Landscapes, Rock-art and the Dreaming: an Archaeology of Preunderstanding
B. DAVID, 2002. Landscapes, Rock-art
and the Dreaming: an Archaeology of Preunderstanding.
Leicester University Press, London.
The apparent timelessness of the Dreaming of Aboriginal Australia has long intrigued European observers, conjuring images of an ancient people much akin to Europe's own ancestral past. In this book, Bruno David examines the archaeological evidence for Dreaming-mediated places, rituals and symbolism. What emerges is not a static culture of long-standing, but modes of conceiving the world that began to approach their ethnographically recognisable forms about 1400 years ago.
As worldviews, the Dreaming in their various regional manifestations are examples of what the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has called preunderstanding, historically particular frameworks of knowledge that guide interpretation and that shape experiences of the world. By tracking through time the archaeological visibility of the ethnographically known Dreaming of Aboriginal Australia, as well-known modes of preunderstanding, the author argues that it is possible to scientifically explore an archaeology of preunderstanding; of body and mind; of alterity, identity and being-in-the-world. Such an investigation is ultimately also a self-reflective questioning of preconceptions that continue to inform Western notions of the indigenous Other in a supposedly postcolonial world.