Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture

by Deborah Bird Rose

• ISBN13: 9780521794848
• ISBN10: 0521794846
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-08-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This original ethnography brings indigenous people’s stories into conversations around troubling questions of social justice and environmental care. Deborah Bird Rose lived for two years with the Yarralin community in the Northern Territory’s remote Victoria River Valley. Her engagement with the people’s stories and their action in the world leads her to this analysis of a multi-centred poetics of life and land. The book speaks to issues that are of immediate and broad concern today: traditional ecological knowledge, kinship between humans and other living things, colonising history, environmental history, and sacred geography. Now in paperback, this award-winning exploration of the Yarralin people is available to a whole new readership. The boldly direct and personal approach will be illuminating and accessible to general readers, while also of great value to experienced anthropologists.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vii
List of figures	viii
List of maps	ix
Remembrance	1	(24)
Expectations	25	(17)
Earthborn Law	42	(16)
Living and Dead Bodies	58	(16)
An Emu is not a Catfish	74	(16)
The Gift of Life	90	(16)
Dream Country	106	(17)
To Have and to Hold	123	(22)
Freehold	145	(20)
Testing	165	(21)
Jacky Jacky	186	(17)
Life Time	203	(15)
This Earth	218	(18)
Postscript	236	(2)
References	238	(8)
Index	246