Rejecting Culture: Some Aspects of Continuity and Change among Aboriginal Christians in 'Settled' Australia

Abstract

One of the leading challenges for contemporary anthropology is to try to contribute to an understanding of continuity and change of culture and society, especially at the conjuncture of colonial and post-colonial contact situations. This paper explores variation and change in Aboriginal people's definition of Aboriginal culture, as a function of their differential historical relationship to their primordial past, or their sense of attachment to the ritual sites, their community and their own people. Among Bundjalung people who have maintained the all-Aboriginal Pentecostal Christian fellowship for three quarters of a century in rural New South Wales of Australia, Christians who keep to the strict Pentecostal doctrines reject Aboriginal "culture". The term "culture" is two-fold in its usage among them. Within the Aboriginal domain, culture means witchcraft practised on the basis of the traditional Aboriginal knowledge of "clever men" or witch doctors, which they strongly reject and fear. On the other hand, the Bundjalung Christians are familiar with the national discourse of Aboriginal culture that is a channel to self-empowerment and material benefits. This category of "culture", however, is also of great concern to the Bundjalung Christians, as Pentecostals regard desires for secular success and material benefits as the channel through which the Devil insinuates into people's everyday life. Hence they reject revitalisation of Aboriginal culture, as well as traditional cultural knowledge. However, the practice is not the rejection of Aboriginality. In Bundjalung society, Christianity is needed by those who are deeply embedded in the lived reality of everyday life in the Aboriginal social domain that is based on the blackfellas mode of thought. The Bundjalung Christians' emphasis is always on each individual's spiritual warfare against the Devil. Fear urges them to renounce "culture" which falls into two categories as mentioned above. Loss of knowledge related to the djurebil (sacred places), at which both beneficent magic and destructive magic used to be performed, has enhanced fear as generations have passed. Throughout the process of the collapse of traditional social institutions, especially rites related to localised spiritual beings, Christianity has functioned as protection against evil spirits which are considered to have been left intact. This paper seeks to develop discussion of such variation and the historical processes involved. The Bundjalung case brings into focus the process in which conquered indigenes try to redefine their own self to bring the devastating effects of the colonial contact under their control by accepting the exogenous God.