Wayfinding
Page 19
If the map is a psychologist’s fallacy for understanding wayfinding, what is a more accurate metaphor? Consider how you get from your home to work. Do you see a picture of the whole route, a bird’s-eye view from above, and begin charting your course? Likely not. Rather, you know your starting point and the series of decisions you will make, and you have a visual memory of the route that follows. It’s an experience that is perhaps more akin to recalling a melody, a fact that was pointed out to me by Harry Heft, a professor of psychology and environmental studies at Denison University in Ohio. “When I think about getting to work, it’s like I want to start humming or singing a song. I don’t hum the whole song before I begin. I think, how does it begin?” said Heft. “As with humming a melody, I might get lost at some point and then I would stop and keep thinking of the thread again—what happens after this point? I see the analogy of navigation and music as quite direct because they are both temporally structured information.” Maybe the metaphor at the heart of navigation is not following a map but listening and intuiting the progress of a piece of music.
Heft’s academic lineage traces back to William James. He studied with James Gibson, pioneer of environmental psychology, who was taught by psychologist E. B. Holt, who was James’s student. Like his mentor Gibson, Heft does not believe cognitive maps are involved in wayfinding. Sure, we can conceptualize a maplike layout of our surroundings if asked to do so. But such Euclidean coordinate maps are not the foundation of our spatial knowledge, he told me. “They don’t exist as we travel from one place to another as a picture in our head. Of course, we are capable of creating all kinds of images in our head. We can picture family members when they’re not present. But when they are present, we perceive them directly. We only produce images of people at a remove from immediate experience. A cognitive map is like that: it doesn’t guide us in an ongoing manner. We can produce a map to try and get our orientation, but it’s not the foundation of wayfinding.”
Heft has written that the human ability to think in terms of configurational, Euclidean-cartographic fashion is a historical development stemming from the cultural invention of maps, such as Ptolemy’s Geographia, and the European expansion of economic and political power in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Today, the ubiquity of maps and our constant exposure to them has made it much easier to assume they describe a basic mental process. “When I read the animal literature and the insect literature and folks are talking about cognitive maps, I just scratch my head,” Heft said. “From my perspective, that’s James’s notion of the psychologist’s fallacy, of imposing the concepts onto the process you’re trying to study. To talk about the hippocampus as having a GPS—that’s crazy. It’s imposing these concepts of a much higher order of nature to a level of functioning where it doesn’t fit.”
Heft was a graduate student in psychology in the mid-1970s when he discovered James Gibson’s 1966 book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, which described environmental psychology and the idea that humans could directly perceive the world. While many of Gibson’s peers ignored or criticized his work for its radical departure from the academic canon, others felt they had finally found answers to profoundly important questions about human experience. Heft was one of them. “It was like a religious experience,” he said of reading the book. “I felt it was absolutely right.” Forty years later, Heft can still recall exact passages that inspired him. Reading Gibson’s assertion that visual perception wasn’t based on sensory inputs or stimuli assembled into a mental representation but immediate ecological information was “like hearing violins” for Heft. “The brain is relieved of all this work we kept assuming we had to do,” he realized. In 1975 Heft was finished with his dissertation and wrote a letter to Gibson. Could he come to Cornell for a year to learn about ecological psychology? The professor agreed, and when Heft arrived in the fall, he discovered a handful of like-minded pilgrims all doing the same thing: gathering around the elderly professor in order to understand the tenets and implications of his theories.
One night Gibson’s wife, Eleanor, a respected psychologist in her own right and a professor at Cornell, held a party at their house and asked Heft for a favor. Gibson, then in his early seventies, taught a class once a week at SUNY Binghamton in the early evening. Would Heft drive him? He immediately said yes. “Once a week I would spend a couple of hours in the car with him,” Heft said. “I was pretty new to the topic so I would formulate my sophomoric questions the week before and then we would chat all the way there and all the way back. One of the things I was wondering is: How are we doing this? How are we finding our way from Ithaca to Binghamton? In my program they had been talking about cognitive maps all over the place.” At the time Gibson was still working on his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, in which he talked about wayfinding and how it consists of a sequence of transitions, the stretches of connected sequences in what we perceived over time, that connect “vistas.” This explanation stuck with Heft, and he has shot a series of sixteen-millimeter films with his students to explore the relationship between ecological information perceived over time and wayfinding. In one they created a “transitions” movie consisting of just the transitions along a route presented at ten-second intervals. Another film consisted only of vistas along the same route presented at ten-second intervals. Then he asked study subjects to watch either the transitions or the vistas film, or the entire unedited film three times, before transporting them to the start of the route. He found that those who had seen the transitions were able to navigate with greater accuracy, strengthening his belief in Gibson’s view that transitions are critical for route-learning.
Heft now thinks that cartographic maps have influenced human thought so heavily they have obscured how much of our navigation is about the pickup of visual information over time as we travel through the environment. “Wayfinding to a specific destination involves traveling along a particular route so as to generate or re-create the temporally structured flow of information that uniquely specifies that path to the destination,” he has written. “This temporal approach requires a departure from standard ways of thinking about navigation—a shift made easier if instead of drawing a parallel between navigational knowledge and perceiving a pictorial map, we recognize that a more appropriate parallel may be between perceiving route structure and perceiving musical structure.”
AMONG THE LIGHTNING PEOPLE
Maybe navigation is more like singing a song than following a map. If so, Aboriginal navigation according to songlines would seem to epitomize this strategy. I flew to Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory to meet an Aboriginal man by the name of Bill Yidumduma Harney, who had coauthored a paper in 2014 called “Songlines and Navigation in Wardaman and Other Australian Aboriginal Cultures.” Harney had described how as a child in the Northern Territory he had been taught how to derive compass directions as well as use the stars as mnemonic devices to remember Dreaming stories. The Wardaman, whose ancestral homelands stretched across a 5,000-square-mile region, often traveled at night, when it was believed distances shrank. In order to find their way they memorized the stories associated with constellations, and to keep time they followed the movement of stars they associated with the Dreaming of crocodiles, catfish, and eagle-hawks. “We talk about emus and kangaroos, the whole and the stars, the turkey and the willy wagtail, the whole lot, everything up in the star we named them all with Aboriginal names.”
Before I left for Australia, I had called Harney’s coauthor of the paper, Ray Norris, on the phone. An astrophysicist with the governmental space agency Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Norris works to detect radio signals emitted from galaxies millions of light-years away in order to understand the evolution of the universe. But in his spare time, Norris contributes to a little-known field of study called archaeoastronomy or ethnoastronomy: how ancient and contemporary indigenous cultures understand the celestial sky. Norris became interested in the field after getting his
theoretical physics degree from Cambridge University in the 1970s; he studied Stonehenge and ended up surveying most of the stone circles in the British Isles. I wanted to talk to Norris because he was one of the few people I was able to find who had published any articles specifically about Aboriginal navigation in the last forty years. In fact, Norris is among just a handful of people, including David Lewis, who in the last century has written about how members of Australia’s hundreds of language groups wayfind.
My first question to Norris was, why can’t I find more on this subject? Norris told me there were instances while scouring the anthropological literature where he could see how close some academics had come to grasping the importance of songlines for navigation but for whatever reason hadn’t considered it very interesting. They may also have been deterred; most Dreaming stories and places are considered so sacred and unknowable to the uninitiated that sharing them with outsiders could lead to extreme consequences (in some cases, immediate death).
One of the most vivid descriptions I found of the ritual inculcation of young Aboriginal people to the Dreaming stories and songs was in a book written by a white Australian. The elder Harney spent most of his life in the company of Aboriginal people, first as a cattle drover in the outback, then as an employee of the Australian government’s Native Affairs Branch, and finally as the first ranger of Uluru—the sacred and iconic sandstone rock formation in central Australia. He wrote many books, including one with the anthropologist A. P. Elkin, documenting song-cycles. In Life among the Aborigines, he described the disruption to the culture and transmission of Dreaming songs in Arnhem Land.
Dead too are the “song-cycles” that took weeks to record; epic chants taught by elders to the male initiates at night by taking them to the sacred places and chanting the lines over and over into the youth’s body and head until he became saturated with the theme and, forgetting everything else, he repeated the chanting of the elders. When this occurred the elders would pause to listen, and if he was out in one word or syllable they would chant once more until he was word-perfect. So each line was learnt, and after years of teaching, the one with the best memory would become the “Song-man” to carry on the traditions of the tribe.
His name was Bill Harney, and he was the father of Yidumduma.
Now in his eighties, Harney’s son had helped Norris to understand how Dreaming tracks not only mark routes on the ground and describe the location of waterholes, landmarks, boundaries, mountains, and lakes but also follow the movement of the stars in the sky. For example, an Eagle-Hawk songline of the Euahlayi people, who live in New South Wales and southern Queensland, extends some fifteen hundred miles from Alice Springs to Byron Bay and follows the stars Achernar, Canopus, and Sirius. Another Euahlayi songline, the Black Snake/Bogong Moth songline, follows the Milky Way to connect the Gulf of Carpentaria to the Snowy Mountains, a distance of seventeen hundred miles.
Harney’s descriptions of how he accumulated this knowledge of the stars and their songlines as a child were lovely: in the bush he spent his nights lying on the ground with other children and elders, who translated the stories the stars were telling them. “If you lay on your back in the middle of the night you can see the stars all blinking. They’re all talking.”
On the phone Norris said, “To be an elder is not an honorary title. You really have to work on it. From puberty to forty, he would have been memorizing stuff all the time. He says he knows the name of all stars down to the naked eye.”
“Really?” I exclaimed. “How many can you name?”
“As an astrophysicist, my knowledge of the stars is less than most amateur astronomers,” he said. “I can name twenty. The keenest astronomer could do maybe a hundred. He can name thousands.”
“But that’s incredible,” I said.
“At one time memorizing things was considered a very important skill, as important as logical reasoning. Whereas now it’s not valued at all because we just go to Google,” Norris said. “The nearest thing I can compare Bill to is the ancient Greeks.”
* * *
The Wardaman’s traditional territory is bordered by rivers, the Daly Fitzmaurice and Flora Rivers to the north, the Katherine River to the east, and the Victoria River to the west. It is a tropical savanna of eucalyptus, bloodwood, ironwood, and whitebark trees, with rocky escarpments and gorges. From May until October, the region is dry and sunny, and then come November it is flooded with monsoon rain, and temperatures rise into the nineties. I arrived in Darwin to a wave of sticky humidity, but as I drove along the two-lane highway south into the interior of the Northern Territory, the air began to dry and the trees became less and less verdant. It was the month before the monsoon, and the landscape was so parched the trees were dropping their leaves to survive till the rain came.
Water is a central feature of Wardaman Dreaming stories, which tell of a Rainbow Serpent who brought the sea and flooded the land. Finally the willie wagtail bird, brown and peregrine falcons, and the Lightning Men—powerful spirits—conspired to kill him. They threw spears from Barnangga-ya, the top of Mt. Gregory, and chopped the Rainbow Serpent’s head off. His eyeballs came out of his head and landed several miles away, creating two waterholes called Yimum. But even after he was killed, the land was easily flooded by rain, and so the black-headed python and water python got digging sticks and made all the rivers to hold the water, naming the places and creating songlines as they worked.
My nearly two-thousand-mile journey from Perth to the Northern Territory to see Harney on his cattle station—his family’s ancestral land just west of the outback town called Katherine—was a bit of a shot in the dark. I had written him a letter that went unanswered and discussed my arrival in a short phone conversation with one of his family members in broken English, made more challenging by a weak phone connection. I hoped he would welcome a visit from me, but there was no way to be sure he even knew I was coming. In the meantime, I had read whatever I could about Harney’s life and family, much of which came from his autobiography, Born under the Paperbark Tree. Many birth stories in Wardaman culture start with the surrounding plants or landscape features; the names of babies might include a gender prefix, the word for head, and the name of the nearest plant or tree, thereby connecting the baby’s arrival into the world with the place it occurred. Harney was born under a paperbark tree, of the genus Melaleuca, whose layers of paperlike skin and green leaves were used for medicine, containers, and shelter. His father had fought in Europe in the First World War and gone to the outback to try and escape the trauma of battle. In 1932 the elder Harney was driving a donkey team to build roads in the Northern Territory and met Ludi Yibuluyma, a Wardaman woman. Ludi and her mother and father, Pluto and Minnie, worked with Harney to create a road from the pastoral cattle stations of Willeroo all the way to Victoria River Downs, a distance of 150 miles. The work took nearly four years. During that time, Harney and Ludi had two children, Dulcie followed by Bill Jr. Once Harney moved on for work, Ludi married a Wardaman man by the name of Joe Jomornji and the family lived on the Willeroo cattle station. Jomornji became the young Harney’s stepfather, and when the wet season came and cattle work was impossible, all the workers would put away their clothes and return to the bush for months at a time. It was during these periods that Harney learned Wardaman hunting, law, and Dreaming stories from Jomornji and his grandfather.
The Australian government had an explicit policy toward “half-caste” children: removal from their Aboriginal families and placement in orphanages where they could be assimilated into white Australian language and culture. Harney’s grandmother, Minnie, had a child taken away, as did her daughters; in each instance, they never saw their children again. In 1940, a police officer took Harney’s sister, and she was sent to a home—he was spared because he was so small. From then on, Ludi did everything she could to keep him, hiding him from the police and even painting him with black plum juice mixed with charcoal to cover his light skin. This might be one reason why the elder Bill
Harney never wrote about him: to do so would have given the welfare agency evidence to put him in an orphanage. In an oral autobiography published in 1996, Harney said that whenever his dad came to visit, he encouraged his mother to “show him your history and the story, keep the cultural side going.”
Throughout his life, as a child in the bush to his work as a stockman and horseman on cattle stations beginning at the age of ten, Harney had to negotiate the borders of Aboriginal and white identity in the Northern Territory, a region considered by Australians to be the equivalent of the Wild West. It was a shockingly violent place ever since the first pastoral settlers had arrived in the 1850s looking for land. The Wardaman put up a resistance to the intrusion into their country, and in turn the colonizers used massacres, poisoning, and indentured servitude to subdue them. At one such massacre at a place called Double Rock Hole, Aboriginal women and children were shot and pushed off a cliff to their deaths. Ludi Harney’s paternal grandmother was among them, and her dead body, along with her child’s, was put in a heap with others and lit on fire. Somehow the child, Yibadaba, survived and was adopted; he was Bill Harney’s maternal grandfather, also known as Pluto.
I was told this story by Francesca Merlan, an American linguistic anthropologist, who has spent years studying in the Northern Territory and who first heard it in 1989 from Elsie Raymond, a relative of Harney’s. “These guys lived in a part of the countryside where there was a quite violent contact history as the pastoralists took over the countryside,” Merlan told me from her office at Princeton University, where she was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study. “Their real purpose was to eliminate the Aboriginal people, if they could. Elsie and people at her age were just on the cusp of those massacres. Their parents in that generation were the immediate victims and survivors.” Merlan went to the Northern Territory in 1976 as a young student with a grant to study the Wardaman language. Throughout the 1960s, Aboriginal people were thrown off pastoral “stations,” and most lived in Katherine or in camps on the fringes of town. The stations’ white owners tried to keep Aboriginal people away from their properties in order to prevent them from foraging, hunting, or conducting ceremonies, and they were hostile to Merlan’s presence on the land as well. Her best sources were in town, where she found prolific storytellers, like Raymond, who could recount the history, genealogy, and mythology of the shrinking community. During these conversations and ventures into the bush, Merlan discovered most had an encyclopedic knowledge of the landscape. “We always moved around it with total confidence,” Merlan told me. “They knew exactly where they were all the time, even if we’d walked for four days. No way would they have ever gotten lost.” And those places where massacres had taken place were not forgotten; the memories were fresh. “Elsie and her father and mother had these endless stories of being shot at,” said Merlan. “After awhile, you had to notice that this was a very deliberate strategy. They tried to kill everyone they could find.”