The power of interpretation lies with the whole system of belief which is in the hand of those who practice this culture.
When the elders’ experience cannot be physically shared, the question of cultural reproduction becomes an issue. We know, however, that data recorded in books or other mediums always remains open to future reinterpretation and criticism. Historians and specialists on literature and art have demonstrated this many times. It is time to also recognise this in anthropology: anthropological books all carry some useful information about the given society, either the one observed or its relationship with the society of the observer. It is also important to recognise that different interpretations can co-exist. With multimedia, the advantage is that you can hear the songs and stories and see through films and photos the visual elements that persons connect with the oral elements. But another story-teller could tell the same story in a different way. I did not include in this CD-ROM anthropological interpretations published elsewhere (Glowczewski 1991, 1996). There are only a few texts contextualising some key domains (art, artefacts, church, fieldwork, hand-signs, healing, history, hunting, kinship, land-rights, law, rituals, taboos). The data presented is only a sample collected at a given time (between 1979 and 1998) of the huge cultural heritage of the Warlpiri, but it is structured as an open network according to the Warlpiri mode of mapping knowledge.
I was often asked ‘why should the recording stop there?’ My answer is that if Warlpiri wish to continue the project they should be assisted.9 Multimedia technology requires money and technical expertise, but just as Aborigines in Australia adopted video recording in the 1980s and teleconferencing in the 1990s, they are now starting to use new technologies, including the internet precisely to record their culture.10 The Maningrida community in Arnhem Land had a website for several years: it showed examples of songs, didgeridoo players, paintings for sale and the community telephone. This site was so popular that the community was inundated with orders for art works as well as questions from users wanting to know more about the culture or to come and visit them. The site was closed because of this popularity: the community could not keep up with the demand. It has since been redesigned to respect their privacy.
The focus now is on using new technologies as tools for recording and connecting. While many museums have put their collections on the internet, Aborigines say information relating to their objects should be controlled: they want to decide what can be made public or not. They would like that all information related to their specific groups to be made available through the internet—but only to the community concerned. In other words, if there are Warlpiri objects in certain museums, a process should allow the Warlpiri, but the Warlpiri only, to access the inventory of these objects as compiled by each of the museums through the internet. This idea led to the concept of an Aboriginal Gateway, which is being developed by the AICN (Australian
9    The project of a Warlpiri linguistic encyclopaedia was undertaken in the 1970s with the participation of several linguists and Warlpiri specialists (Laughren ed.). A temporary CD-ROM, ‘Kirrkirr’, a graphical electronic interface to the Warlpiri Dictionary, was developed at the University of Sydney by Kevin Jansz, Christopher Manning, and Nitin Indurkhya. Information about the development of the project is available on the site of the linguist David Nash at <http://www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/>.
10 Melinda Hinkson (1999) has recently analysed the use of different audio-visual technologies by the Warlpiri people of Yuendumu. Hinkson has also produced the CD-ROM, ‘Yardiliny’, with this community and the South Australian Museum.