Aboriginal Dreamtime Reenactments
Australia – Storytelling rituals dramatizing cosmogenesis and tribal law
Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence
“Enacting the Law of the Ancestors”
1. Cosmogenesis as Ethical Framework
Aboriginal Dreamtime reenactments are not merely historical plays or didactic parables; they are ontological performances that animate the Tjukurpa—the Dreaming Law. Foucault’s notion of subjectivation—the process by which one becomes a subject through ethical practices—finds a powerful analogue here.
To perform a Dreamtime story is to actualize the self not through introspection, but through ritual embodiment of ancestral law. Foucault's “care of the self” here becomes care for land, for spirit-beings, and for the continuity of origin-myths, all choreographed through symbolic gesture, chant, and movement. One's ethics emerge not through abstract reason but through immediate performative participation in cosmological memory.
2. Cartographies of Power and Voice
The performance space is not neutral. It is a songline, a geopoetic route that encodes both topography and law. Foucault’s critique of Enlightenment rationalism is mirrored in Dreamtime's refusal to divide myth from truth, or art from governance. Power circulates not via institutions but via landscapes encoded with ancestral agency.
Through Dreamtime reenactments, the subject becomes a living node in a network of spatial-temporal law—not a modern autonomous individual, but a relational being governed by ancestral precedent. Foucault’s idea of genealogy as a method of unearthing knowledge-power through history is mirrored in the genealogical kin-lore performed live in the rituals.
3. Technologies of the Ancestral Self
Rather than confession or introspective care, Aboriginal performance involves ritual techniques of transformation: body-painting (ochre as cosmological map), dance imitating kangaroo tracks or water serpents, and chanted stories guiding young initiates into sacred roles. These are technologies of the self that precede and exceed the self—practices that weave individuals into a larger matrix of belonging.
Foucault’s model of aesthetics of existence—the idea that one’s life is to be crafted as a work of art—takes on a collective, ancestral dimension here. The work of art is not the individual, but the continual renewal of origin through performance.