Drawn from the Ground by Jennifer Green

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Drawn from the Ground

Sand stories from Central Australia are a traditional form of Aboriginal women’s verbal art that incorporates speech, song, sign, gesture and drawing.

Small leaves and other objects may be used to represent story characters. This detailed study of Arandic sand stories takes a multimodal approach to the analysis of the stories and shows how the expressive elements used in the stories are orchestrated together.

This richly illustrated volume is essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication. It adds to the growing recognition that language encompasses much more than speech alone and shows how important it is to consider the various semiotic resources employed in communication as an integrated whole rather than in isolation. jennifer green is a research fellow in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. She has over thirty years’ experience working on projects documenting Indigenous languages, history, and visual arts.

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Drawn from the Ground Sound, Sign and Inscription in Central Australian Sand Stories Jennifer Green

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107028920 © Jennifer Green 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2014 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data ISBN 978-1-107-02892-0 Hardback Additional resources for this publication at www.cambridge.org/XXXXX Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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A storyteller’s practised hand inscribed in sand a desert tale of spirits caught.

Composed of thought that’s burnished by an ancient tongue in verses sung, she traced their footsteps in among the rocks and range and to a gap.

Her lines all linked to form a map inscribed in sand, composed of thought in verses sung.

DPW 2012

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Contents

List of illustrations List of tables Acknowledgements 1

Introduction 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8

2

Sand stories as social and cultural practice 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9

3

Previous documentations of sand stories Lexical semantics of the term tyepety Dreamtime, Dreaming and the meanings of Altyerr Sand story styles Techniques and tools Mapping, diagramming and games in Central Australia Sand stories and awely ceremonies The end of the story Concluding comment

Catching a move as it flies: multimodal data collection and annotation 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

4

The Arandic language region A multimodal approach to communication Sign and gesture in sand stories Tracks and traces: iconicity in sign, sand and gesture Space and frames of reference A multimodal perspective on gradient phenomena Relationships between gesture and speech Outline of the remainder of the book

Recording naturalistic data in challenging conditions Coding and transcription The ‘sand quiz’: testing the meaning of V-units Representing multimodal events as transcript Concluding comment

Lines in the sand 4.1 Conventionalized ground-ground type V-units 4.2 Visible paths in sand 4.3 Combinations of static and dynamic elements

page ix xv xvi 1 4 6 12 16 19 28 30 32 35 35 41 43 44 53 59 64 66 68 71 72 74 88 93 98 100 101 115 119 vii

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Motion and multimodality The interpretation of motion in space Innovation and change Concluding comment

Body-anchored and airborne action 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

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Contents 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7

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Previous work on Aboriginal sign languages and gesture in Australia Handsigns in sand stories Pointing in sand stories A tunnel ball game in sand Concluding comment

Ordering, redrawing and erasure 6.1 V-units and the order of narrative events 6.2 Erasing the story space 6.3 The role of deictic units in transitions between frames

7

Vocal style in sand stories 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

8

‘Talking song’ and ‘singing story’ Some features of Arandic songs Doodlebugs and bogeymen: repeated text and borrowed words in a sand story A ‘sung’ sand story Concluding comment

Crossing boundaries 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7

Multimodality, forms and functions in sand stories Alternative representations in sand, sign and gesture Convention or continuously varying forms?

Coordination across modalities Verbal art, visual art Inscriptive practices: beyond Central Australia Concluding comment

Appendix 1: Abbreviations, glossing and orthographic conventions Appendix 2: Summary of six stories annotated in detail Bibliography Index

121 127 131 136 137 137 145 152 157 163 166 166 176 191 195 196 198 203 209 219 222 223 224 228 230 231 235 240 244 247 249 266

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Illustrations

Maps 1 Map showing the approximate location of some of the Arandic languages and their neighbouring languages (Languages belonging to the Arandic group are in bold italics.) page 5

Figures 1.1 A continuum from gesticulation to sign 1.2 Two interlocking spatial frames used in sand stories. Interlocutors are shown in varying orientations to the drawing space 1.3 North-south orientation of a drawn windbreak in an Alyawarr sand story 1.4 Cave painting of an emu sitting on eggs, recorded by Baldwin Spencer in the Gill Range. Spencer, B. (1896) Part IV. Anthropology. Plate 4 (detail) 1.5 Gestures accompanying the Kaytetye whirlywind song 1.6 Ceremony; Hunting and fishing. Tommy McCrae (c. 1860). Pen and ink on blue paper, 22 cm x 32.3 cm. Pictures collection, State Library of Victoria. Reproduced with permission 2.1 Child drawing wati mamu or devil man on the Ooldea sandhills (1934). N.B. Tindale Collection, South Australian Museum, Series AA 338/5/13/7 2.2 Sand drawing of a vehicle with passengers 2.3 A grandmother and granddaughter practise drawing 2.4 Women telling a tyepety story. Margaret Kemarre Turner (2007).

Acrylic on canvas. Reproduced with permission of the artist 2.5 Story-wire drawing session with three participants 2.6 Variations in the shape and size of story-wires. The shorter one was specifically made for a small child to use and the longer for teenage girls

13 19 23

24 27

32

38 39 47 49 50

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List of illustrations

2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14

2.15 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10

3.11 3.12 3.13

3.14 4.1

Story-wire worn around the neck in Ngaanyatjarra communities Open handshape with palm contacting the ground. Used for drawing and erasing Inverted open handshape with fingers trailing across the ground Handshape used for painting awely ceremonial designs Handshape used to impact on the ground Narrator moves two leaves across the story space, leaving a trail of dots Drawing lines on the ground to represent bird species Arrernte string figures demonstrated by Veronica Perrurle Dobson, Alice Springs, August 2007. (a) Arrwe iltyingke ‘group of wallabies’, (b) Angenty ‘soakage’, (c) Irretye ‘eaglehawk’, (d) Eaglehawk and chick Wild fig leaves (used to represent story characters) and story-stick bundled up at the end of a sand story Sand story recording set-up with one camera attached to a ladder and another mounted on a tripod Screen shot from an elan annotation file with two video clips imported and synchronized Tier structure of elan annotation file A schematic representation of a G-unit, showing the difference between Kendon’s and McNeill’s definitions of a gesture phrase A deictic move of the ground-air type Diagram showing preparation/recovery phases for ground-ground moves The ordering of moves in a V-unit representing ‘fire’ Three V-units representing ‘motion’ (arrows added) A schematic representation of a visual frame consisting of a series of three V-units The accumulation of ground-ground and ground-air units in a visual frame just prior to total erasure and just after it: (a) the end of a visual frame, (b) the beginning of a new frame after erasure An example of three sequential V-units in a leaf-story (Story 3) Sand drawing of a traditional shelter A schematic representation of the spatial arrangements of V-units in a sequence of two visual frames: (a) visual frame 1, (b) visual frame 2 Anmatyerr sign emu Some variations in the representation of ‘person’: (a) drawn with a ‘flat’ hand, (b) drawn with fingers, (c) drawn with a stick, (d) a person with a wounded leg

55 56 56 57 58 58 61

63 68 73 74 76 78 80 83 85 85 85

86 87 91

97 98

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List of illustrations

4.2 Sand drawing of two nested figures, representing a mother and child 4.3 (a) Leaves with women’s ceremonial designs scratched onto them (the scratchings on these leaves have been highlighted to make the designs more prominent; (b) leaf (on right) modified to represent a mother carrying a child on her hip or shoulder 4.4 Varying representations of ‘fire’: (a), (b) drawn with the hand; (c) drawn with a stick 4.5 A pair of ‘person’ V-units facing each other 4.6 Sand drawing of the trackprints of a person and several dogs 4.7 A V-unit representing motion around a plant (arrow added) 4.8 Sand drawing of figures in motion 4.9 A man from the arnkenty and a woman from the arlweker move towards each other. The dots (highlighted in white) represent indentations in the sand made by the leaves as they are moved 4.10 Path of four referents (1) 4.11 Path of four referents (2) 4.12 Broken lines representing ‘walking’ 4.13 Sand drawing of the path a character follows to exit a house 4.14 Motion of two characters towards a creek 4.15 Two moves in a sand story about picking desert raisins (arrows added) (Story 2) 4.16 Three sequential V-units (Story 2) 4.17 Whirlywind brothers story (Unit 1) 4.18 Whirlywind brothers story (Units 2 and 4) 4.19 Whirly Brothers. Kathleen Kemarre Wallace, Keringke Arts (2007). Lino print on paper, 28 cm x 30 cm. Photograph Judy Lovell. Reproduced with permission of the artist 4.20 ‘Flattening’ of the computer screen when viewing sand story data 4.21 Interpreting spatial aspects of motion (1): (a) orientation of narrator, (b) orientation of viewer 4.22 Interpreting spatial aspects of motion (2): (a) orientation of narrator, (b) orientation of first viewer, (c) orientation of second viewer 4.23 (a) Spatially dissonant view of three people behind a windbreak (interlocutor facing east); (b) spatially congruent view (interlocutor facing south) 4.24 Sand drawing of a camp scene 4.25 Teenage narrator draws an orthographic ‘w’ 4.26 Representations of the Alice Springs football oval and the town centre by two teenage narrators

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104 105 109 112 114 116

117 118 118 118 119 120 123 124 125 126

128 129 129

130

131 132 133 134

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List of illustrations

4.27 A drawing representing sleeping figures (with heads shown) 5.1 (a) Sign for Solanum chippendalei (bush tomato); (b) base of the sign – cleaning out the bitter seeds using the katyelarr tool 5.2 Three handshapes used in Arrernte manual pointing, and the ‘horned’ handshape 5.3a ‘Monster’ story graphic schema 5.3b Narrator signs die over the story space 5.4 Narrator signs kurdaitcha 5.5 Arandic sign husband/wife, etc.

5.6 Representation of picking fruit (Unit 1) 5.7 Representation of placing fruit into dish (Unit 2, highlighted) 5.8 Representation of tewem ‘rubbing fruits on the ground’ (Unit 3) 5.9 Arandic sign pick 5.10 Arandic sign put 5.11 Wide-hand point denoting plural reference in a leaf-story 5.12 One-finger point indicating singular reference 5.13 Two-finger point in a leaf-story 5.14 ‘Forked’ two-finger point in a leaf-story 5.15 A point to the plane behind the narrator 5.16 Sand drawing of a tunnel ball game (Story 5, F1:1–4) 5.17 Sand drawing of a tunnel ball game (Story 5, F1:5–14) 5.18 Sand drawing of a tunnel ball game (Story 5, F1:18–40) 5.19 Air-air units in a sand story about a tunnel ball game: (a) ‘They would stand with their legs wide apart’ (F1:10); (b) ‘. . . throw the tunnel ball under’ (F1:24) (Illustrations Jenny Taylor) 5.20 Two views of a deictic gesture that signals a shift from one sand story frame to the next 6.1 Twelve sequential V-units in a sand story (Story 1) 6.2 Units 1–8 in a sand story about collecting pencil yams 6.3 Units 9–12 in a sand story about collecting pencil yams 6.4 (a) Arrangement of leaf characters in a Kaytetye leaf-story (Story 3); (b) Units 1, 2 and 3 6.5 Two sequential units in a Kaytetye leaf-story (Story 3): (a) Unit 4, (b) Unit 5 6.6 Two sequential units in a Kaytetye leaf-story (Story 3): (a) Unit 7, (b) Unit 9 6.7 Get up after sleep 6.8 Example of partial erasure: change of stance 6.9 Example of partial erasure: change of orientation 6.10 Relocation of objects: (a) a woman with a dish and digging stick, (b) the woman stands up, (c) the woman moves off

135 142 143 146 146 147 148 150 150 151 151 151 153 154 155 156 156 158 159 160

162 164 168 169 171 173 174 175 179 180 180 181

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List of illustrations

6.11 (a) Sand drawing of a woman with a dish in front of her; (b) the woman is erased and one dish is redrawn 6.12 Dancing action of women (units 7–12) and redraw of man (13) 6.13 (a) Three units preceding erasure of frame; (b) four units at the beginning of a new frame 6.14 (a) Units 38, 39, 40, 41 prior to partial erasure of the space; (b) after the partial erasure 6.15 Drawing of dishes of food and motion lines 6.16 Drawing space filled with representations of desert raisin plants 6.17 (a) Dishes with fruits; (b) grinding and transfer of fruit; (c) grinding the fruit (handshape used) 6.18 Schematic representation of two alternate spaces in a sand story 6.19 Ground-air units at the end of visual frames: (a) end of visual frame 2 (Story 1, F2:12–15); (b) end of visual frame 4 (Story 1, F4:1–4) 6.20 Simplification of the transitions between two narrative spaces (A and B) 7.1 Pitch contours showing contrast between ‘song’ and rapidly intoned speech. The first part is ‘sung’ and corresponds to (7:06) and the second part is rapidly intoned speech (7:08) 7.2 Eastern Anmatyerr kurdaitcha sand story, showing the spiral path followed by the two sisters 7.3 The falling pitch contour associated with the journey of the younger sister after her encounter with the kurdaitcha, inwards along the spiral path 7.4 Establishment of visual frame (F1:1–6) 7.5 Dancing action of women (Units 7–12) and redraw of man (13) 7.6 Enactment of covering head with feathers (F1:15) 7.7 Units showing dancing action of women (F1:17–20) 7.8 The seated men are redrawn (Units 22, 23, 24, 26) 7.9 Units showing dancing action of women (F1:30–34) 8.1 Variations in sign coolamon: (a) April Pengart Campbell, (b) Janie Pwerrerl Long 8.2 Young Bethel girl using her ivory storyknife to draw the floorplan of a house while telling a tale. Photograph Hans Himmelheber, Alaska, Bethel, 1936. Copyright by Museum Rietberg Zürich, gift of the community of heirs of Hans Himmelheber 8.3 Sand drawing depicting the creation of the Rom mask, drawn by Benjamin Tekon from Ranvetlam village, North Ambrym.

Photograph Mike Franjieh. Reproduced with permission of the artist

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183 184 186 187 189 189 190 191

192 193

202 206

208 210 212 214 214 215 216 227

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List of illustrations

8.4 The late Kenneth Hale at work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988. Photographs courtesy of MIT. Photographer S. D. Sloan. Reproduced with permission of the Hale Family 8.5 Sonogram of Dusky Grasswren’s song (detail). John Wolseley (2005). Watercolour, graphite, carbonised wood on paper, 56 cm x 76 cm. Reproduced with permission of the artist Colour plates 1 A sand story ‘stage set’ with leaf characters, a fire pit and branches for putting cooked meat on (Veronica Perrurle Dobson recorded at Emily Gap, NT, July 2007). Photograph Jenny Green 2 The rich red palate of the ground in an Eastern Anmatyerr sand story (Rosie Pwerl, Utopia, NT, August 2011). Photograph Jenny Green 3 Recording Kaytetye sand stories near Artarr community, July 2011 (Tommy Thompson Kngwarreye, Myfany Turpin and Carol Thompson). Photograph Jenny Green 4 Bush Football. Josie Kunoth Petyarre (2009). Acrylic on linen 122 cm x 122 cm. Reproduced with permission of the artist 5 Grandmothers Teaching. Margaret Kemarre Turner (2003).

Acrylic on canvas. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Photograph courtesy of Barry McDonald and IAD Press (see Turner 2010: 218) 6 Awerratherre – Hamilton Downs. Wenten Rubuntja (1982).

Synthetic polymer paint on hardboard, 60 cm x 91 cm. Gift of Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd. Painting courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia (see Rubuntja and Green 2002: 83) 7 Violet Petyarr telling the angkwerey-angkwerey or ‘ant-lion’ sand story. Iylenty outstation, Utopia, NT, November 2011. Photograph Jenny Green 8 Using the story-wire in Western Desert. Elizabeth Marrkilyi Ellis, Tjukurla 2012. Photograph Jenny Green 9 Batik on silk by Rosie (Roese) Pwerl, Utopia, NT, 1997.

Collection: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Photo Nitsa Yioupros.

Reproduced with permission of the artist 10 Grandmother’s stories (2012). Christine Laidlaw preparing a mould for making slumped glass by tracing designs in a bed of fine sand. Photograph Gary Proctor, Warburton Arts

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Tables

1.1 Modalities and semiotic systems used in sand stories page 11 3.1 Transcription conventions for move types and for total and partial erasure 95 4.1 A selection of static sand drawing elements 106 4.2 Pluralized V-units 107 4.3 V-units representing relations of enclosure and containment 108 4.4 Some composite V-units 109 4.5 Orientation of ‘person’ V-units to each other 110 4.6 Some relations between ‘person’ V-units and other items 111 4.7 Variation in forms of motion paths 120 4.8 V-units composed of sequences of static and dynamic elements 121 6.1 Frequency and types of erasure in the sand story corpus 182 7.1 Words for ‘ant-lion’ and ‘elder sister’ in some Arandic languages 205 7.2 Distribution and functions of V-units in a sand story 219 8.1 Distribution of V-unit types in sand story corpus 224

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Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the Aboriginal people from Central Australia who have contributed to the research for this study of sand stories. Many have been my mentors and teachers, some over decades. The research represented in this book is the culmination of long and valued collaborations between us, beginning with work on Aboriginal spoken-language dictionaries and on oral histories and then moving into the visual realm of sign language, gesture and some forms of drawing. I am indebted to these women and men for their generosity and their patience as teachers, and for allowing me the opportunity to begin to understand something of the richness and diversity of their languages and narrative practices. This book is dedicated to all those who endeavour to keep these traditions alive. I particularly thank Hilda (Cookie) Menmatwek Pwerl, who was among my first Anmatyerr teachers at Utopia, in Central Australia, in the mid 1970s.

Cookie taught me spoken language, and then we moved on to sign and sand. I also thank many others, including Margaret Kemarre Turner (OAM), Veronica Perrurle Dobson (AM), Margaret Pengarte Heffernan, Violet Petyarr, Janie Mpetyan Briscoe, Eileen Pwerrerl Campbell, Clarrie Kemarr Long, Amy Ngamperle, Mary Nangala, April Pengart Campbell, Janie Pwerrerl Long, Mary Kemarr, Mary Ngal, Katie Kemarr, Lucky Ngwarray, Fanny Mpetyan, Renee Mpetyane McClean, Dorothy Mpetyan, Weetji Mpetyan, Weeta Ngwarray, Wendy Mpetyan, Peggy Mpetyan, Rita Ngal, Kitty Peltharr, Kitty Kakatew Peltharr, Jessie Peltharr, Myrtle Petyarr, Nancy Petyarr, Patsy Mpetyan Morton, Rosie Pwerl, Lena Pwerl, Rosie Ngwarray Kunoth, Alison Ngamperle Ross, Acacia Lewis, Letishia Bartlett, Marissa Gibson, Elisha Garawirrtja, Maria Long, Jancita Dixon, Josephine Foster, Josie Douglas, Kathleen Kemarre Wallace, Tommy Thompson Kngwarreye and Elizabeth Marrkilyi Ellis.

For providing guidance and inspiration during the initial process of researching and writing about sand stories, I thank my PhD dissertation supervisors, Barbara Kelly and Lesley Stirling, and my associate supervisors Nicholas Evans and Nick Enfield. I also thank other staff and colleagues in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. A number of other people gave encouragement and insightful feedback along the way. Thanks go to Inge Kral, Carmel O’Shannessy, Jane Simpson, David Nash, Myfany Turpin, xvi

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Acknowledgements

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Stephen Levinson, Gunter Senft, Adam Kendon, Marianne Gullberg, Alison French, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, Claire Farago, Donald Preziosi, Philip Batty, David Wilkins, Tim Rowse, Judith Lovell, Julia Murray, Robyn Davidson Adam Schembri, Gabrielle Hodge and David Strickland. My family was also drawn in, and in particular I thank my mother, Avril Green, whose support has always been there.

It was a privilege to be hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen during their winter of 2005–2006, and again in 2007. The Charles Darwin University provided me with office space in Alice Springs during my fieldwork in 2007 and in 2009, and the CSIRO at the Desert Knowledge Precinct in Alice Springs continues to do so. Thanks also go to the Central Land Council, Alice Springs. I am particularly grateful to William McGregor, Inge Kral and Ruth Singer, who read a final draft of this manuscript and provided invaluable comments. I also thank Jenny Taylor, who created several of the line drawings that appear in this volume, Chris Storey, who helped me to get the most out of a large and diverse collection of images and who drafted the map, and Pamela Lofts, Judith Lovell, Mike Franjieh and Gary Proctor, who supplied additional photographs. The Museum Rietberg Zurich, the National Gallery of Australia, the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, the Museum of South Australia and the State Library of Victoria also supplied images that appear in this book.

In particular I thank David Wilkins for his friendship, support and encouragement, and for the many carefully observed and invaluable insights into Arandic languages that he has shared with me over the years. It was my reading of his 1997 paper on Arrernte sand drawing that crystallised my resolve to investigate sand drawing as a way of understanding issues of multimodality, and to use a multimodal approach to try and understand sand drawing. Special thanks also go to Myfany Turpin who has been a friend and colleague throughout much of the fieldwork that underpins this book. She has attempted to fill in some of the gaps in my understanding of music and assisted me with translations of Kaytetye texts. I also thank Nicholas Evans for encouraging me to take on doctoral research. A conversation in the shade of a large tree at the Australian Aboriginal languages workshop at Blackwood in 2004 kick-started my plan to do a PhD. In the final phase of completing this book, I was supported by an ELDP (Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, SOAS, London) Postdoctoral Award (IPF0173) and an ARC Fellowship (DP110102767). This book was also supported by an Arts Faculty publication subsidy from the University of Melbourne.

Every effort has been made to secure necessary permissions to reproduce copyright material in this work, though in some cases it has proved impossible to trace or contact copyright holders. If any omissions are brought to our notice, we will be happy to include appropriate acknowledgments on reprinting, and/or in any subsequent edition.

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Introduction

If one gestures by moving some object so as to leave a trace on another object, one has entered upon marking and drawing.

(Bloomfield 1935: 40, emphasis in original)

When we were children we sometimes played with sparklers. Part of the fascination was in creating arabesques and curvatures of airborne calligraphy with their smouldering tips. These lingered in space, imprinted glowing on the retina for all too short a time. It was as if the trajectory of our gestures had a fleeting permanence not usually afforded by the gestural medium, and the recognition of it encouraged more expansive and elaborate use of our arms.

One system of representation – gesture – and another – writing or drawing – were for a few moments magically fused as the normal rules governing their temporality and the medium in which they could be inscribed were flouted.

We literally drew in the air. Such juxtaposition and exaggeration of the everyday affordances of communicative systems draws our attention both to the multiplicity of devices that can be used for expressive purposes and to recognition of their interdependencies. It raises the question of how to define both similarities and differences between ‘gesture’ and certain types of drawing.

Speakers of the Arandic languages of Central Australia have a range of semiotic resources or ‘systems’ in their communicative repertoire. These include everyday language, spoken auxiliary languages, such as those used to encode respect for certain kin, sign language, the esoteric language of songs, and symbolic or graphic conventions used in sand stories and in various forms of Aboriginal art. Spontaneous gesture is also part of this complexity. In everyday communication it is the norm for several of these systems to coexist and be interdependent. The performance of Arandic sand stories (called tyepety in some Arandic languages) is a traditional form of visual storytelling in which co-speech graphics form an essential part. A skilled narrator of these stories incorporates multiple semiotic systems and uses the potentials within these systems to great creative effect. Speech, sign, gesture and drawing are employed, in sequence and in unison. As well as drawing on the ground, 1

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Introduction

narrators may also use a variety of objects to establish a visual field in front of them, somewhat like a miniature stage-set. Leaves or sticks are used to represent story characters, and other small items which come to hand may be used to symbolize objects that are part of everyday life, such as shelters, shades, windbreaks and fire pits.

The use of the ground for illustrative and explanatory purposes is pervasive in the environment of Central Australia where there is ample inscribable ground, and this attention to the surface of the ground arises partly from a cultural preoccupation with observing the information encoded on its surface.

As a story begins, a space on the ground is cleared for inscription, and extraneous leaf litter, prickles and other debris are removed. If the ground is hard, it is broken up with a stick or crowbar to soften it. Some narrators prepare a screen of wet sand overlaid with fine dry sand, as this provides a solid base for drawing and makes for greater contrast of the drawn graphic symbols with the earth. A stick or a bent wire may be used to draw with, to provide a rhythmic complement to the verbal narration, and to augment deictic gestures as the narrator orchestrates the action in and around the space in front of them.

A narrator builds up layers of real and imagined spaces, using drawing, signs and gesture and by moving objects around the story space. The accumulation of graphic elements is periodically erased as the narrative unfolds, yet the palimpsest of previous drawing may be referred to anaphorically even after it is no longer visible. Erasure of the drawing space marks the beginnings and ends of stories and signals changes in time and space within stories (Munn 1973a: 69–72; Wilkins 1997b: 144). This device enables sequences of visible narrative action to be superimposed on top of one another in the same spatial plane. The resultant drawings are both product and process and they involve a complex interplay between dynamic and static elements. They leave a mark or an artifactual trace that can be ‘read’ or observed by an interlocutor for a short amount of time, yet this semi-permanence is subservient to broader rhetorical aims as the story unfolds.

Sand stories are a means of communicating information that ranges from accounts of day-to-day events to performances of traditional narratives that are closely associated with the ancestral topography of the land and its Dreamings.

Before television and video came to remote regions of Australia, these stories were a popular form of entertainment. In some contexts they remain so. The iconography of sand stories, the ways that space is used and the various perspectives taken in the drawing provide part of the visual repertoire of contemporary painting traditions in Central Australia. Acrylic paintings from the desert have achieved worldwide recognition since the 1970s, and some feature ‘characteristics of informal sand drawings’ (Morphy 1998). An understanding of sand drawing deepens our appreciation and understanding of these

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art forms, and leads to a more sophisticated understanding of the characteristics of Arandic speech, song and song-poetry.

Records of sand stories from Central Australia stretch back to the early twentieth century (Strehlow 1915; Strehlow 1951; Munn 1962, 1966, 1973a, 1986; Wallace and Wallace 1968; Todd Woenne 1973; McRae 1991; Watson 1997, 2003; Wilkins 1997b; Eickelkamp 2008, 2011). Despite this previous work there is little that takes a fine-grained approach to the description of sand stories, and in particular to their dynamic aspects and the way that the expressive elements used are woven together. Various scholars have enquired about the nature of the ‘binding’ (Levinson 2006) between the spoken, signed and graphic aspects of these stories. All acknowledge that much remains to be known about the nature of the links between the different modalities, the ways the different semiotic systems are selected for conveying meaning, and the contexts of their use. Speech, sign, gesture and drawing are deeply intertwined, but, as Levinson writes, ‘the complete picture has yet to be painted’ (1996: 376).

In this study I presuppose that utterance meaning is ‘a unified product of multiple sources of information’ (Enfield 2009: 6), that human communication is multimodal and multidimensional, and that the fundamental units of this communication are ‘composite utterances’ in which elements of different semiotic systems work together (cf. Clark 1996; Enfield 2009). Kendon has argued that in utterances that use multiple systems, such as speech and gesture, the ‘speaker creates an ensemble in which gesture and speech are employed together as partners in a single rhetorical enterprise’ (2004a: 127, emphasis in original). The inclusion of dynamic movements in a definition of language and social action challenges persistent ideas in mainstream linguistic thought that fail to see the ‘vocal/visual integration at work in the performance of communicative acts’ (Farnell 2011: 153; 2012). As Farnell writes, ‘Social actors are not only embodied but they consistently and systematically use bodily movement according to cultural schemas in discursive practices, and not simply in addition to them’ (1995: 296, emphasis in original).

There have been few studies of utterances ‘in which an attempt is made to see how kinesic and spoken elements are deployed in relation to one another to create unified gesture-speech ensembles’ (Kendon 2008: 358). This study addresses that lacuna by investigating the semiosis of ‘visible bodily action’ in Arandic sand stories (cf. Kendon 2008). By drawing on some of the conceptual tools used in gesture studies I explore the nature of the different components of a sand story, their semiotic properties and the ways that the elements in a story are ‘laminated together’ (Haviland 2000, 2003). In so doing I am mindful of the fact that a sophisticated understanding of the ‘semiotic bricolage’ so evident in sand stories cannot be based on ‘a simple summation’ of the communicative potentials of each of the semiotic systems that a narrator employs in a particular narrative event (Preziosi 1986: 44, 47).

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The study outlined in this book is solidly grounded in empirical data collection and interpretation. The methodologies I use contrast with many investigations of speech and gesture which draw empirical conclusions based on parallel studies in different languages and based on identical experimental tasks, often recorded in laboratory settings. The stories I discuss in this book were told in the bush – in the shelter of windbreaks, in the shade of mulga trees or in the soft creek sand of wide dry riverbeds. The deceptively simple exercise of coding and segmenting sand story data draws attention to some important theoretical issues in gesture research, in sign language linguistics and in the related but little described (from a linguistic point of view) field of drawing. It raises the question of how to define similarities and differences between gesture and drawing and suggests that in some contexts they have much in common. It also draws attention to the problem of defining commonalities between gesture and sign. This description of the complexity of sand stories deals not only with referential functions, but also with poetic and rhetorical ones. We are reminded of Jakobson’s famous charge that ‘the investigation of verbal art in all its compass and extent’ is part of ‘the right and duty of linguistics’ (1971 [1960]: 377). In the case of sand stories, this leads inevitably to a consideration of the ways that the rich semiotic potentials available to storytellers are manipulated for pragmatic and aesthetic effect. As T. G. H. Strehlow put it, ‘the language of prose . . . ministers to the needs of everyday life’ (1971: 208). In contrast the poetic function is foregrounded in song and poetry (Jakobson 1987: 71; Foley 1997: 362).

In order to understand how these practices are embedded in social and cultural traditions, I now turn to a description of the research region and to an overview of the conceptual and theoretical tools relevant to the investigation.

1.1

The Arandic language region

The Arandic language group belongs to the Pama-Nyungan family of Australian languages. These languages are spoken by around 5,500 people1 in the area of Central Australia roughly centring on Alice Springs (see Map 1). The term Arandic is used as a matter convenience to refer to this language group as a whole, even though there are significant differences within the group.2 I draw on data from several of the languages within the Arandic group – Northern and Southern Alyawarr, Central and Eastern Anmatyerr, Eastern and Central Arrernte (sometimes referred to as Mparntwe Arrernte) and Kaytetye. My

1 2

Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006.

The spelling ‘Arrernte’ is used for the Eastern & Central dialects. ‘Arrarnta’ is the spelling preferred by Western ‘Arrernte’ speakers. Although it has generally been regarded as Arandic, Kaytetye is not mutually intelligible with other Arandic varieties.

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Map 1 Map showing the location of Arandic languages and their neighbouring languages (Languages belonging to the Arandic group are in bold italics)

ďŹ rst-hand knowledge of Arandic peoples stretches back to the mid 1970s, and my work on the grammar and lexicon of Arandic languages (Green 1992, 2010), and on Arandic art, oral history and ethnography (Rubuntja and Green 2002; Cook and Green 2007), inform this book.

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Although the recordings that form the basis of this book are generally of senior women, I also discuss a few examples of sand stories narrated by younger women, and I include some examples told by men. Many of the examples that I give come from a selection of six sand stories that were annotated in detail (Green 2009, and see Appendix 2), but the broader corpus includes stories told by more than forty narrators, during on-going fieldwork in Central Australia between 2007–2012. The emphasis in this book is on the ways that the multimodal complexity seen in sand stories works as a narrative practice, rather than on deeper cultural meanings of the stories. The stories represented in this book are ‘open’ and not restricted, and care has been taken to ensure that any details that may be regarded as culturally sensitive are not included. It is also important to note that ceremonial ‘ground paintings’ or ‘sand paintings’ from Central Australia are distinct from the types of ‘sand stories’ featured in this book.

Ground paintings, often but not always associated with men’s ceremonies, are constructed collaboratively, using ochres, feather down, crushed flowers and other plant matter. They have a semi-permanent presence and they are erased at the completion of the ceremonial event. Although they share some semiotic features with the more ‘everyday’ or spontaneous use of sand drawing that I discuss in this book, I do not address them here.3

1.2

A multimodal approach to communication

This study of sand stories from Central Australia has a lot to offer as an exemplar of multimodal practice. In addition, it provides a description of a narrative form that predates written representations of speech, and so circumvents any residual idea that writing presents a unique source of meaning or a full and accurate representation of the many and varied dimensions of natural speech. It also demonstrates very clearly the multimodal nature of traditional forms of verbal art. Multimodality is by no means ‘new’, even as the technologies for studying it are changing rapidly. A multimodal approach to the recording and analysis of the sand stories is taken as a given and is essential if we are to work towards understanding the complex interaction of the different

3

See Myers (2002) for a discussion of the sociocultural significance of Papunya men’s ground paintings. Dussart (1988: 128) discusses Warlpiri and Anmatyerr women’s ceremonial ground paintings. Sand drawing of the type seen in Central Australia is also distinct from ‘sand painting’ where coloured sands and pigments are applied or poured onto surfaces to create images – for example in the ceremonial healing sand paintings of the Navaho, or in Tibetan sand mandalas. A recently popularized form, ‘sand animation’, involves a series of evolving images drawn in a sandfilled lightbox and projected onto a screen. In 2009 Ukrainian artist Kseniya Simonova won a popular Ukrainian talent quest with a sand animation that depicted the story of the German invasion and occupation of the Ukraine in World War II.

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communicative systems used. This approach forces us to ‘rethink the putative primacy of language in meaning making’ (Enfield and Levinson 2006: 28).

Spoken language is part of a ‘multimodal ensemble’ that also includes a range of other semiotic systems or resources. Images, action and sound are orchestrated together in complex ways that utilize their expressive potentials or ‘affordances’ (Gibson 1979). So what does it mean to say that a text, a narrative performance or a communicative practice is multimodal, and is there any consensus about the use of the term multimodality? Conversely, are there examples of real-life communication that could truly be characterized as monomodal or unimodal?

The use of the term multimodality has proliferated in recent times, coupled with what some refer to as ‘an explosion of multimodal studies’ (Jewitt 2009b: 2).

Some of these trace their linguistic heritage to Halliday’s theories of social semiotics and systemic functional grammar, and they place varying emphases on the role that cultural, historical and social factors play in determining the use and interpretation of ‘modes’ in communicative acts (ibid.: 15). The range of phenomena that fall within the scope of multimodal studies is broad and diverse.

Any study of co-speech gesture is by definition multimodal. The term multimodal can be used as a technical term to describe the simultaneous use of multiple therapeutic practices or in logistics to describe transportation systems (Streeck et al. 2011: 9). Some address multimodality in the organization of text and graphics in paper-based objects and in digital media; others describe human– computer interactions, and others musical interactions in performances (Haviland 2007, 2011). Multimodality can be used as an approach to explore the design and use of public and domestic spaces, as well as the relationship between embodied humans and the objects and artefacts that they construct and employ for various purposes (Luff et al. 2009). The repartee of auctioneers can be analysed using a multimodal approach (Heath and Luff 2007), as can teacher–child interactions in classrooms, and the use of various digital devices, such as iPads, to augment and assist in education and communication (see Jewitt 2009a and Streeck et al. 2011 for discussion).

Other studies bring the interaction of the body with objects such as tools, technologies and other aspects of the ‘material surround’ into the domain of multimodality (Goodwin and Goodwin 1992; Hutchins and Klausen 1996; Goodwin 2000, 2003a, 2003b, 2007; Ueno 2000; Enfield 2003, 2005, 2009; Murphy 2005, 2011; Stivers and Sidnell 2005; Jewitt 2009a; Streeck 2009; Streeck et al. 2011). Goodwin (2007) investigated what he calls ‘environmentally coupled gestures’ in the use and manipulation of objects in the communicative environments of various workplaces. He suggests that his findings ‘force us to expand our notion of what counts as gesture and the analytic frameworks required to study it’ (ibid.: 195). Meaningful action is built up from diverse resources, and inscriptions themselves can become targets of ‘further symbolic

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acts’ (Streeck 2011: 77). Murphy (2005) shows how architects use speech and gesture, in combination with visible information from architectural drawings or plans, in the collaborative development of their ideas. Drawings provide ‘systematic visual shorthand’ or a kind of ‘anchor’ for the other co-occurring semiotic media (ibid.: 124). Murphy (ibid.: 127) writes that: most analyses of gesture . . . tend to look at representational gestures in isolation from their material contexts of production. The psychological study of gesture tends to look only at the co-occurring talk in order to interpret a gesture’s meaning while overlooking its larger potential meanings in social interaction.

Ochs et al. (1996) describe the way that scientists build meaning through the use of speech, gesture and graphic representation. They argue that ‘grammar’ is not only found in the verbal stream but, rather, constituted through interlocutors’ use of gestures and tools as well (ibid.: 359). The graphic displays the physicists construct provide them with a tangible place to conjecture and formulate their ideas, a ‘cognitive and spatial domain to inhabit and wander in’ (ibid.: 350). They are ‘sensori-motor re-enactments within graphic spaces’ (ibid.: 353).

Goodwin takes one further step and includes tracing and inscription as legitimate components of what he refers to as ‘situated interactive activity’.

‘Typologies of gesture’, he says, ‘have almost completely ignored those that get their distinctive organization from the way in which the gesturing body interacts with other phenomena within a domain of scrutiny, such as tracing, touches, and so on’ (Goodwin 2003a: 230). He observes that some gestures leave an ‘enduring record’ such as ‘the form of a line in the dirt’ (Goodwin 2007: 207).

Although there is a major difference between the ephemeral visible traces on the ground characteristic of sand stories and more permanent drawings, maps and diagrams, some of these studies suggest ways of broadening our view to deal with the complexity found in sand stories. In understanding sand drawing sequences, meaning is derived from the integration of both their static and their dynamic aspects. This of course has real-world analogues. As Schnotz and Lowe write, ‘in our everyday lives, we do not continually compartmentalize our environment into static and dynamic parts. Rather, we deal with these components in an integrated and flexible manner as we continually construct a coherent functional mental representation of the world around us’ (2008: 305).

Part of the challenge presented by complex data of the kind seen in sand stories lies in understanding how static and dynamic aspects work together. In later chapters I will discuss actions that leave semi-permanent traces on the ground yet nevertheless the perception of their dynamic qualities is essential to understanding their meaning.

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9

Modes and modality

In this book I use the term modality to refer to either of two major divisions based on the encoding and perception of communicative signals. Speech utilizes the vocal/auditory modality. Sign languages, gesture and systems of graphic representation utilize the kinesic/visual or visuospatial one. These divisions reflect basic pairings between the way a signal is produced – by the vocal cords in the case of speech and by bodily movement in the case of sign and gesture – and the way that signal is perceived by an interlocutor – either by listening or by looking. Within this major binary division into modalities are various ‘systems’, ‘resources’ or ‘potentials’ that convey meaning. There are of course communicative systems based on other human sensory capacities, and in particular circumstances these expressive potentials may develop and become the primary mode of communication. Sign languages used by people who are both deaf and blind are an example of semiotic systems that use the expressive potentials of touch and haptic sensation. It is also important to note that there may not be a clear demarcation between modalities – a communicative action that is primarily intended to be seen can also at the same time produce a sound. The feel of an action, its haptic dimensions, may well contribute to its social and cultural meaning or to the aesthetics of a performance alongside other modality-specific functions. Conventions that originate in one communicative system may find expression in another. For example, gestural air quotes, translated in some contexts as ‘so-called’, are derived from orthographic quotation marks. Graphic conventions that originate in various forms of art find their way into sign language registers.

The definition of modality outlined above is narrower than that used by many other scholars. I suggest that multimodality involves more than one sensory modality: it is not simply an accumulation of ‘modes’. If speech is considered without the accompanying visible bodily action, then this is a monomodal approach. However, even when a communicative event is truly monomodal, it is of course possible that it will incorporate a range of semiotic resources and so be ‘multisemiotic’ (cf. O’Halloran 2009: 98). For example, in this framework a text that combines written and graphic elements is not multimodal unless it has an additional dimension that falls within the other sensory modality, for example sound (even though a written text might be derived from or represent oral language). If, on the other hand, a teacher or a storyteller incorporates a written object into a presentation that requires interlocutors to access multiple modalities – listening to what is said; tracking gestures; and attending to graphic and orthographic schema – then we are getting closer to the kind of multimodality found in sand stories. My intent is to provide a useful terminological framework while at the same time not detracting from the importance of what Streeck et al. call ‘embodied interaction in the material world’ in the process of meaning making (2011: 9).

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And what about the concept of ‘mode’? In some theoretical frameworks modes are described as the fundamental units that are selected and configured to create meaning (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001; Jewitt 2009b: 15). There is no theoretical limit to the number of modes that may be recognized in various sociocultural contexts, and this leads to an abundance of modes that are difficult to compare.4 For example, writing, gesture, music, colour, taste, touch, gaze, prosody and laughter have all been described as modes in some contexts. In this book I aim to do away with the concept of mode altogether and instead talk about semiotic resources and systems. Semiotic resources have been described

by Van Leeuwen as ‘the actions, materials and artifacts we use for communicative purposes’. Such resources may be the consequence of physiology or technology, and ‘they have a meaning potential, based on their past uses, and a set of affordances based on their possible uses’ (Van Leeuwen 2005: 285).

Semiotic resources are shaped from social action and the affordances of material, and there are both cultural differences and similarities (Kress 2010: 55).

I reserve the term multimodal for communicative ensembles or utterances that truly do draw on more than one of the main sensory modalities. This removes some of the terminological ambiguity that results from using the term multimodal to refer both to the use of more than one of the many possible ‘modes’ in a communicative event (that nevertheless may well be monomodal in terms of the primary division of modalities based on sensory perception) and to the use of multimodal in the way that I intend to use it.

The range of semiotic systems codified within a speech community varies cross-linguistically. Central Australian Aboriginal communities are particularly rich in this respect, as alongside ordinary everyday speech there are auxiliary spoken languages, ‘alternate’ sign languages and systems of graphic representation. Nowadays writing systems have been developed to represent Indigenous spoken languages, and formal tuition in English literacy begins, for most, in early childhood. The resources or ‘systems’ that I consider in this study of sand stories and their alignment within the two major modalities are shown in Table 1.1.5 Although these individual semiotic systems may well be custom-fitted to take advantage of certain aspects of the social and physical environment, in the expression of these potentials the systems interact. As I will demonstrate in this book, there is a lot to be gained from an inter-disciplinary approach and some of the more interesting theoretical issues in multimodality are found in these ‘border zones’.

4 5

See Bateman (2011) and Kress (2010) for discussions of this problem.

In this study I do not consider the role that body posture, eye-gaze or facial expression plays in sand stories.

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Table 1.1 Modalities and semiotic systems used in sand stories Modality

Vocal/auditory modality

Kinesic/visual modality

Semiotic ‘system’

Spoken language Song language Spoken language registers such as ‘avoidance’ or ‘respect’ language

Sign language Gesture Graphic schema Manipulation of story artefacts or ‘props’

In a broad sense affordance refers to the ‘meaning potential’ of semiotic resources, or in other words the range of expressive purposes that they lend themselves to (Jewitt 2009b: 24). There are spatial and temporal constraints inherent in the expressive potentials of the mediums in which communicative signals are enacted. These constraints can include aspects of the physiology of production or articulation of a communicative signal (Levinson 2003) as well as ‘the social conventions that inform its use in context’ (Jewitt 2009b: 24). In these terms each of these semiotic systems outlined above has differing affordances. I will illustrate this idea with a few examples from sand stories. A leaf used for storytelling is a moveable object with a tip and a base, and, if chosen well, the leaf will be robust enough to remain upright when placed in the sand.

Its surface can be inscribed and decorated with a sharp implement. In the natural world the leaves used for storytelling come in a range of sizes, which lend themselves to particular kinds of analogue symbolism. The flat plane of the drawing space in front of the narrator and the three-dimensional space surrounding them present different potentials: the air is good for deploying sign and gesture, and the ground for showing the spatial layout of drawn graphic symbols. The pliable earth itself has affordances: it can be inscribed and the inscriptions can be wiped out easily, thus contrasting markedly with the semiotic potentials of, say, pen and paper, or acrylic paint and the surfaces of buildings.

One of the key differences in the affordances of the semiotic systems used in sand stories is on the parameter of persistence. Speech is the least persistent.

Intuitively it seems that gesture and sign are slightly more so. A sign or a gesture can be ‘held’ momentarily in space, and then its imaginary but meaningful location subsequently returned to later in the discourse (see Enfield 2003, 2004, 2005, 2009). In primary sign languages loci in signing space that are established as standing for objects are then subsequently used to track referents and predicate relations and actions between these objects (Engberg-Pedersen 1993; Emmorey 1996). On this parameter of persistence, graphic marks made in the sand fall somewhere between gesture and permanent diagrams: they remain in view until the narrator wipes them out and clears the space to begin

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drawing again. The ephemeral nature of sand story graphics is driven by the requirements of the narrative and the constraints of the drawing space. In another context the durability of marks made in the sand along shorelines is defined by the ebb and flow of tides – this is another temporal affordance that perhaps licenses spontaneous inscriptions and forms of discrete messaging.

Evanescent sign-writing in the air and various forms of urban artistry or street art are other examples of semi-permanent inscriptions that are defined by the media in which they are enacted and sociocultural contexts of their use.

If expressive systems use the same modality – for example, in the way that drawing, gesture and sign all use the kinesic/visual one – then there are restrictions as to possible combinations (Okrent 2002: 177). Clearly people can speak and gesture or sign at the same time. However, if someone draws on the ground and gestures in the air simultaneously, then they have to use different hands for each activity, so this has a significant effect on the types of gestures that can co-occur with the drawing. Even so a narrator may use one hand to draw with and the other to sign or gesture with, even conducting seemingly unrelated conversations with each. A close analysis of the timing of actions between alternating hands also shows that there can be significant overlap. One hand may be completing a sign or a gesture as the other prepares to draw.

1.3

Sign and gesture in sand stories

Although drawing is an essential component of a sand story, the graphic parts of the stories are interlocked with other communicative systems, including sign, gesture and various distinctive styles of speaking and singing. I will now briefly outline some issues in sign and gesture research to provide a context for examining their use in sand stories. Kendon uses the term sign for codified gestures – those that are conventionalized and used as an alternative to speech.

Such signs are distinct from the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech, although both exploit the potentials of bodily action or kinesis for creating communicative meaning (Kendon 1988: 2). Where the codified vocabulary of sign is large and signing is used as an autonomous mode of discourse, we have a fully-fledged sign language. Where the inventory is small and used with or without accompanying speech, Kendon calls this sign use.

There are significant differences in the origins and use of primary sign languages and those that Kendon has referred to as ‘alternate’ sign languages.

Sign languages used in Deaf communities do not rely on speech and sound, whereas alternate sign languages may be learned and used later in life by persons already competent in some spoken language. Examples of alternate sign languages exist in various parts of the world, where speaker–hearer communities may switch to sign use in various circumstances. They include the sign systems of the Plains Indians of North America, sign used in some

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monastic orders, and kinesic codes used in workplaces where speech is not effective as a means of communication (Kendon 1988; 2004: 284–306). In Aboriginal Australia rich sign systems of this type were traditionally used in various circumstances. Female bereaved kin used signs during extended periods of mourning in observance of speech taboos. Signs are also used in certain types of restricted ceremonies and in other situations where speaking is inappropriate.

Although these sign languages are highly endangered and knowledge of sign is diminishing, senior women in the areas where I work in Central Australia still use sign on a daily basis. In fact most members of the community use sign in some circumstances. In Chapter 6 I give some examples that show how elements of these sign languages are incorporated into sand stories.

McNeill defines gesture as the ‘idiosyncratic spontaneous movements of the hands and arms that accompany speech’ (1992: 37). They may include any visible bodily actions that are treated by an interlocutor as having communicative intent and they are an integral component of an utterance. In contrast to conventional/codified manual signs discussed above, gestures tend to be idiosyncratic and not drawn from a list of standard lexical items. Gestures vary from person to person and even from time to time when produced by the same person, and meaning is conveyed through continuously varying forms (McNeill 1992, 2005; Goldin-Meadow 1997). McNeill regards gestures as active components in the processes of speaking and thinking – as different sides of a single ‘mental process’ (2005: 3, 4). There is now a revival of interest in gesture and the various roles it plays in human cognition: Gradually we are freeing ourselves of the prejudice that real thinking can only be done using symbols that are utterly abstract. As we become free of this prejudice, the place of gesture in cognitive processes will be given ever more recognition. (Kendon 2004b: 100)6

McNeill (1992; see also McNeill 2000, 2005) suggested that signs and gestures could be arranged along a continuum (Figure 1.1). Gesticulation is at one end of this continuum. It is non-conventionalized, often accompanies speech and is the least ‘language-like’. Primary sign languages, which are conventionalized, used Gesticulation Not ‘language-like’ Occurs with speech Not-conventionalized

Emblems

Alternate sign languages

Primary sign languages ‘Language-like’ Absence of speech Conventionalized

Figure 1.1 A continuum from gesticulation to sign

6

For an overview of the study of gesture in western academic traditions see Kendon (2004a, 2007).

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in the absence of speech and are fully-fledged languages, are at the other. On this continuum emblems are a category that falls between ‘gesticulation’ and more ‘language-like’ sign language systems. Emblems have a standardized meaning within a social group, can be understood in the absence of words and are often named. Kendon describes emblems as ‘quotable gestures’ or ‘any gesture that makes its way into an explicit list or vocabulary’ (2004a: 335). A typical example of an emblem is the ‘thumbs up’ sign. In th schema shown in Figure 1.1, the alternate sign languages of Aboriginal Australia would be placed adjacent to primary sign languages: they are conventionalized and they can be used with speech or without it.

Discussions of pointing (Kita 2003) show that various kinds of pointing can have characteristics on both ends of this continuum. Wilkins (2003) has argued that pointing falls somewhere between conventionalized culture-dependent signs and spontaneous co-speech gestures. Pointing has systematic form– meaning relationships that have to be learned (Wilkins 2003); it can be segmented, responded to as a spoken act (Haviland 2003), and it can be given propositional meaning (Wilkins 2003). Recent research discusses how pointing signs are used for pronominal reference in primary sign languages (Johnston 2013; Cormier et al., forthcoming).

1.3.1

The classification of gestures

The ways that gestures have been classified reflect varying preoccupations of linguistic and philosophical inquiry. These include interest in bodily movement as a form of verbal art or rhetoric, in evolutionary aspects of speech and gesture, in communicative and cognitive processes, and in the modelling of the relationship between gesture and speech. In a classification system that applies to the gesticulation end of the continuum shown in Figure 1.1, McNeill (1992) makes a broad distinction between imagistic gestures, which are movements that display an image of how something appears or moves – and non-imagistic gestures. Imagistic gestures are further categorized as being either iconic or metaphoric and non-imagistic gestures include deictic gestures and beats. Beats are usually biphasic and this contrasts with other kinds of gesture that typically have three phases: a preparation, a stroke and a retraction. Beats have no propositional content and serve discourse functions as the hand moves ‘with the rhythmic pulsation of speech’ (ibid.: 15). Some suggest that, rather than being a category of gesture, beats are a fundamental organizing principle per se.

Loehr (2007: 191) paraphrases Duncan as claiming that, ‘ “Everything’s a beat”. . . all gestures are overlaid on gestural beats . . . stressed syllables and pitch accents are spoken versions of gestural beats.’

A deictic or pointing gesture ‘instructs the hearer to attend to something beyond the talk itself’ (Goodwin 2003a: 223). They may be performed with any

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part of the body that ‘can create a vector’ (Clark 2003: 251). Most commonly they are articulated with the finger or hand, but directed nodding of the head, shifts of the torso, eye-gaze and lip pointing (Enfield 2009) can also be used to draw attention to an object. Interlocutors ‘relocate themselves discursively’ by using pointing, which ‘laminates and transposes’ conceptual spaces (Haviland 2003: 158). Such relocations can be between both ‘real’ and imagined or hypothetical spaces (ibid.: 151) and pointing is used as a ‘central device for invoking the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent’ (ibid.: 168).

Pointing gestures can refer to abstract entities, such as referents in discourse, or to objects in virtual spaces (see Liddell 2000, 2003).

The gesture descriptors – metaphoric, iconic, deictic and beat – are frequently discussed in gesture research and McNeill (1992: 77) claims that they correspond to fundamental types of semiotic sign. In later work McNeill acknowledges the difficulty of assigning gestures to unitary categories. He admits that most gestures are ‘multi-faceted’ – they are ‘dimensional and not categorical’ and may manifest multiple semiotic dimensions (McNeill 2005: 38, 41, 268). A particular gesture may have representational aspects, but it may also be deictic and locate referents in relation to a particular origo. A pointing gesture can trace the shape of what is being pointed at and so ‘superimpose an iconic display on a deictic point within the performance of a single gesture’ (Goodwin 2003a: 229). In sand drawing there are frequent examples of these. A gesture whose stroke coincides with a point of prosodic emphasis in speech may be like a beat, but it may also have iconic, deictic or metaphoric properties. In Chapter 7 I will discuss a sand story in which the drawing actions are closely aligned with the rhythm of the speech and song that accompanies them. I will present data from the microanalysis of this particular sand story that show the multifaceted nature of the units of visible bodily action employed.

Kendon (2004b) suggests that more differentiated terminology is needed to talk about gesture. With this must come recognition ‘that “gesture” is a term that covers a multitude of diverse activities’ (ibid.: 98, 99). Most studies of gesture have focused on manual gestures. As yet there are few examples where such descriptive terminology has been applied to a broadened definition of gesture that encompasses the interaction of the human body with its contextual surrounds. In this book I argue that we need to broaden the scope of what counts as gesture and where it can be found, and work out better ways to model such semiotic complexity. Goodwin (2003b) introduces the term symbiotic to describe the kinds of gestures that are built up through ‘the mutual interdependence of unlike elements’. He gives examples of archaeologists tracing patterns in the soil or in the air immediately above it, of weather forecasters pointing to weather charts and of computer screens smeared with the fingerprints of those interacting with their visual displays. These provide useful analogies for sand

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Introduction

stories, and they begin to establish a descriptive framework that can be used to account for the complexity found in them.

The question of what counts as ‘sign’ and what is ‘gesture’ is not a trivial one.

As I will discuss in Chapter 6, deciding whether an action is a gesture or a sign is not always straightforward. There are many examples in sand drawing when an action from the Arandic sign lexicon is embedded in a series of movements that seem more gestural, or when several conventional signs follow each other in quick succession. A particular action that we may be tempted to think of as a gesture may in fact be identical in form to the conventional expression of that same meaning in sign language. For example, a narrator may cease drawing on the ground for a moment and use both hands to depict an action such as ‘collecting’ or ‘harvesting a bush food’. Whether this imagistic depiction of the action is a ‘gesture’ or in fact the lexical sign for this action is not an easy question to answer. Some recognize that the difficulties in distinguishing aspects of a sign that are linguistic, conventional and grammaticized from those that are gestural and non-conventionalized are the same for sign and gesture research (Gullberg 2004: 243). Kendon (1992: 240) suggests that ‘the processes underlying the creation of expressions in gesture and the processes that give rise to morphological structure in sign languages may be very similar’.

Although the field is changing, what has held back recognition of the commonalities between the two is the reluctance, on the part of primary sign language analysts, to regard anything in their domain as ‘gesture’ and the ignorance, on the part of gesture analysts, of sign language linguistics (ibid.: 240). As Kendon has pointed out, ‘Gesture and sign are cut from the same cloth.’7 Although a thorough analysis of Arandic sign languages is beyond the scope of this book, in Chapter 6 I give some examples of sign use in sand stories. The performance of sand stories is a particularly fruitful arena in which to look at issues at the sign/gesture interface, as the senior narrators represented in this book typically are fluent in the sign languages of their communities. They also, of course, use gesture. The moment-to-moment transition between semiotic systems in sand stories appears to be effortless. This prompts us to re-examine our assumptions about what we understand the characteristics of each of these systems to be, and to look for ways of defining common ground in our understandings of sign and gesture.

1.4

Tracks and traces: iconicity in sign, sand and gesture

I now discuss the role that iconicity plays in sand stories and the semiotic systems it employs, and speculate on some of the sources of this in 7

Adam Kendon, pers. comm. to J. Green, November 2007.

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Indigenous communicative systems from Central Australia. One of the founders of modern semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) divided signs into symbols, icons and indices. Symbols are related to their objects by means of convention or rule or by some agreed-upon link. In contrast, non-conventional signs are the result of context-dependent form–meaning relations that hold only within ‘singular events of interpretation’ (Enfield 2009: 12).8 Non-conventional signs include icons and indices. An icon refers to an object on the basis of some perceptible similarity – for example in sand stories the curved line drawn to show a windbreak I some ways resembles the shape of actual windbreaks. An index stands in a dynamic or causal relationship to its object. The shape of a footprint or track resembles the entity that made it and so has iconic properties, but it is also an index of a presence in a particular place. Indices are contextdependent and they instruct ‘the hearer to attend to something beyond the talk itself’ (Goodwin 2003a: 223). They may be mediated to their objects by some physical or temporal connection. Examples in spoken language are demonstratives such as ‘here’ or ‘there’, and in the kinesic/visual modality they include deictic gestures.

The relations between a sign and its object may be multiple. As Enfield writes, indexicality and iconicity ‘are not different kinds of signs or gestures, but different semiotic functions, which may be, and often are, combined in a single sign or gesture’ (2003: 10). For example, in primary sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) or Australian Sign Language (Auslan), pronouns have a conventional symbolic dimension, but in addition a grammatical requirement that they be directed towards their referents. In Peirce’s terms the lexically fixed features of these pronouns are symbolic, and the pointing aspect, which is context driven, is indexical (Liddell 2003: 356; Cormier et al., forthcoming). The small piles of coloured sand, used in some sand stories to represent fire pits, bear complex iconic and indexical relationships to their object (see Plate 1). The presence of ash is an index of fire. The layers of coloured sand represent the different coloured layers of ash that are revealed when a previously used fire pit is excavated. This evokes the passage of time and the generations of people who have used the place before. The inscription of the ground in a pattern of converging lines to represent ‘fire’ bears an iconic relationship to the way that firewood is usually placed and has a conventionalized symbolic meaning in sand stories.

8

Peirce introduced a tripartite typology of sign relations. This trilogy includes the sign (whatever stands for something else), its object (whatever is stood for by the sign) and its interpretant (whatever the sign creates, or the ‘meaning’ of the sign). In Peircean terms semiosis involves two sets of relations – the relation between a sign and an object and the relation between a sign and an interpretant. An interpretant may become a sign taking on another interpretant and so on, branching out in ‘infinite regress’ (see Kockelman 2005).

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As described earlier, for McNeill (1992) iconic gestures are one category in his system of gesture classification, which also includes metaphoric gestures, deictic gestures and beats. Iconic gestures depict an event or object by creating a homology to some aspects of it. For example, a hand moving upwards may signify upwards movement (McNeill 1985: 354; 1992: 12). Elements of the kinesic/visual modality, for example graphic symbols, sign and gesture, lend themselves to forms of iconic representation. The principle of iconicity is one that occupies common ground in both gesture and sign although some believe that sign languages have been devalued partly because iconic aspects of signs have dominated analyses, at the expense of both arbitrary and indexical aspects (Farnell 1995: 51).

Those familiar with Aboriginal people from Central Australia often remark on their visual acuity and on their finely tuned ability to read the surface of the ground. Strehlow wrote that, ‘A Central Australian native used to read the ground like a book’ (1951: 3). The surface of the country preserves the marks of recent events (Wilkins 1997b: 139; see Strehlow 1956: 17; Munn 1973a; Dubinskas and Traweek 1984). I have been hunting with women who are able to discern the direction of the tracks of a goanna on a road, even when we were travelling along at some speed in a four-wheel drive truck. Tyre tracks are decoded for both the direction of travel and the size or type of vehicle. Such tracks and traces are indices of events and of people and their engagement with the landscape: they can be used to distinguish between family and strangers and between authorized entry and trespass. The footprints of a child who is learning to walk may be ‘corrected’, or wiped out until the correct gait is attained, showing the importance attached to visible traces of actions.9 This attention to the ground as a surface rich with graphic meanings is a matter of everyday practicality – but it is also an aesthetic one. The landscape in Central Australia is traditionally cleansed by burning, and the burnt areas then become favoured destinations for hunting. Here tracks are clearly visible and mobility is not restricted. Ground that is used for drawing is softened and cleaned. Its rich red colour and texture are valued and commented upon (see Plates 2 and 3). Such valuing of the ground and close attention to the significance of marks made upon it is probably characteristic of many hunter-gather societies.

Tracks and traces are one of the sources of iconicity in the graphic symbols used in sand drawing and in Aboriginal art. Some symbols used have the same shape as the impression that their referent would leave in the sand. For example, the U-shaped marks prevalent in both sand drawing and some Aboriginal paintings (see Plates 5 and 6) are derived from the cross-legged sitting position, which is known as antimerrk in Arandic languages. The concave part of the ‘U’

9

Faye Bell, pers. comm. to J. Green, November 2008.

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shape represents the front of the person and the convex part the back. Such tracks or imprints are classic examples of semiotic signs with iconic and indexical properties. The mark on the ground is itself an index of the presence of the object that made it, and the shape of the symbol bears an iconic resemblance to its physical form. These are clear examples of what Taub refers to as iconicity that is ‘partially motivated by our embodied experiences common to all humans’ as social and cultural beings (2001: 19, 20).

1.5

Space and frames of reference

The way that space is used for expressive purposes presents one of the theoretical conundrums at the heart of debates about sign and gesture. It is an a priori assumption that signs that are deployed in the kinesic/visual modality are directed in some way in spaces that may be immediate or distant, and real or imagined. A sand story performance exists in the framework of several interlocking spatial fields, including the ground space in front of the narrator and the air space around them. In my analyses of sand stories, I describe the use of the two-dimensional drawing space in front of the narrator and the threedimensional space around their body. At the centre of these spatial frames is the narrator’s body, and in various orientations to these spaces and to each other are interlocutors (see Figure 1.2).

The drawing space (A) is used for mark-making. Some of these have codified meanings and others are the result of more spontaneous interactions of the

Figure 1.2 Two interlocking spatial frames used in sand stories. Interlocutors are shown in varying orientations to the drawing space (Illustration Jenny Taylor)

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Introduction

narrator with the surface of the ground, which nevertheless leave traces. The space around the narrator (B) is used for the deployment of actions that have conventional meanings and for other kinds of bodily enactment or direct demonstrations of actions or events that are not conventionalized. In a story both an intrinsic set of relations and potentially an extrinsic one that places the story within the context of the ancestral topography in absolute space will be expressed. I now briefly describe some of the conceptual tools that assist in a description of these various spaces.

1.5.1

Absolute and relative frames of reference

Broadly speaking, frames of reference are coordinate systems that function to ‘designate angles or directions in which a figure can be found with respect to a ground, where the two are separated in space’ (Levinson and Wilkins 2006). We will consider three main frames of reference: an absolute one, a relative and an intrinsic one. Frame-of-reference coding varies between languages. For example, languages differ as to whether or not they use a relative or an absolute system for encoding spatial relations (Levinson 2003: 3; see also Levinson 1996; Levinson and Wilkins 2006; Evans 2010). Those that use a relative frame of reference tend to have a body-centred or object-centred calculus of spatial relations, epitomized in the sentence ‘the house is on your right’ or ‘the dog is to the left of the tree’. Those that use an absolute frame employ cardinal directions, or some other spatial reference system such as a mountain/shore or an upstream/ downstream distinction to specify location and direction. Many languages of Aboriginal Australia use an absolute system and speakers typically show directional awareness and precision in their use of the various communicative systems at their disposal. The following comments concerning the Pintupi may equally be applied to speakers of Arandic languages. Myers (1986: 54) writes: Orientation in space is a prime concern for the Pintupi . . . It is impossible to listen to any narrative, whether it be historical, mythological, or contemporary, without constant reference to where events happened. In this sense, place provides the framework around which events coalesce, and places serve as mnemonics for significant events . . . Not temporal relation but geography is the great punctuator of Pintupi storytelling.

According to Evans, the Kayardild from Bentinck Island in Queensland ‘virtually never think, imagine, or even dream without orienting their mental scenes to the compass’. They have a rich set of compass-point-based derivatives that specify things such as ‘in the dugong grounds to the east’ or a ‘previous night’s camp in the west’ (Evans 2010: 164). In Warlpiri the zigzagging of a snake’s path or the swaying motion of a woman’s hips can be described in terms of compass directions. A person who is drunk or

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light-headed and cannot walk in a straight line may go karlarra-yatijarra (lit. west-north), then kurlirra-yatijarra (lit. south-north) and then karlarrakakarrara (lit. west-east).10 In Arandic languages there are four basic cardinal direction terms: ayerrer ‘north’, ingerr ‘east’, antekerr ‘south’ and altwerl/alturle ‘west’. These also form the basis of a limited set of derived forms: ayerrer-irrem ‘go north, turn north’; ingerr-irrem ‘go east, turn east’; antekerr-irrem ‘go south’ and so on.

These terms are used to specify direction on both micro and macro scales. So, for example, it is usual to say that the ‘hill is to the west’, rather than to the left or right of some reference point or origo. Compass directions are also used to describe micro-spatial relations. It is commonplace for people to say things like ‘move your bedroll a little to the north’ rather than to the left or right, or to say that they were sitting to the south side or the north side of another person in a vehicle. At a meeting discussing spelling systems for the Anmatyerr language prior to the publication of the Anmatyerr dictionary (Green 2010), people decided that they agreed with the orthography written on the west side of the whiteboard. In the 1970s, when I was teaching English literacy to women from the remote Northern Territory community of Utopia, the women discussed the way to cross the letter ‘t’ in terms of the orientation of the two strokes of the letter in absolute space. On a broader scale, discussions about songs, travel and people are almost always accompanied by gestures, diagrams or maps on the ground that indicate the location of places and events in an absolute frame.

Within absolute systems deictic gestures are directionally anchored and often taken literally. Speakers of Aboriginal languages are highly ‘gesture conscious’ and the orientation of gestures is taken to be part of the asserted propositional meaning of an utterance (Wilkins 2003: 181, 204). Pointing is usually in the actual direction that something is, or would have been, rather than in an arbitrary direction that it is momentarily imagined to be. Aboriginal people from the bush are skilled way-finders. Even when in unfamiliar urban environments, they will direct deictic gestures and conventional signs correctly. For example, I observed that the sign go back, return was accurately oriented to the north-west by a person from a remote Central Australian community when they were in Melbourne several thousand kilometres away on the south-east coast of the continent. Other examples of this abound. Nash notes that in forms of mapping where graphics are drawn on the ground, the drawing action that depicts a watercourse consistently incorporates the direction of the flow (see Nash 1993, 1998). Musharbash writes that in Warlpiri sand stories, ‘the design is oriented in

10

Source: Laughren, Mary & Warlpiri Lexicography Group (2005). Laughren notes that Warlpiri collocations for N-S, E-W are always the other way around from English. i.e. S-N, W-E (pers. comm. to author, August 2012).

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Introduction

the same way that the camp spoken about is, or was, oriented in real space’ (2009: 36).

Various researchers have found, by comparing recordings of narratives made on several occasions with the narrators facing in different directions, that the absolute direction of the gestures has a durability that survives from one telling to the next and from one location to another. For example, Haviland (1979b, 1993, 2000) and Levinson (1997) found that speakers of Guugu Yimithirr orient their pointing gestures in the ‘correct’ compass directions. In Kuuk Thaayore, a language spoken on the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, Gaby (2005) recorded the narration of a single event in two different locations and found that the absolute orientation of the narrated event was constant.11 My observations of Arandic deictic gestures provide ample evidence to support these findings and the deictic gestures used in sand stories are no exception. In this study I extend the analysis to see how spatial aspects of the graphic traces of actions are understood.

In sand stories certain aspects of the drawing space configured in front of the narrator are represented in an absolute frame, in what Wilkins has referred to as a ‘geo-centred absolute frame of reference’ (1997b: 143). The orientation of some objects and the representation of drawn motion are expected to convey correct information about direction, just as deictic gestures are. For example, Wilkins observes that narrators tend to draw windbreaks in their canonical position as foils to the prevailing easterly winds, no matter which direction the narrator is facing (ibid.: 143). The curved drawn line in a leaf-story (Figure 1.3) represents such a windbreak, and in this instance its north-south orientation accords with Wilkins’s observations.12 Although this convention is not always adhered to in sand drawing – for example in some stories up to three windbreaks may be drawn to represent constellations of families or camps oriented towards the centre of the drawing space – the strong expectation that windbreaks will be drawn facing the right way has interesting consequences for how spatial attributes of drawings are ‘read’. I discuss this in detail in Chapter 5.13 In contrast to the absolute one, a relative frame of reference employs aspects of the interlocutor’s own body (such as their front/back/left/right) as a heuristic for calculating spatial relations. Arandic languages have terms for ‘in front of’,

11 12 13

Intriguingly, ‘time’ was also found to be configured on a spatial axis (Boroditsky and Gaby 2010).

Image shown in Figure 1.3 recorded at Arnkawenyerr Outstation, Sandover, April 2007.

Archival metadata file name TYEP-20070404–01.

There is a logical limitation to Wilkins’s observation about the absolute orientation of windbreaks in sand stories. If a narrator is facing west, then for the drawn windbreak to have a north-south orientation the narrator must draw it in front of them with the outer part of the curve facing towards them. I have not observed this in my data. For a detailed discussion of the Australian Indigenous architecture of windbreaks, see Memmott (2007).

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Figure 1.3 North-south orientation of a drawn windbreak in an Alyawarr sand story

‘this side of’ and ‘behind’ which are used to specify the location of an object in relation to the speaker – for example, ‘the car in front of the tree (from where we are looking now)’. Reference to the left and right sides of a speaker’s body is not generally used to indicate the relation between a figure and a ground, but rather to indicate handedness in relation to the physical manipulation of tools and artefacts.

One of the fundamental properties of sand stories is that the orientation of the interlocutors to the narrator is variable and so spatial aspects of a sand story can be understood from any angle. Hence the relative frame, significant in many other cultural contexts and in the description of systems in the kinesic/visual modality in other languages, is not so useful for describing how sand drawing works.

1.5.2

Intrinsic frames of reference

Intrinsic frames of reference refer to scene-internal or simple binary relationships between figure and ground based on inherent properties of either – for example, canonical orientations of objects which have a ‘front’ and a ‘back’ (see Levinson and Wilkins 2006; Perniss 2007b: 53). In Arandic languages the intrinsic frame of reference is used ‘in smaller-scale space where objects are visually available to both interlocutors’ (Levinson and Wilkins 2006: 567).

In sand drawing this smaller space corresponds to the drawing space (A) in front of the narrator. In Figure 1.3 the leaf characters are shown in various configurations: facing towards or away from each other and ‘behind’ (i.e. to the west

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Introduction

of) the drawn windbreak. In some cases these scene-internal intrinsic relationships may be partially conventionalized to represent things such as kin relations (see Chapter 5).

In sand stories the perspective taken to objects and to the spatial relationships between objects in this drawing space is generally from ‘above’ rather than ‘side-on’, although I will later give some examples that show how these conventions are changing (Chapter 5). Sand drawing presents an aerial or bird’s-eye perspective, although this is not meant to imply that the world is habitually experienced in this way. Rather, this particular perspective provides one source for iconic representations of referents (Strehlow 1951; Munn 1973a, 1973b; Wilkins 1997b).

The perspective characteristic of sand drawings is one seen in some other forms of Indigenous art. An early example of this is a cave painting recorded in 1896 by the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer during the Horn expedition to Central Australia (Figure 1.4). The caption for the image describes an emu sitting on its eggs and the perspective taken is ‘as if seen from below or above

Figure 1.4 Cave painting of an emu sitting on eggs, recorded by Baldwin Spencer in the Gill Range. Spencer B. (1896) Part IV. Anthropology. Plate 4 (detail)

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through a transparent body’ (Spencer 1896: 189). What is intriguing about this image, apart from its elegant beauty and the details chosen by the artist (including the imprint of the emu’s neck), is that it was not made on the ground in the manner of a sand story but rather on either a vertical stone surface or a rock ceiling, thus showing the persistence in transformation through space of the top-down perspective. It is also likely that the source of the imagery lies in the imprint that a seated emu makes on the ground – feet, neck bone, tail and neck feathers.

One of the consequences of the combination of a bird’s-eye perspective and the tendency to ‘read’ images in an absolute spatial frame of reference is that, for the artists, some paintings do not have conventional ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’ or fixed left and right sides. Divorced from their context, paintings may be read in alternate ways (see Rubuntja and Green 2002). An example of this is seen in the painting of a football game at one of the Utopia communities, north-east of Alice Springs (Plate 4). The players, the spectators and even the dogs are painted in a flattened perspective with their feet oriented towards the centre of the field. A clue given for a conventional ‘top’ of the painting lies in the orthographic and numerical symbols on the scoreboard. Wilkins (1997b) also notes examples of alternating perspectives existing side by side in some artworks. For example, Arrernte children will draw a motor vehicle from a side-on perspective, and the passengers from an aerial one.

1.5.3

Viewpoints and perspectives

Another dimension of gesture discussed by McNeill (1992: 119) is the difference between what he calls Character viewpoint (C-VPT) and Observer viewpoint (O-VPT). In simple terms narrators may use their hands or other parts of their body to ‘enact’ or ‘depict’ an object from the perspective or vantage point of an onlooker (O-VPT), or they may become an aspect of a character in a story (C-VPT). In Character viewpoint the space envelops the narrator and the event is portrayed as if it is being experienced; in Observer viewpoint the narrative space is located in front of the speaker. McNeill suggests that ‘voice’ can be inferred from observing the viewpoint taken by iconic gestures (ibid.: 190).

Differences in centrality are reflected in viewpoint, with the character’s voice appearing when events are more central and the observer’s voice when they are more peripheral.

In her dissertation of German Sign Language, Perniss (2007b) uses the term perspective to denote this phenomenon, reserving the term viewpoint for the distinction between a signer’s and an addressee’s view of a signed event.14 14

For a useful summary of the differing terminologies used in sign language research to refer to ‘perspectives’ and ‘viewpoints’, see Perniss (2007b: 64).

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A dual viewpoint or double-perspective is possible, as in German Sign Language where two perspectives may be realized simultaneously (Perniss 2007a, 2007b; see also Dudis 2004; Evans 2005; Parrill 2009). Perniss also found that the perspectives and frames of reference used depend on the discourse type. Signers use observer perspective and a relative frame of reference to encode location in static scene descriptions, whereas they predominantly use character perspective and an intrinsic frame in event narratives (Perniss 2007b: 190).

Liddell (2000, 2003) discusses the various ways that a signer uses space in ASL. Signs are directed towards elements of mental spaces and projections and mappings occur from one space to another.15 Liddell distinguishes between real space ‘a person’s here-and-now conceptualization of the immediate environment based on sensory input’, surrogate space in which a signer ‘blends at least partially with some other entity or character’, and token space ‘a nontopographical real-space blend separate from the signer’ (2003: 367). Token space corresponds to Observer viewpoint and surrogate space to Character viewpoint (Perniss 2007b: 64). Spaces may be ‘blended’ and a sign exists in relation to the signer’s body, and in relation to both immediate physical worlds and imagined conceptual ones. In primary sign languages space is used to refer to the location of referents in real space; but signers can project themselves into a space to create a ‘surrogate’ space. Grammatically encoded information together with pointing and gestural information of various types prompt an addressee to construct mental spaces. Liddell gives an example of the signing of the verb ‘look-toward X’, which requires that the signer point towards X with the fingertips, but also that they create what Liddell calls a ‘surrogate’ space in which they demonstrate the act of looking (2003: 356).

Liddell also introduces the notion of what he calls buoys – conceptual landmarks that guide discourse and which may be maintained for a period of time and then referred to subsequently (ibid.: 223). In primary sign languages the non-dominant signing hand often forms these, and they are a way of providing ‘referential continuity’ throughout stretches of discourse (Slobin 2006: 179). A gestural example of this is given in Enfield’s (2004) description of how Lao speakers create virtual objects in shared space using gestures accompanying their descriptions of the construction of fish traps. The non-dominant hand is used as a counterpart and anchor for the dominant hand and it provides a stable reference point for the description. It signals ‘that certain background information’ has continuing discourse relevance (ibid.: 60, 61). In later chapters I show how one of the functions of drawn elements in sand stories is to provide temporarily visible anchors for the unfolding narrative. In some ways these 15

Fauconnier describes mental spaces as ‘the domains that discourse builds up to provide a cognitive substrate for reasoning and for interfacing with the world’ (1997: 34).

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Figure 1.5 Gestures accompanying the Kaytetye whirlywind song (Illustration Jenny Taylor)

are a ground-based visible counterpart to the notion of buoys described by Liddell.

A complex Central Australian example illustrates some of these points about viewpoint and perspective. The gestures illustrated in Figure 1.5 were accompanied by a song that has equivalents in two Arandic languages – Eastern Anmatyerr and Kaytetye. The purpose of the song is to deflect whirlywinds, spiralling tunnels of wind that have the potential to disrupt domestic spaces by scattering their contents and spraying people with dust and grit. The song implores the wind to change direction and go around the people by warning the wind of the presence of its avoidance kin – its mwer ‘son-in-law/mother-in-law’. The words of the song translate roughly as, ‘Watch out for your son-in-law, go round the long way; watch out for your son-in-law, go round the long way.’ Thus the cultural taboo on being in close proximity to avoidance kin is evoked and the wind is treated as a player in the complex network of kin relations.

The dramatic gestures accompanying this song show the spiralling path of the wind’s movement as it passes by an imaginary location established by the narrator.

With her right hand held at some distance, the singer enacts the path of the wind as it approaches the camp (from west to east in this particular instance).16 She then 16

Whirlywinds associated with the beginning of the hot season in Central Australia tend to come from the west. Large-scale low-pressure systems in the southern hemisphere have a clockwise rotation due to the Coriolis force (David Nash, pers.comm. to J. Green, September 2009). In this example the gesturer replicates these real-world characteristics of whirlywinds. Archival metadata file name TYEP-20070508–02.

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keeps that hand stationary, ‘holds’ the ‘wind’ in a function akin to that of Liddell’s buoys, and with the other takes the perspective of the wind’s avoidance kin as they frantically signal for the wind to change its path and ‘go round’ them. Then, briefly, both hands are active, and both represent different parts of the story. Both perspectives – that of the wind and that of the people present – are simultaneously represented. Then the right hand takes up the perspective of the wind again. A few moments later the narrator repeats these actions, but this time the distribution of the actions changes to the opposite hands, and the sequences are varied. The use of gesture clearly adds much to the perceived interpretation by a viewer of this small event. We are shown the spiralling motion of the wind, its trajectory past the camp, and the actions of the people who are trying to deflect it with song. This example also shows some of the difficulties in applying the C-VPT/O-VPT schema to complex data. Is the narrator enacting two different viewpoints simultaneously – at first as an observer of the wind and then as a character telling the wind to change direction – or is she enacting two simultaneous aspects of an observed situation?

Little is known about the relationship between frames of reference and viewpoint (or perspective) in sand stories, and the role that different types of visible bodily action play in negotiating shifts between frames of reference and between various viewpoints. There are many questions to answer. Is there some consistency in the depiction of spatial relations in successive scenes of a sand story? Do the spatial relations expressed in a narrative event persist when a particular story is retold in varying locations? How are C-VPT or O-VPT manifest, and what other devices are used to switch perspective in a multimodal event in which a narrator has a range of options – both verbal and non-verbal (cf.

Dancygier and Sweetser 2012)?

1.6

A multimodal perspective on gradient phenomena

Gradient phenomena are expressive devices that cannot be analysed by categorical means, and, as I will demonstrate below, examples of this can be found in the semiotic systems associated with both of the major modalities – the vocal/ auditory and the kinesic/visual one. The traditional view in regard to gesture is that the relationship between meaning and form is gradient rather than categorical. Gestures have been previously described as ‘continuously varying forms’ that contrast with so-called ‘linguistic’ systems that are linear, segmented and hierarchical. Although gradient phenomena have often been excluded from linguistic analyses, some argue that they are a feature of most linguistic systems (see Liddell 2000: 354; 2003: viii; Okrent 2002: 177; Duncan 2003, 2005; Enfield 2004, 2005; McNeill 2005: 142–5). Duncan (2003) suggests that identifying gestural properties of spoken languages can provide a heuristic for identifying the gestural dimensions of sign languages. She writes that ‘it is important to keep in mind that morphemic or context-independent forms of

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gesture are routinely co-produced with other, spontaneously generated, dimensions of gestural performance’ (ibid.: 261).

There are on-going debates about which aspects of primary sign languages may count as ‘gestural’ and about commonalities between the gesture that accompanies speech and that which accompanies sign (see Liddell 2000, 2003; Wilkins 2003; Gullberg 2004; Kendon 2004b; Johnston and Schembri 2010). At the core of this problem is the very nature of space itself, which does not lend itself to the kinds of analyses traditionally associated with the standard ‘linguistic’ sign. Space cannot be adequately described by categorical means (see McNeill 2000; Okrent 2002; Emmorey and Herzig 2003). There has been substantial disagreement between sign language linguists about whether or not a signer’s use of space is grammatical, gestural or both (Liddell 2000, 2003; Duncan 2003; Goldin-Meadow 2003; Kendon 2008). One domain where these issues are played out is in understanding the relationship between pronominal pointing signs in sign languages and pointing gestures used by non-signers (Cormier et al., forthcoming).

In sign languages certain types of signs combine both sign and gesture (Liddell 2000: 354). For example, in a study of the ways that signers and nonsigners use space (Schembri et al. 2005) highlighted a surprising degree of similarity in the responses from native signers, home-signers and gesturers, thus ‘offering some support for the claim that at least some verbs of motion in signed languages represent combinations of linguistic and gestural components’. In an analysis of pointing signs in the Auslan corpus, Johnston (2013) concluded that they show blends of linguistic and gestural elements, and there is much in common with pointing in sign and gestural points. Cogill-Koez (2000a, 2000b, 2000c) argues that signed language classifier predicates (CPs) present a strategy of ‘schematic visual representation’ that exists side by side with more classic ‘linguistic’ aspects of signed communication systems. In her discussion she draws a direct analogy between these and the Indigenous ‘dot art’ from Central Australia (Cogill-Koez 2000a: 161–6). Some elements of these paintings, she writes, resemble ‘a flattened version of CPs, with shapes and movement both forming part of a schematized communicative system through which propositional information is conveyed’ (ibid.: 165).

Liddell also argues strongly for an approach to the concept of language that includes not only conventional linguistic forms but also ‘gradient aspects of the signal’. Such gradient and gestural aspects are not ‘peripheral or paralinguistic’ but rather are ‘central to the meanings being expressed’ (Liddell 2003: 362).

Liddell suggests that ‘our understanding of what constitutes language has been much too narrow’ (ibid.). By taking a multimodal approach to the documentation and analyses of sand stories from Central Australia, this detailed study illuminates some of the consequences of an approach that integrates the verbal and the visual, and places an emphasis on the dynamic nature of this narrative

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practice. I will show how some of the more intriguing phenomena that emerge through a microanalysis of visible bodily action and its graphic consequences, and its integration with a range of speech styles, can be understood only if we take such a broad approach.

1.7

Relationships between gesture and speech

Considering gesture and speech together as a communicative ‘ensemble’ gives rise to many questions. One of these is about the temporal relationship between gesture and speech. Numerous studies have shown that gesture is (or can be) synchronized with the co-expressive portion of the associated speech (Kendon 1972, 1980; McNeill 1992). The most ‘expressive’ part of a gesture, the gestural stroke (see Chapter 3), may occur just prior to or at the onset of a stressed speech syllable (Kendon 1980; Loehr 2012). Although gestures and their co-expressive speech affiliates may express the same ‘underlying idea units’ they do not necessarily express identical aspects of these (McNeill and Duncan 2000: 142, 143). Gesture may be prolonged to enable speech to catch up, or it can slightly anticipate speech – and these facts lend support to the idea that both are synchronized early on in the stage of the evolution of an utterance (McNeill 1985, 1992, 2005; Morrel-Samuels and Krauss 1992; Kendon 2004a; Chui 2005). These observations have led to varying hypotheses about the nature of the cognitive linking between the modalities, and to models of speech-gesture production (for summaries see Kendon 2004; Seyfeddinipur 2006: 86–91).17 McNeill believes that gestures are an integral part of speech production (1987: ix), providing a window into people’s innermost thoughts. McNeill calls the point in ‘deep-time’ from which, he suggests, both speech and gesture emanate, the ‘growth-point’ of an utterance (1987, 1992). These growth-points embody ‘both image and linguistic categorical content’ and they are ‘unpacked’ into ‘surface linguistic forms’ such as speech and gesture (McNeill 2005: 82, 115). McNeill’s metaphor has inspired others. Haviland (2007: 151) describes the ‘growth point’ as ‘the dynamic cognitive kernel or wellspring which energizes different partial representations in various semiotic channels’.

Seyfeddinipur (2006) calls it the ‘seed’ of an utterance. ‘The imagistic part of the growth point grows into the gesture stroke. The linguistic part becomes the words that are synchronized with the gesture . . . ’ (ibid.: 88).

In Chapter 8 I present some observations about inter-modal synchrony in sand stories. I suggest that gestures that leave visible traces need to be incorporated into models of the relationship between speech and gesture.

17

For summaries of these issues, see Kendon (2004a), Seyfeddinipur (2006: 86–91) and Loehr (2007: 180–4).

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‘Thinking for drawing’

Another pivotal question is whether or not language-specific grammatical, syntactic and semantic particularities affect the way that gesture and speech are coordinated in complex utterances. For example, do gestural expressions of events vary across languages in ways similar to the way that the linguistic packaging of events varies across languages? Some have found that languagespecific grammatical structures and semantic categories can influence the types of co-speech gestures produced by speakers of those languages (Özyürek et al.

2005). In a study of the gestures of English, Turkish and Japanese speakers, Kita and Özyürek (2003) concluded that the semantic categories of a language do have an influence on what is displayed in gesture.

Slobin writes of the notion of ‘thinking for speaking’, a ‘special form of thought that is mobilized for communication’ ( 1996: 76; 1987; 2009). In his investigations of Arrernte sand drawing, Wilkins raises what he calls two analogous ideas – that of ‘thinking for drawing’ and ‘thinking for narrating’.

Wilkins refers to this idea in his account of sand stories told to Arrernte children in Alice Springs, where he outlines some of the spatial features of sand stories and discusses children’s acquisition of sand drawing conventions. He writes: In Central Australia narratives of all sorts tend to be supported and augmented by two other semiotic systems, sand-drawings and absolutely-oriented gestures. Either system, or both together, could draw a child’s attention to certain aspects of the rhetorical structuring of narrative and lead them to hypotheses concerning the critical features of adult-like ‘thinking-for-narrating’. (Wilkins 1997b: 161)18

The parallel question to the one framed about co-speech gesture and speech is whether or not the ‘architecture’ of a language affects the way that people draw and the ways that they perceive drawings. There are some clues. Early references to the production of drawings by indigenous artists report that the human figure may be drawn foot first. For example, when Victorian Aboriginal artist Tommy McRae (c. 1830–1901) drew the human body, he ‘commenced at the foot and worked upwards’ (Sayers 1994: 31, and Figure 1.6). Wilkins’s (1997b) studies of Arrernte children’s drawings of the human figure also show that they draw the foot first, rather than the head. The methodologies that I use in this study lead to some understandings of how drawing is perceived and of how particular cultural propensities are reflected in the way those graphic forms are conventionally drawn and understood.

An investigation of the ways that information is distributed across the different modalities used in sand stories contributes to these debates about the nature

18

See also Wilkins 1997a: 307, 2004:157.

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Figure 1.6 Ceremony; Hunting and fishing. Tommy McCrae (c 1860). Pen and ink on blue paper, 22 x 32.3 cm. Pictures collection, State Library of Victoria. Reproduced with permission

of underlying conceptual systems used in communication and the ways that complex multimodal systems are coordinated.

1.8

Outline of the remainder of the book

In Chapter 2 I summarize some previous findings about sand stories from Central Australia. I give a semantic perspective on the Arandic words tyepety, the Arandic term widely used to refer to the sand drawing practice, and Altyerr (‘Dreaming’, etc.). I discuss the context of sand story narration, the thematic content of the stories and instrumental aspects, such as the use of tools and props. I outline features of the two main sand story styles and discuss the relationship between sand stories and particular genres of Arandic ceremony, particularly women’s awely.

Chapter 3 describes the methodology used to record, code and transcribe sand story data. I devise formal criteria for the coding of the kinesic/visual elements of the stories, based on the medium in which they are enacted – either on the ground, in the air or between the two, and I define units of visible bodily action (V-units) and visual frames, which are delineated by erasure of the drawing space. My decision to code movements in this way gives us a new perspective on this kind of visual data. This collapses what may have been thought of as a neat distinction between gesture and drawing and allows us instead to look at the semiotic functions of various expressive movements used in sand stories,

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regardless of the medium in which they are found. I employ some of the terms used in gesture studies to describe various units of visible bodily action that occur in sand drawing. For example, like gesture, the process of inscribing the ground involves phases of preparation and retraction that encapsulate the actual mark-making itself. The fact that a mark made on the ground by a sand drawing graphic stroke lasts until it is wiped out makes the recognition of this part of a graphic unit more straightforward than fleeting gestural strokes in the air, as part of the trajectory of drawing can be clearly seen on the ground. Then I describe the ‘sand quiz’, in which native speakers’ interpretations of sequences of sand story data were tested. This technique was used to explore the extent to which some of the sand story symbols have ‘context-free’ meanings. The conventions used for representing sand story data as transcript are explained.

In Chapter 4 I use the results of the ‘sand quiz’ to investigate the extent to which various graphic elements have conventionalized or ‘context-free’ meanings. I begin by considering what I call static elements, and then move on to outline the semiotic properties of dynamic ones, including the different ways that motion is represented and interpreted. I detail some preliminary observations of younger sand drawers that show how there is both intergenerational stylistic and thematic continuity, while at the same time innovation and change.

The use of conventional signs, pointing and other types of visible action that are sign-like but not recognized as being part of the Arandic alternate sign lexicon, are discussed in Chapter 5. I suggest some reasons why the distinction between codified sign and other types of bodily action is not straightforward.

In Chapter 6 I consider more complex aspects of the structure of sand stories.

I look at the levels of ordering of units within a visual frame, and the ordering of these frames in a story. I discuss the devices used to mark the ends of and the transitions between visual frames, the different types of erasure, and the various uses of redrawing or over-drawing. Lastly, I examine the role that deictic or pointing gestures play in signalling transitions, or shifts in time and place in sand story narratives.

Chapter 7 focuses on the rich variety of speech styles used in sand stories, drawing on previous research on Arandic song (Strehlow 1971; Moyle 1986; Turpin 2005, 2007a, 2007b). In a sand story performance narrators may speak in an everyday fashion, they might employ a special intoned speech style or they might hum or sing at the same time as they are drawing. Storytellers skilfully manipulate the quality of their voices to bring the story characters’ personalities to life (Klapproth 2004). This chapter also addresses the importance of the rhythm, and the complex relationship between musical beats and gestural beats in the stories.

The final chapter takes a broad view and argues for a modality-free and a medium-free approach to the components of a sand story. Some examples are given that illustrate both similarities and differences in the expressive potentials

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of drawing, gesture and sign. I argue that data of this kind lead us to expand our sense of what counts as ‘gesture’ to include various kinds of inscription. In the final section I discuss the relationship between sand stories and forms of Aboriginal art. The book concludes with some examples of narrative practices, taken from domains outside the context of Central Australia, that also include inscription.