The politico-historical construction of the Pintupi Luritja and the concept of tribe

Abstract

This paper explores the history of the emergence of Pintupi Luritja as the dominant language in the Central Australian community of Amunturrngu (Mt Liebig), traced from the people's first encounters with settlement in the 1940s at Haasts Bluff, through to the present. It is a political history, as movement toward settlement demanded a re-structuring of social relations within a newly settled polity. To elaborate on this polity I examine the concept of a language community through the construction of Pintupi Luritja as a 'communilect'. The development of this communilect as a lingua franca in these early settlements signals the value of the original term 'Luritja' as a trope. The meaning of this original Indigenous term is not only indicative of the regional history, but also of the flexible potential in group formation. The pattern of contact and settlement in this Pintupi Luritja region has compelled a socio-linguistic re-configuration, lending a currency to the label Pintupi Luritja that suggests a modern, firmed up, 'tribe'. This tribe is a 'secondary phenomenon' formed through the manipulation of relatively unstructured populations - stateless societies - by the colonial State (Fried 1975). At issue here is the inter-cultural aspect of this language formation that is the elemental process in the creation of this 'new' social formation.