AustLit

'Green's book provides a fascinating and fine-grained analysis of a traditional narrative practice among Arrernte women that entails the telling of ‘sand stories’. Green's principle concern is how the technique of sand drawing is used in conjunction with speech, gesture, hand signs and song to communicate meaning. The complexity of sand story narration is such that it is difficult to separate these different semiotic modalities from each other. Indeed, ‘in isolation, each of these modalities does not carry the entire message’ (2014: 90). Accordingly, Green focuses on sand drawing as part of an ‘ensemble’ of expressive forms. Her approach is informed by new developments in linguistics and anthropology which view language as more than just speech and emphasise its embodied nature.' (Introduction)

'Tanna is not an ethnographic documentary. It is rather a cinematic work of art, which is to say that it is an independent film made outside Hollywood for Pacific audiences and other interested viewers. At the same time, I think it is one of those rare movies that succeeds as both (like The Fast Runner or Smoke Signals, or perhaps, The Dead Lands). The story it tells of two young people, and their love which runs afoul of collective norms and values, is of course a story that echoes one we all know. But Tanna is set in a rural corner of contemporary Vanuatu, of all places. And its actors, who are villagers dressed in nothing more than raffia skirts and penis sheaths, speak in their vernacular. So the obstacles that block their love are of a Melanesian kind rather than of the sort that fair Verona might impose. Thus Tanna's imagery is not at all strange to any of us who have done fieldwork in the region.' (Introduction)