Exploring Certain Anomalous Experiences as Mediators of Personal Relationship

Abstract

<p>This thesis, comprising an exegesis and two creative non-fiction stories, sets out to produce an autoethnography informed loosely by grounded theory. Its primary purpose here has been to explore, in depth, aspects of the author’s close and continuing engagement with Aboriginal Australia in remote, rural, and urban locations. The thesis aims to arrive at a clearer understanding of the nature of a series of ‘anomalous’ experiences and the way that they, and ongoing responses to them, have deepened the author’s relationships with Aboriginal people. In turn, these developing relationships have further conditioned his attitudes – social, spiritual, epistemological and political -- to the sharing of being on the Australian continent.</p> <p>The study also investigates the potential these experiences have had for the transformation of personal and political identity. A persistent theme examines the way in which ‘fatal’ events and individual agency might operate in a recursive relationship to moderate these aspects of one’s life. This relational experience has also had a transformative effect over the author’s ontological and epistemological understandings. Autoethnography eschews rigid definitions of what constitutes allowable, meaningful and useful research, and seeks to open the field to non-traditional subject-matter, such as the inclusion of ‘more-thanhuman’ agency in social research. Insofar as anomalous experience comprises an important focus of this study, autoethnography provides a suitable locus for its analysis. </p> <p>The question of the nature of ‘more-than-human’ agency inevitably raises issues of interpretation, including political issues. Several fields of such agency appear in stories contained in the thesis: spiritualism; the Land and Dreaming; the Christian Godhead and lesser Christian ‘deities’ such as the Blessed Virgin, goddess spirituality, and - representing an objective, scientific approach -- C.G. Jung’s hypothesis of a <i>unus mundus</i>. The loose interpretation of these powers and potentialities – viewed as metaphors for a universally recognised underlying unitary Force or World Soul -- has received considerable analytical attention in the stories.</p> <p>The methodological/analytic side of the two stories canvasses literatures of anthropology, sociology, ethnomusicology, history, cultural studies, Jungian philosophy, social theory, Aboriginal (particularly <i>Arrernte</i>) spiritual philosophy, and Irish spirituality. The creative side of the project examines literatures relating to Australian and Irish poetry and story-telling. The kernel of the exegesis comprises a survey of the recent literature canvassing the nature of autoethnography with a view to placing the stories within its methodological purview.</p>