Abstract
For First Nations people living in the central desert of Australia, the performance of oral storytelling drawing in the sand drives new agency in the cultural metamorphosis of communication practices accelerated by the proliferation of portable digital devices. Drawing on the ground sustains the proxemic and kinesthetic aspects of performative storytelling as a sign gesture system. When rendering this drawing supra-language, the people negotiate and ride the ontological divide symbolized by traditional elders in First Nations communities and digital engineers who program and code. In particular, storytelling’s chronemic encounter offsets the estrangement of the recorded event and maintains every participants’ ability to shape identity and navigate space-time relationships. Drawing storytelling demonstrates a concomitant capacity to mediate changes in tradition and spiritual systems. While the digital portals of the global arena remain open and luring, the force enabled by the chiasmic entwinement of speech, gesture and sand continues to map the frontier of First Nations identity formation and reformation.
Highlights
Spirit and SystemTelling stories really is a kind of power, and not an insignificant one
In First Nations communities in remote areas in central Australia, performative practices such as oral storytelling accompanied by drawing in the sand navigate real experience within the virtual boundaries offset by the communication systems of cyberspace
Mobile and WIFI access allow the conglomerates of the social media world to entice and engage residents as they do elsewhere
Summary
Telling stories really is a kind of power, and not an insignificant one. Stories give shape to experience, sometimes by accommodating traditional literary forms, sometimes by turning them upside down, sometimes by reorganizing them. In First Nations communities in remote areas in central Australia, performative practices such as oral storytelling accompanied by drawing in the sand navigate real experience within the virtual boundaries offset by the communication systems of cyberspace. Within those communities, first film and satellite television opened channels to the outside world. The ownership and protection of sacred stories and culture change in the transition from orality (memory) to recording (storage) Their accompanying though modified rituals, such a performative storytelling/drawing take on renewed cultural importance in a proliferating wider digital world. Fortifying the ephemerality of narrative’s temporal construction, at critical stages in the genesis of the story or at its conclusion, the narrator using her hands or a storytelling stick (milpiri) will erase the rendered marks in the sand, clearing the slate for the chapter, segment, or descriptive shot
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