Is the aboriginal landscape sentient? Animism, the new animism and the Warlpiri.

Peterson, Nicolas

It is increasingly common for anthropologists writing about Aboriginal people's relationships to land to use phrases like 'the sentient landscape' (eg, Biddle 2007:13; Poirier 2005:10, 57, 120,153; Povinelli 1993:139, 1995: 133; Rose 1996: 7) or the 'land is sentient' (Povinelli 1995:507). This may be partly influenced by the renewed interest in animism among anthropologists more generally (Bird-David 1999; Clammer, Poirier and Schwimmer 2004; Descola 1992; Viveiros de Castro 1998) which in turn is not unrelated to the rise of interest, outside anthropology, in the relations between humans and material objects in science and technology studies, and actor network theory. These latter studies, of which Bruno Latour is a key exponent, ascribe agency, but not intention, to material objects (eg, Latour 2005). Another group interested in animism, is also outside anthropology, and sometimes they refer to themselves as the new animists (Harvey 2005). These new animists draw directly on a wide body of ethnographic literature, some of which refers specifically to central Australia.

The new animists' use of anthropological writings raises at least two questions: how accurate are the anthropological accounts they draw on in translating the views and understandings of the people they are working with; and whether there is an unwitting collusion between the anthropologists and the new animists. While the anthropologists do not refer to the new animists' work, some of them seem to derive inspiration from common influences such as the deep ecology movement, and other anti-modernist views.

Here I want to set out these new animist views and then consider how they relate to central Australian and Warlpiri ethnography. First, however, I will provide a few examples of the anthropological usages in respect of Australia.

THE SENTIENT LANDSCAPE

What is meant by phrases like the 'sentient landscape' is often unclear and is variable between authors. Jennifer Biddle uses the phrase in writing about Warlpiri speakers:

Central Desert art commands our attention in explicit ways. An energy emanates from contemporary artworks by women, a life force that is irreducibly bodily, palpably visceral, mesmerising in its effects. Such effects are not only the result of culturally distinctive sensibilities but are being harnessed, honed even, by contemporary painting techniques. As I explore, such bodily responses are crucial to the intercultural work that these paintings perform.

In effect I am not saying anything that hasn't been said countless times by Aboriginal people, as well as anthropologists and art advisors: that country is sentient, alive, sensuous to those who can recognise it and know it (Biddle 2007:12 -13).

No illumination is provided as to what is meant by country being 'sentient, alive, or sensuous' to selected humans, nor whether this view implies an animated flora, fauna and/or topography, or whether this should be understood simply as literary licence.

On the other hand Sylvie Poirier, writing about the neighbouring Kukatja is explicit: 'When it is said that some rocks at Kutal are the ears of the ancestors that dwell there, this should be understood in a literal sense and not as a metaphor' (2005:153). Since rocks are rocks and not ears although they might be the transformation of ears, the implication of this statement, it seems, is that the Aboriginal people believe that rocks can hear and are therefore animated.

Elizabeth Povinelli is clearer about the situation among the people of Cox Peninsula west of Darwin when she writes: 'The everydayness of their labor-action is swept within the suprahuman realm of a sentient landscape populated with ancestors and totemic beings' (Povinelli 1993: 133). That is, when she refers to a sentient landscape, what she is referring to is a landscape believed by the people to be populated by ancestral spirits with human-like form that live among the rocks and trees. However, in other places the phrase seems to have different implications. Thus, 'Because the country is sentient, the ground, for Belyuen Aborigines, is always potentially liable to act for its own reasons' (1993:150).

This ambiguousness is a common feature of such writings, nowhere more so than in the following, taken from Deborah Rose's book Nourishing Terrains:

 Country in Aboriginal English is not only a common noun but also a
 proper noun. People talk about country in the same way that they
 would talk about a person: they speak to country, sing to country,
 visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and
 long for country. People say that country knows, hears, smells,
 takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy.... country is a living
 entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness,
 and a will toward life' (1996:7).

Consequently one may ask whether this implies an Indigenous animist view or is it simply an impressionistic and metaphorically rich account seeking to create a certain aura. If the country does hear and smell, is it the soil, the flora, the fauna or all of them and is the 'will toward life' something other than what is commonly understood when plants and animals are spoken of as 'being alive'? There is ample scope here for varied interpretations.

THE NEW ANIMISM

New animists are people who Graham Harvey, an academic at the Open University in Britain, says, recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human (2005:xi). It follows that there are fish, bird, and plant persons, and even it seems stone persons (Harvey 2005:102-106) and there could be kettle persons too in some circumstances (2005:110-111). Indeed the March 2007 issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2007:230) carries a review of a book titled, Do glaciers listen? which speaks of sentient glaciers (Cruikshank 2005) echoing the title of Elizabeth Povinelli's paper, 'Do rocks listen?' (1995). Chapter a of Harvey's book is devoted to Australia with an emphasis on the desert (2005).

Harvey makes a distinction between the old animists, of which more later, and the new animists. According to him the new animists are concerned with knowing how to behave appropriately towards persons who are not human: that is, it is about respecting the living world. The new animism refers to:

 the widespread indigenous and increasingly popular 'alternative'
 understanding that humans share this world with a wide range of
 persons, only some of whom are human. While it may be important to
 know whether one is encountering a person or an object, the really
 significant question for animists of the 'new' kind is how persons
 are to be treated or acted towards. Discussion of these discourses,
 points of view, practices and possibilities aids attempts to
 understand worldviews and lifeways that are different in various
 ways from those typically inculcated and more or less taken for
 granted in Western modernity (2005:xi-xii).

It will come as no surprise that people who do not share these new animist views are considered not only to have the facts wrong but also to carry assumptions that preserve colonialist and dualist views of the world (Harvey 2005:xii).

According to Harvey, persons are:

 ... those with whom other persons interact with varying degrees of
 reciprocity. Persons may be spoken with. Objects, by contrast, are
 usually spoken about. Persons are volitional, relational, cultural
 and social beings. They demonstrate intentionality and agency with

 varying degrees of autonomy and freedom. That some persons look
 like objects is of little more value to an understanding of animism
 than the notion that some acts, characteristics, qualia and so on
 may appear human-like to some observers. Neither material form nor
 spiritual or mental faculties are definitive (except in the 'old
 animism' where they are the problem). People become animists by
 learning how to recognise persons and, far more important, how to
 engage with them. The ubiquity of terms like respect and
 reciprocity in animist discourse demonstrates that the key
 identifier of a person is someone who responds to or initiates
 approaches to other persons (2005:xvii).

For those not versed in the Australian literature on totemism, a superficial knowledge of accounts of a foundation period, in which ancestral beings are identified with human and nonhuman organic and inorganic forms, could be seen to support the foregoing views. (1)

THE OLD ANIMISM

For Edward Tylor (1929(1): 425) 'animism' simply designated the belief in the existence of spiritual beings, and thus included 'belief in souls ... in controlling deities and subordinate spirits ... [that were the focus of] some kind of active worship' (1871 see 1929 (1): 427). Tylor found, from his survey of the literature, that virtually all peoples had a belief in ghost-souls, or spirits (1929 (1): 428-457). He goes on to say that 'Plants, partaking with animals [in] the phenomena of life and death, health and sickness, not unnaturally have some kind of soul ascribed to them' (474) and among the simplest animistic religions the theory of the soul extends to inanimate objects (477).

As Brian Morris points out (1987:100), in Tylor's view, ideas about soul/spirits were not the outcome of irrational thinking, although he did see animism and science as mutually exclusive, but as George Stocking points out Tylor thought animism was fundamentally in error (Stocking 1987: 192). Anthropologists like Nurit Bird-David, and non-anthropological new animists like Harvey believe on the contrary that it is Tylor who is in error.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL REVIVAL OF INTEREST IN ANIMISM

Nurit Bird-David's paper, 'Animism revisited: personhood, environment and relational epistemology' (1999) not only stirred the interest of some anthropologists, but also of Graham Harvey, who has drawn upon it extensively. (2) In this paper, Bird-David reconfigures animism in to what she calls a 'relational epistemology'. Bird-David reports that the Nayaka of southern India, a group of less than 70 people, who hunt, gather and trade in forest products (1999: s72) have a belief in devaru. Devaru objectify sharing relationships between Nayaka and other 'beings'. Thus a hill devaru objectifies Nayaka relations with the hill, making known the relationships between Nayaka and a particular hill (1999: s73). She goes on to say:

 Nayaka maintain social relationships with other [mainly inanimate]
 beings not because, as Tylor holds, they a priori consider them
 persons. As and when and because they engage in and maintain
 relationships with other beings, they constitute them as kinds of
 person: they make them "relatives" by sharing with them and thus
 make them persons (1999:s73).

Bird-David expands upon the notion of relating to the environment:

 If "cutting trees into parts" epitomizes the modernist
 epistemology, "talking with trees", I argue, epitomizes Nayaka
 animistic epistemology. "Talking" is shorthand for a two-way
 responsive relatedness with a tree--rather than "speaking" one-way
 to it, as if it could listen and understand. "Talking with" stands
 for attentiveness to variances and invariances in behaviour and
 response of things in states of relatedness and for getting to know
 such things as they change through the vicissitudes over time of
 the engagement with them. To "talk with a tree"--rather than "cut
 it down"--is to perceive what it does as one acts towards it,
 being aware concurrently of changes in oneself and the tree. It is
 expecting response and responding, growing into mutual
 responsiveness and, furthermore, possibly into mutual
 responsibility (1999:s77).

She goes on to say that framing the environment relationally is not the only way Nayaka know their environment but it does enjoy an authoritative status, not just among them, she believes, but among hunter-gatherers generally, with the apparent, single exception of Indigenous Australians (1999:s78). Near the end of her paper she has this to say:

 Furthermore, relational epistemologies function in diverse contexts
 where other epistemologies enjoy authority, including Western
 contexts (to a much greater extent than the authoritative status of
 science permits). When ... we animate the computers we use, the
 plants we grow, and the cars we drive, we relationally frame them.
 We learn what they do in relation to what we do, how they respond
 to our behaviour, how they act towards us, what their situational
 and emergent behaviour (rather than their constitutive matter) is.
 As Nayaka get to know animated aspects of their environment, so we
 get to know these animated things by focusing on our relatedness
 with them within the confines of that relatedness from a relational
 viewpoint (1999:s78).

It is an empirical question as to whether the Nayaka, or any other group, has a modernist understanding of nature and the person, but I find this account a little confusing, especially Bird-David's attempt to clarify the nature of relational epistemologies by reference to Western contexts. Nowhere in her paper does she give any consideration as to whether the Nayaka are speaking figuratively or metaphorically.

It is fascinating too that once again (see Murdock 1968:336) Indigenous Australians appear to be an exception to a broad generalisation about foragers, as far as Bird-David is

concerned. They are not listed by her as animists, yet they were amongst the classic cases of the old animism because of their elaborate totemic rituals, and they surely manifest what she calls relational epistemologies or ontologies that are central to this new animism. (3)

Nurit Bird-David and Graham Harvey, like Sylvie Poirier, Jennifer Biddle and Debbie Rose (1998), are not only concerned with deep ecology, but with what they see as the problematic aspects of influential accounts of Aboriginal religion. While the latter group are dissatisfied with WEH Stanner's (1966) structuralist attempts to understand Aboriginal religion on its own terms (Morphy 1988:243), Bird-David and Harvey are also critical of anthropological accounts of Aboriginal ontology such as that by Nancy Munn. In particular they are critical of her paper, 'The transformation of subjects into objects' (1970) in which she examines the way ancestral beings, in her understanding of Warlpiri and Pitjantjatjara understandings, transform themselves into features of the landscape through the processes of metamorphosis, imprinting and externalisation (1970:142). Munn argues that any feature or object created by an ancestor in this way is:

 thought to contain something of [the ancestor] himself within it,
 and the various creative modes all imply a consubstantial
 relationship between the ancestor and his objectifications....The
 number of distinctive ancestors is indefinite, and the objects they
 create constitute, in effect, the total, non-sentient environment
 as epitomized by the country itself (1970:142-143).

Harvey comments that Munn seems to find it difficult to 'escape seeing land, boards, paintings and so on as objects. It seems easier', he says, ' to convert indigenous language into the language of symbol and metaphor, in which a hill symbolises an ancestor, a board is a sign of their presence and stories are metaphorical' (2005:73). He then goes on to quote Bird-David as saying, 'certainly the "native [Australian] experience" is fundamentally rooted "in a view of the country and the material world as animate entities"' (2005:74) preferring her assertions about a part of the world in which she has not done research to Munn's ethnographically based work.

In Munn's view what is being inherited via ancestral transformation is not simply the moral order and an authority structure associated with the superordinate beings that have come before, but the a priori grounds upon which the possibilities of this order are built. That is the fundamental:

 mode of orientation to objects in which experience of self is
 firmly anchored in objective forms incorporating moral constraints,
 that is being transmitted down the generations ... in which symbols
 of collectivity are constantly recharged with intimations of self
 ... How then shall we interpret the psychological grounds of this
 orientational mode? An older Anthropology regarded orientations of
 this type as indicative of a 'confusion of categories' or a failure
 to distinguish the subjective from the objective, the self from the
 object world. On the contrary, it should be apparent from the
 present analysis that this orientation is grounded in the awareness
 of subject-object distinctions (1970:157-158).

Thus Munn sees her analysis as rescuing Warlpiri and Pitjantjatjara people from misconceived 19th century ideas about hunter-gatherers, while Graham Harvey and Nurit Bird-David see her as separating them from 19th century insights, with her modernist dualisms. One might ignore the criticism because it is based in assertion and lacking in evidence, but for the spate of ethnographers who use phrases like the sentient environment when writing about the Warlpiri and their close neighbours (eg, Biddle 2007; Poirier 2005; Rose 1998).

None of the above recent writers engages with the work of Francesca Merlan who although not writing about people in the Warlpiri region provides a fascinating account of Mangarrayi people's relationship, mainly with trees, in the Roper River area in a way that is similar to the Warlpiri practice of identifying some individuals with particular trees, but not as elaborated as among the Mangarrayi. The Mangarrayi directly link trees, at localities made by particular creator figures, to living members of patrilines of a particular semi-moiety (1982:147). Merlan makes the L6vi-Straussian point that while a totemic creator being may loosely be considered as a prototype of a species, people made a clear distinction between the totemic creator and the existence of instances of that species on the ground; these in turn must be distinguished from the visible signs left by totemic creators' figures at particular places (1982:164). People may greet a particular named tree:

 by announcing who has come and his relation to persons represented.
 The junggayi [or ceremonial managers], however, often say that they
 have come hungry, that they require a plentiful catch, hunt, or
 harvest; they flatter warriwiyan [ancestral beings] by saying that
 they are barraj-yirrag (unique mother's property), that is without
 equal in plenty and potential. The junggayi often stroke or pat
 trees representing people and may rub them with mud as part of the
 procedure of asking for plenty and to ensure fertility of the
 locality. Thus, the warriwiyan serve as a direct link to the
 potential of localities at which they stand (1982:155)

If a named tree dies or is burnt, the named person, if living, is responsible for paying his ceremonial manager, generally a sister's son or mother's brother. It seems that it is probably some time before the person's name is transferred to another tree (1982:156). Merlan speaks of this practice as personalising rather than individualizing, the landscape, commenting that:

 It seems needlessly literal to ask whether trees and other objects
 "are" people: both people and the objects are linked with locality
 by the ... [totemic creator figure] that placed them in the social
 order. The objects are treated like people in certain ways. Easily
 perceptible natural objects are used by the Mangarrayi as a system
 of expression conventionally correlated with a certain content, the
 interconnected cultural ideas described above. This conventional
 correlation of expression with content establishes a cultural order
 in which it is meaningful for a member of the society to talk about
 links between trees (or other objects) and persons, even to the
 extent of saying that a certain tree (or any number of trees, and
 other objects) "is" a certain person. Nothing belongs to the sign
 system that is not culturally considered to represent an
 expression/content correlation of the requisite kind. Thus there
 are many available trees that do not (at least at any given moment)
 belong to the system (1982:162).

Michael Jackson gives an extended account of damage to a tree that was identified with the spirit of a number of Warlpiri men, but despite his own phenomenological orientation, he did not understand the Warlpiri to believe the tree was sentient, but rather related to the spirit of the deceased men through the sharing of the life force between them that had originated from the original founding ancestor (1995:137-155). (4) Like Munn and Merlan, Jackson uses the language of symbolism, representation and metaphor and not of sentience. These divergent views call for a review of the Warlpiri evidence.

WARLPIRI WORLD VIEW

Although there is no doubt that now, and almost certainly in classical times too, there was a diversity of beliefs, there is no question that most, if not all Warlpiri believe that they are liable to encounter non-corporeal persons in their interaction with the world. The question is whether they believe that the flora, fauna and material objects in their environment can be communicated with.

There are a number of spirits and forces in the Warlpiri world. Pilirrpa/kuntu is the soul or life force; yiwirnngi is the conception spirit or life force that is originally located in the environment; kurruwalpa are invisible beings thought by Warlpiri to be like small children, that live in big trees such as in bloodwoods, ghost-gums and river-gums, who can kill people but who can also enter into the stomachs of women and then turn into children. Manparrpa are ghosts of a dead person. Jarnpa/Jilpirda is a man with special powers to make himself invisible and equated with the Kurdaitcha. Kuuku is a term for bogeymen and used mainly to scare children. Kinki is a monster or devil that is often cannibalistic. All of these terms for spirits involve human-like forms with the exception of the pilirrpa and life force (yiwirnngi). The nature of this life force emerges from an entry in the Warlpiri dictionary related to increasing species. (5)

Ngarrmirni means 'to perform a ceremony to increase goannas, snakes, edible seeds or anything else', an operation that can be carried out in one of two ways. The dictionary provides a text from a Warlpiri person in relation to a common public way this can take place:

 People who are owners for the country concerned, who are closely
 related to it through their fathers and mothers they work on the
 Dreaming which put down some food such as yams to make it
 plentiful. They rub and rub and grind off coarse sand from those
 small stones from the Dreaming, which they then scatter in the
 direction of yam country, they throw it all over so that the yams
 will grow up everywhere, so that they will develop under the
 ground. That is how they increase them. Later when good heavy rain
 falls, the burnt off ground will turn into a yam garden.

That is, life force (yanjarra, kuruwari or kurrunpa) (6) is seen as a particle that comes from grinding two stones together, at least one of which in this case is a metamorphosis of a yam ancestor, to produce a dust that is then scattered to the four winds. (7) On the several occasions I have seen this done the action was carried out in silence or during conversational small talk. Sometimes such an increase action can simply involve brushing a particular ancestral transformation with ironwood leaves. As the above statement makes clear, nothing happens until the right conditions come along, indicating that the particles containing life-force have to be activated in some appropriate way. No reference is made to exhortations, supplications, requests or the singing of particular verses or chanting of particular formulae that would suggest that a sentient yam or seed person was being addressed. (8)

The second way in which such increase can be encouraged is through the performance of a male only ritual that involves one or more men decorated with down and dancing to the accompaniment of others singing. At the climax of what is always a brief ritual act, although after an extended period of preparation, celebrating an ancestor's actions at a locality, down from the shoulder of the decorated man is brushed off and said to infuse the surrounding environment with life-force. The songs recount the actions of the ancestor at the time of the original founding drama. There is no hint of worship or supplication in this instance either.

On some occasions, and in some localities, older Warlpiri people can be seen apparently addressing thin air. This is generally when bringing an outsider to an area for the first time. On the several occasions I have been present in such situations, when visiting places that nobody had visited for many years, or approaching a dangerous sacred site, the person speaking indicated that they were addressing ancestral spirits and/or those of deceased people closely associated with the locality as site owners (see also Rose 1996:71). On other occasions, where there is deep water, the same practice is directed towards rainbow serpents (warnayarra) conceived of as invisible spirit beings that reside at the bottom of such bodies of water.

WARLPIRI SYMBOLIC ACTION AND METAPHOR

I will focus on two aspects of Warlpiri symbolic action and metaphors as they evidence Warlpiri ontological, and cosmological understandings. (9) A key point I wish to make is quite straightforward. Symbolic activities manifest in ritual actions are usually surprisingly transparent, although this is not always evident initially, and there may be no interest or even, perhaps, awareness of this among participants in the ritual, and certainly no ready acknowledgement by them. By contrast statements about ancestral beings or those made in songs, which are understood as the words of the ancestral beings, and which can be taken by us as evidence of thinking about them, cannot always be taken literally and are not nearly so transparent.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

As an example of symbolic action I will briefly look at a Warlpiri ritual episode which makes manifest the connections between what takes place and Warlpiri cosmology. It involves what Munn calls spacetime, by which she means the nexus of relations produced out of the interaction between participants in rites and some of the related spaces they create and occupy (1996:449). These spacetime episodes illustrate, and are evidence for, aspects of Warlpiri ideas about cosmic order that Munn has explored in relation to iconography (1973).

The full sequence of Warlpiri boys' maturity rites takes place over several days and involves two occasions when people sing from dusk to dawn: in the first of these, the men, women, children and boys to be circumcised--there are generally two--gather together on the fringe of the main camp at dusk. The men sit facing east and behind them at a distance of ten metres or so sit the women facing in the same direction. Immediately behind the women is a windbreak and behind the windbreak is a small fire, besides which crouch the boys to be circumcised, each watched over by a sister's husband.

The men sing of the travels of a group of women from west to east to a place where they held an ancestral circumcision ceremony. With each verse women, including the mothers and sisters of the boys to be circumcised, get up and datace forward in a hopping style to close to the back row of seated men before returning to sit down. Each verse lasts a minute or so and is followed by 2-3 minutes of good-humoured conversation.

From time to time, the actual mothers of the two boys leave the women and move round behind the windbreak and dance around the two crouching boys for a few minutes before returning to join the other women. At dawn the boys are taken off to a secluded place and everybody else returns to the camp to sleep.

Throughout much of the night, the two boys covered in white down have been required to remain in a sphinx-like crouching position, but with their heads lowered. The small fire helps keep them warm, while their two guardians ensure they remain completely still, allowing them to stand up and stretch only occasionally. As dawn breaks the white down on the crown of the boys' heads is removed and replaced with red. Later, once the sun is up, the boys are covered in red ochre from head to toe.

In her examination of Warlpiri iconography, Munn pays particular attention to the circle, which she says can represent not only an enclosure but can also represent a three-dimensional container. If the circle is to indicate something enclosed, the nature of the enclosure needs some other element within it to indicate the kind of enclosure. So a circle with another inside it may represent a convex surface with something on top of something else, or a concave surface like a nest. A covering container is usually expressed with concentric rings or a spiral. Thus, sons crouch all night, within circles traced in the sand by their mothers' feet, suggesting foetuses. The colours also suggest the boys are being represented as foetus-like. The down covering their body is white, the colour associated with spirits, both conception spirits and those of the deceased. As dawn breaks in the east, the sun shines on the crown of their emerging heads, now red, as they begin their journey into the world.

What is striking about this vignette is how iconic the spacetime and performative aspects are on examination: they are rich, complex but deeply grounded in everyday experience. However, that may not be so evident during the performance, when so much else is going on, when events are fleeting, seen by few, and always accompanied by singing. In my experience, the participants are preoccupied with their dance movements, song verses, immediate sensual experiences and bodily states, and the great majority do not respond to a distanced overview or readily adopt another's subject position. The embeddedness of these actions in wider Warlpiri understandings is a lot more evident on reflection than in participation. (10)

ANCESTRAL BEINGS

Henry Jakamarra talking about two ancestral kangaroo beings that are his dreaming, and are associated with the introduction of male initiation, tells the story of their journey across the southern Tanami desert. At one point one of them drowns. The other one sees something:

'What is this sitting here?'

It was a type of little mouse, a little rat, somewhat related to a mouse but slightly different, called wulyu-wulyu. He approached it and picked it up. He looked at it closely.

'Ah, it has two ears, two ears and it has a tail, it has two feet, and it has a tail.' He looked at it carefully. In particular he looked at its tail.

'What will I do with this creature? I'll take it with me, I'll take it along.' He carried it to Mulyu, he carried it to Mulyu. There he remade it, he remade it completely. He made it into a kangaroo. Now that he was a kangaroo, he started to hop about. Where did he go? He went away.'....(Napaljarri and Cataldi 1994:47)

The transformation of this small animal, recognisably like the surviving kangaroo, with its two ears, two feet and a tail closely inspected, is clearly a metaphorical account of making a boy into a man. This is suggested by the association of this story with initiation, a little animal is made into a big animal like the protagonist, and later on the two together sing the initiation songs to make others into young men (see 1994:51).

It is a very common feature of song cycles, which are seen to be an ancestral inheritance of songs originally sung by the ancestral beings during their foundation travels, that many of the verses use the first person singular. Thus as the ancestral party of women sung about in the initiation ceremony crosses the track of the above two kangaroos much further south, the men sing:

Yilimintirrirna karri
Two legs--1SG subj. stand

Wawirrirna parnkaparnka
Red kangaroo-1SGsubj. run-redup.

I, red kangaroo, stand up on my two legs and run off (11)

No one would suggest that the singers think they are literally ancestral beings, any more than Bororo literally think they are red parrots (Smith 1972). Indeed, during the course of this, and many other song cycles, the singers adopt several different subject positions, the complexity of which affirms the highly intellectual nature of Warlpiri ontological thinking. Clearly the use of this kind of language is expressive and may evoke complex feelings and identifications in some individuals in particular because the songs link place, ancestral actions, and often with known individuals, they may create the sense of the landscape being almost alive, yet the ancestral beings and the stories about them are spoken of in resolutely human terms.

CONCLUSION

This brings us to the heart of the issues: do these beliefs and practices constitute animism? While it is potentially an interesting analytical approach to conceptualise things as possible persons, as the new animists do, because it may be helpful in seeing what would not have been seen otherwise, the new animists' accounts of the relationships between people and things lose subtlety, and introduce misleading speculation. It is significant that their ideas are almost always invoked in the context of a ritual or in reference to one. Even if people speak to trees, it is the social relations between people that are the bedrock of ritual, not the ritually engendered relationships in the special circumstances of particular ritual enactments. One cannot leap from these highly specific circumstances of particular ritual enactments to the everyday ontological significance of trees acquiring personhood.

So what may be an analytically useful strategy should not lead to presumptions about people's ontology.

Nobody today is writing about a primitive mentality but some people are asserting things about Aboriginal people's perception of the world that are unsupported by ethnographic evidence. We know that humans go in for believing, and often find each other's beliefs strange if not unbelievable, but the evidence that normatively Warlpiri, or other desert Aboriginal people believe or believed that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are humans or that plants and trees have sensibilities, is lacking.

It is worth recalling what Graham Harvey (2005:xvii) says that people holding animist views mean by persons:

 ... those with whom other persons interact with varying degrees of
 reciprocity. Persons may be spoken with. Objects, by contrast, are
 usually spoken about. Persons are volitional, relational, cultural
 and social beings. They demonstrate intentionality and agency with
 varying degrees of autonomy and freedom. That some persons look
 like objects is of little more value to an understanding of animism
 than the notion that some acts, characteristics, qualia and so on
 may appear human-like to some observers.

Writing of the Warlpiri view of the desert landscape as sentient easily leads to a confusion between their perception of the landscape as being occupied by the spirits of human ancestors and other human-like spirit beings, and the understanding that they hold animistic beliefs about plants, animals and inanimate objects. It fails to reflect the complexity of their highly intellectual and richly metaphorical ontology, replacing it with an overly literal 'relational' ontology.

As Durkheim long ago perceived Aboriginal practice does not make the totemic animal sacred, but only objects like sacred boards and other things that stand for the totemic ancestors, which are at the centre of religious life. Their conception of life force has a lot more in common with the idea of sperm than it does with a world filled with sperm-persons. Deep ecology and other anti-modernist views seem influential here and until we have some substantive evidential base for Warlpiri, or other Aboriginal, animist views, what we know points in the direction of a variety of ancestor oriented religion. (12) As to the new animism, where it is not the old animism, it seems to be either the product of a substantial, if well meaning, empathetic muddle in the Australian context, or confusing literary licence.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is a modified version of the Joel Kahn Annual Anthropology Lecture given at La Trobe University in May 2009. An early version was presented at the ANU Joint Staff seminar. I would like to thank Long Paddy Jakamarra White, in particular, for his interest and persistence in helping me gain some understanding of the richness and complexity of Warlpiri religious life. I would also like to thank Georgia Curran, who worked with myself, Mary Laughren and Stephen Wild on recording, transcribing and translating Warlpiri song cycles with assistance from many Warlpiri people, but especially Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan and Thomas Jangala Rice on an Australian Research Council Linkage grant LP0560567 in which our partners were the Central Land Council and the Janganpa Association. I have also benefited from discussions with John Carty, Chris Gregory, Howard Morphy, Mary Laughren, and Ben Smith. I would like to thank the people at the lecture and the seminar for their comments. I am especially indebted to Don Gardner and Michael Houseman for close and challenging readings, from very different perspectives, and also to John Morton and David Nash for helpful comments. The reports of three engaged reviewers of this paper have strengthened it.

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NOTES

(1.) However, it is clear in many cases that not only were these ancestral beings humans first and foremost, even if endowed with shape changing powers (eg. see Rose 1996: 29; Strehlow 1947:7-9), but as Phillipe Descola has emphasised, the 'pure form' of totemism in Australia, in which a distinction is made between species as a class concept, from individual members of a species, is rare and distinct from animic systems, as he calls them, although in his view animic systems are most common in hunting societies (1996:94). The absence of large and dangerous animals in Australia may relate to this difference.

(2.) The relatively recent discussion of animism in the South American context around the concept of perspectivism is quite different from the issues discussed in this paper. By perspectivism is meant, viewing the world as inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human and non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view (see Viveiros De Castro 1998:469). This is not the old animism but a new animism, which can be defined as an ontology that postulates the social character of relations between humans and non-humans (1998:473).

(3.) The issue here is whether animism is an ontology concerned with being and conceptions of reality, rather than an epistemology concerned with knowledge and knowing as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro points out in his comment on Bird-David's (1999:s79; see also 1998).

(4.) Interestingly at the important soakage of Yilkardi a dead tree was identified with a deceased traditional owneron my last visit although to my knowledge it was not identified with him thirty years earlier when he had been alive.

(5.) All of the definitions in this paragraph are taken from the Warlpiri dictionary.

(6.) For some evidence of this view see Mountford 1968:73.

(7.) Writing of the Arrernte/Aranda, southeastern neighbours of the Warlpiri, Strehlow (1947:17-18) calls these particles life-cells or life-atoms.

(8.) On one occasion recently I witnessed a woman rubbing a stone to increase witchetty grubs at a site for which her husband was the senior owner (kirda), but which, because of infirmity, he was unable to walk to.

(9.) This is a complex area and my limited knowledge of Warlpiri certainly means that I am not in a position to provide a comprehensive account of metaphor in Warlpiri language and life. Further there is the question of how metaphors relate to individual perceptions of the world: they can, of course, have nothing to do with them. Yet it would be a radical step to say the core metaphors and symbols shed no light on these issues.

(10.) Howard Morphy has addressed this issue of coherence in respect of Yolngu understandings of their rituals. He comments that participants are concentrating on reproducing the correct form, rather than reading meaning into the actions (1994:137) and that the coherence of ritual events is more apparent retrospectively for both anthropologists and senior participants (1994:140). He also suggests that the meaning of ritual episodes 'must always have varied on an individual basis according to experience, personality, knowledge and so on. In times of rapid social change, however, each generation's experience is often radically different from the previous generation's' (1994:138).

(11.) I thank Georgia Curran for this example derived from her fieldwork during the ARC Linkage project on Warlpiri Songlines.

(12.) Cree animism (eg. see Tanner 1979) has been drawn on by JohnBradley in an ethnographically unconvincing way in his PhD (1996) thesis by suggesting a parallel between Cree hunters and their relationships with caribou, and Yanyula and dugong.