Stephen Muecke: 'Echology': Field Philosophy and Indigenous Australia

Stephen Muecke is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales and Senior Research Fellow in the Nulungu Research Institute of the University of Notre Dame Australia. He has collaborated for many years with the Goolarabooloo people of the Kimberly region in Western Australia. An early result of that collaborative work was the book Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (1984), co-authored with Krim Benterrak and Paddy Roe, which explored the meaning and politics of place through Aboriginal narratives, songs and paintings. More recently, again with Paddy Roe, he published The Children's Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia (2021). He is also a creative writer (The Mother's Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays was published in 2016) and has translated several books from French into English, notably Another Science is Possible (2018), by Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers, The Wandering Souls (2019), by French ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan, and Our Grateful Dead: Stories of Those Left behind, (2021) by Belgian ethnologist Vinciane Despret.

Echology is a neologism using the Greek ἔχω [ékhō, 'to have'], rather than oikos ['house'] forming both 'ecology' and 'economy'. It is an alternative concept to ontology, the study of existences or beings, and is here proposed to designate modes of belonging.

For that is what one seems to encounter carrying out field philosophy in Indigenous Australia. There is much talk of attachment: people 'belonging' to one another through kinship, 'holding onto' culture, having inalienable connections to Country: there are multiple echologies. Bruno Latour seemed to suggest this, following Gabriel Tarde in the initiation of a philosophy of relations, which replaces the 'being' of philosophies of existence, with the 'having' of attachments. And in Indigenous Australia there seems to be little existential talk—pointless, really. In the vernacular, we talk rather of what something 'has got going for it', a process echology. In the process of describing what something is, we usually end up listing its attachments, rather than fixing on its identity or essence: what it needs to get along in its world in the form of its attributes and extensions.

The prime example in Indigenous Australia is its famous totemic system: kinship extended to the non-human world. Here we can oppose totemic relations to symbolic ones (and early anthropology mistakenly saw totems as arbitrary symbols or representations). Totemic relations have vital continuities, rather than representational gaps. And here we can follow Deborah Bird Rose's revisiting of the concept as 'a common property institution for long-term ecological management'. It seems there is a scientific (reliable) and philosophical (conceptual) solution here: Indigenous Australia may have invented totemism as an extended multispecies kinship system that makes rights and responsibilities in relation to non-humans explicit in their Law.

The event is organized jointly with the Department of Ecological Anthropology at Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The event is funded by Strategy AV21.