Fiona Magowan

GLOBALISATION AND INDIGENOUS CHRISTIANITY: TRANSLOCAL SENTIMENTS IN AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL CHRISTIAN SONGS

Indigenous societies have responded to a legacy of missionisation, universalist Christian beliefs and global contemporary Christian music through their own expressions of worship in a myriad of ways. This article considers the role of emotions in Australian Aboriginal expressions of contemporary Christian music amongst Yolngu in the Northern Territory. Moral obligations to kin and land are strategically embodied in Yolngu traditional ritual performance and shape appropriate “performative emotions.” These emotive ideals persist through Christian worship styles and have influenced the composition and performance of Yolngu Christian music. Because Indigenous performances are based on inherent connections between place and personhood, it is argued that translocal sentiments of belonging can be shared amongst Australian Aboriginal communities as well as amongst other Indigenous groups at Christian gatherings. Thus, while Indigenous communities participate emotively in the worldwide Christian arena through contemporary Christian music, they also resonate with one another at the level of translocal sentiments expressed in conceptions of self and personhood that are based in songs about the country.

Honouring Stories: Performing, Recording and Archiving Yolngu Cultural Heritage

A proliferation of databases containing digitized musical knowledge and associated cultural heritage information of indigenous societies has created dilemmas for archivists, researchers and indigenous groups. The web age has also facilitated access to musical information for the masses at the touch of a keypad, changing the nature of access and contributing to the democratization of knowledge worldwide. As knowledge and the power it provides are types of currencies, the Internet has enabled indigenous communities to participate in a distance education of the West in ways not previously imagined. However, the processes by which particular kinds of information come to be stored as narratives of cultural history are often tacit. Many of the conflictual processes behind documentation, reproduction and repatriation are masked behind authoritative as well as competing versions of history recorded in different modalities such as the web, commercially available CDs, royalty payments, cultural centre displays, archival collections and indigenous knowledge repositories. These end products obscure their making and the kinds of performances that shape the documentation of indigenous cultural heritage.