Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. 208 pp. (Figures, maps, B&W photo.) US$62.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-6796-6.
The edited collection, People and Change in Indigenous Australia, explores the concept of personhood through various ethnographic accounts of life in remote Indigenous Australian communities. The editors begin by locating the collection within a discussion of the anthropological literature on personhood and, in particular, Marilyn Strathern’s description of Melanesian people as “the plural and composite sites of the relationships that produced them” (The Gender of the Gift, Berkeley: UC Press, 1988, 13). They then move into a discussion of how this anthropological literature has developed to explore Indigenous personhood in an Australian context, including a discussion of the highly influential works of Fred Myers (Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986) on Pintupi concepts of autonomy and relatedness, on demand sharing and reciprocity as foundational to Aboriginal personhood (B. Samson, “A Grammar of Exchange,” in Being Black, ed. I. Keen (ed), Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press: 1988, 157–177; N. Peterson, “Demand Sharing: Reciprocity and the Pressure from Generosity among Foragers,” American Anthropologist 95, no. 4 [1993]).
More recently, the field of Australian anthropology has begun to consider the role of the state and non-Indigenous people engaged in the Indigenous industry and how conscious these people are of the broader culture and whiteness that often invades their work (T. Lea, Bureaucrats and Bleeding hearts: Indigenous Health in Northern Australia, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008; E. Kowal, Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia, Oxford: Berghan, 2015).
The Warlpiri people of the central Australian desert are the focus of three chapters in the collection—those by Musharbash, Burke, and Vaarzon-Morel. The chapter by Musharbash is engaged in a scholarly conversation around the meaning of relatedness in contemporary Warlpiri society, which is significantly more sedentary due to the impacts of colonization (44). In these experiences in which relations are sometimes forced into close residential proximity, Musharbash describes the emotionally exhausting processes of managing “bad relations with kin” (46). In his chapter, Paul Burke traces the lives of four Warlpiri women living in the broader diaspora who have placed themselves beyond the usual cultural norms by moving away from networks of family and kin, and the demands that maintaining these relationship entails (39). Burke describes the ways in which these women are able to exercise their autonomy; in the case of Dulcie up to:
…the risky outer limits of such self-assertion; for example, by overriding the sensitivities of grieving relatives and threatening non-attendance at a funeral; by making initial wisecracks and refusals to drunken male relations seeking food from her; by teasing and already wild and disruptive drink about the likely extramarital affairs of his wife; by pulling funny faces at her grandchildren during a break in sorry business. (31)
All of these acts are potentially personally dangerous, and one final act that goes “too far” is where Dulcie enters into a relationship with a violent schizophrenic alcoholic boyfriend (32). Finally, Vaarzom-Morel’s chapter considers how relational aspects of Warlpiri personhood, such as those present in the relationships between kirda and kurdungurlu (translated as traditional owner and manager) have been more recently transformed suggesting changed relations between people and country (89).
A second major theme of the volume is the transformations in conceptions of personhood amongst Aboriginal children and youth in various remote locations. Chapters by Eickelkamp, Mansfield, and Dalley discuss children and young people in response to ideas of how relational ontology and the idea of relations as intrinsic to sense of self underlies Aboriginal personhood (S. Poirier, “The Dynamic Reproduction of Hunter-Gatherers’ Ontologies and Values,” in Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, eds. J. Boddy and M. Lambek, Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, 2013, 55). In his chapter, for example, John Mansfield tracks the changes to Murrinhpatha relational conceptions of personhood as informed by social connections through totemic systems, into spaces where young men—while still engaging with kinship structures—are also embracing elements of heavy metal and gang culture.
The final theme of the volume is discussion of the moral aspects of personhood in remote Aboriginal Australia. The chapter by Gaynor McDonald considers the way in which “allocative power” over the distribution of certain goods and objects is central to the ideas of “caring and sharing” that prefigure Wiradjuri personhood. Carolyn Schwarz discusses how Christianity has been largely overlooked in the literature on personhood in Australia, and offers her own ethnographic encounters with Yolngu people in Galiwin’ku settlement. Schwarz describes the tension between relational modes of personhood and persons in conversation with the church who are “fundamentally individuated subjects; the person is a bounded and possessive individual” (147). Finally, an afterword to the volume is provided by Victoria Burbank tying together the themes of ethnographic empathy and the capacity to understand emotional affect in cross cultural contexts, and why the expressions of anger and shame can be understood as responses to relational personhood.
Together this volume provides important insights into contemporary personhood in remote Aboriginal Australia. It would have been fascinating if more attention had been paid to these concepts in urban Australia, where the majority of Indigenous Australians live. Perhaps this could be a future volume?
Siobhan McDonnell
Australian National University, Canberra