gendered substancesand objects inritual: an australianaboriginal study

ABSTRACTThe creative action ot the foundational beings known asDreamings lies at the heart ot Aboriginal Australian ceremony.In ritual, gender is drawn into a nexus of generative actionand interaction. I will make the case that gender characterizescountry, ceremonies, many sacred sites and many objectsand substances. People, country, sites and ceremonies areintegral to the bringing forth of the life of the world, and drav ^on a root paradigm of birth.! will examine that paradigm fromthe perspective of gender in domains of blood, ritual, country,men and women, and objects. The analysis will show thatwhile gender is most assuredly a difference that makes adifference, in Gregory Bateson's famous words, it is the playof difference itself that is most productively worked with inrituaf.

Keywords; Aboriginal Australians, ceremony, fertility, secrecy,land claims

Debaafi Brtd Rose s tr>e auttiof ot sevwai pnze-

justjce aod on ethics for decotonuatKJn. Matwial Religion vcSume 3.

IntroductionIf you are a woman are you always and entirely a woman?One of my Aboriginal teachers told me about a womanin a neighboring community who had failed to respectthe boundary around a ceremony from which women areexcluded. She intruded, and as punishment they drew onmen's power and turned her into a man —but only from theknees down.

This story provocatively introduces an organization ofgender separation that is severely defended: how else toexplain punishment of a woman who intrudes info a men'szone? At the same time it equally provocatively suggests adomain of gender that is open to reoombination. Along withother papers in this special issue of Material Religion (Kenyon,Lohmann, and Straight, in particular), my analysis opensgender, objects and action in ways that confound ideas ofgender as a totalizing construct defined by "either-or."

The teachers I discuss in this paper live, or lived, in the | fopen savannah oountry of the Victoria River District of the .S .= t ' ^Northern Territory of Australia. There in the monsoonal tropios "" ^ 5!? gthe grasses are yellow and gold, the soils are red, white- : | ' |,-|barked eucalypts are crowned with dusky green-gray leaves, E-Sisland the sky is large, blue, and encompassing. Mesas andoliff lines interrupt the open plains and the big rivers snakethrough the country marking their paths by the denser greenof the riverine trees. I have been working with and learningfrom Aboriginal people in this region for over twenty-fiveyears. Several languages and communities are located withinthe area of my research, and I refer to the people collectivelyas Victoria River people.

White settlers established broad acres cattle ranches inthis region just over 100 years ago. Overrunning the homesof the indigenous peoples of the region, they first shot andhunted away the looal peoples, and later pressed them intosen/ice on the cattle stations as an unfree and unpaid laborforoe. In the mid-1960s Aboriginal people in this region wenton strike against the appalling system of oppression that ruledtheir lives. Citizenship was granted in about 1969, and hasenabled people to participate in national and internationalstruggles for equity and cultural survival. All of my olderteachers worked in near slavery for white ranchers for greateror shorter periods of their lives; most went on strike, and allhave achieved some measure of land rights.

36 In recent years Pentecostal missionaries have workedto suppress or eradicate the indigenous religious life, buttheir efforts have not yet been sucoessful. I have discussedtheir actions elsewhere (Rose 2004) and perhaps there willalways be more to say about the chaotic confusions that arisewhen missionaries try to impose either—or distinctions andhierarchical dualisms and to eradicate a cultural logic foundedin both—and and nuanced contextual ity. in this paper Ihold my analytic gaze on nuanced contextuality, focusingon autochthonous religious life as it is expressed in majorceremonial events (known in Aboriginal English as "business").These include the initiation of young men, in which both men

RG1Male and female clap

and women are key participants, and the gender restrictedceremonies in which men and women separate into closedor "secret" spheres in order to perform their ceremonies.'Seoret business separates men and women, defining someknowledge as appropriate only to one or the other (seeMichaels 1986 for an excellent discussion of secrecy).

I avoid secret matters for reasons of respect as well asethics. As will become clear, while I cannot speak of men'sbusiness because I am not privy to it, I am able to draw onpublished work that offers some insight into that sphere, andwhile I am unable to speak of women's business becauseso much of the knowledge is secret. I am able to discussmatters that have both a public and a secret face. In peer-reviewed academic writing, as in Aboriginal verbal, gestural,and iconic communioation. one seeks to say that whichmay be formally unsayable but which is communicable

using allusion, homology, and other techniques. Secrecythus poses interesting challenges for standard expositorywriting, especially in our sociai science mode where the aimis to explain as clearly and comprehensively as possible. Iapproach this challenge by bracketing my exposition withimages of two objects and inviting readers to contemplateeach in itself and to consider how they resonate with eachother In between these two images I take an expositoryapproach to issues of creation, sites, country, substance, andmale/female gender constructs.

Dreaming Origins, Earth ProcessesIn the beginning, according to Victoria River people, the Earthwas covered with salt water The water pulled back, and lifecame forth. Referred to by some people as "Mother," Earthbrings forth life. The creative and shape-changing ancestors—the Dreamings—came traveling into country, shaping it,marking it, naming it, laying down human groups and theirnon-human kin, oeremonies, plant communities, and animalhabitats. There were men and women Dreamings, and theiractions created gendered geography. Dreamings also createdthe territorial units known as oountries: areas that are smallenough to accommodate face-to-face groups of people, and

large enough to sustain their lives. The ceremonies, includingthe songs and designs, belong to the people of the countryas instituted by Dreaming. Performance "lifts up the country,"people say, enhancing its capacity to flourish.

The origins of the Dreamings themselves are spokenof allusively: they emerged from holes in the ground. Thisemergence lays out the basis for the birth-like process bywhich all life comes into being. Law in Aboriginal Englishinvokes the whole domain of ecological complexity: howthings came into being and how they must go on if life is tocontinue to come into being.' The process, defined by myteacher Hobbles Danaiyarri as coming up out of the ground,is foundationai for an anaiysis that explores motion andsubstance. From inside to outside, from life contained to lifeemergent, there is no metamorphosis that does not emergefrom and rely upon the paradigm of birth, the sacred sites, 15and the ceremonies.^

In another paper (Rose 2003) I suggested that the = ^West's long history of equating the sacred with the eternaland immutable ill equips us to imagine a world in whichlife is valued for its qualities of birth, chanqe, motion, and £ «.= -gtemporality. I proposed that the work of bringing life into 1 | . o.embodied being, work that is accomplished primarily in ritual, o o < 1involves this metamorphosis: from inside to outside, frompotential to actual. Motion is integral to the ongoing creationof the living world, but so too is fixity. Dreaming men andwomen imprinted themselves on the Earth, leaving behindthe traces of their activities, the sites of their actions, andtheir specific presence. Many of the "sacred sites." as theyare known in contemporary Australian culture, are sources orreservoirs of potential life.

Earth itself is thus both the origin of and the artefact ofDreaming action. From a fixity perspective, the geographycan be understood as a sacred and gendered artefact. Froma motion perspective, the analysis goes in the direction ofunderstanding gender difference as a foundational patternin the ongoing bringing forth of life. In the remainder of thispaper I will explore the intersection of motion, gender, andartefact. In doing so I link my analysis to that of Magowan(2001) in considering Dreaming kinesis. The analysis movesaway from ideas of objects as bounded things, and looktoward the fluidity of interacting substances. In the VictoriaRiver context. I will be saying, gendered objects include Earth,

38 other subjects, and the substances that flow between them.

Hobbles asserted the birth-like Earth origins of life saying:"Everything come up out of ground—language, people, emu,kangaroo, grass. That's Law" (in Rose 2000: 57). Hobbleshated what the missionaries were teaching—that AboriginalLaw was the work of the devil—and he rarely missed anopportunity to say so. After asserting that Earth origins areLaw he added: "Missionary just trying to bust everything up.They fuck 'em up right through. Gonna end up in a big war. -5 'Before, everything been good—no war, no missionary' (inRose 2000: 57). When the Assemblies of God missionariesfinally established themselves in the community of Yarralin

their first attacks on indigenous Law were targeted at women;at the nearby sacred site, at ceremony, and at the longtradition of autonomous sacred work. I shouldn't have beensurprised. This is a familiar story with an ancient imprimatur.Even knowing enough of biblical history to appreciate thepattern, I was still shocked when it started happening beforemy eyes, and happening to women whose knowledge I sodeeply respected.

BloodDreaming women traveled, and they bled. They bled, andthey gave birth. Women's blood is one ofthe most prominenttraces of life force in the sacred geography. Places wherethe Dreaming women bled and gave birth today hold thepresence of the blood of creation; they continue to be sourcesof life and Law. Menstrual blood (as well as other forms ofbtood) remains in fhe ground as red ocher deposits.'' Somesifes are accessed exclusively by the women of the countrywhere the site is located; some are accessed exclusively bythe men. Both men and women have an interest in protectingthe integrity of these sites. Dreaming blood is dug up andused in ritual as people are rubbed with fat and then rubbedwith the ocher so that they glisfen and glow with a shiningredness that connecfs people to the processes I have beendiscussing —birth, flow, emergence, life. In some contexts, asI will discuss below, human blood as well as the ocher thatis understood to be Dreaming blood, is used in ceremony.This powerful substance also offers a perspective on fixityand motion: it is contained within sites, and it continues toflow in and through the bodies of living things; both forms areworked into ritual.

The connections between blood, birth, flow, and Law canbe fleshed out in fhe context of childbirth. In the recent past,before childbirth was medicalized, women gave birth ontothe ground. The blood flowed into the ground, and becamea powerful form of connection between the new person, themother, and the country into which that blood flowed. RileyYoung, one of my Victoria River teachers, spoke of thesematters, connecfing the Earth as mother with his own motherand his own birth. He pulls fhese different strands of birth andblood, mother and ground, together as Law:

Because this ground belong to Aboriginal people. Aboriginalpeople been born la this ground. What they call it this ground,he's [she's] the mother He's the mother. Used to be born la thisground. No hospital, no needle, no medicine. ... Because thisground is the hospital. Even me, [I] been born la this ground...That's what they been do: this Law, la this place. Early days.Because I never been born by top of the hospital. I been born byground. Because I know this Law. (in Rose 2000: 61-5}

Blood flows outward from the body and into the ground,New life emerges from the ground and, wifh pregnancy, intothe bodies of women. Menstruation constitutes a momentof intensified participation in the flow of life between country

and the transitory bodies of the people of the country, Asan event, menstrual blood is an announcement: somethingis happening. The question is, what does menstrual bloodannounce? In a survey of menstrual symbolism, Buckleyand Gottlieb (1988) note two contrasting ways of construingmenstrual flow. One way is as a sign of failed fertility, thusassociating it with death. The other way sees blood as a signof onset of fertility and thus associates it with life. The two arecontrasting but not necessarily mutually exclusive. Evidencefrom Aboriginal Australia derives from both public and secretcontexts (see Berndt 1950; Gross 1980). As my discussionof Dreaming blood seeks to articulate, blood is life-oriented; itsignals the possibility of. and perhaps calls forth, new life.

I pause briefly to consider feminist studies of genderedbodies in the Western world that have critically exposedan extremely different form of menstrual symbolism. Thisliterature starts with a consideration of the body as the bearer gof particular kinds of subjectivity (Grosz 1994). Thus, Western e < „liberal democracies rest on a concept of subjecthood, or 1 1 f "

subjectivity which is implicitly male and individuated, in the ^ ^ ^ asense that there are clear and clean boundaries between | ^ sJpersons (Kristeva 1982; Rosengarten 1996: 16-27), Grosz | | | lmakes the point that the good subject is in control of the o o < ibody—that is, the body is fully enclosed, and the boundariesare under the will of the person. Clearly human and otherbodies do not conform to these ideals, and the feministcritique focuses on how the familiar gender binary is deployedto cast women in the role of the transgress ive, and by defaultto cast men in the role of the proper subject. Within theseidealized images of the embodied subject, women appearto be extremely transgressive. The wetness, fluidity, and"leakiness" of menstrual blood escape the requirements ofa clean and proper body (Douglas 1966; Kristeva 1982; seeBuckley and Gottlieb 1988). The permeability signaled bymenstrual blood suggests a lack of proper subjecthood, sothat for women to achieve subject parity in Western societies,menstrual blood must be hidden, and the fact of individualmenstruation concealed from public knowledge (Rosengarten1996:27-66).^

I offer this very brief summary of feminist critiqueof Western embodied subjectivity because it poses aninvigorating question for analysis: what do we learn aboutgender, life, birth, and fertiiity from a radically different way

40 of conceptualizing bodies? What shifts are required in our | j^understanding when permeability, rather than being a debility,is absolutely central to a full life?

One of the things that is highlighted is that the mystery oflife depends on metamorphosis, and that blood is central tothis metamorphosis. And so we see that for people whosepurpose it is to promote the flourishing of their country,permeability and blood are simply too important to beconfined to one sex only. f"

Recent studies suggest that Aboriginal women formeriywould have experienced very few menstrual periods in thecourse of their lives. Later onset of menstruation (compared s a

to the present) combined with long periods of lactation, andin all probability with periods during which body fat was below

• the critical threshold for menstruation are key factors. DianeBell has stated that in her interviews with senior Aboriginalwomen, she found that women could remember eachmenstrual period of their fertile lives and count them on theirfingers (quoted in Buckley and Gottlieb 1988; 45), NancyHowell's (1979) research with the Dobe IKung people of theKalahari in southern Africa assessed the data in light of thecritical fatness hypothesis and concluded that normal fatnesslevels of the IKung may often have been close to the criticallevel and may have played a role In preventing or delayingconception.

If, as seems likely, these factors were operative amongAboriginal people in arid and semi-arid zones such as theVictoria River region, then it is also likely that critical fat levelsresponded to cycles of rain and drought for humans justas for most other mammals. Chris Knight (1988) makes aninteresting case for the possibility that prior to colonizationAboriginal Australian women menstruated in synchronyThe ethnographic evidence is sketchy but compelling. Thesignificant aspect to synchrony, in my view, is that in thesavannah it would have been linked to the e)ctreme variationbetween wet and dry seasons. A further cycle of synchronicitymay have connected with the longer cycles of drought andrain characterized by the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

In the Victoria River region, most years offer a period ofabundance (late wet, eariy dry) and a period of extreme stress(late dry, eariy wet). It is probable that amenorrhea would havebeen most common during stress times (especially duringdroughts), and that women who were ready to menstruatewould be most likely to do so in the period shortly after thewet season when food was in abundance. This was also theperiod when people gathered for ceremony, most of whichconcerns fertility. Aboriginal women have remarked uponhow vigorous activity tends to stimulate menstrual flow, andit may be that dancing all night instigates or enhances theflow of blood. Synchronicity would thus inave been linkedto ecological cycles, and the release of menstrual bloodas it flowed down women's legs and was danced intothe ceremony ground imbued that ground with power. Itconstituted one of women's contributions in fertility rituals,and may have offered evidence of the efficacy of ritual.

41Gender in CountryWomen's blood is a powerful, generative substance, andwomen and men both manage it. I will focus on men'smanagement of women's blood as the published literatureprovides an entree into matters that othenA ise are rarelydiscussed publicly. Men's ceremonies have the intention ofinvigorating the fertility of the country {both in reference tospecific totemic species, and more broadly in reference tooverall fertility), in some ceremonies, certain men dance adance that is similar to women's dancing (Wild 1977/8: 18}.These men reopen the subinclsion wound on the penis,

so that as they dance their blood splatters their thighs andflows down their legs (Wild 1977/8: 19). Some authors havecontended that this replication of women's blood by men is asymbolio appropriation of women's reproductive power (Swain1993: 191; see also Buckley and Gottlieb 1988: 17), andsome go even further to claim that men transform women'sblood into symbolic capital which they use to dominatewomen (Linke 1999: 4-5).

These ideas are misleading in the Victoria River context.Ideas of symbolio appropriation set men and women inopposition to each other, whereas they are actually incomplementary and procreative relationships. Furthermore,ideas of appropriation sustain, and even reinforce, the theorythat gender categories are given in nature. Culture, in theseexplanations, is a mechanism whereby the naturally givencan be culturally supplemented, or even supplanted. Menare men, and women are women, the idea seems to be, andin their separate sphere men work culturally with that whichbelongs naturally to women.

in contrast, I draw on Gertrude Stotz's (1993) innovativework to suggest that in ritual events, people go into theirmale-female separated spheres in order to embody theprocreative gender identities of mother and father. In thecontext of men's ceremony, men enter an exclusive zonewithin which they then become either father or mother. Theboundary defined as "men only," and which is so clear inone context (exclusion of women), enables a zone withinwhich men differentiate, moving into dialog with country asprocreative partners. Wild states that "in men's rituals, the... men for whom the country is mother's country' dance inwomen's styles" (1977/8: 18). It thus becomes clear that theblood from the male "mother" is a flow of fertility-making malemenstruai biood."^

Within this subtle understanding of the complexities ofgender, we can see that in any given ceremony men whodance for their mother's country dance as "mothers." and themen who dance for their father's country dance as "fathers."Similar obseivations could be made in the context ofwomen's business—the gender category women (excludingmen) enables a zone of gendered procreative partnershipsinvolving mothers, fathers, and country. Together, women withwomen and men with men. but also together as "mother"and "father," people dance up the fertility of the country. The

42 work of bringing life forth is thus the work of men and women,separately from each other and in conjunction with theircountry.

Contemplation of ObjectsProcreative work is embodied praotioe, and is shot throughwith uncertainty, unpredictability, contingency Men andwomen carry out some of this work in their separate spheres,and they work with their permeable bodies to generate flows:from within to outside the body, and from outside the Earthto inside as people's feet and blood imprint the ground. Atthe same time, they call forth the life that is contained within

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FIG 2Wu^iian's ground palnvlng and sacrea object,displayed (or men and women, Central Ml. WedgeStation. Photo: D. Rose.'

43

the Earth and the sacred sites. The very permeability of theEarth enables life to be brought forth into oonneotion, and thevery permeability of living bodies enables new life and newoonnections,

When women do ritual, they work with saored objeotssome of which are in the shape of digging sticks. They makethe designs on the ground and they penetrate the design andthe Earth with their sacred sticks (Watson 2003). The designand the implanted pole become a focal point of powa- andflow.

Visually and imaginatively we can see a lot of gendercomplexity in women's ritual work with this and similarobjects. Another layer of complexity might be apprehendedwhen we consider that in Victoria River languages and ritualsthe pole is identified with a snake as well as a penis, and thatsnakes are associativeiy linked with a variety of meanings thatinclude not only penis, but also testes or clitoris, according tocontext (Berndt 1950: 33^4, 51).

Figure 1 siiows two clap sticks, one male and one female;sticks like this are suitable for use in either open or secretcontexts. As 1 look at them, I consider how similar they areto each other, and how that similarity enhances the idea thatit takes two—for music, as for procreation. Rgure 2 showsa more differentiated set of gender imagery—the sacredpole and the circular design which is penetrated. Culturalknowledge ambiguates the obvious differentiation, not onlybecause this is women's work, but because the Earth is notbeing impregnated, but rather is being sung up into the worldof ephemeral life.

In sum, the gendering of oountry, sites, human bodies,substances, ritual, and objects serves both to sustaindifference and to work procreatively with difference. Thecomplexity of gendering ties here: that the joy of ritual workdraws people and their substances and objects into a fullnessof male-female/father-mother action.

The World of FlowIn 1988 I was working with a group of Victoria River peopleon a claim to land brought before the /y^original LandCommissioner under the Aboriginal Land Rights (NorthernTerritory) Act 7976. There were women's sites within theclaim area, and the women had secret ceremonies for theDreamings. Women wanted to prove their relationship tocountry in the deepest way possible, and that meant doingsecret business. The Land Commissioner, a Federal CourtJudge, was a man, and for the ceremonial action to countas evidence it would have to be witnessed not only by himbut by the lawyers (all men) including those representingopponents to the claim. The women decided that in spite ofthe Law excluding men, they would make an exception. Onthe morning of the day of their ceremony the men all wentoff on site visits that did not require women, and the womenall went off to the area where they had been preparing aceremony ground. They had brought the sacred objectsfrom the keeping place, and their plan was to spend the

day preparing for ceremony, which would be witnessedin the late afternoon. Not long after we had assembled allthe women and their gear the senior women told me therewas a problem. They wanted me to go back to camp andconvey the message that they had decided not to show theceremony after all. As they explained: "From Dreaming rightup till now no man has looked at this. We can't lose thatLaw." They spent the rest of the day doing the ceremony—forthe country and Dreamings. for themselves, and for the non-Aboriginal women who had been invited to the business. Ithad no evidentiary vaiue other than that I was able to note forthe record that it had occurred.

I did what I was told to do that morning, and as I drovethe truck back to camp I was burning witii the lack of equitythat this interculturaf encounter imposed upon women. Butalong with my indignation at the iniustice of the procedure, mythoughts also were drifting around my ambiguous position.On earlier occasions women had brought me into secret/sacred business and my teacher Jessie Wirrpa had instructedme: "You are inside the Law now. You've got to take careof this." "Taking care" meant working on land claims, andthus for me meant being enough on the outside to serve asconsultant and expert witness, and to be the go-betweencarrying messages back and forth between the main campand the gender restricted ceremony ground.

The ethics of this inside-outside position are not newto anthropologists, but they are forever challenging. Howto sustain secrecy and at the same time acknowledgeporosity and flow? Does "taking care" include finding waysfor information to move differently in the world and for theiife-giving force of blood to find new sites of power? Alongwith dancing blood into the ground, is it perhaps possiblealso to inscribe it into texts? Flowing across cultures, events,and a multiplicity of media, can blood affirm a metaphysicsof birth, motion, and metamorphosis in a world that seemsincreasingly dominated by death?

notes and references44

' Women's religious practice is •' Montague (1974) devoted adiscussed extensively in Bell 1983; major study to "Coming intoBerndt 1950; Dussart 2000; Gross being among the Australian1980; Hamilton 1981; Kaberry Aborigines." He limited his focus to1939; Rose 2001; Watson 2003. questions of beliefs about humanMerlan (1988) provides a critical procreation, thereby approachingoverview of the literature at that but never managing to engagetime. with the larger issues of life in all

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its ciifferentiation, connectivity, ancjpermeability.

^ The metamorphosis thatworks across boundaries ofinside-outside, or life containedand life brought forth is central to amultitude of cxssmogonies aroundthe worid (for example, see Lovinand Reynolds 1985).

' Other forms of blood inciude theblood of animal Dreamings, suchas the famous Parachiina ocherwhich is variously identified asbiood from a Dingo giving birth topups and blcrad from Emus whowere chased by Dingoes and whotransformed into ocher (McBryde2000), A parallel study couid focuson the interactive presence ofsemen, in sites and in ceremony.Nancy Munn (1973) deals elegantlywith semen and its transformationsin her study cf Warlpiri culture.

^ Buckley's and Gottlieb's S'OOG'hAagic (1988) is an exemplarytext that holds to the possibilityof making cross-cuitural andcomparative sense of humanexperience. It may be a measureof the embeddedness of ideas ofpollution in Western thought thatsome scholars find in Btood Magica message of the universality ofblood as poiiutant, for example,Linken999;73).

^ There is a body of literature, toolarge to be discussed here andespecially notable in the contextof Papua New Guinea, on men'suse of blood in ways that connecttheir own blood to menstrualblood. Equally, permeability iswell discussed in some of thatliterature (for a recent example, seeBonnemere 2004).

' A similar object is pictured onthe cover of Bell's 1983 bcx)k.Daughters ot tiie Dreaming.

" There is a large literature on thistopic, but no one has probed thecomplexities of these cross-culturalencounters more fully and withgreater critical insight than Povinelli(1993:2002).

Bell, D. 1983. Daughters of theDreaming. Melbourne: McPheeGribble.

Berndt, C. 1950, Women'sChanging Ceremonies in NorthernAustralia. Paris: Hermann et Cie,Editeurs.

Bonnemere, P. 2004. Wom&iasUnseen Characters: Male Ritual inPapua New Guinea. Philadelphia:University cf Pennsylvania Press,

Buckley, T. and A. Gottlieb, 1983.A Critical Appraisal of Theories ofMenstrual Symbolism, In Stoodtragic: The Anthropology ofMenstruation. T Buckfey and A,Gottlieb, eds, Berkeley: Univwsttyof Califomia Press, 3-50.

Douglas, M, 1966. Purity andDanger. London; RoutlecJge &Kegan Paui.

Dussart, F, 2000. The Politics ofRitual in an Aboriginal Settlement:Kinship, Gender, and the Currencyot Knowledge. Washington, DC:Smithsonian Institution Press,

Gross, R. 1980. Menstruationand Childbirth as Ritual andReligious Experience amcng NativeAustralians. In Unspoken Worlds;Women's Religious Lives in Non-Westem Cultures. N. Falk and R,Gross, eds. San Francisco: Harper& Row, 277-92,

Grosz, E. 1994. Volatile Bodies:Toward a Corporeal Feminism.Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Hamilton, A, 1981, A ComplexStrategical Situation: Gender andPower in Aboriginal Australia.In Australian Women: FeministPerspectives. N, Grieve and P.Grimshaw, eds. Melbourne: OxfordUniversity Press, 69-85,

Howell, N. 1979, Demographyot the Dobe IKung. New York:Academic Press,

Kaberry, P 1939, Abong/na/Woman; Sacred and Protane.London: George Routledge andSons,

Knight, C. 1988. MenstrualSynchrcny and the AustralianRainbow Snake, In Blood Magic:The Anthropology of Menstruation.T. Buckley and A. Gottlieb, eds.Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 232-55.

Kristeva, J, 1982. Powers ofHorror: An Essay on Abjection.

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New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

Unke, U. 1999. Blood and Nation:The European Aesthetics ofRace. Piiiiadelphia: University ofPennsyivania Press.

Lovin, R. and F. Reynolds. 1985.Cosmogony and Ethical Order:New Studies ir) ComparativeEthics. Ciiicago: University ofChicago Press.

Magowan, F. 2001. Waves ofKnowing: Polymorphism and Co-substantive Essences in YoinguSea Cosmology, T7ie AustralianJournal of Indigenous Education 29(1): 22-35.

McBryde. I. 2000. Travellers inStoried Landscapes: A CaseStudy in Exchange and Heritage.Aboriginal History 2A: 152-74,

Merian, F. 1988, Gender inAboriginal Social Life: A Review.In Social Anthropology andAustralian Aboriginal Studies, aContemporary Overview. R. Berndtand R, Tonkinson, eds. Canberra:Australian Institute of AboriginalStudies, 15-76.

Michaels. E. 1986 The AboriginalInvention of Television in centralAustralia 1982-1986. Canberra:Australian Institute of AboriginalStudies.

Montague, A, 1974 [1937], Cominginto Being among the AustralianAborigines. London: Routledge SKegan Paul.

Munn, N. ^973. WalbiriIconography: GraphicRepresentation and CulturalSymbolism in a Central AustralianSociety. Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press.

Povinelli, E. 1993. Labor's Lot:The Power, History and Cultureof Aboriginal Action. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

— . 2002. Tfie Cunning ofRecognition: Indigenous Alterlties

and the Making of AustralianMulticuHuralism. Durham, NC:Duke University Press.

Rose, D. 2000. Dingo MakesUs Human: Life and Land In anAustralian Aboriginal Culture.Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

-—-. 2001. The Silence and Powerof Women, in Words and Silences:Aboriginal Women. Land andPower. P. Brock, ed. Sydney; Allen&Unwin, 92-116.

— . 2003. Dance of theEphemeral: Australian AboriginalReligion of Place. In Experiencesof Place. M, Macdonald, ed.Cambridge, MA; Center for theStudy ot World Religions, HarvardDivinity School. Harvard University.163-86.

— . 2004, Reports from a WildCountry: Ethics for Decolonisation.Sydney: University of New SouthWales Press.

Rosengarten. M, 1996. Bloodand the Fragility ot Identity. Ph.D.Thesis, University ot Technology,Sydney.

Stotz, G, 1993, "Kurdungurlugot to Drive Toyota": DifferentialColonizing Process among theWarlpiri. Ph,D. Thesis, DeakinUniversity, Geelong.

Swain, T 1993. A Place forStrangers: towards a Historyof Australian Aboriginal Being.Cambridge: Cambhdge UniversityPress.

Watson, C. 2003. Piercing theGround: Balgo Women's Imaget^aking and Relationship toCountry. Fremantle, WA: FremantleArts Centre Press.

Wild. S. 1977/8. Men as Women:Female Danoe Symbolism inWalbiri Men'3 Rituals. DanceResearch Joumal 10 (1); 14-22.

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