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Aboriginal Archive Uses New DRM
ianare writes "An application that gives fresh new meaning to 'digital rights management' has been pioneered by Aboriginal Australians. It relies on a user's profile to control access to a multimedia archive. The need to create profiles based on a user's name, age, sex and standing within their community comes from traditions over what can and cannot be viewed. For example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families. These requirements threw up issues surrounding how the material could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a traditional sense, but also about how people would access it depending on their gender, their relationship to other people, and where they were situated."
Of course they could. But to draw a parallel, in Aztec society there were no doors. A horizontal bar across the entry way, however, acted as the most secure lock imaginable, because of cultural norms. Basically the same thing here about making a fake account.
-nB
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These kinds of taboos against men and women seeing one another, against talking about the dead, etc. are very common in the aboriginal cultures of Australia, and they take them very seriously. The Warlpiri language, for example, has a sort of sub-language called the avoidance register, used when people of certain familial relations need to talk to each other (a woman and son-in-law, for example) - the grammar's mostly the same, but the words are dramatically simplified, and often replaced with generic terms. And such phenomena occur in other cultural/language groups too - I believe there's something like it in Zulu.
It seems odd to you, but it's also how they want to live. They're free to leave where they live (and many do), and those that stay want to live the traditional way.
"Jingoism and bigotry posing as rational smug superiority. Nothing more."
I'd say ignorance even.
The reason why this is important, is due to the critical need for anthropologists to win the trust of many of these ancient tribes to study the practices so we can learn a bit more about how hunter gatherer societies organise. Back in the earlier days of Anthropologists studying Aboriginal tribes, the Aboriginals, knowing "whitefulla" had no real ability to use the dances and rituals in the "magical" way Aboriginal religions see them, they freely cooperated and would show the rituals etc. However a series of incidents, where the rituals where shown on TV and then seen by neighboring tribes, thus unleashing "curses" or whatever, led to most of these tribes stopping from trusting anthropologists to respect the conditions of the cooperation. This particularly occurs with gender specific rituals. "womens business" rituals are not to be seen by men (white men included), and unless the anthropologist can guarantee this, she won't be shown the ritual. But oftentimes she cant, and so anthropology never gets to study it.
Systems like this, where the community gets to decide the 'rules' of accessing the multimedia (a bit like creative commons even) means that the Anthropologist can finally win the trust of the tribe to do the studies needed to piece together the mysteries of traditional Aboriginal life.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I know some Koori's, that's how first Australian's (the politically correct term in Australia for Aboriginals) refer to themselves.
Actually the Aboriginal people of the area known as New South Wales call themselves Koori, the people of Queensland call themselves Murri, the South Australian's are Nunga, WA far west (around Perth) are Nunya, whilst in the Top End (Darwin Region) there are Larrakia, Tiwi, Mirar and Yolgnu, People of Central Australia call themselves Arrente, Marla etc. Whereas I am a Balanda (in the local language).