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Warlpiri ritual leader from Lajamanu, Central Australia, Nakakut Barbara Gibson Nakamarra, recounts her dream revelation of two songs for totemic ancestors of the Rain and Emu Dreamings (Jukurrpa). She explains how the dream took her on a journey from her country in the Tanami desert, where she was living hunting and gathering until she was moved to a reserve. The dream takes her up dancing with ancestral women up North where one Emu songline disappears in the Ocean. The testimony ends with the magic reunion of the narrator and the book’s author at the birth of her second baby in Broome, Western Australia.

This chapter compares depictive secondary predicates in English and Warlpiri. In English, heavy constraints are given to depictives in terms of their phrase structure position, their co-occurrence with other adjunct types and resultatives, their controllers, and their semantics, as well as the semantics of the main predicate. It demonstrates that most of these constraints do not exist in Warlpiri, and suggests that these differences originate from basic syntactic differences between the two languages. This chapter concludes that Warlpiri regards depictives as true adjuncts, whereas English views them as comparable to complements.

This chapter addresses the lengthy debate between those who claim that children acquire the principles necessary to count by actively using verbal routines and theories that propose tacit knowledge of those principles is acquired independently from verbal experiences with counting words. It investigates whether domain-specific lexical differences across different languages affect children's mental processes and performance in a nonverbal addition task. Based on work carried out, this chapter compares data from children who are raised speaking only Warlpiri or Anindilyakwa — languages that have very limited number vocabularies — with data from children who were raised speaking English. Speakers of Warlpiri and Anindilyakwa, aged between four and seven years old, were tested at two remote sites in the Northern Territory of Australia. These children used spatial strategies extensively, and were significantly more accurate when they did so than English-speaking children who used spatial strategies very infrequently, but relied on an enumeration strategy supported by counting words to do the addition task. The main spatial strategy exploited the known visual memory strengths of Aboriginals, and involved matching the spatial pattern of the augend set and the addend. These findings suggest that counting words, far from being necessary for exact arithmetic, offer one strategy among others. They also suggest that spatial models for number do not need to be one-dimensional vectors, as in a mental number line, but can be at least two-dimensional.

This chapter examines the link between local communities and broadcast radio in central Australia, with particular emphasis on how local broadcast practices are related to the Warlpiri people's cultural reproduction. It shows how Warlpiri radio broadcasting mirrors the distinctive cultural politics that may be observed more broadly in Warlpiri social interaction, and how broadcasting activity occurs against/in response to the demands of the Australian state. It also explores what radio activity reflects on Warlpiri people's sense of who they are in turbulent times and on the increasingly complex parameters of their public sphere. The chapter focuses on broadcasting by the Pintupi Anmatyerre Warlpiri radio network as well as the distinctive approach of young Warlpiri people to on-air broadcasting within particular Warlpiri cultural imperatives.

This chapter unfolds a dialog between Guattari and Glowczewski about Australian collective dream-work, totemism and rituals of resistance during collective discussions, including Eric Alliez, Jean-Claude Pollack and Anne Querrien. ‘Félix Guattari — Barbara is an anthropologist specialising in Australian Aboriginal peoples who has written a fascinating piece of work about the dreaming process. I’d like her to tell us a bit about the collective technology of dreams among the Australian Aboriginal people she has studied. In this context, not only do dreams not depend on individual keys, but they are also part of an a posteriori elaboration of the dream that anthropologists have characterised as mythical. But Barbara comes close to refuting that definition. And dreaming is identified with the law, and with the possibility of mapping the itineraries of these people, who circulate all the time since they cover hundreds of kilometers. Barbara, I would like to ask you to try to tell us how the dreaming method functions. My first question is to ask you to explain the relationship between dream, territory, and itinerary.’

Glowczewski emphasises here her debt with regard to Guattari’s thinking by tracking some steps in the exchanges that they had over the years about her continuous fieldwork with Warlpiri people in Central Australia. She also comments anthropological debates that took place around the notion of rhizome, the notion of ‘society against the state’ popularised by Pierre Clastres and Indigenous understanding of ‘copyleft’. ‘In the early 1980s, the decade Guattari called Les Années d’Hiver (The Winter Years), when he was testing the concepts, graphs and machines of his Schizoanalytical cartographies, in his seminar, it was sometimes difficult to understand what was happening in his intellectual garage, full of spare parts and oil. But a very tangible flux regularly emerged, like an illumination that sketched out a route, onto which everyone would graft certain of their own questions, a flux of collective desire. It was a passionate subjectivation, shared with Guattari through a multitude of singularities: a vocalisation of ideas, as Deleuze put it.’ First published in 2011.

This chapter presents digital forms of anthropological restitution developed in the late 1990’s and early 2000 by Barbara Glowczewski with different Aboriginal peoples for their own use and a larger audience. She designed the CD-ROM Dream Trackers (Yapa Art and Knowledge of the Australian Desert published by Unesco) with 51 elders and artists from the Central Australian community of Lajamanu in the Northern Territory. Quest in Aboriginal Land is an interactive DVD based on films by Indigenous filmmaker Wayne Barker, juxtaposing four regions of Australia. Both projects aimed to explore and enhance the cultural foundations of the reticular way in which many Indigenous people in Australia map their knowledge and experience of the world in a geographical virtual web of narratives, images and performances. The relevance of games for anthropological insights is also discussed in the paper. Reticular or network thinking, Glowczewski argues, is a very ancient Indigenous practice but it gains today a striking actuality thanks to the fact that our so-called scientific perception of cognition, virtuality and social performance has changed through the use of new technologies. First published in 2002.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter begins by examining Yuendumu Doors, a series of Dreamings done on the doors of the local school by Warlpiri elders, which were reproduced in a publication of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. The Warlpiri were reluctant to exhibit the Dreaming designs, as they were determined to protect the secrecy of their kurruwarri. The kurruwarri's transcription onto the school doors represented a compromise between Western and Aboriginal worlds. They also functioned symbolically to communicate the children into the Western world of written language and education, in the knowledge of their Aboriginality. This knowledge is similar to the claim to Aboriginal culture; the “copyright” in designs is stricter in Aboriginal law than in Western, since the claim to know is also a claim to title. To be untitled is to be open to interpretation, and be exposed to unintelligibility, lack of recognition, and the threat of extinction.

This chapter takes as its point of departure British writer Zadie Smith’s definition of language as “shared words that fit the world as you believe it to be” and illustrates its aptness with examples from English and the Australian language Warlpiri. Each language offers its speakers a set of words that appear to “fit the world as it is” but that in fact derive from the speakers’ own culture, history, interests, and needs. The chapter shows how this insight applies to the domain of color and how English color words have been reified in the successive versions of the Berlin and Kay popular theory of “basic color words.” It also discusses the different conceptualization of landscape in English (British and Australian), drawing on Australian historian Jay Arthur’s observation that Australians are trapped in the language of the ‘Default Country’ (England).

This chapter shows how we can move beyond the myth of “basic colour terms” and re-interpret the colour words of English and Russian in universal terms, i.e. in terms that are equally applicable to the many languages of the world which organise their descriptors of visual experience along very different lines. It shows how to deconstruct the European concept of ‘colour’, while at the same time recognising (even, insisting) that ‘colour’ functions as semantic molecule in the lexicon of European languages. It shows how colour terms rely on environmental prototypes, and stresses that even among European languages, such as English and Russian, there are substantial semantic differences in colour vocabulary. The chapter includes an extensive treatment of the visual semantics of the Warlpiri language of Central Australia, which highlights visual distinctiveness, shining-ness, and patterns, rather than colour in the European sense.