Meetings with and without meat: How images of consubstantiality shape intercultural relationships in the northern Kimberley region of Western Australia

Abstract

The highly visceral ways in which forms of consubstantiality are produced between kin in Indigenous Australian social worlds can be explored through close attention to local understandings of bodily substances and their modes of exchange and transformation. Recalling here Paul Schilder's observation that 'our attitude towards the different parts of the body can be to a great extent determined by the interest other persons take in our body' (1964: 299), this paper traces some of the ways in which images of the self and others are deployed in Euro-Australian ('whitefella') and Kimberley Aboriginal ('blackfella') images and practices circulating around the provision, avoidance and consumption of meat which is, of course, nothing if not an assortment of bodily parts which most human-beings have an abiding interest in. The circulation of meat is something which is focal to a great range of Kimberley social relationships and inevitably comes to permeate the organisation of the never-ending stream of meetings with Euro-Australians through Aboriginal land councils and other local government agencies. Show more