Spring 1996
Volume 22, Number 3

Commenting on Pausanias's description of his travels through Greece, James Frazer wrote: "without [Pausanias] the ruins of Greece would...be a labyrinth without a clue, a riddle without an answer."1 Perhaps Frazer imagined the sanctuary at Nemi as a picturesque landscape riddle and he himself as the travelling Pausanias in the guise of anthropological detective--purveying both clues and answers as he unrolled that ever-expanding labyrinth The Golden Bough. Needless to say, I offer here nothing so mysterious or endless as this quest of Frazer's to explain the King of the Wood--the key "figure in his landscape" (to adapt John Dixon Hunt's book title),2 and the dangerous and endangered, excluding agent of Frazer's "place." Nevertheless, my aim is to explore some ancient places of power and certain interactions between persons and space entailed in modern Australian Aboriginal spatial taboos. In doing so I examine the question of spatial prohibition less as an issue in itself than as a way of posing certain more general problems in the analysis of social space and time.

The present essay assumes that in comparative anthropological studies, the spatiotemporal dimensions of a theoretical problem not only are intrinsic to it but require analytic foregrounding. In this respect, I intend to speak to some current preoccupations in the humanities and social theory with space, time, and bodily action; with "places" and their "powers"; and with what David Parkin has recently described as a discourse "of positions, stances, moves...close and distant gazes...of spatial orientation and separation."3

My topic is certain Australian Aboriginal spatial interdictions that are pervasive wherever Aborigines still treat the land in everyday life as the ancestrally derived locus of Aboriginal law.4...Although my own approach bears no similarity to Kurt Lewin's, I share his interest in relational models. Thus I address the "synoptic" anthropological notions of taboo and sacred places in two related ways: by dissolving them into a more general spatiotemporal analytics of (culturally significant) location, distancing, movement, relative duration, and boundaries; and by considering spacetime as a symbolic nexus of relations produced out of interactions between bodily actors and terrestrial spaces. We shall see that once we make these theoretical moves, questions involving the locus of powers of exclusion, or how boundaries emerge and are signified in cultural practices, can be articulated in the same paradigm.

1. James G. Frazer, Pausanias and Other Greek Sketches (London, 1900), p. 159.

2. The phrase is Thomas Hardy's. See J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford, Calif., 1995), p. 4. See also John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (1976; Baltimore, 1989).

3. David Parkin, Sacred Void: Spatial Images of Work and Ritual among the Giriama of Kenya (Cambridge, 1991), p. 1.

4. Numerous studies draw attention to these interdictions. Mention should be made of Kenneth Maddock, ``Dangerous Proximities and Their Analogues,'' Mankind 9 (June 1974): 206-17, and David Biernoff, ``Safe and Dangerous Places,'' in Australian Aboriginal Concepts, ed. Leslie Hiatt (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1978). I discuss only a small portion of the range of interdictions here.

This essay is a slightly revised form of the Frazer Lecture presented at Oxford University in May 1995. The analysis is part of a larger work in progress on the cultural anthropology of space and time. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship supporting part of the basic research for this work and for the present essay.