Cultural Geography

simultaneously constructs and limits our vision.

Language reflects and constructs power. For

example, concepts of time are embedded in

language. English, for example, constructs tenses

in ways that reflect and reinforce a view of time

as categorically distinct, as either past, present or

future. In other words, the linearity implicit in

much Eurocentric epistemology is embedded in

English language, making it difficult to convey

non-linear concepts of time and temporal

relations, and their spatial implications. Consider,

for example, the use of the verb ‘come’ in the

following passage of Aboriginal English:

Kakawuli(bush yam) come up from Dreaming. No

matter what come up, they come up from Dreaming. All

tucker come out from Dreaming. Fish, turtle, all come

from Dreaming. Crocodile, anything, all come from

Dreaming. (Big Mick Kankinang in D. Rose, 1996: 35)

In this passage Kankinang uses the verb ‘to

come’ without conventional tense markers. For

many English speakers this shift from standard

English is read as an inability to express the past

tense properly because they construct the

Dreaming as a time in an ancient past. Yet

Kankinang’s grammar here precisely represents

an ever-present Dreaming (what the anthropolo-

gist Stanner, 1979: 24, referred to as the ‘every-

when’), where things did come, do come and

will always come from the continually renewing

relationships between people, place and other

species and entities that are called ‘Dreaming’.

In this reading, the statement offers a potent

challenge to conventional temporal thinking in

English. It unsettles English tense boundaries

and a Eurocentric notion of time by presenting

time as simultaneously past, present and future.

It very carefully constructs a cultural landscape

that Eurocentric philosophies and most English

speakers cannot easily comprehend.

In providing a culturally mediated relationship

between foreground and background, between

the here-and-now of place and the horizon of

space (Hirsch and O’Hanlon, 1995: 4), the idea

of landscape offers a metaphor for cultural rela-

tionships and processes in space–time, place and

scale. Hirsch and O’Hanlon’s useful discussion

considers the notion of landscape within the dis-

cursive space of anthropology. They consider

Carter’s (1987) account of the colonial encounter

in Botany Bay when James Cook’s expedition

encountered or intruded into the cultural land-

scapes of Eora people. The different cultural

readings engaged in that encounter used different

narrative forms to contextualize people and land-

scape. For the European imperial narrative,

exploration, discovery and settlement are the

central tropes. The other might be unknown, but

the human other was constructed as naturally and

inherently inferior (capable of being known and

dismissed) and the non-human other, however

exotic and bizarre, capable of discovery,

exploitation, conquest and acquisition (see also

Blaut, 1993).

Although the task of engaging with the

reading of this distant encounter by contempo-

rary Eora people is difficult, perhaps impossible,

the central trope of the Eora narrative was the

Dreaming. Although indigenous peoples’ sense

of place is often glossed as exemplifying a local-

ized world view, the Dreaming offers a scale

metaphor which encompasses the infinite within

the immediate. It mediates relationships across

space and time at vast scales, while retaining an

embodiment and emplacement that is concrete,

local and specific. Cultural geography’s ‘local

sense of place’ gloss for non-European or

non-academic ontologies just will not do in such

situations. It reserves the only cultural logic of

multiple scales for the imperial, acquisitive

European gaze, reducing the question of scale in

cultural relations to an underlying economic and

political logic that is Eurocentric. In the

Dreaming, there is an ethical narrative that estab-

lishes a very different relationship between the

here-and-now of place and the wider narrative of

distant horizons of space, time and social and

environmental order. For D. Rose (1996), the

Dreaming nurtures the landscape as a nourishing

terrain – country. This term in Aboriginal

English encompasses people (countrymen),

place (homeland) and past, here-and-now and

horizon.

NATURE AND CULTURE

In the process, the Dreaming reveals and

challenges another Eurocentric construction –

the assumed categorical separation of culture and

nature. This construction places the human

(culture, society) in a binary opposition with the

natural (animals, plants, landscapes, seascapes,

lightning, thunder, etc.). Within the Judeo-

Christian tradition, the creation process itself

constructs naturalized boundaries between

‘culture’ and ‘nature’. The human, or to be more

specific the hierarchically privileged man, is

seen as separate from and more powerful than

other ‘living creatures’ (including woman), in

large part owing to his ability to name them.

Science produces classificatory systems which

distinguish animals from plants and other things

(Anderson, 1995; Whatmore and Thorne, 1998).

Nader (1996: 3) sees the power of science not

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