We’re Here to Worship God

This chapter considers the ways that personhood is experienced, staged, and politicized in the weekly Sunday services of the Galiwin’ku Uniting Church. Central to the discussion are the tensions between a kin-based social order—vestige of the hunting-gathering way of life—and a bureaucratic order that emerged with mission station life and the requirements of the state, institutional church, and market society. I argue that the particular dynamics of the Sunday services, including the thematic content as well as the roles, statuses, sequences, and the relations that are involved, work on the one hand to facilitate individual ways of being and the centralization of authority, and on the other hand, to continue relational ways of being and the dispersal of authority. I examine how these oppositional tendencies are brought to life in the same ritual space and even find some degree of stability. The chapter concludes with some comparative comments on the Galiwin’ku material in relation to discussions of personhood in the “anthropology of Christianity.”

Mobility and the Education of Indigenous Youth Away from Remote Home Communities

Mobility has long been recognised as an integral dynamic in Indigenous lives. In Australia, the current model of education delivery is to provide opportunities for Indigenous youth to attend secondary boarding school away from their homes in remote communities. The goal is to provide high quality education and life experiences different to those available remotely. This paper uses the case study of the remote Indigenous community of Mornington Island in the northern Australia. It considers the conditions under which teenagers are sent to boarding school, and also the impacts of these experiences on their lives. Ultimately it argues that experiences outside communities can create expectations for more autonomous lives within communities themselves.

The Role of Allocative Power and Its Diminution in the Constitution and Violation of Wiradjuri Personhood

This paper explores the role of allocative power in constituting Wiradjuri personhood, in turn enabling practices they refer to as caring and sharing. New South Wales is one of Australia’s most developed states, and Wiradjuri people have undergone immense change since colonization began in the 1820s. What changed, why and how, has only recently become a focus for anthropology, partly in response to recent social stress. Enduring unemployment, reliance on social service benefits, and centralized control of their modest resource base has undermined Wiradjuri ways, introducing unanticipated contradictions. Experienced by some as opportunities, for many it became more difficult to address their experienced world and to sustain a known social order. Concerns voiced by Wiradjuri people often targeted other community members rather than changes they had little control over. A key to understanding both the concerns and why these were personalized lies in the way the allocative power essential to the expression of caring and sharing had been challenged by state programs ostensibly designed to achieve social justice and development. To explore the impact of changes introduced from the 1970s, I integrate an historical with a social analysis, drawing on my observations of Wiradjuri interactions over more than 30 years.

Predicaments of Proximity

Relatedness has been a fundamental notion in recent studies of Aboriginal personhood. My research asks how people who ‘form a mob' decide with whom to do this and for how long. The concept of relatedness—while useful—distracts the ethnographic gaze away from those relations not captured by relatedness—away from considering non-realisations, and different ways of relating to others (e.g., Aboriginal ways of relating to non-Indigenous people). Three case studies illustrate that we need clearer understanding of relatedness and its non-realization. The first two are concerned with non-relating between kin and the ensuing emotional burden carried by all involved. The last case study, about relations between Aboriginal camps and non-Indigenous neighbours, offers a glimpse into non-relating without toxicity, and shows why this template does not work in the intra-Aboriginal domain.

Bold Women of the Warlpiri Diaspora Who Went Too Far

This chapter attempts to move beyond traditionalist notions of the Australian Aboriginal person. It accepts that personhood is porous and likely to change as general social conditions change. It explores this idea through mini-biographies of four Warlpiri matriarchs who have moved to diaspora locations and deliberately placed themselves at some distance from the social norms operating in their remote homeland settlements. Accounts of traditional Aboriginal personhood emphasised the spiritually emplaced and socially embedded person. In contrast, the lives of the four Warlpiri matriarchs demonstrate the extension of social networks beyond kin, pursuit of their own projects and the rejection of some aspects of traditional law that constrained them. The vectors of these changes include Western education, religious conversion and escape from traditional marriage.

Empathy, Psychic Unity, Anger, and Shame

Psychic unity is a fraught concept in anthropology and related fields, yet, I argue, even those of us who doubt the existence of a shared human nature carry an expectation of it into the field. Empathy, which necessarily depends on a degree of psychic unity, has long been a critical tool for doing ethnography though our recognition of this fact comes and goes in the anthropological canon. In this experientialist approach to personhood, set in the changed and changing environment of the remote Australian Aboriginal community of Numbulwar, I draw on emotion talk to explore my intuition that, in spite of our differences, the women I know there and I are very much alike. In this effort, I am guided by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s ideas about primary metaphors and the bodily experiences that underlie them. I focus on an Aboriginal woman’s experience of anger and shame, and on why I think I can understand both what is said and something of the experience behind what is being said. I also, however, consider arguments that shared experience is necessary to the ethnographic project.

People and Change in Indigenous Australia

This introduction provides coverage of anthropological theorization of personhood, and Australianist work on personhood. In doing so it identifies major works, their contribution, and changes in the historical conditions shaping personhood and certain major on-going transformations. It provides a concise introduction to each of the following chapters.

Murrinhpatha Personhood, Other Humans, and Contemporary Youth

The traditional Murrinhpatha conception of personhood is similar to what has been observed in other Australian Aboriginal societies, conceiving of the self as a node in a relational network of kinship. But since town settlement, traditional social roles have been radically reconfigured, with a series of economic and ideological factors conspiring to deprecate the role of young men. Murrinhpatha youth respond by embracing a rebellious sub-cultural identity, drawing on mass-media sources to re-imagine themselves as other types of persons. The Murrinhpatha language makes this re-imagining of personhood unusually explicit, since it uses separate grammatical categories to encode socially recognised “persons” versus other animate beings.

Reconfiguring Relational Personhood among Lander Warlpiri

In recent years many Indigenous communities in central Australia have undergone multiple dramatic changes. Responses to the resulting tensions, conflicts and anxiety illuminate local understandings of personhood. Drawing on long term ethnographic fieldwork with Lander Warlpiri/Anmatyerr Willowra (Northern Territory), this paper discusses how relatedness (involving social obligations and reciprocity) among particular categories of persons was understood and maintained during the 1970s, comparing this with the contemporary period, in which considerable conflict between previously united families has occurred. It considers the implications of these differences for notions of personhood, taking into account the altered material conditions in which people live today, changes in practices such as marriage arrangements and ritual, shifting notions of “property”, and embodied relations to land. Local cultural understandings of relational being are explored through analysis of a myth that was publicly performed by a senior male and recorded by young media trainees, with the intent that the younger generation reflect upon what it is to be a person in Warlpiri/Anmatyerr society today.

Self-possessed

Based on fieldwork with Anangu (Western Desert) children, I examine the psychological meaning of autonomy and its structural counterpart, relatedness, from a developmental perspective and in the context of settlement life today. Drawing on psychoanalysis, I show how autonomy evolves out of recognition and the mastery of social and emotional technique. These afford a sense of belonging and as such function as a form of self-containment. Crucially, as an experiential reality, autonomy relies on the social and emotional mechanism of mirroring from the early stages of life, because parts of the self (“part-objects” or “subselves”) are acknowledged to be located in others, including in the cultural and humanized natural environment. This means that, in order to achieve cohesion, the developing self needs to be appropriated by others who internalize these part-objects and share in the child’s identity—the child becomes self-possessed. Consideration is given throughout to culturally external factors that impact how much separation of self from others is tolerated and desired.