A Century Later

In the wake of the Cold War and a global movement of decolonization, anthropology was included in the vast number of institutions and fields of study examined critically by other anthropologists. This should not come as a surprise given the field's historical proximity to people and cultures which experienced colonization, oftentimes through violent means. This was followed by the development of postcolonial strategies in an attempt to "democratize" anthropology through dialogue, dissatisfied by its history as a standardized study of lesser 'others' (Wolfe, 1991, 197). Such re-analysis included the history of anthropological work in Australia and, inevitably, the concept of the Dreaming/Dreamtime as well, revealing that the "English Dreaming" was, in the words of Patrick Wolfe (1991), an "invention of the anthropologist's own culture" (199). In this sense, the interpretations of Aboriginal culture was a truer reflection of the worldview and human understanding of anthropologists of the late 19th-mid 20th century than actual Aboriginal beliefs and cosmology.

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Key elements of these 'Western' anthropologists' culture that are most evident here is their understandings of sleeping dreams and perception, although not necessarily awareness, of time in relation to character and the status of being evolved and 'civilized.' As Wolfe (1991) notes, the designation of Aboriginal peoples as "dreamers" by anthologists and ethnologists was double-edged given its romantic and contrary subtext. The combination of the European view of animism as a "childish doctrine" and the "savage's" unquestioned proximity to animals (as claimed by Darwin in 1871) gave way to the notion that indigenous peoples were incapable of distinguishing dreams from reality (204-206, 212). Furthermore, due to the apparent timelessness of the interchanging Dreaming/Dreamtime and exoticism of what Maureen Perkins (1998) described as "other temporalities," it was also believed that Aboriginal people lacked a sense of time. And given the relation between space and time, the nullification of Aboriginal spaces was justified by British settler-colonists who held that the 'owners' of such spaces had neither a history nor concept of property (336-338).