Building an understanding of the complex nexus between social movements, cultural heritage, and the state in Oceania requires attention to the intangible dimensions of heritage expressed in public events. This paper explores how Indigenous Australians are productively harnessing the performative power of cultural heritage beyond, but also in engagement with, the state. I provide a comparative analysis of three different performance events that reveal how, in the service of diplomacy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians employ "the human body as a moving agent in a spatially organized world of meaning" (Farnell 2001: 7). I define diplomacy as a form of political engagement in which the participants employ various performance tactics of etiquette to announce whatever claims are at stake and with the intention of avoiding open conflict. As Judith Martin writes in a paper titled "A Philosophy of Etiquette,"

Etiquette does not operate on the encounter-group theory of social harmony, which believes that conflict can be resolved through the frank expression of everyone's every thought and feeling. Rather, it recognizes that people may sincerely harbor a great many thoughts and feelings that, if expressed, would cause social disharmony. (1993: 352)

I offer vignettes of dance performances at three different events: local, regional, and national. My aim is to show how dances operate as political protocol, or as a form of etiquette in diplomacy, to convey messages that are all the more powerful because they remain unspoken and to announce sentiments that are all the more strongly conveyed because they are veiled.

     These ephemeral qualities and intangibility lend this power to dancing. Through moving their bodies in the dance, people bring fraught sociopolitical relationships into the limelight and attempt to mediate exchanges between estranged or alienated parties. I emphasize here the notion of movement and of cultural heritage as including "culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one's body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others" (Csordas 1993: 139). As Rolf Scott (2011: 107) shows in his discussion of the revitalization of Hawaiian navigation, while "[t]he double hull of the canoe, the crab sails and the steering oar are all powerful symbols of Hawaiian heritage," their political efficacy lies in the way they are collectively performed by Hawaiians as moving agents. It is in the dynamic act of navigating and voyaging itself that the power of heritage lies.

     My understanding combines a semiotic with a phenomenological approach. I treat dancing as a form of political strategy that can only be fully comprehended through symbolic analysis as well as aesthetic experience. What a dance communicates is partially understandable through consideration of its affects; fuller appreciation must also extend to symbolic value. A dance is about feeling, but it is also about meaning. We understand the meaning of a dance through feeling, and we feel a dance through understanding what it might mean. The events under consideration are at a local level, a birthday celebration on Thursday Island (Torres Strait); at a regional level, a cultural festival in Cape York (Queensland); and, at a national level, the opening of parliament in Canberra (Australia) on February 12, 2008.

A Birthday Party on Thursday Island

On September 29, 2007, I was invited to a birthday party on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait. It was a joint eightieth-birthday celebration for twin sisters, Ina and Cessa, of the renowned Torres Strait Islander singing group The Mills Sisters.¹ The party was organized in a community hall in the main street of the town. There were tables laden with food cooked and contributed by family and friends. The containers of food were labeled with the name of the contributor and the contents. Dishes included dugong, turtle cooked in its own blood, deer curry, fried rice, damper, stir-fried chicken, and sweet potato and pumpkin cooked in a variety of ways. After the meal, there were speeches, and then guests went home to shower and rest while the tables were rearranged to make room for the night's program of dancing so that the performers would face the table at which the birthday party sat in pride of place.

     The dances consisted of rehearsed performances of ailan dans by a number of different dance teams, generally representing different islands in the Torres Strait. According to Mabo (1984), this style of dance was developed by islanders from different Torres Strait islands at a two-week workshop about ninety years ago on Mabuaig Island, while their pearling luggers were sheltering from the weather (see also Fuary 1991: 267). The style is based on taibobo, a form of dance introduced to the Torres Strait by Rotuman Islanders (Mabo 1984). Ailan dans contrasts with an earlier style, which islanders refer to as prapa dans (Lahn 2004: 75).²

	Figure 1. Ruth Neru Doolah dancing at the Thursday Island birthday celebration for her twin sisters, September 29, 2007. Photo: Rosita Henry.

The birthday celebration was an intimate small-community celebration among kin and friends who were well known to one another. The dance performances were both a form of birthday gift and a means of honoring and paying tribute to these well-loved elders of the community. Yet, while the dances displayed relatedness and communal closeness, they also constituted a diplomatic articulation of divisions, differences, and competition among the participants.³

     Each dance group was dressed in a different uniform marking team identity, men wearing plain, colored sarongs (lavalava) and women wearing patterned island dresses with coconut-frond overskirts. Except for the Saibai Island dancers, who had much more ornate and complex leggings, team members wore simple white cotton anklets (makamak) (see also Fuary 1991: 267; Lahn 2004: 74).

     I highlight the observation that, during the performances, members of the audience jumped up and sprayed the dancers' shoulders and legs with perfume or dusted them with talcum powder. This is a common practice associated with Torres Strait Island dance and is also found elsewhere in the Pacific (Liep 1994; Hereniko 1995). Fuary (1991: 269) explains it as an expression of "audience appreciation and delight" and notes that "extra perfume is lavished on certain kin." Indeed, the dance performances provide an opportunity to mark publicly particular kin relationships. A woman might spontaneously jump up and briefly dance close to her male kin (brothers or sons). Fuary (1991: 275) notes that "[s]ometimes she will not dance, but will instead stand close to her kinsman and hold a lantern or a torch nearby, so as to draw the attention of the audience to his performance, of which she as a kinswoman is immensely proud." According to Beckett, in his day (the 1960s), "they held up a kerosene pressure-lamp over the dancer" (personal communication, June 17, 2008)

     Such observations refer to invitations for spectators to see the dancers under the light, to hearken to the stamping of their feet and the sound of their seed rattles and bamboo-stick clappers, and also to smell the performance of these dancers. Corporeal experiences of sight, sound, and smell enable the constitution and mediation of intersubjective relations. The anointing of the dancers with sweet-smelling powder and perfume is a practice that echoes other cultural practices in the Torres Strait, revealing the experiential importance of the sense of smell in constituting and mediating relationships between persons, between persons and spirits, and between groups. Sometime after death, the belongings of a deceased are usually distributed among kin. Fuary (1991: 307) cites Lui, who noted that the clothes of a deceased were distributed "so that the smell of the deceased was dissipated" and would not bring sickness and death to his wife and children. The spirit of a relative or friend may appear to a person in the form of a sweet smell, and Beckett has observed islanders dusting talcum powder onto a gravesite (personal communication, June 17, 2008).⁴ It appears that Liep's (1994: 70) argument for the Massim area in Melanesia applies also to the Torres Strait: "[B]aby powder has been appropriated into a symbolic context of colors, smells and tactile qualities employed in a discourse of life and death, youth and old age, success and failure."

     In addition to jumping up and perfuming the dancers, there is another practice that, according to Beckett, can be observed all over Torres Strait in one form or another: "Women, mainly older women, and occasionally older men do a funny dance, while serious dancing is going on. The dancers are not supposed to respond." This intervention, he notes, can be "just to make people happy with no particular dancer in mind" or a means of "celebrating the dance of a favorite son or brother, or nephew—probably a new or particularly skilled dancer" (personal communication, June 17, 2008; see also Beckett 1987: 2).

     This form of intercession in the choreographed dance by members of the participant audience is known as kaythian (Fuary 1991: 271) in the Western Torres Strait language. A woman will spontaneously join the dance team of men and perform in a comic or exaggerated way in front of one or more of them. According to Fuary (1991: 272), a woman will generally do this to her sister's husband, and "the physical avoidance and physical restraint which obtains between cross-sex affines in everyday life is temporarily allowed to disintegrate." The performance constitutes a kind of diplomatic practice, I argue, in that it provides a means for the mediation of potential tensions between gender categories and also categories of kin, particularly affines, as well as mediating actual relationships of estrangement and alienation between kin groups. Such performances, in which social boundaries that are maintained on other occasions are collapsed, are much appreciated by the participant audience, who, in this local community context, are well aware of the nuances and the nature of the relationships at stake. Their particular intercorporeal aesthetic experience of the performance is flavored by their ability to understand what the comic, sexually charged frolicking of the women, and other ribald interventions from the participant audience, symbolically represent in terms of the specific nature of the relationships being spotlighted.

     During the performances of different teams at the birthday party, such burlesque or exaggerated cavorting by women occurred several times, to the delight of the participant audience, which responded with much laughter. One instance particularly stood out. In this case, a woman meandered on to the dance floor with a plate of food. She danced sensuously in front of the men, flourishing the dish, and then sat immediately before one of them and proceeded to eat with delicate deliberation. In the meantime, the man continued to dance and maintained studious inattention to her performance. Beckett said he has never seen a routine with a plate of food in his field experience (personal communication, June 17, 2008). Fuary has also not observed this particular routine, but she has observed similar ones between women and their brother-in-laws (personal communication). She has also observed mothers jokingly pretending to breastfeed in front of their sons and suggests that in this way they highlight the reciprocities entailed in that relationship but also reduce the dancer to, and remind him of, his most basic bodily processes and dependencies.⁵ Another interpretation might be that such life-cycle events allow for performances in which social hierarchies are inverted, so that, as Hereniko writes in relation to clowning at Rotuman weddings,

relations of complementarity that are conflict prone—between chief and commoner, between male and female, and between kin groups—are inverted and re-examined. The wedding context, like the plays of the western world, provides a frame in which forces that are potentially threatening to the well being of its members can be acted out and diffused, displaced, or resolved in a safe arena. (1995: 77)

The spontaneity of the women's interventions at the Torres Strait birthday party challenged the rehearsed choreography and equanimity of the trained row of dancers.⁶ Structured roles, autonomous social statuses, and idealized bodily states were momentarily exposed for what they are: part of a socially constructed smokescreen that hides the fact that the dancers remain dependent slaves to physical demands. Yet, as Suzanne Langer (1953: 349) writes, "the fact that the rhythm of comedy is the basic rhythm of life does not mean that biological existence is the 'deeper meaning' of all its themes." For Langer, "the essential comic feeling" is what she calls "felt life" or "felt vitality"—"the sentient aspect of organic unity, growth, and self-preservation" (ibid.: 350) and laughter is "a culmination of feeling—the crest of a wave of felt vitality" (ibid.: 340). This felt vitality, I argue, lends power to the dance as a tactic of persuasion.

The Laura Aboriginal Dance and Cultural Festival

The second event I will describe is a performance that I observed at the Laura Aboriginal Dance and Cultural Festival in Cape York, Australia. Every two years the festival brings together Aboriginal people from Cape York communities and, occasionally, invites dance teams from other parts of Australia.

	Figure 2. Injinoo Dancers on the dance ground at the Laura Aboriginal Dance and Cultural Festival, Cape York. Photo: Rosita Henry, 2009.

I first witnessed the dance performance I describe here at the 2005 festival, and it was repeated at the 2007 festival. What struck me as significant about this particular performance was that this dance was a deliberate combination of Islander-style dancing and Aboriginal-style 'shake-a-leg,' whereas the two styles of dance are otherwise kept quite separate and there is a heavy emphasis on the fidelity of the different dance traditions. In fact, before the performance, the leader self-consciously announced that the young men and boys in the Aboriginal dance group from Injinoo at the tip of Cape York were actually of mixed Aboriginal and Islander heritage and that in their dance they would celebrate both sides. This is all the more noteworthy because there had been tensions over the inclusion of Torres Strait Islander dance teams in what is considered to be an essentially Aboriginal festival and over whether they should be permitted to participate as a matter of course or whether they should perform only if invited as special guests.

     Relationships among the five mainland communities at the tip of Cape York have been delicate over the years. The community at Injinoo was established in the early twentieth century "as an Aboriginal response to the drastic effects of European presence in the region" (Greer 1995: 161). The four other communities did not come into being until after World War II. Two of the communities, Bamaga and Seisia, were founded by Torres Strait Islanders who relocated from Saibai Island in 1946/47, due to concerns over sea-level rise (Saibai is a swampy island only one meter above sea level). Historically, relations between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been peaceful but fraught, particularly with regard to jockeying for dominance in, and control of, community councils and associated resources. The changing context of state bureaucratic structures and processes has done little to ease the tensions.

     In 2007, while visiting Injinoo in relation to another project, I took the opportunity to ask one of the senior dance leaders about the performance I had witnessed at the Laura Festival. He laughed and said that they had been one dance short, so, during the festival itself, while practicing behind the scene on the banks of the Laura River, they spontaneously created the new dance performance, building on a dance/song that was already well known to the team members. The melody itself, he said, was composed about forty or fifty years ago as part of the creation of an Island-style dance. It was an Island-style song, but the lyrics were actually from an Aboriginal language of the mainland. In fact, he said, the words were provided by an Aboriginal man from Doomadgee, in the gulf region south of Cape York, and were in the language of that area. He then laughingly said that the song was actually a love-magic song, but that neither the dancers nor he knew what the words themselves meant.⁷ Moreover, he gleefully joked, the elders had not told the younger boys that they were actually singing and dancing love magic out there on the festival ground.

     The syncretic or hybrid nature of this dance-song, with its mainland Aboriginal lyrics and its Islander-style dance rhythms was considered by the dance leaders/elders to provide a perfect base for choreographic license in the context of the festival. The dance leaders drew on this well-known community dance-song to choreograph a new dance of diplomacy, one that performatively spotlighted the different identity categories, while at the same time mediating or bridging political differences between Aboriginal and Islander in Cape York through embodied identification with both.

The Opening of Parliament House

My third vignette is the indigenous 'welcome-to-country' ceremony at the opening of the Australian House of Parliament on February 12, 2008, before the newly elected representatives were sworn in as members of the 42nd Parliament. This event exemplifies how heritage, as a construct that serves the state, can at the same time provide a means of unsettling state interests. David Hanlon (2011) supplies a comparative example in his account of Nan Madol on the island of Pohnpei in Micronesia. While, on the one hand, state recognition of Nan Madol as a heritage site has resulted in its "formal colonization," on the other hand, Pohnpeians have themselves "proven adept" at using state laws, resources and processes to protect the site in line with "their own very particular, culturally informed understandings of heritage and preservation" (Hanlon 2011: 135).

     The welcome-to-country ceremony took place the day before the government made its historic "Apology to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous Australians." I doubt whether the significance of this ceremony on the eve of the apology has been fully appreciated within the flurry of media focus on the next day's events and amid the scrutiny of the words in the statement. With this welcome-to-country ceremony, for the first time in Australia's history, Indigenous Australians were able to act as a nation to welcome retrospectively representatives of other nations to their country. Through this performance of political protocol, they were able to claim priority in the right to authorize shared access to Australia's resources.     

     This was the very first time that the Australian parliament had opened with such a ceremony. The leader was Aboriginal elder Matilda House-Williams, who acted also as the interpreter of the symbolism of each of its elements for the unversed. She explained the event by noting that "[a] welcome to country acknowledges our people and pays respect to our ancestors' spirits who've created the lands." She added that "[f]or thousands of years our people have observed this protocol, it is a good and honest and a decent and human act to reach out and make sure everyone has a place and is welcome."⁸

    Marilyn Miller, national Indigenous dance co-coordinator of Ausdance's 'Treading the Pathways' program, choreographed the forty-five-minute dance performance that followed. She also choreographed the formal greeting of the prime minister by Matilda House-Williams and her procession with him to the dais. To perform her creation, Miller contracted sixteen performers from around Australia, representing the wider indigenous community.⁹     

     Matilda House-Williams interpreted the symbolic value of this performance for the audience by noting that it represented "[t]he hope of a united nation through reconciliation[;] we can join together the people of the oldest-living culture in the world and with others, who have come from all over the globe and who continue to come." A key element of the ceremony involved the handing of a message stick to the Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd. The symbolic value of the message stick was explained as follows: "The message stick is a means of communication used by our people for thousands of years that tells the story of our coming together."¹⁰ However, the choreography of the dance performance itself was not subject to such interpretation. It was left to the audience members to interpret the significance of the dance, and the audience here was not just those who happened to be invited to attend the opening of parliament, but, via new media technology, the Australian nation and the international community. In fact, my own understanding of the event comes not from 'being there,' but from the visual representations on television and distributed to the international community via the Internet on YouTube.¹¹

     In Australia, and elsewhere in Oceania, cultural heritage is indeed a state project, an expression of state effects that "never obtain solely through national institutions or in governmental sites" (Trouillot 2001: 126). However, cultural heritage is also actively and strategically employed at the grassroots, sometimes against the state. Guillaume Alévêque (2011) describes conflict that developed when agents of the state in French Polynesia attempted to appropriate, for their 'symbolic nation-making' project, public rituals that had originally been organized and performed at the grassroots as part of a Tahitian social movement aiming to achieve collective 'cultural awakening' beyond the state. Similar tensions are evident in Australia regarding appropriation of Aboriginal welcome-to-country ceremonies in the service of a nation-state-building agenda.

     Aboriginal Australians have employed the concept of heritage as a political means for engaging with the state. This has been described by a number of anthropologists, particularly with reference to public performances involving dances (Greer and Henry 1996; Magowan 2000; Henry 2000 and 2008). Often such performances are interpreted as a form of political resistance or protest against the state. Tamisari (2007: 40) argues that the impact and success of such productions "cannot entirely be understood as Indigenous political strategies in the narrow sense of the term." She proposes instead that they should be understood as "a performative tactic, a struggle that, forced to play in the territory of the enemy takes advantage of any opportunity to announce itself and confront" (ibid.). The invitation to perform the welcome ceremony in the Member's Hall at the opening of Parliament House indeed provided such an opportunity. Yet, I suggest, the ceremony can also be read differently, that is, in terms of the expressive art of diplomacy. While not conducted between two states but between an encompassed people and the state, the welcome ceremony is an example par excellence of diplomacy as defined by Der Derian (1987: 110-11), that is, a "mediation of mutual estrangements" that "presupposes a system of reciprocal orientations" for the sake of "self-preservation in an alien environment." The welcome ceremony, in heralding the official apology by Prime Minister Rudd on behalf of the nation that was to take place in Parliament the next day, gave "sensuous form to the signs of a desired reconciliation" (Cohen, Dwyer, and Ginters 2008: 79). The political efficacy of the performance can be judged by its success in enabling non-Indigenous Australians to secure a sense of authentic belonging and legitimacy in place, through feeling welcomed to the country by the original inhabitants. Yet the ceremony could also be read as an assertion by Indigenous Australians of their right to authorize the very functioning of the state itself.

The Sensory and the Ideational

The three events I have described can be compared and contrasted in numerous ways and for many purposes, but my main aim here is to highlight how ethnographic understandings about the efficacy of cultural performances in local contexts can be applied to better understand the role of cultural heritage in state contexts. A focus on apparently simple events at the grassroots, such as a small-community birthday party or a regional dance festival, can reveal much about the power of similar performances when, as cultural heritage, they are employed in the workspace of nation and state.

    For example, in their analysis of the 2007 Balopa Cultural Festival in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, Dalsgaard and Otto (2011) describe how the main festival organizer, a local man who was not a traditional leader by birth, attempted to transcend local kastam criteria for leadership by harnessing the concept of kalsa (translated as 'heritage') to the festival and to other events associated with his nomination as a candidate for the national parliamentary elections. Nevertheless, while he "employed kalsa as a resource for uniting people" in preference to kastam, which defines "differences between descent groups," it could be argued that his case was actually served by the tension between these two concepts and by the ambiguity inherent in local interpretations of the performances as kastam or as kalsa. This is relevant to my argument regarding the efficacy of dance performances as diplomacy, that is, that their efficacy lies in their power to veil tensions and to convey messages that must remain unspoken in order to allow for effective social interaction and delicate political negotiation and persuasion. In other words, diplomacy requires the performative means to conceal as much as to reveal.     

     Comparative analysis of the three Australian events reveals differences in the amount of verbal explanation of the dance performances supplied to each audience. The welcome-to-country ceremony required detailed exegesis for a national and international audience, while the Injinoo dance performance required only a brief introductory announcement for the sake of the regional Cape York audience. In further contrast, at the local community birthday party on Thursday Island, the comic dance interventions of the women required no exegesis at all; nor were the dance teams announced. These participants did not require any interpreter; they personally knew each dancer, how each dance team was socially constituted, how the dancers in the teams were related to one another, and what to expect in terms of their performances. In this context, I argue, the dance performances are understood via attention to their phenomenal surface; meanings are conveyed through sensory experience. Participants' sensory experiences of the dance are mediated by their personal relationships with the dancers, their comfortable interactive knowledge of the dance-songs themselves (evoking familiar memories of many similar past events), and their cultural understanding of the "movement conventions" (Kaeppler 2001: 41).

     Adrienne Kaeppler (2001: 41) argues that "[d]ance like language, communicates, and therefore those who do not know the movement conventions will not have communicative competence and will not be able to understand what is being conveyed both visibly and invisibly." However, in relation to the three events that I have described, what is important for understanding their significance is not so much the movement conventions themselves but the history and politics of relationships at stake in these encounters. Moreover, meaning in these contexts is more than a matter of understanding cultural symbols. Dancing conveys a variety of intended and unintended meanings, even to outsiders, via the sensory experience of the performance and the embodied experience of "felt vitality" (Langer 1953: 340), and this is what lends a dance its particular efficacy in the practice of diplomacy in intercultural contexts.

     The three performances engage their participant audiences differently. All three events—the local, the regional, and the national—carry sensory and as well as ideological meanings, but they can be arranged along a continuum according to their relative dependence on each of these modalities of consciousness. I am here influenced by the ideas of Victor Turner (1967) concerning the polarization of meaning in dominant symbols. I locate the Torres Strait birthday party at the sensory pole of meaning, where somatic understandings, resulting from sensory modes of attention reign supreme; while the national welcome-to-country ceremony in Canberra is at the ideological pole, where solemn exegesis of key symbols to a distant audience is required (an audience that would/could not dream of intervening in the choreographed performance in the way the participants at the birthday party felt free to do). From the sensory to the ideational, from sensibility to intelligibility, the three events capture the range of ways that meaning can be conveyed through performance and that political agency can be asserted.

     As a number of authors have shown,¹² understanding the performative dimensions of cultural heritage is crucial for comprehending how grassroots social movements in Oceania creatively work the political space between nation and state. An appreciation of the power of performance as diplomacy, indeed of diplomacy itself as a form of heritage practice, fosters insights into the nature of political innovation and alternative nation-making processes in Oceania today. Successful diplomacy, however, whether it is interpersonal, intergroup, or in relation to the affairs of the state, requires subtle and skillful maneuvering between, and harnessing of, sense and sensibility, symbolic meaning and aesthetic experience.