Enacted relations: Performing knowledge in an Australian indigenous community By FrancaTamisari, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. 2024. pp. viii + 274. $34.95 (ebook), $135 (hardback). ISBN (hardback): 9781805392392, ISBN (ebook): 9781805392408

Tamisari's Enacted Relations locates performance at the heart of the relational epistemology of Yolŋu people from northeast Arnhem Land. The crux of this book is the interrelationship between two performativities that Tamisari progressively reveals to the reader through the text: Yolŋu relational performativity—whether in traditional song, hip-hop dance, or sign language—intersects at each stage with performativity as method for making knowledge claims as a researcher. In presenting these dual performativities side-by-side, Enacted Relations will be of interest to a broad anthropological audience continuing to interrogate and reimagine ethnography and the ethnographic encounter beyond the ‘crisis of representation’. Those familiar with Tamisari's previous work will recognise this monograph as a synthesis of numerous research articles published out of her longstanding relationships with Indigenous collaborators in Milingimbi since 1990. Fortunately for those of us unable to read in Italian, this includes English-language adaptations of parts of Tamisari's Italian journal articles and her other (Italian) monograph, La Danza dello Squalo (2018). Newcomers to Tamisari's writing will discover an ethnographically rich and nuanced account of Yolŋu performance in ceremonial and everyday life. Tamisari begins with ‘The Law’ (Rom), the ancestrally instituted foundation of Yolŋu cosmology. Ancestral beings travelled across land and sea, their embodied journeys leaving visible ‘traces’ or ‘footprints’ (djalkiri), ‘metamorphosing themselves into landscape features, natural phenomena, language, stories, kinship, paintings, songs and dances’ (p. 227). As the ancestors implant themselves and the Law into the felt universe, so ‘learning the Law’ or ‘becoming knowledgeable’ for Yolŋu is grounded in sensory bodily experience. Performance—framed by Tamisari as ‘affective intra-action’ (p. 171)—is the Yolŋu epistemic method for enacting the Law as a ‘multidimensional tangle of relations’ (p. 227) between ancestral beings, humans, and more-than-humans in the present. The body (human or otherwise) is central to Tamisari's understanding of Yolŋu epistemology; there is no ‘knowing’ that is not embodied. As bodies move in dance, hold names of ancestral power, grow grey hair as knowledge seeps out in old age, or are scarred to remember close kin, the Law is manifest in the present. Performance is the epistemic means by which bodies are trained to become ‘knowing bodies’. As Tamisari writes, performance ‘should be approached and understood as establishing intercorporeal relationships of co-presence and co-presencing among all human and more-than-human beings constituting the living country’ (p. 221). If the Law ‘must be experienced and felt in order to be observed and applied’ (p. 44), the participation of Tamisari's own body in feeling and experiencing is critical to the emerging argument of Enacted Relations. Tamisari began her research in the 1990s with a specific interest in Yolŋu ceremonial dance, and it is her chapter ‘Dancing with and for Others’ (chapter six) that most lucidly demonstrates the presence of the author as one learning the Law through performance. She writes about observing dance movements, practising in front of a mirror in private before first attempting to join her adopted kin on the sand of the ceremony ground, and growing in confidence over years. By participating in dance, Tamisari appears to come into her understanding of performance as affective intra-action that opens a novel analytic lens on her entire body of work. In her own words, ‘it was my participation that allowed me an analytical, as well as an empathic understanding of how knowledge associated with country is embodied by re-enacting the past in the present’ (p. 167). This shift, hinged around the participation of the researcher's own body in Yolŋu performance, moves Enacted Relations beyond traditional studies of Indigenous performance in dance, with their semiotic focus on the interrelationship between bodily movement, song narrative, and cosmology. Using dance as method, Tamisari articulates her intuited account of Yolŋu epistemology centred around affect. Performance must be understood as a sensory experience of relating with others, with ancestral beings, with country that—in the moment of its enactment—enables one to ‘know’, that ‘renders feeling intelligent’ (p. 10). Tamisari is at pains to emphasise that the Law is not a body of information to be cognitively comprehended, but something felt, held dear, cherished, worried over, and participated in. Performance, in creating moments in time and space where the Law is felt in affective intra-action, makes ancestral power visible in such a way that ‘knowing’ can occur. This is ‘an epistemology that does not separate cognition and affect, language and the body, content and performance, representation and expression’ (p. 157). As a reader with a research interest in Arnhem Land, Enacted Relations offered me an exceptionally detailed, holistic account of Yolŋu epistemology illustrated across numerous contexts. The book will, of course, be of great benefit to the social science of performativity, particularly around dance and song. I have attempted in this review to articulate the contribution this book makes (beyond area studies or specific subfields) to ethnographic method. Tamisari offers both a nuanced and novel interpretation of the participation of the researcher in the field, in which knowledge claims can only be made through the very body of the author. At times, it feels that Tamisari is constrained by the medium of her work. Enacted Relations is written squarely within the voice of the Western academy, and while her writing is compelling, I was on occasion left with a sense of being unable to fully grasp the emotion or atmosphere implicit in Tamisari's work as someone who has not danced the dances or walked on the country. Perhaps this is by intention. Dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom means when that feeling goes in and comes out it shows in your reaction. Something happens inside and other people can see. Other people can feel it as well. Your body opens up; that's the connection. That feeling, it sits on your ŋayaŋu [soul], doturrk [heart] and your djäl [your desire]. And it comes out from your body … You don't need to speak or understand Yolŋu matha [language, tongue], because you can feel it, straight away. If balanda [non-Indigenous people] can take in those feelings, it would help them a lot. In charting Yolŋu relational epistemology, and articulating her own journey to feel the Law through performance, Tamisari offers here a significant contribution for balanda within the academy who may aspire to ‘take in those feelings’.