Warlpiri materiality

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork with families at Nyirrpi, a Warlpiri community in central Australia, this thesis is an ethnography of contemporary Warlpiri life through the lens of materiality. Underpinning it is a question about Warlpiri ways of seeing and engaging with materiality - the stuff of everyday life that one might see as furniture, bedding, personal belongings, household items, even rubbish. Across the chapters, my unpacking of this question takes shape over three main themes. The first has to do with the role of things in Warlpiri relatedness. I explore sharing on different scales, from broad patterns around Nyirrpi and beyond, to the most intimate forms in the context of family gatherings, and in doing so illustrate the nuances of sharing as a practice that both creates and maintains relatedness. The second has to do with the meanings things take on in the places where Warlpiri people travel and live together. Whether in the context of Warlpiri mobility or domestic life in and around a house, I 'read' things as traces of Warlpiri lives and activities and analyse how material things become part of the physical and symbolic structure - and often mark the boundaries - of the places in which Warlpiri people gather. The final theme relates to a question of 'thingness' and 'materiality', of what material things might even be, mean or be used for. I analyse Warlpiri concepts and practices pertaining to 'rubbish' and the realisations of multiple material affordances. Grounded as this project is in the practices and dynamics of domestic and community life at Nyirrpi, ultimately, I suggest my research question can only be answered by attending to the broader framework and dynamics of a relational ontology. Warlpiri people, I argue, incorporate material things into their lives, relationships, and places with a modality of openness, flexibility, and possibility that, with few exceptions, is not informed by nor creates or delimits fixed categories or boundaries. To put it differently, I answer my question about how Warlpiri people see and engage with material things with reference to the praxis of a relational way of being, and some exploration of how that intersects with certain governance structures at Nyirrpi that rely on fixed categories, or fixed relations between categories, to see and order the world.