form the core forthe imaginative self (1984, p. 244; emphasis in the original removed)’.
Figure 1: 10-year-old girl playing milpatjunanyi in the companyof other girls, Ernabella 2004
Figure 1 shows the typical sight of a girl at play. Theimage here is of self-absorption, self-containment, butalso of being with others, being watched, listening, others waiting, perhaps taking turns. One may ask with Winnicott in mind, where is the live body in the placing of thoughts into sand? Where are inside and outside in the imagined space of play? This paper is then both about containment or holding and the feeling of aliveness that playing seems to bring forth. Rather than asking how culture and society shape human development, I ask how aspects of psychological growth shape a distinctive play technique that is as popular now as it must have been a very long time ago. The vital attraction of milpatjunanyi is not just the result of a transmission of skills from one generation to the next; it is also, and perhaps foremost so, driven by the ‘continuity of being’ (Winnicott 1986, pp. 242ff.) that is experienced from infancy onwards and is expressed throughout a person’s life in relation to thecollective imagination. The perspective adopted here isthen bidirectional; it suggests that forms of self-experience in infancy are bound to be ‘writ large’ in children’s play as a form of cultural expression.
The discussion is organised in three sections. The first outlines the general features of the play technique, followed by concrete examples. Section two presents propositions about infant development and symbol formation. These are then shown to be ‘at work’
139
24943 text.indd 139
24/6/08 3:36:53 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
in sand storytelling in section three, which discusses cultural and psychodynamic meanings of the technique.
General features of sand storytelling and examples at different ages
Sand storytelling is a multimodal form of expressing thoughts and feelings that girls at Ernabella, a Central Australian community on Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, practice and grow up with. It isa playful activity that Anangu regard as an important tradition originating in the Ancestral cosmology of theDreaming. With much encouragement from the women, younggirls begin to acquire practical knowledge of the technique from about two years of age, and are likely to use it throughout their lives, if with diminishing frequency. Boys may watch and listen to the stories that the girls perform. It is held to be inappropriate for boys and men to play milpatjunanyi, although some observers have pointed to parallel forms of expression
in boys’ play.1 At Ernabella sand storytelling is calledmilpatjunanyi, meaning literally ‘to put (tjunanyi) the stick (milpa)’. The following section describes its basic elements.
Clearing the ground. Once seated on the ground, perhaps giving it a few quick hits with the wire as if to warm up and also signal to others that a switch to playing is about to begin, the next step is to clear a patch onthe ground with a swiping movement of the arm. In the local dialects Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, the terms for both this movement and the cleared space thusmade are pana urini or manta urini. The flat hand, its edge or sometimes the wire, are used to smooth the sand in asemi-circular area close to the body, usually in front of the player who is sitting cross-legged on the ground(Figure 2). A performance stage is thus created, a pictorial space with dynamic multiple qualities that, for the time of playing, will be filled with symbols drawn in the sand, with gestures in mid-air between face and ground, and with words or song. The swiping clear of the ground is repeated several times; at intervals that mark the end of a segment of a story, or, as a young woman explained, ‘when you make a mistake’, and always at the very end of playing before leaving the scene. Old women explained that pana urini also has something to do with re-telling the same story. They remember how, in the past, the children would relish ‘bedtime stories’ told by a grandmother, so much so that at the end, they would call out, ‘Kami,tjukurpa wirunya palatja. Wanyu piruku wangka!’—Grandmother, this is a truly beautiful story. Please tell it again!
Figure 2: 9-year-old girls ready to play having cleared the ground and holding the wire, Ernabella, 2004
140
24943 text.indd 140
24/6/08 3:36:54 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
Using the wire, building the space. Milpa is a bent twig or, as isnowadays preferred, a piece of wire about 50cm long, with which to beat, poke, strike, stroke and scratch the ground while a story is told. Both tools are associated with shelters—the traditional homes made from branches and twigs, and contemporary houses surrounded by wire fences. Metal is harder than wood and the new material may have given the movements and shapes a sharper edge.
The ‘story wire’, as girls call it today, is a personalpossession that they carry slung around their neck as they walk about, ready at any time to sit down and start playing. When in action, the wire is held in the right hand by right-handed girls to give intermittent support to the mark-making gestures with the left hand.These mark- making actions are usually verbalised and the integration of touch, gesture, visual perception and words is a striking feature of this technique.
Every so often, the girl would skilfully flex the ‘talking stick’ into the desired curvature. It is mostly the tip of the wire bent downward that hammers the ground, but every now and then she might turn it over so that the tip is pointing upward, namely in order to make strong lines by whipping the sand with the length of the wire. Occasionally, the wire is straightened to perform this movement. This alters the shape of the performance space dramatically. Its characteristic form is that of a rounded container dynamically sustained by movements: (a) by sweeping thearm across the ground in a way that shapes a horizontalplane bulging outward from the player (Figure 2); (b) by bending the body over the area as she places graphicsymbols with the tips of her fingers in the sand (Figures 1 and 2); (c) by drawing symbols to represent people that echo the curved shape of the pictorial plane as well as the U-shaped posture of the player whose legs are folded under or spread apart (Figure 3),leaving at the end a U-shaped imprint of the player’s body on the ground in mirror symmetry to the playing field so that the trace of a circle or sphere becomes visible; and (d) when sitting upright, by tapping and striking the bent wire.
Another counterbalancing element to the dominant rounded shape of the activity as a whole is the straight line often drawn to depict a person—when tallying people in talking about a group, such as family members or peers, and to show a person lying down. As will be discussed in section 2, the line bearsan iconic relationship with the wire, stick or nail, that is, with drawing tools that become assimilated into the body- image. And the body, as I can merely indicate here, is replete with cultural symbolic linkages. Ethnographers of Central Australian groups
reported that each person has a ‘second body’ in the form of a sacred board. Wrapped up in string, it used to be placed into the infant’s sleeping place. The (Arrernte) women called these boards by the same name as the little walking stick that toddlers used to hold onto when learning to stand upright. The symbolic chainalso includes punitive elements, namely in the form of dangerous sticks that a Dreaming being would throw at his human representative in case his sacred object was mishandled (see Róheim 1971). (Ceremonial poles, fighting sticks and digging sticks of women, as well asspears used by men, belong to the same symbolic cluster.)
Characteristic motifs. From middle childhood onwards, the mostfrequently depicted motif in milpatjunanyi is the interiorof homes. In the past, girls drew a circle or semi- circle (Figure 3) with a twig to represent wiltja, the traditional bush shelter made of branches, and older women today always show homes in this fashion. When
141
24943 text.indd 141
24/6/08 3:36:54 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
Anangu began to live in houses in the early 1970s, the girls were quick to adjust the drawings to their new living spaces—rectangular constructions internally divided by straight lines that invariably show a floor plan and details of the interior furnishing, also depicted in plan view2 (Figure 4). Within this topic, the most common theme is sleeping arrangements. The
girls often update one another on who slept at their house during the previous night, or quietly enact such situations in solitary play. If at all, verbal explanations of domestic scenes are softly spoken, evenat the edge of audibility.
In addition to scrutinising the social life within family homes, the girls use sand
Figure 3: Family in wiltja by Figure 4: 11-year-old girl drawing senior woman the interior of a house
stories to exchange information on a range of significant events in their lives; a school excursion to the city, a hunting trip with family, a sports competition, a shopping trip, a notable scene from their play in the shrub or the classroom, or mishaps such as an accident or perhaps a fight they may have witnessed. In stories about travelling across longer distances, movement is represented in a variety of ways: by drawing the floor plan of a motor vehicle and/or a road to indicate driving, or by dragging or tapping the wire along a line to represent walking.
The play of younger girls about three and four years ofage reflects a different horizon of understanding and concerns. They often act out fantasies of having a boyfriend, coitus and pregnancy. These are ‘made real’ by setting the fantasies into a relationship with actual people, and by expressing strong feelings, both tender and aggressive. Sexual themes and relationship issues may again become a focal point of sand stories during adolescence, when a girl might dwell on her situation in solitude or share it with a close friend.
I next describe three play sessions. One is the solitary play of a young toddler girl; the other two are mixed peer group activities that highlight the
social significance of milpatjunanyi in the world of children.
Example 1
A little girl about 18 months old is sitting on the ground. She tilts her head slightly downward and holds her body mostly upright in order to watch her creationscome into being. She is looking into the space in the sand between her legs where she has just begun to make marks by dragging a rusty nail that she holds firmly inher right hand. Her grandmother has been showing her how, by placing the nail into her hand,
142
24943 text.indd 142
24/6/08 3:36:54 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
patting the sand, encouraging her to draw. I have a feeling that this has become a matter for attention because I demonstrated my interest by pulling out the camera.
To see the strong and secure motion with which she cutsdeep lines into the sand is an impressive sight, and I am astonished to see such self-possessed behaviour
coming from such a small person; to me her composed posture, skilled motion of the arm and happily absorbedlook on the face, appear at odds with the white diapersfrom which the legs stick out, and also with the fact that she is only beginning to mimic baby talk. Her grandmother sits closely by her side, with one leg stretched out behind the girl’s back, the other folded under. Her hands, which move with gestures as she is chatting to other women, including myself, are near theedge of the girl’s playing field. The grandmother’s dogis lying at the back on the other side of the girl. It is as big as the toddler and its snout moves in and outof the periphery of the playing field.
The next examples illustrate contexts for playing milpatjunanyi in peer groups of mixed age.
Example 2
It is school holidays and the best time in the hot weather season to engage with girls and their sand stories are the late evenings, from around 9pm until after midnight. I find them in the usual spot between the church and the store, as a church service is being held outside on the platform across the road. At play tonight are nine girls between five and 13 years of age.
They sit in a circle, with enough space for each to have an approximately 80cm-wide story field in front ofher, the typical semi-circle in the sand wiped clean with the hand. No single girl tells a full story. Several make a few graphs in the sand, followed by idlehitting of the stick (all are using the bent wire). I see mostly squares and rectangles— rooms inside houses,that is. The two smallest girls throw a dead lizard across, they try to scare me with the warning—‘Snake!’—
and make a snake’s track behind me. Three older boys come charging through the passageway between church andshop on the other side of which a police car has pulledup. The boys are running towards a house and one girl explains to me in English, ‘They’re running from the cops’.
I notice the precision and speed with which they hammerand even stencil marks into the sand—like a typewriter pounding the letters of a name. M, for whom I had written my name in the sand the night before, remembered it earlier in the day, ‘typing’ it without hesitation.
After a while, she leaves the circle and sits down a couple of metres away, again clearing the space in front of her. One of the older girls sits down next to her, they seem to be really exchanging something, but Icannot hear what.
Attention turns towards me: Can you tell a story? Wheredid you come from? Do you know my mother? Where are youstaying? Can we come and stay with you? Have you got a friend for company? I know most of their grandmothers, and we establish our kin relationships. My ten-year-old‘mother’, Y, pulls out a photograph folded twice—of thedeceased girl E, who recently died from a congenital heart weakness at age 15. She asks if I know this girl,and when I affirm, wants to give me the picture as a gift. E’s younger sister who is also present does not seem to mind.
143
24943 text.indd 143
24/6/08 3:36:54 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
Example 3
On another night, two teenage girls let me sit next to them. They are chatting as they engage on and off in milpatjunanyi, and are very frank in responding to my queries about their lives. Both grew up at Ernabella and recently started going to a high school for children from Anangu Pitjantjatjara lands in the city of Adelaide. They draw their school bedrooms in the sand: a vertical rectangle, two beds, door, cupboard, aroom- dividing curtain, and another set of beds. The girls and boys share rooms according to communities. Next to the room of these two Ernabella girls is another community, ‘Indulkana’, or is it ‘Fregon’? One of the girls checks every detail in her drawing with the other—‘Cupboard nyangatja, mulap?’—Is this really where the cupboard is? and so on. All numbers are counted in English. I ask what else they tell in milpatjunanyi. The response is instant: ‘We are sitting here, Ute, I, and J [three U-shapes], and we are talking [the wire is made to poke lots of holes for spoken words—again, the motif of the typewriter; but letters are never used, asI tells me, even though I later observe that the girls often write names and initials into the sand. A car is coming along [rectangle] with two people [two U-shapes inside the rectangle]. This is actually happening whileshe is explaining what they play. I can hardly make outanything in the dark, and admire that everything is spotted so quickly. Then more talk about family relationships. One of the boys playing nearby is a cousin and the girls point him out to me indirectly by sketching his position among others in the sand. He is sitting on a boulder with other boys. The boulder is
depicted as a circle and elongated semi-circles mountedon top represent the boys.
As the examples of older girls at play show, sand storytelling often takes place in a larger context of various peer interactions. Considering the co-activities around milpatjunanyi I found especially remarkable the ease and spontaneity with which it is entered and left, how it echoes, expands, and re-socialises scenes as they happen close by and in the more distant fields of the past, the future and other locations. The situation as a whole presents a relatively open space of playful sociality, offering the individual pockets for withdrawal without being cutoff.
Taken together, the vignettes demonstrate that the plurality of aesthetic and technical features, topics and contexts of telling sand stories is nevertheless integrated into a distinctive technique. Read in comparison, the illustrations of a toddler’s play and of older girls also indicate that story performance skills evolve with age; from about five years the girlsknow how to elaborate and refine their play in the social context of peers. However, rather than analysingsand stories across age cohorts of players, I shall adopt a developmental perspective of another kind. Thisis to probe those aspects in the life of infants that, in my view, give shape to the basic attributes of milpatjunanyi.
Conceptualising playing and development
The developmental perspective that, directly or tacitly, underlies my analysis of milpatjunanyi is based on the psychoanalytic research and concepts of Donald Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, Paul Schilder, René Spitz,
Wilfred Bion and Erik Erikson. Outlining that perspective seems most economically achieved in the form of general propositions about playing and development.
144
24943 text.indd 144
24/6/08 3:36:55 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
The first set of these propositions is related to the overall functions of play and its several forms:
1. 2.
3. 4.
5. 6.
7. 8.
The experience of playing appears to be a condition forfeeling fully alive.It is natural for children to play,and a child who never plays would be a cause for concern.Playing facilitates psychological equilibrationand growth, and specific forms of play can be discernedin all stages of life.Play may take the form of fantasyproductions in word or image, experiences made manifestin the imaginary use of objects or dramatisation, acting out inner dialogue, playfulness in exchange withothers, and a whole range of combinations.The specific forms that appear may depend on cultural and personal preferences, maturational age and gender, and the immediate situation. But play, in order to be play,
requires artifice: props and techniques that transform non-play activity (as well as passivity) into play activity.A further set has to do with early forms of psychological growth and play. Psychological growth occurs by way of increasing differentiation of functions and their integration (Werner and Kaplan 1963). At first, the functions of mouth, hands and eyesare closely integrated, as is most evident in the nursing situation. As the close tie between these threeorgans loosens, they take on new and explorative functions that are increasingly directed towards the environment (Spitz 1955; Mahler and McDevitt 1982).Muchof this happens through early forms of playful engagement, when the baby begins to discover that the feet, toes and fingers she may be playing with, just like the reflection of herself in a mirror, are indeed her own (Mahler and McDevitt 1982).A critical part of early growth is the perception of our body as an integrated whole with an outer boundary and inner volume. The baby forms an inner space through first perceiving a containing object, primarily the breast, but other sensations—light, sound, smell—can serve the same function. The containing object is experienced as a skin and leads to the formation of a skin boundary (Bick 2005) and skin ego (Anzieu 1980) that become the somatic core of the self (Schilder 1950).A third set has to do with the particular significance of the relationship between mother and child. What is represented is often this relationship. Even before anyrepresentation, however, the relationship between mother and infant is seen as critical for the development of a sense of inner space and the growth ofimagination.The newborn baby is not a separate self. The perception of our body as an integrated whole with an outer boundary and inner volume is a gradual processthat depends crucially on the earliest contact with the
mother (Schilder 1950; Hartmann and Schilder 1927; Scott 1948). She reflects back the baby’s whole being through her loving response.Play is essentially an extension of, and even a substitute for, the original ‘potential space’ (Winnicott 1971) between mother and infant that first gives rise to the imagination.The child’s mental activity is prompted by the fact that the caring environment can never be perfect (Winnicott’s ‘good enough mother’, 1958). The baby begins to make up for deficiencies in the caring environment by moving from
9.
10. 11.
145
24943 text.indd 145
24/6/08 3:36:55 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
being passively cared for to actively co-creating the environment: a vital step in the development of mind and self.
Of special interest for examining developmental processin sand storytelling is the sequence of emerging capacities to differentiate. Infant research shows thatnewborns are able to distinguish a finger from an inanimate object such as a stick by touch (grasping), that the capacity to distinguish visually between animate and inanimate objects develops around six months, and the capacity to visually distinguish between mother and stranger emerges at around eight
months (Spitz 1965; Mahler and McDevitt 1982). Spitz (1965, p. 172) considered the combination of these capacities to be a ‘momentous development in the infant’s thinking process’ that marks ‘the inception ofthe concept “alive”, of life’. Of course, these timelines may well vary across cultural milieus and themeaning that the distinctions may obtain depends alwayson the concrete situation. Nevertheless, the innate grasping of the finger, the subsequent visual differentiations and the known image of the mother mustbe significant factors in the process of becoming a self for all children. Milpatjunanyi literally plays with these early cognitions and vitality feelings.
Cultural and psychodynamic meanings in sand storytelling
I now return to the ethnographic material in order to develop an interpretation of the characteristic features of sand storytelling. Adopting a psychodynamicperspective, I discuss certain technical elements, shapes, and socio-cultural aspects in order to considerhow milpatjunanyi might relate to the ongoing process of symbol formation that begins in infancy and moves towards the development of a separate self.
The use of a nail, stick, or a wire. An elongated mark-making tool is an integral part of milpatjunanyi. In the play session of the 18-months-old toddler (Example 1 above), an ironnail is used that is similar in shape and size to a finger of this little girl, and to make lines with it is much more effective. As a mark-making instrument, the nail as substitute finger will ‘grow’ with the child into a longer bent piece of wire. Already the inanimate object is no longer that, and soon the joy ofmovement made visible in the sand will be invested in representations of thoughts by way of drawing
meaningful shapes and figures. At this young age, the instrumentalisation of the nail, which would be insufficiently explained as an act of imitation, is possible because of the dynamic nature of the body-ego.It is best understood as an act of not only prehension,but also comprehension, whereby an object is assimilated into the schema of the body. Fliess (1961) explained that the body-ego can ‘extend into and co-opt... elements of the object world’. Schilder, he continues, demonstrated this plainly with the followingillustration:
‘When we take a stick in our hands and touch an object with the end of it, we feel a sensation at the end of the stick. The stick, has, in fact, become part of the body-image. In order to get the full sensation at the end of the stick, the stick has to be in a more or lessrigid connection with the body. It then becomes a part of the bony system of the body ...’ (Schilder 1935, p. 202; cited in Fliess 1961, p. 209).
I will have to say more about the transpositions between finger, wire, gesture, and mark at the end of the discussion. I here wish to underscore that milpatjunanyi is a way
146
24943 text.indd 146
24/6/08 3:36:55 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
of, quite literally, staying in touch with earlier experiences of self-world relationship through tactile,groping and grasping action.
The significance of clearing the ground. The initial step of milpatjunanyi is to clear the ground, pana urini. The swiping movement of the arm has the practical purpose of creating a smooth surface on which graphs become clearly visible. This is a developmental achievement and not present from the start. Turning again to the play of the little girl, we see that a number of features characterise her play as a precursor to milpatjunanyi. There is the grandmother’s approval of the girl’s mark-making as a proper kind of behaviour, whichshe would not have extended to a boy. The girl’s bodilyposture and positioning towards her own sphere of engagement and away from others indicate the beginning of a self-contained space. But one aspect in the play situation of the toddler is notably different: At no point does the little girl swipe clear the ground in front of her. She does not create a confined pictorial space, because representation is not her intent. With her, movement comes before the image. And yet, containment is achieved, namely by flanking an area with her legs and the presence of grandmother and her dog on either side. Soon the macrosphere of life that is physically present in this play configuration will be transformed into symbolic representations of sand storytelling proper.
Surface and container as symbolic spaces. Sand storytelling is animportant cultural tradition and needs to be appreciated in terms of its tacit cosmological underpinnings. Although the children are not fully aware of it, the ground on which they sit and play, andin particular the space that they transform into a pictorial surface, is associated with deeper cultural meanings. A first hint to these may be seen in the factthat clearing the ground is not only a performance device to mark the beginning of a story or a new
segment within a narrative, but also the closing gesture that erases the traces of the event. Placed into the larger cultural context of mark-making, it could be said that to clear the ground signifies new beginnings that invite revelations on the one hand, andextinguishes their traces on the other. So even in children’s narrative play, the ground is not a neutral medium. Nancy Munn (1986, p. 69), in her ethnography ofWarlpiri women’s visual iconography, saw the smoothing of the ground in women’s sand drawings as an act of ‘erasure’ that is associated with the unmarked or original ground that the first Ancestral beings imprinted and shaped through their meaning- making movements—an interpretation that also applies to clearing the ritual ground prior to a dance performance.
The cultural meanings of clearing the ground extend to the concept of the ground itself. It is a dynamic concept closely associated with movements and especially the rhythmic motions of walking, singing and, as it were, narrative performance involving the tapping of a wire and speaking. Although it is generally true for children at Ernabella that the ground is the foundation on which all learning activities unfold, there is another dimension to it. Asethnographers of Australian Aboriginal societies in various parts of the continent have emphasised, the ground, like the rock surfaces used for painting, is a contact zone between Ancestral and human activity. The axis above-below is associated with public or ‘outside’, and secret or ‘inside’ knowledge respectively (e.g. Taylor 1996). It is also associated with the life cycle that begins in the ground in the form of spirit children, proceeds to the surface manifestation of being born/coming out/becoming visible
(expressed by the single verb utini in
147
24943 text.indd 147
24/6/08 3:36:55 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
Pitjantjatjara), then through the life span of the person whose traces (footprints, name, fireplace) will be erased at the time of death, and concluding with re-entering into the ground (e.g. Munn 1970). People are conscious of the marks they make with their bodies, such as their footprints or imprints of sitting or lying at a place, that is, they are conscious of the testimonies to their presence, which counts so much in a social world where being there and sharing experiences is a condition for discursive participation(e.g. Sansom 1995, p. 280ff.). The double presence of being there and talking about past, present or future events is also a hallmark of children’s sand storytelling.
As I will argue in more detail below, milpatjunanyi affords the feeling of maternal containment from infancy onwards throughout a woman’s life. Conceivably,this complements the symbolic substitution of the mother-child link that certain ritual objects afford men from the time of their initiation. I want to suggest a parallel between the sign qualities of sacredobjects on the one hand, and milpatjunanyi on the other. Marika Moisseeff (2002, pp. 246-247) characterises the Dreaming as ‘dynamic generator of forms’ that injects
vitality by way of giving shape, that is, by way of creating differentiation and hence perceivable objects.She furthermore makes the interesting point that the representation of this idea in the form of sacred objects (used in Arrernte male initiation ceremonies) embodies two focal attributes of the Dreaming, namely movement and evanescence. The objects are material manifestations of Dreaming beings, in the shape of ovalpieces of flat stone or wood that bear incised designs,which in turn refer to the geographical locations of Dreaming creativity and the travelling movements between them. In Moisseeff’s (2002, p. 254) words, ‘[t]hey are mobile landscapes imprinted with movement’.The efficacy of these self-referential sacred objects depends on the performance gestures in the ritual context and is laid to rest after the event, when the sacred objects are stowed away and other paraphernalia disassembled.
Conceivably the same core qualities shape the techniqueof milpatjunanyi. It is evanescent because drawings are only effective as long as the storyteller animates themand they are wiped out, that is, disassembled, at the end of playing. Movement is present not only because a girl might depict travel, but also because the drawingscan be made anywhere and individual graphs wiped out and remade. In this sense they can be shifted in space like objects. The mark-making gestures and the beating of the wire present further motility factors. But perhaps most importantly, children’s sand storytelling has a self-referential aspect: by immersing herself in the descriptive activity which itself constitutes an experience, the girl refers to another experience— past, present or future, remembered, imagined, or fantasised. In this, the body, like the sacred object, is both the signifier and the signified, as is fully
acknowledged in the recognition of the U-shaped imprinton the ground made by the player’s body. And there are further links between the symbolic dimension of development and tradition.
Milpatjunanyi shows how in childhood there begins an elaboration of forms of representation in which the ground is both the space of representation and at the same time a representation of the body-self. The same was observed by the child psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who, from watching children build spatial scenes with toys, also found that ‘experience is anchored in the ground plan of the body’ (Erikson 1984, p. 94). In forms of artistic and ritual representation practiced by adults, these
148
24943 text.indd 148
24/6/08 3:36:55 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
connections receive a further elaboration. The close link between person and symbol is expressed by a culturally conceived affinity between ground and skin as identity markers within the logic of the so-called Dreaming or Ancestral Law. This has received substantial commentary. Following Munn’s (1970) exegesis of the links between country and the human body, Jennifer Biddle (2003, p. 65) writes about Lajamanu Warlpiri: ‘The fleshly traces of birthmarks and freckles are indicative of how “skin” is literally and materially the same “substance” as country, in thatit is equally a medium in which Ancestral traces
reside’. This is so because Ancestral presences ‘can enter women’s wombs, cause conception and in turn, leave birthmarks, freckles and other identifying traits’. She adds that intercorporeal linking between living people and Ancestors is also effected by fillingopen cuts in the skin with site specific country (ground, dirt), and refers to Christine Watson’s reportthat Kukatja people at Balgo liken such cicatrices to ridges made in sand drawings (cited in Biddle 2003, p. 65; see also Watson 2003, pp. 65ff.). Barbara Glowczewski, in discussing Warlpiri women’s ritual and body painting, claims that the outline of designs is painted repeatedly ‘until the background becomes saturated, so that the kuruwarri, the Ancestral force, enters the body through the surface of the skin and “feeds” the woman’ (quoted in Biddle 2003, p. 67). All of these observations—intercorporeal linking, imprinting, seeking contiguity, and nurturance—can be seen as related to the experience of the mother- infantdyad and early attachment; the symbolic forms appear then as substitutions.
Yet although highly perceptive of psychological factorsin cultural practices, these ethnographers do not consider concretely how developmental dynamics might shape such cultural conceptions of ‘ground-skin-linking’. In fact, the phenomenon of ‘primary skin function’ first observed by Esther Bick (1968), and theidea of the ‘skin ego’ formulated by Didier Anzieu (1980) suggest that this cultural imaginary might bear the traces of the impact of the nursing situation on the formation of an inner container in which sensory experiences gradually evolve into symbolic forms.3 Fred Myers, in his analysis of Pintupi social thought, did recognise that the core social metaphors derive from the principles of child socialisation. Men ‘hold’—have
rights to, knowledge about, and responsibility for—country, he explains (1991, pp. 145ff.), but country also ‘holds’ people:
‘One’s own country (ngurra walytja) is ... a place of security. Here, dangerous noumenal forces are absent: One is “known” by the spirits and one “knows” the proper rituals that maintain the ongoing relationship. One’s own country provides the source of one’s identity.’ (Myers 1991, p. 151)
The mapping of individual identity and group identity onto the landscape suggests an image of containment, ofbeing held. In other words, people and country are in amutual relationship of nurture and care, and in this way, both territorial organisation and emotions are held in place. However, it would be erroneous to picture a purely benign relationship between people andcountry, just as the mother-child relationship is neverwithout ambivalence. People swear at the Ancestors if they feel neglected (von Sturmer 2007; see also Maslow and Honigman 1970, p. 332), not unlike children who show aggression towards mothers, as Aboriginal childrenoften do—mostly without reprimand. If children’s attacks on mothers are part of the struggle of becominga separate self, the re-creation of the bond in sandplay, especially when the child begins to move her play away from mother and into the peer group, may
149
24943 text.indd 149
24/6/08 3:36:55 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
be interpreted as a sign of individuation. From a cosmological perspective, the total fusion with the ground is brought about by death, whereas the task of the living is to seek differentiation through symbolic work. As I have tried to show, children’s play in the form of sand storytelling is foundational in this process, as it facilitates a transitional space betweenself and mother that is necessary for the experience ofindividuation and of cultural integration.
Enacting the inner dialogue
I described the experience of containment as a prominent aspect of sand storytelling. It is reflected as a circle or semi-circle in the graphic vocabulary; as the curving surface- shape onto which the story is told; and in the arc that is formed by the body of the player and the bent wire in motion. As a total image, sand storytelling is reminiscent of the traditional round wet-weather shelter made from branches and twigs.It has womb-like qualities, and the term for home, ngura, can indeed mean womb. The symbolising activity, that is, the actual mark-making, is directed back into this inner protected cavity.
I believe that the primary intent of sand storytelling is to continue the space of the early mother-child relationship in order to facilitate separation. It is this that the girl seeks to re-animate, to re-integrate, and to self-contain, as she is living through profound psychological changes and challenges. The stick or wirebecomes an extension of the live body, the playing field a zone of familiarising the world around and within the self, and in the total dynamic situation of humming, stroking, rhythmic beating, reaching out and pulling back in, the girl literally cradles herself. Through these sensory dimensions milpatjunanyi enhances
the ‘continuity of being’ that begins even before symbolisation is possible. It begins with the earliest forms of optic, sound and tactile perception that, likethe motor structure of the organism, have rhythmic qualities (Schilder 1950). Such early impulses are an integral part of the infant as a whole person; they cannot be separated from early experiences of attachment, from what Ivri Kumin (1996, p. 21) has described as ‘the sense of “being there” and “being with” which accompanies all normative human experiences’. He gave this early stage the apposite term ‘pre-object relatedness’, a stage that marks the beginning of an internal space. As the child matures, these now unconscious forms of knowledge and experiencethat Spitz (1963) called ‘basic dialogue’, continue to actively shape conscious action and interaction in the world.
From this angle, milpatjunanyi can be understood as an enactment of inner dialogue. It indeed reflects that early non-verbal forms of communication are a conditionfor verbal speech (Freedman and Grand 1977). If it is correct to see in the microsphere of milpatjunanyi a momentary recreation of the baby’s omnipotent being, the self- made shelter of playful significations makes this possible. Winnicott’s (1958, p. 253) observation that, at six months of age, the baby ‘is at times usingthe circle or sphere as a diagram of the self’, seems relevant here. This and the previous observations on the co-evolution of self and m/other might explain why the most frequent motif of milpatjunanyi is the house, or more exactly, the interior of the child’s home. The house refers to the breast and what it stands for—nourishment, containment, repletion, and stimulation (von Sturmer 2007; Anzieu 1980, p. 27). Although more evident in the cocoon-like structure of the bush
shelter and its graphic representation as a circle or semi-circle (Figure 11-3) than in the rectangular constructions common today (Figure
150
24943 text.indd 150
24/6/08 3:36:55 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
11-4), this is true for any kind of home building. Importantly, the emulation of maternal nourishment advances the girl’s psychological growth towards her own feminine identity: by giving expression—that is, space for recognition and reflection—to the spatial andmorphological experience of her own body. Erikson (1951; 1984, p. 93) has made this explicit when he found that there are ‘significant sex differences in the use of play space’, with boys tending to create strong motion scenes and high structures that tumble down, and girls preferring to build ‘static interiors, which are open, simply enclosed, and peaceful or [benignly] intruded upon’. In milpatjunanyi the girl not only depicts a house; she re-creates the early relationship to the mother and extends the original dialogue into her own inner life. The fact that the usual mode of speech when playing is fragmentary and atthe edge of audibility also indicates that here, the child is addressing the inside of the self4. Furthermore, milpatjunanyi is an attempt to describe, makeintelligible and change the mother-figure, by way of incorporating certain parts of her into the self and rejecting others (Klein 1975). Sandplay is therefore not a sign of regression to an infantile state per se,
but a vehicle for separation-individuation while feeling held. I have also indicated that the maternal womb-like space transforms into the social world of relationships, and that this is reflected in the gradual progression from the self-absorbed solitary play of the very young to the communicative play of older children.
We are now in a position to appreciate the story wire and the motif of the house as part of the process of coming to inhabit the body and the world through playing. International studies show that children frequently and spontaneously draw houses, trees and people (Di Leo 1983, p. 41), and the three themes may be regarded as the building blocks of their world. I found the same when I asked all schoolchildren at Ernabella to make family drawings on paper, but it was not until I embarked on an analysis of sand storytelling that I could see that the children are doing more than creating representations of the self andelements in their environment. I now think that house, tree and person are objects of knowledge and also the unified schema that the self uses to make itself known to itself in relationship with others.
It was suggested that the earliest schema of the self is a sphere—something that expresses the striving for closure. As the sphere of the mother-child bond expandsand grows, it also becomes differentiated, yet without losing its spheric structure. In sand storytelling, I propose, this structure, which is at once unified and differentiated, is reflected in the transpositions thatlink stick, house and person. As an extension of a finger, the story wire is assimilated into the body-image. Its shape is also echoed in the straight line drawn in the sand to symbolise the body of a person. Róheim (1971) had observed that the traditional walking
stick for Arrernte toddlers is believed to represent the child’s sacred object which in turn is his double or second body. Twig and piece of wire are materials used in house building past and present, and they are used in storytelling in such a way that the shape of a container is formed through gestures and graphs.
As the child leans over the narrative space, placing graphs into the sand and beating the bent wire, her whole body-image obtains the gestalt of a container. But she is now filling the sphere of earlier bonds with associations and ideas progressively of her own, and that she will soon put to the test in the company of peers. Since, like all children’s play, sand storytelling not only transforms early experiences and life situations into
151
24943 text.indd 151
24/6/08 3:36:55 PM
Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
symbolic representations—it also is a social process and, as such, creates a distinctive sociality of its own. Milpatjunanyi might then be seen as a metaphor—a specifically desert Aboriginal female metaphor—for separation-individuation.
Research on children’s play and family in Central Australia was initially funded by a Macquarie University Research Development grant in 2004 (A004651), and is currently supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP0556111). The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait IslanderStudies funded most of my fieldwork between 1995 and 2004 (L95/4955, 95/5021, G97/6033, G1999/6217, G2002/6645,
G2004/6887). For discussions of ideas I thank John von Sturmer, Gary Robinson, Jacqueline Goodnow, and my husband, Jadran Mimica.My greatest debt is to the children and their families at Ernabella, who do not wish to be mentioned by name.
Milpatjunanyi is clearly perceived as a distinctive technique belonging to girls and women. Nevertheless, boys and girls play on the ground and enact stories, by digging a track, using toy cars or other props. Until perhaps a decade ago, it was common for boys to make toy cars out of powder milk cans, that were steered with a piece of wire stuck through the can and formed into a wheel at the other end. An Anangu teacher observed that the boys would be talking to themselves as they walked along witha ‘rolly-polly’, and she saw this as an activity comparable to the girls’ sand storytelling. A discussion of such convergences and of the larger context of oral traditions is reserved for another occasion.
I have provided elsewhere (Eickelkamp, 2008, pp. 36-37) a discussion of the distortion of the rectangular shape representing residential homes in children’s sand stories, which I interpret as a realism of the habituated body.Anzieu (1980, pp.22-23), for example, describes how the baby feels the mother’s warmth, softness of skin, her movements and nursing activities, and emphasises that this is accompanied by a flow of words. On this experiential basis, the infant gradually learns to ‘discern a surrounding volume in which he feels himself bathed, with surface and volume giving him a sense of a container (p. 27)’. Bick (2005) similarly held that the state of the newborn is one of un-integration, hence the need for a containing object, such as the nipple in the mouth, or the holding, talking and familiar smelling of the mother. She concluded that the containing objectsfeel like a skin, namely in the sense of a holding boundary, and that once the baby is able to internalise such a binding force it hadfirst perceived in an external object, other differentiating processes will set it. Importantly, this first inner space remains the locus of our sense of self. I believe it is explored,challenged, re-made, expanded and consolidated in milpatjunanyi. Notonly do the children play in the knowledge of acting within the secure boundaries of an established tradition, or in the physicalcompany of a caring adult or significant peers; they also re- build the maternal holding by creating a ‘surrounding volume’ of rhythmic movement, flow of words, sound, and touch.