Festering Boils and Screaming Canvases: notes from an anthropologist’s diary un-written

This paper reflects on almost twenty years of ethnographic field work with Warlpiri Aboriginal people, specifically, the relationship between Central Desert art production and the anthropologist’s incarnate involvement.   Drawing on the anecdotal and incidental, and figured through the possibilities provided by a certain ficto-critical confessional form -  a form which Jacqueline Rose (2004) describes as a specifically female and modernist mode of ‘faking it with the truth’  -   this paper reconsiders the palpable failures of the ethnographic endeavour as its only possible success.  A recent visit by six Warlpiri women, and one baby, to Sydney, at CCAP, COFA, in March, for a ten day Lajamanu Women’s Painting Workshop forms the basis of this account, as well as the exhibition of the art works that resulted.    The precarious terms in which culture travels, and the degree to which the anthropologist’s life world   -   body, experience, sentience -   is always at stake, in art production particularly, will be explored.   

Dr. Jennifer L. Biddle is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology in the Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy, Macquarie University. She conducts research with Warlpiri women in Lajamanu, and has published widely on language, affect and cultural difference; translation, art, aesthetics and the politics of interpretation; Central Desert writing and art. Her recent book is entitled breasts, bodies, canvas:  Central Desert art as Experience (UNSW Press, 2007).   Dr. Biddle is currently conducting a 3 year ARC research project (with Associate Professor Robyn Ferrell) on the relationship between feminist aesthetics and indigenous art.