Finding Spirit

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264
Finding spirit
Ontological monism in an Australian
Aboriginal desert world today
Ute Eickelkamp, University of Sydney
Anthropologys philosophical interests of late invite reflection on subject-object relationships

under duress. I suggest herein lies an opportunity to recover and engage through the prism
of ethnography the heritage of modern philosophies of mind and nature. Taking tentative
steps in that direction I venture to discern epistemic alignments between the self-world
relationship as envisaged by the Anangu living at Pukatja in the eastern part of Australias
Western Desert, Friedrich Schellings idea of a first nature, and Sigmund Freuds notion of
the life and death instincts. My discussion, focused on the emergent Anangu perspectives
on nature, explores an ontological monism facing uncertainty. I approach its vicissitudes
by examining the metaphoricity in the Indigenous figuring of the link between spirit and
being, including inflections through Christianity that the Anangu are juxtaposing with the
reality of Dreamings.
Keywords: Central Australia, ontological monism, nature, Christianity, marginality,
romantic philosophy, psychoanalysis, metaphor
Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind the invisible Nature.

Friedrich Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, 1797
Tjukurpa mantatja [Story of the land/Dreaming] cannot be given up, spirit is bound to it.
Big Dreamings are inside the ground.
Senior Anangu man, 2015
In Genesis, life was in the still water and it began to movelike a baby in the tummy.
Peter Nyaningu, Anangu Minister of the Uniting Church of Australia, 2014
his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Ute Eickelkamp.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.019
Ute Eickelkamp 236
Introduction
Australian Aboriginal metaphysics appear unconcerned with nature and its be-
yond, or with explanations of being as being, or with questions about First Prin-
ciples. Yet if there are no verbs or nouns in the Western Desert language (nor in
many other Australian languages) signifying either on (being) or physis (nature),
the complex totemic worldview that the Anangu call Tjukurpa, what is commonly
referred to as the Dreaming,1 is nevertheless an expression of a distinctive cosmo-
onto-logical orientation. Its object is to grasp beingor more precisely, a being or
beingsas dynamic localized presence. Such is expressed at the most basic lingual
level in the postural modalities in which particular Dreamings endure in their situ-
ated singularitynyinanyi (sit), tjilinyanyi (squat), pupanyi (crouch), ngaranyi (be
in a standing position), ngarinyi (be in a lying position), kumpini (be concealed),
and so forth. In its totality, Tjukurpa is unfolding across all time, from the be-
ginnings of the phenomenal world into the future, assimilating new phenomena
along the way. The temporal flow of connections is bidirectional. On the one hand,
people look back to follow the laws established by Dreaming beings who shaped
the land and brought forth their human and nonhuman progeny, languages, and
customs. On the other, Dreamings look forward in time by following people and
other life forms; they incarnate themselves in each generation anew, enter ritual
space, and erupt into the everyday. This temporal dynamic is closely connected
to yet another movement: the Dreamings indexical being between presence and
absence in the register of the mark, imprint, or trace (Munn 1970; Biddle 2001;
Glowczewski 2007; Varzoon-Morel 2016). Simultaneously being there and not be-
ing there, the trace exists through concealment and revelation. Correlative is the
human effort to bring forth and reveal (utini) through reflection, recollection, and
mobile iterations in the forms of mark-making on ground, skin, and canvas, ritu-
al song and dance, dreams, and visions, what lies beneath even the most solid of
surfacesspirit.
For the Anangu, the arrival of Christian missionaries in the 1930s altered the
epistemic landscape, and many have since embarked on a journey of searching
reflections about what the Good News of the Bible might mean for their long-
held ideas about the life forces. For the anthropologist, this reflexivity invites com-
parison with other Indigenous communities engaging and interpreting Christian
spirituality in their own terms (e.g., Magowan 2016 on Yolngu performance). My
primary interest here, however, is to extend the comparative hermeneutic beyond
Indigenous contexts. I will have occasion to draw on Friedrich Schellings ideal-
ism of nature2 and on Sigmund Freuds metapsychology of life and death, keeping
1. The polysemic term tjukurpa literally means story of any kind. In the cross-cultural
communications referred to here, it is used to designate the Dreaming as a cosmic
force, as the complete religious system from which derives the morally binding law of
social conduct, and as particular manifestations as this or that Ancestral being. I capi-
talize Story and Tjukurpa as well as Country to indicate this sacred dimension.
2. Expounded in his earlier works spanning the so-called negative philosophy and into
the middle period: On the possibility of an absolute form of philosophy (1794), On the I
as a principle of philosophy (1795), Ideas for a philosophy of nature (1797), On the world

237 Finding spirit
center stage the evolving thought traditions of the Anangu. Specifically, my inter-
est is in the idea that nature shares the structure of subjectivitywhich immedi-
ately begs the question if nature and subjectivity exist as distinct ontic categories
in the Anangu cultural imaginary, or if these are emerging novelties that, at least
for now, resemble only superficially the traditional conception of the self-world
relationship. To seek out such differences is important given that the Anangu are
in the midst of those processes of translation and mutual rapprochement that forge
a vernacular Christianity. As Diane Austin-Broos (2016: 130) alerts us to consid-
er, indigenous groups commonly identify elements of shamanism in charismatic
Christian practice ... [while] assumptions about the necessary relation between an
animated nature and the immanence of a high god have encouraged more than one
missionary in his or her task. Most Anangu Christians are reluctant to articulate
and practice a syncretistic religion; that is, they tend to keep apart, maunta, the
two great Stories in their lives (Eickelkamp forthcoming). And yet, the Christian
worldview and temporality, especially as conveyed through alphabetical literacy
and written Bible translations, is a significant factor in the Indigenous conceptual-
ization of living matter.
In elucidating these processes of cultural translation, I will draw on Roy Wagners
(1977) semiotic assessment of the idea of the innate. Of special relevance is his view
that both literal (Western scientific) and figurative (indigenous) symbolizations of
a being need the alternative modality as context in order to be meaningful. The
question of the mode of interpretation inherent in culturally specific conceptions
of the self-world relationship is also at the heart of Paul Ricoeurs (1995) analy-
sis of the sacred. I therefore take recourse to his distinction between two forms
of religious language, manifestation and proclamation, which posits a polarity of
semiotic modalities. I see Wagners scheme to correspond in some respects with
Ricoeurs, where one figuration of the sacred (the metaphoric) is closer to nature
than the other (the literal), which is removed from landscapes and idols and real-
ized instead in the proclamation of His Word.
Christianity, which has become a significant source of knowing and living in
this part of Australias Western Desert, brings new ideas into the Anangu cultural
imaginary and as such is shifting the figure-ground relationship of semiotic modal-
ities. This openness toward the new is not just the result of coercion from without,
let alone of a linear development from a totemic toward a naturalist orientation.
Rather, the shift is enabled by certain correspondences between the ontological
structure of Christ on one hand, and of Dreamings on the other: both exist through
revelation and manifest as dream, word, body, mark, place, and spirit, both are
extraordinarily powerful and eternal, yet quintessentially human (and in this sense
proximal), and both are centrally concerned with an ethic of care. It is these cor-
respondences that account for the receptivity to the idea of Christ.3 By the same
soul (1798), Outline of a system of a philosophy of nature (1799), and Of human freedom
(1809).
3. One wants to recall that, from the beginning, Christianity developed in relationship
to Hellenistic culture and philosophical thought. This is what led the church fathers to
articulate the idea of Christ as theological discourse. That is to say, one dimension of
the figure of Christ in the Anangu world is as philosophy brokerhe is good to think.

Ute Eickelkamp 238
token, however, and in concert with its secular derivations, the figure of Jesus that
unifies human history into a single universal truth of progress toward the end of
time becomes a formidable challenge to the faith in the totemic Ancestors who
will abide forever in the land, or else all life will come to a cataclysmic end. It is
hardly surprising that the promise of equality and hope for future salvation are im-
portant in dealing with political marginalization, racism, socioeconomic hardship,
and associated stresses that have become endemic across the generations ever since
the lamb entered the Dreaming (Kenny 2007). Yet I doubt the relevance of Christ
would be what it is were it not for the epistemic and ontological receptivity to spirit
grounded in a totemic orientation, which Philippe Descola (2013: 122, 237) aptly
characterized as the sharing of interiority (perhaps better mentality) and physi-
cality among human and nonhuman kinds.
Continuities in a transforming life-world

My argument about the transformational impact of Christianity on the Anangu
worldview is not detached from the social, economic, and ecological changes that
have reshaped peoples lives over the last one hundred years. Clearly, the history
of the frontier, the mission, and pastoralism, and since then a string of state in-
terventions, the cash economy, consumerism, and demographic changes toward
a younger population all structure the Anangu reality. Hence, a brief sketch of the
social and ecological history shall set the scene.
The Anangu, a Western Desert group of about 3,000 Pitjantjatjatjara and
Yankunytjatjara speakers, live in eleven small communities dotted across 103,000
square kilometers that make up the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY)
Lands. Pukatja (Ernabella), the oldest settlement, was established as a ration de-
pot and sheep station by Presbyterian missionaries in 1937. If the far-reaching
changes that the arrival of dingo scalp traders, missionaries, white settlers, and sev-
eral thousand sheep and cattle had brought to their lives as hunters and gatherers
are now part of the historical memory of the Anangu, the transformation of their
world goes on alongside what seem, at least at this point, deeper continuities.
Since the early 2000s, the state government has tightened its control over the
local administration and welfare benefits. With the explicit goal to improve the
economic and social well-being of families, it has enforced school attendance and
job-seeking efforts, while building more houses and paving roads. Most families
own at least one motor vehicle, yet outstations that the now elderly had fought for
in the wake of the decentralization movement in the late 1960s are now largely
abandoned and the time people spend on Country in touch with Ancestral pres-
ence has markedly shrunk. Meanwhile, domestic life at Pukatja has shifted from
unfolding visibly in back and front yards to the interior of houses, and doors are
often kept shut. As a result, the visceral contact with the larger social and natural
environment so carefully observed for meaningful signs before, is compromised
further, making bush trips on weekends or special occasions all the more urgent.
Mobile phones that help sustain connectedness among relatives and friends near
and far (and occasionally serve to entertain a young child) also shield people from
direct exposure to being with others and their demands. Some problems endemic

239 Finding spirit
to community life have ebbed. Most notably, a string of initiatives succeeded in

halting the destructive youth practice of petrol sniffing, although former sniffers
and a new generation of young people consume marijuana and alcohol instead.
The Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Womens Council (NPYWC), a
support organization for women and families that began at grassroots level in the
wake of the 1970s land rights movement and was formally established in 1980, has
since grown into a large service provider with a substantial number of non-Anangu
staff. Freehold title over their Ancestral lands was granted in 1981, allowing the
Anangu, despite subsequent adverse amendments of the Pitjantjatjara Land Rights
Act, to exert some control over their lives. Mining of the mineral wealth in the
Lands seems on the horizon, stirring hopes for royalties, jobs, and training, as well
as fears of further social and ecological destruction.
Dependency on the state and its agents remains an encompassing fact of life,
notwithstanding the social and political achievements of the 1970s and 1980s. Yet
despite high levels of poverty (Pukatja has the second lowest per capita income in
South Australia), it is more correct to speak of codependence, which has been in-
tegral to the Anangusettler relationship throughout and indeed intensifying since
the 1970s, when the number of white jobs in APY communities and organiza-
tions began to grow excessively (Edwards 2011).
The cultural continuities that need to be appreciated against the background
of such changes run deep. First and foremost is the reality of big Dreamings in-
side the ground, as a senior man put it when he explained to me the inalienable
boundedness of spirit to Tjukurpa mantatja, the Story of the land. Even those
whose spiritual affinity is strongly oriented toward the Story of heaven, Tjukurpa
ilkaritja, identify existentially with the productivity and knowledge of the bush,
and with their subsistence tools of old. Not only have these accrued new symbolic
value (and capital) as tangible and intangible artifacts at the cross-cultural inter-
face of contemporary living but men and women also feel they must adhere to
the customary principles of care and emotional participation that guide human
interaction with the environment. Knowledge traditions and cultural sentiments
continue to be formalized in ritual life that is thriving (with some financial and lo-
gistical support from state-sponsored Anangu organizations), including Christian
inma comprising church services with singing, praying, testimonials, and sermons.
To use Mervyn Meggitts (1987: 130) memorable phrasing, a catenated system of
cultural coding is in place, even if former subsistence practices contribute only
a fraction to peoples daily food intake. Cultural coding occurs in a dialect of the
Western Desert language, the mother tongue of the majority of people across ages,
and children are socialized into extended networks of kin.
A new symbolic nexus?

My argument about an incipient notion of nature as externality begins here: depen-
dency on an elaborate externally produced materialist culture and knowledge has
cast a shadow on the human-land relationship. We have a new way of hunting
shopping, a church elder explained in a nutshell the predicament of not spending
enough time on Country in order to secure the Ancestral willingness to proliferate

Ute Eickelkamp 240
life. To not look after Ancestral sites by keeping these clean and paying visits is a
moral breach that causes considerable stress for those responsible. To uphold this
basic reciprocity between Dreamings and people requires adjustments. Hence art
workshops held out bush (putitja), and land management and research programs
that bring together science and traditional environmental knowledge are increas-
ingly important forums through which the Anangu attend to Country.
At Pukatja, the most significant medium through which traditional and exter-
nal knowledge about nature is filtered is the Word of God. Collectively rewriting
the sacred book as Bible translators, the Anangu adhere to a literal interpretation,
including of the book of Genesis. They reject a culturally open hermeneutic that
would allow for comparison and include references to Ancestral Stories in the
translation, explaining that the written word on paper is not to be mixed up
with Stories of Country. Intimately familiar with what is the most widely read
text by far, many reflect on the foundations of life and the order of the phenom-
enal world through the veil of the Good News, Tjukurpa Palya. Christianity is
now a firm part of Emile Durkheims (1915) symbolic nexus of religion, society,
and forms of reasoning, to which John Morton drew attention in his psycho-
analytic interpretation of the idea of nature in the classical Arrernte totemic in-
crease rites and beliefs. Morton (1987a: 454) showed how this general outlook
of Durkheims theory of religion was pivotal to understanding rationality as a
critical dimension of all subjectivity and objectivity. Extending that discussion
to the contemporary dynamics of cosmo-onto-logical transformation, I suggest
that indoctrination per sebe that through consumerism, managerialism, sci-
ence, art, or Christianityis only another symptom of what is fundamentally an
ontological rupture.
As I see it, two factors could push the Anangu worldits semiotic orienta-
tion and what Thomas Luckmann (1970) called plausibility structurebeyond
the bounds of current recognition. One is a severely compromised productivity
of Country, which, amid other problems, is choking under introduced buffel
grass and suffering the extinction of local desert animals. These destructions
and losses in their homelandswhich ethnographers are only beginning to un-
derstand in Indigenous termsare cause for considerable worry. For example,
women artists voiced their concerns in their language of a revelatory regime
of value (Myers 2004: 9) during a collaborative workshop in 2014 with envi-
ronmental artist Fiona Hall. Takiri Tjawina Roberts, one of the Tjanpi Desert
Weavers who have become well known for their expressive grass sculptures that
capture endangered and extinct species, explained: In our hearts we worry
deeply about the whole of Australia. Our animals have hidden themselves away,
the poor things. The animals of old are now hiding somewhere. We now have
only a few animals left (Michael 2015: 49). On the other hand, as Britta Duelke
(pers. comm.) remarked, introduced species are not only a source of existential
stress; they also make for an important livelihood as they become a new resource
material, including for grass sculptures of endangered animals that are made
from buffel grass or raffia.
The other major source of existential stress is the overwhelming experience
of the death of loved ones, including of the junior generations. These two pre-
dicaments are connected at various levels and as such are the source of a sense of

241 Finding spirit
impotence that is deeply saddening. For the Anangu I know, and especially women,
life-sustaining power must come from without. To put it into the starkest of terms:
even if only evident in a few individuals, it is now thinkable that the totemic Ances-
tors who sustain the phenomenal world are falling silent (and in this sense become
mortal), as abiding living presence is the privilege of one man onlyJesus Christ.
In the language of Wagners (1975, 1977) semiotic approach, this new source of
being and knowing that enters from the outside into the province of human action
and thus becomes its cause, cannot be symbolized figuratively (or metaphorically
in Ricoeurs terminology). Rather, He will be spoken of only through representa-
tions properthat is, in recognition of the gap between symbol and reality. An
external (divine) view is cast onto the universe of significations that divides the
symbol from what it stands for. This new literal orientation toward being is push-
ing the hitherto dominant figurative mode of symbolization into the background.
A rupture is thus inflicted upon the self-producing and self-signifying world of
totemic differentiations that flow from an all-consuming humanityone in which
Ancestors turned into and did not stand for the phenomena.
To illustrate the above: Easter banners decorating the outdoor church in 2015
announced the death and resurrection of His Only Son as historical events of uni-
versal significance. Bearing the promise of eternal life, for some, these world-chang-
ing events instill hope for a future reunification with deceased family members.
The statement on the left banner signals historicity: Jesunya ilungu (Jesus died
[past]) munu (and) wankaringkula (after he awoke [secondary verb form]) pakanu
(he rose [past]). Here, Jesus is used as a proper name (suffix nya) that stands for
the Son of God as a concrete individual who once lived and died. Combined with
the past tense verb form, ilungu, the statement constitutes a literal symbolization
of the represented context: the Word become flesh. However, the continuous verb
form in the English language banner to the right, He is Risen, signals a shift of
state of being; it condenses the unique event of the death and ascent into the dure
of eternal life. This ever-after appears to invert the direction and locus of abiding
living presence of so many Ancestral creator beings who went into (tjarpangu;
past tense) the ground after they had risen out of (pakanu) the land and created
through their embodied action in the world certain features of the landscape. These
lingual significations of sacrality in time and space differ from the pattern that
Aram Yengoyan identified some forty years ago for the Pitjantjatjara worldview.
They bear directly on his proposition that there are ontological (or, with Wagner,
semiotic) constraints in place that prohibit the Anangu to convert to Christianity:
For the Pitjantjatjara, sacred activities and sacred thoughts have
no beginning or end. . . . Ideally, all sacred events . . . are cast in the
imperfective, and all secular events are expressed in the past. ... Thus, in
versions of the eaglehawk myth, for example, one hears eaglehawk was
falling off the branch, not eaglehawk fell off the branch. ... Not only is
the past tense absent then in mythic narrative, but its use is not tolerated
in the culture. The combination of the imperfective as aspect and the use
of physical referents for all mythic accounts provides a collective means
of maintaining religious value in the present, even though its source is in
the most distant past. (Yengoyan 1993: 240)

Ute Eickelkamp 242
Figure 1: Easter church banners on cotton and canvas, Pukatja 2015

(authors photographs).
It is undoubtedly the case that the Anangu conceive of Ancestral presence as an

abiding force that can be activated, and that in fact might be better understood
as constituting a spatial rather than a temporal dimension: Ancestral powers or
Stories are mostly inside the ground, below the surface or kampa kutjungka, on the
other side of the visible world (see also Morton 1987a: 456; Meggitt 1987: 121;

243 Finding spirit
Hiatt and Jones 1988: 10). However, this is not expressed dogmatically through the
avoidance of the past tense. Thus, a recent elaborate documentation of the world-
shaping Story of Wati Ngintaka (Perentie Lizard Man) contains numerous instanc-
es of verbs in the past tense in both mythic narrative and song (James and Tregenza
2014), while I have documented dozens of profane childrens play stories in which
the imperfective abounds. Nonetheless, his overly literal interpretation of a gram-
matical feature notwithstanding, Yengoyan raised important questions about the
cultural and psychological preconditions that make possible the comprehension
and internalization of a universal God who will either save or condemn the indi-
vidual soul.
I want to suggest that the incipient (Christian) distinction between the creator
and the created opens the door for the symbolization of nature as pure phenom-
enon or external object of significations. To repeat, this does not mean a wholesale
shift from totemism to naturalism was occurring by default. Rather, the encounter
produces points of tension that can lead to the renewal of a monistic ontology
(cf. Magowan 2016)as indeed occurred in Western thought. To make my case,
I focus on the recalibration of subjectivity in life and in death through two im-
portant if neglected notions in modern philosophies of mind. One is Freuds view
(following Sabina Spielrein) that there exists an entropic death instinct, lifes gen-
eral striving to return to the resting place of the inorganic world ([1920] 2000: 270;
my translation). I see expressed the same intuition in the cooling of the Dreaming
Ancestors who submerged in the land at the end of their creative existence. The
other is Schellings idea of a First Nature, that barbaric principle that, in excess
of being and as its incomprehensible ground (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 38), none-
theless exhibits self-organization and purposiveness. For Schelling, all of nature
possesses intelligence and is the self-producing ground of both being and knowing
(see Nassar 2016). It is not the product of mind but participates in the same organic
structure as mind. On account of its organicity, that is, as a force not confined to
mechanical laws, nature is self-generative and hence both subject and objectcre-
ator and created (Richards 2002: 14243). Similarly, the Ancestral creative power
that produced the much-noted consubstantiality between Dreamings, humans, and
nonhuman life, is conceived of as an organismic rather than a mechanical force.
As emplaced Stories with life-giving and organizing powers, the Tjukurpa beings
might be thought of as the unconditioned, as nature was for Schelling.
One need not be a new animist and believe that nonhuman entities speak back
to us in order to grasp something of the organic, everlasting link between people,
places, and totemically significant others. The emotional and cosmic connected-
ness with the tools, songs, designs, sacra, and features of the environment that the
creative totemic beings left as tokens of their being in the care of humans be-
fore they disappeared, was pointedly articulated by Lester Hiatt and Rhys Jones,
in an earlier discussion of Aboriginal conceptions of the working of nature: At a
deeper level, they serve as a palpable link with the departed dead, through whose
hands and minds the works have passed from time immemorial (1988: 1011).
The Anangu today too strive to keep spirit in place across the generations because
they continue to be emotionally and existentially attached to those who went be-
fore them and along the deep grooves of the path of customs. In 2016, Anangu
educator Katrina Tjitayi explained to me the importance of taking the kids out

Ute Eickelkamp 244
bush and build a proper traditional wet-weather shelter, wiltja, in which to camp
with them: To put a little bit of that spirit inside them.
Mind in matter
Youre an anthropologist? a very senior man I had not met before wanted to know.
It is 1995 and I have just begun my maiden fieldwork, so I nod with much hesita-
tion. He continued, in English: I need you to come now, record Tjukurpa, put it
on the tape. Regardless of the fact that I am not working for the land council and a
novice to his culture, he insists and a few days later, we drive to Caterpillar Country
where he speaks Story into my tape recorder. I do not understand a word of the
Western Desert language, the Yankunytjatjara dialect in this case. But this is not
about my understanding or anyones interpretation. It is about putting Story into
place, incarnating the Word in Country. At the end of a long session, he instructs
me, in English: Now bury it in the sand! I am quite shocked as this feels like the
request for a partial funeral to me: with the tape imprinted with his voice, a part of
this man is being buried. I suggest alternative storage places such as the Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (funding my research!)
that could keep the knowledge, which I presume the Story presents, alive, but to
no avail. He finally says: I got no-one left to give my Story. When, years after
his death, I shared this memory with one of my Anangu women friends, she was
surprised to hear of his decision since his adult daughters, her own age, are still
alive (as are other senior owners of this Story). Presumably, for this old man, what
was at stake was not knowledge per se but the unity of knower and known, which
he seemed to want to preserve by placing his voice into the ground. Moreover,
as Duelke (pers. comm.) suggested, he may well have included new stories that
gave voice to his selfhood inside the earth. Ill tell my story to the end, write my
own eulogy, a woman told me in a similar vein twenty years later, in the context of
the funeral of a senior ritual leader and church elder. Part man, part word, the old
mans Story inscribed on tape embodies the transition from the realm of the vis-
ible to the invisible. As such it is part of ngura walytja, the I of place that remains
unafflicted by the human duality of body and bodily soul.4
Human beings are alive because inside their body, in the solar plexus, they hold
kurun. Most often I heard kurun glossed as spirit or soul, but in interactive con-
texts it is plain that the term harbors the wider connotations of self and will. In
the traditional view, a persons kurun is not the immaterial energy of light that the
Anangu now associate with one aspect of the Trinitarian Christian notion, the Holy
Spirit glossed kurun miilmiilpa. Rather, the human soul is a small, homunculus-like
fleshy creature that grows in size and ages with the person, and that has intentions
of its own. In conversations about its nature, people always told me that their soul
will go to heaven and only lost souls linger around on the ground among the
living. Some have explained that the soul of a recently deceased is retrieved by
4. My somewhat deviant translation of ngura walytja (owner of a place) is both more

literal and suggestive: it merges the human subjectivity of the noun walytja (a family
relation, someone you are in a relationship of care with) with that of place (ngura).

245 Finding spirit
a healer who will put it into the body of a close relative; their souls will ascend
together after the death of the second person (cf. Eickelkamp forthcoming). But
even if the Christian women who have been my main source of information never
explicitly spoke of the spirit of the deceased going back to Country, the fact that the
deceased owners of a homeland, which are usually places of Tjukurpa connection,
are buried there in accordance with their will rather than on the Pukatja commu-
nity cemetery, suggests an ongoing existential attachment to emplaced Ancestral
beings. The fact that a number of homelands are now family graveyards also re-
flects an adjustment of the desire to have company even in death. In contrast to the
lonely bush graves of the not so recent past, people generally seek to be buried
next to family members, including spouses.
Some say their soul resembles their outer body, which depends for its well-being
on the inner bodily soul. Others have adopted the scriptural view of the human
body as house for the God-given soul; they speak of the insignificance of physical
well-being, or else of the moral duty to look after ones health. In either case, the
soul knows earlier and deeper than the mind. In order to give a good sense of its
fleshy and indeed libidinal nature, I cite from a published explanation that Sandra
Lewis, one of my Christian interlocutors, gave some years ago:
Young children especially are perceptive through their soul. They can
sense approaching visitors who are coming for some social occasion.
As the visitors travel towards the community where the child lives, they
might be talking about this particular girl or boy, thinking about the
child with anticipation. At home, the young child will touch his or her
genitals, which signals to the parents that visitors are on their way.
We take care of our childrens soul and try not to lay infants on their
back to put them to sleep. Instead, they should lie on the side because if
the baby gets a fright, by a sudden loud noise, for instance, his soul will
jump out of place. If this happens, the baby starts vomiting, and someone
with the know-how will have to push the soul back into its proper place
at the sternum for the baby to recover. But if a babys soul becomes so
frightenedby a looming illness for examplethat it jumps out of the
body and tries to hide away from whatever danger it may perceive, a heal-
er (ngangkari) will be able to find it straight away. However, if the same
happens to an older person, whose soul is much stronger than those of
infants, it can be difficult to retrieve it. For instance, after a car accident
or during a sickness, the soul of a person will try to protect itself from
being harmed by running away from the body. It can hide a long way
away and for a long time. In cold weather, this older soul will grow a fur,
inyutjararinganyi, which makes it even harder for the healer to locate it.
(Tjitayi and Lewis 2011: 5960)
Thus, on this level of concrete encounters, the distinction is not between subjectiv-
ity and matter as such. Rather, the image of the human soul as hairy creature that
can jump out of the person suggests a metonymic participation of spirit in the
flesh.
The procreative Ancestral beings are this participation par excellence. Morton
(1987a, b), in his psychoanalytic discussions of Nancy Munns insights about sub-
ject-object relationships in Warlpiri and Pitjantjatjara (Anangu) religion, writes of

Ute Eickelkamp 246
the fragmented self of Ancestral beings in classical Arrernte thought. By throw-

ing out their own names, by placing into the world dream visions, language, and
songs, and by pulling out or simply releasing objects from their bodies, the desert
Dreamings objectified and dissipated their selfhood and made the phenomenal
world. Thus, psychic and material object are two sides of the same coin. Like the
voice thrown out on the tape I was instructed to bury, the products of such cre-
ative labor are not alienable from their maker; to the contrary, the outpouring of
the self is the human and nonhuman progeny, and, like a mother having given
birth, the Ancestors grew tired from their acts of generation and transformation.
Cooling or slowing down (purkaringanyi), their bodies finally turned into rocks
(or trees) that thus became their resting place. The literal rendering, apuringanyi
(stone.turn.into) is also common. In other instances, the transformation into sites
is brought about by fighting and violent death rather than creation. Either way,
death is figured as a homecoming (ngurakutu) and, as such, clearly a human striv-
ing. I think that, at the end of his life in the realm of the visible world, the old man
who had asked me to bury the tape recording of his Tjukurpa longed to go home,
that is, to merge with his place of origin and to prevent his emplaced Ancestral self-
hood from further dissipation, even if that meant stoppingimmobilizing and
silencinghis voice in the realm above ground. I will have more to say about such
striving toward stillness and here conclude with a proposition: this man knew all
along that, as Schelling ([1797/1803] 1995: 40) put it, sometime, somewhere the
point must surely come where mind and matter are one, or where the great leap we
have so long sought to avoid becomes inevitable.
For Freud, this leap is the beyond of the pleasure principle, the hereafter
(Jenseits as a noun) that moves at once backward in geological time to the begin-
ning of the world, and forward to the deeper understanding of the life processes.
Although overstating the case, Yengoyan captured the gist of the same dual orien-
tation in the Anangu worldview when he wrote, Just as myth is visually present
throughout the landscape as a set of markers on and below the ground, myth is
also propelled from the most ancient past into the present through certain forms of
tense and aspect in language structures (1993: 239).
Unstable metaphors
The incident with the tape adds to the confusion that Nicolas Peterson has identi-
fied to beset anthropological interpretations of desert Aboriginal perceptions of the
landscape as sentient. In his view, forged in the course of decades of research with
Warlpiri speakers and other groups, the land is perceived as being occupied by the
spirits of human ancestors and other human-like spirit beingsthe trees, rocks,
riverbeds, or animals as such are not thought of as being persons (Peterson 2013:
177). But how do the Warlpiri, or the Anangu for that matter, figure the rocks,
trees, and animals as such? How are the nonliving, the non-human-like and the
nonsentient explained, if at all? In order to make tangible the dynamic thrust in
Tjukurpa-thinking, which does not rely on a fixed quality, as such, I return to
one of the major traveling Dreamings of the Anangu, the Story of Wati Ngintaka
(Perentie Lizard Man). It is not my intention to analyze the narrative, songs, or

247 Finding spirit
paintings that were documented and produced in the course of a large collaborative
research, the Songlines Project, led by Diana James. Rather, I will use it as an illus-
tration of the fluid transitions between human and nonhuman, and the identity of
symbol and symbolized in totemic thought and being. In this symbolic nexus, a
categorical distinction between narrative and empirical reality, or the truth within
the Story and belief in its (historical?) veracity, is meaningless. As James (2015: 43)
wrote, Tjukurpa as ontology can avoid the reality versus myth debate.
Wati Ngintaka was a real man, just like us, until he became a perentie lizard on
his journey to get back his grindstone, explained Robin Kankapankatja, a senior
custodian of the Perentie Lizard Man Story (James and Tregenza 2014: 31). The
documentation does not specify where on his journey Wati Ngintaka transformed
himself, but it is clear that the shape-shifting is part of his plan to deceive the group
of relatives who were chasing him after he had taken back what he claimed was
rightfully his. Women in the east were using a most beautiful grindstone, smooth
and long, that could grind seeds more finely than any other. He heard the grind-
stone sing out to him from a long way away; it was calling him and he traveled
over many days to retrieve his special stone. We first learn of the man having a
tail when he took the stone and hid it inside this part of his body, setting off back
home. His reptilian nature is again linked to disguise when, trying to cover his
tracks, he released from himself lots of ngintaka perentie lizards (38). Further on,
the Ngintaka Man created lots and lots of little perentie lizards from his skin, they
flowed out of his body from his spirit. Many men and women and other lizards
flowed from him (50). This outflow of human and nonhuman othersSchellings
excess of being?what psychoanalysts would call externalization of the self,
seems motivated by a desire for company: Wati Nintaka also created his own song
and dance and everybody of the newly created party forgot themselves as he sang
and sang and sang ... and they danced and danced there, all together (50). Grow-
ing increasingly hungry on his long journey home, Ngintaka Man repeatedly de-
voured bush fruits, but only to vomit them out, his stomach churning. At one place
where he vomited up foods, he was standing with his arms spread wide feeling very
hungry. In realization of this feeling, his empty stomach became a large cave (60).
Let me comment here that, unlike say, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a literal in-
terpretation of the stomach having become a cave as such appears extremely reduc-
tive and unconvincingfor the ethnographer as well as for the Anangu. But if there
is no cave as such, that is, pure object onto which mind projected a story after
the fact, a metonymic relationship of subject and object, and of symbol and sym-
bolized, takes precedence. In this modality of being and knowing, the identity of
physiognomic and affective agency across the human and nonhuman is powerfully
expressed in its generative aspect. Indeed, a song verse makes clear that vomiting
is also an act of fertilization: Im throwing out seeds (57). At the site of this event,
small circles on rocks mark the mistletoe berries that he threw away, and this is
a place where the Anangu rub the rocks every spring to ensure there are rains so
more bush foods like mistletoe berries can ripen and be eaten (58). To reiterate,
conveyed here is the inseparability of environmental knowledge, spirit agency,
and libidinal strivings, that is, an orientation that is far more than metaphorical
(in Petersons sense). If a ceremonial act can bring rain, the latter should not be
taken as water falling from the sky as such. Rather, at work here is figurative

Ute Eickelkamp 248
symbolization, where man, lizard and rain are manifestations of one another. In
that sense Wati Ngintaka is rain; what from close up can be identified as his cer-
emonial headdress is revealed from the distance to be a ring of clouds bringing rain
(51). When his pursuers killed Wati Ngintaka, his aunt realized what had happened
as she saw a cloud approaching and then vanishing (78). She sent her sons, hills
kangaroo [euro] and red plains kangaroo men, to revenge the murder. They tricked
the people in the east to follow them into their death, by turning themselves into
their animal appearance enticing the men to hunt them (76). The narrator, David
Miller, goes on to explain that his grandfather, sitting on the hill, said to them,
Thats not a euro, thats a man! But they wouldnt listen (77).
Ancestral events that continue to absorb subsequent generations of human
descendants (the deceased grandfather witnessing the Story that at the same time
happened at the beginning of the world) secure the proximal reality of the Dream-
ing. In this space-time continuum, semiotic determinations that are also libidinal
relationships of the flesh linking signs, sounds, visions, and bodies in a flow of
iterations, are not stable at all. Peterson suggested this much in a seminar presenta-
tion of his 2013 paper, Is the Aboriginal Landscape Sentient?, in a section omitted
in the published version. Explaining how the Warlpiri think of the relationship
between an important Dreaming being, the Rainbow Serpent, and the rainbow, he
cited one of his interlocutors as saying: Rainbows look like the Rainbow Serpent,
which turns on its head a naturalists metaphor.
Here again I see the relevance of romanticism (Nassar 2014). Arguably, to
invert the naturalists metaphor was pivotal to their project of a holistic ontology.
Therefore, can we not compare the rainbow that looks like the rainbow serpent
to the eye that is sun-like in Goethes translation of Plotinus, in his Farbenlehre
(Fischer 2015: 235)? Undoubtedly, the intersubjective relationship with the nonhu-
man was a concern in Western high culture well before ethnography extended its
reach to interspecies encounters. For instance, in his reinterpretation of Rainer Ma-
ria Rilkes Der Panther, Luke Fischer points out that the poem is hardly a report of
a simple perception of the animal; rather, it enacts for the reader a physiognomic
disclosure of the animal at the imaginal level (2015: 241). Far from being a special
poetic orientation confined to the ritual context, I think that for the Anangu, this
disclosure is happening all the time. The indeterminacy between points of view,
this gliding between the proximal and the distant, inside and outside, visible and
invisible, self and other, is of an ontological order and constitutive of the Indig-
enous worldview at large. But as such, it may be less secure than it once was, by the
sheer fact that it has become one alternative among other more deterministic forms
of reasoning.
If Tjukurpa as ontology can avoid the reality versus myth debate, this is not
always the case for the Anangu who enact Tjukurpa in intercultural contexts. Dur-
ing a research visit to the site where Wati Ngintaka vomited seeds, one of James
major cultural advisors, the late Nganyinytja, recalled how her granddaughter once
queried what kind of mark she was looking at:
Grandmother, did you make these markings on the rocks? Nganyinytja
smiles and replies, No little one, these were made by the Ngintaka man
when he turned into stone here. He left these markings so we would

249 Finding spirit
know of his workcreating this land and giving us ngantja mistletoe

berries to eat. (James 2015: 58)
One would not be misguided to find echoed here the image of a caring God.
Although this is fittingly not dealt with in James book, Nganyinytja was also a
Christian who, at times, struggled under the weight of knowing two spiritual pow-
ers. Others have been more definite in choosing the one Story over the other. My
closest companion at Pukatja, a senior artist and Bible translator, explained about
her own reorientation:
Our language is culture, makuku, tjalaku [collecting witchetty grubs and
honey ants], family, sharing. We know who we are. We know our culture.
And my parents told me and taught me Tjukurpa, but I dont pass it on,
I dont believe itbecause He [points skyward] might come tomorrow.
My friend translates the term tjukuritja (commonly used to mean from the
Dreaming) into English as traditional and like folklore. For her, this implies
something made up (ngunti) and not for real (mulapa wiya)real denoting
the empirical world of perception and spiritual manifestations of Godbut from
the imagination, even pretense (ngalypa-ngalypa). To explain further her under-
standing of tradition as having squarely human and not (as she put it) supernatu-
ral roots, she reminded me of a song I had just learned, Tjulpunytjulpunypa (Wild
Flowers). This song, which she considers traditional without reach into the sacred
(miilmiil), tells of a man who, as he is camping by himself, hears people dancing
and singing in the bush at night. He even sees the painted designs on their bodies.
But he cannot find their footprints and realizes in the morning that the ceremony
was a trick of his imagination: it was only the wind rushing in the leaves of trees,
not singing, and only the colors of wild flowers, not bodies painted up for dancing.5
Her message through this song, as I understand it, is her awakening to the new
world of literal truths, to the victory of proclamations over the excess of being
whereby the totemic beings spill over into the realm of life above ground.
Of kinds and excess of being

Tjukurpa-thinking connects depth of knowing with endurance of being. What
Meggitt (1987: 120) wrote of the Warlpiri worldview, and Hiatt and Jones (1988:
10) claimed for a pan-Aboriginal ontology, is true for the Anangu also: reciprocity
5. Voices of dissent, skepticism, and withdrawal from the Dreaming represent a small
minority, including among Anangu Christians. But even taking into account that con-
fessions of faith do not occur in a political vacuum and are context-dependent, and
heterodoxy prevails, it still seems justified to ask, are these voices documented here not
signs of a real rupture from the philosophical underpinnings of Anangu thought and
being; that is, do they not signal an incipient transformation of the Anangu ontology?
Or should we think of negation as affirming Tjukurpa-thinking, as the song could be
seen to suggest? In the interfaith probing of truth that is happening elsewhere in In-
digenous Australia, the reality of Dreamings prevails (see, e.g., Magowan 2016; Smith
2013: 76; When the Dogs Talked 2014).

Ute Eickelkamp 250
between a coextensive realm of invisible spirit and the phenomenal sustains the or-
der of the world. However, unlike these interpreters, I will be careful to distinguish
between this duality, which I see as characteristic of a monistic worldview where,
in Schellings words, nature should be visible mind, mind invisible nature, and an
ontological dualism that cuts being into two kinds. In other words, the idea that
there exist invisible organizing forces that continue to give substance, shape, and
form to the phenomena, and that in this sense are endowed with intentionality,
subjectivity, and indeed a particular nature in which humans participate, is two-
fold and not corresponding to a dualism proper of natura naturans and natura na-
turata. I cite Meggitts apt synopsis of this reciprocal relationship, in order to show
that it is indeed justifiable to speak of a subjectivity of nature and its productivity
in Indigenous terms:
The dreamtime is ... an enduring level of being which continues as a
noumenal [sic] ground that parallels and sustains the ongoing flow of
phenomenal existence. Men, as representatives par excellence of the
phenomenal world, must constantly act, using the ritual innovations of
the dreamtime as models, to stimulate the causal efficacy of the dreamtime
which, in turn, through spiritual, noumenal catalysts, guarantees
the continuity of the phenomenal events. Indeed, the continuing
reproduction of living species, whether floral or faunal, depends on the
recurrent absorption by their phenomenal progenitors of such noumenal
entities. (Meggitt 1987: 120)
The noumenal sources of endurance that link the human and nonhuman are of
a kind, on account of which there is order in the world. Hiatt and Jones (1988: 19)
went so far as to discern elements of Platonism in the idea of Dreamings as arche-
types: They are not conceived merely as essential qualities residing in the mem-
bers of a natural species or kind, but as separate entities inhabiting a transcendental
dimension of reality. Forms and particulars coexist in their different realms, but
whereas the latter are visible and ephemeral, the former are invisible and eternal.
The problem with what at first sight appears to be a most conducive comparison is
profound. Not only is the suggestion of a transcendental realm in the Indigenous
cultural imaginary questionable. More grave is that we are given the false impres-
sion of an ontological schism in both worlds, since the authors neglect to point out
that, in Platos model, there is no intrinsic necessity for the forms to become par-
ticularizedTjukurpa beings, by contrast, must or else they cease to be.
My own records of the contemporary Anangu classification of flora, fauna,
rocks, ecological zones, and seasonal cycles in relationship to the totemic order
are too rudimentary to merit publication. I therefore merely point out what seems
to be a more general pattern in the Indigenous classification of the phenomena
that can be gleaned by comparing the findings of other more substantial investiga-
tions. Describing and reconstructing the traditional subsistence behavior of West-
ern Desert people around Warburton Mission in the 1960s, Richard Gould (1969)
found an especially refined terminology for edible plants (over thirty-seven species
names and further subdivisions), as did Meggitt (1957) for the Warlpiri. Similarly,
drawing mostly on research in northeast Arnhem Land, Hiatt and Jones (1988)
found that the more economically or totemically significant the phenomena, the

251 Finding spirit
more refined the classification and associated terminology. Thus, proper species
names (that correspond largely with the scientific classification) or subdivisions of
these are given to animals and plants that are either important food items or occur
in the totemic songs. Furthermore, to be of a kind is not strictly a matter of Linnean
species identity insofar the taxonomic and totemic orders overlap and functional
as well as creative contiguities or chains of association play a role. For example,
John von Sturmer observed about the totemic order among the Wik-Mungkana
Kugu-Nganychara speakers on Western Cape York Peninsula that certain phe-
nomena are seen as mate to other phenomena, that is, they are associated with
one another on the basis of a principle of resemblance or mateship that manifests
in the sharing of a name, appearance, or habitat (von Sturmer 1978: 32223).
He also reported for the coastal division a distinction between Ancestral pow-
ers that express a relationship between phenomenon and place (awu), and those
that do not and instead refer to a relationship between people and phenomena that
is transmitted patrilineally (kam waya). These latter are the totems proper (von
Sturmer 1978: 320). Similarly, Hiatt and Jones (1988: 11) wrote of a pan-Aboriginal
distinction between the creative, site-specific life-giving Ancestors on the one hand
and totems on the other. These observations as well as my own material underscore
the appositeness of Adolphus Elkins (1933) original distinction between individ-
ual totemism and cult totemism. The Anangu too distinguish such special pow-
ers. First, there are the creative Ancestral beings, Tjukurpa, the original humans
who resembled certain animals or plants and defined their group identity as hare
wallaby people, or mulga seed people, and who became Storyplaces and sources
of landed identity for every generation anew. Then there are bundles of power,
ngangkari, that male and female healers, or witchdoctors, also called ngangkari,
hold in their tjuni (stomach), and use to heal or destroy another person (see also
Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Womens Council Aboriginal Corpo-
ration 2013). One of my Anangu friends thought these are what anthropologists
call totemsgenerative creatures whose concentrated power of their specific na-
ture unfolds when unleashed. She mentioned a tiny puppy dog, a goanna and a
biting sensation, a friendly quiet rainbow serpent and a cranky one, and an eagle
and the feeling and sound of its swoop and clinching claws that only the owner
of this totem perceives. Even as a child, a person may have more than one totem
inside, as I learned from a twelve-year-old girl who had been given an eagle first
and a few years later a spider, each time by a different grandparent. These totems
are not land-based and obtained through birth or inheritance like Tjukurpa, but di-
rectly transmitted from body to body, pulled out of the healer and pushed into the
tummy of another person in whose kurun it will lodge. The astounding thing about
these creatures that move, that can make themselves manifest outside the carrier
in their animal nature, that can be sensed from a distance as they jump out and
ahead of a person approaching others, warn of looming danger and death, punish
a greedy person by inflicting illness, or heal, my friend went on to explain, is that
to give it away to others does not make it less or smaller: Shes got the main one
inside and it is proliferating in her, my friends explanation went, and it is this abil-
ity to grow totems that makes the healer ever more powerful. Insofar I understand
these differentiations of Ancestral power correctly, it can be noted that, unlike the
world-shaping Tjukurpa beings, these healer totems show no signs of striving

Ute Eickelkamp 252
toward stillness, no entropic desire to cool down and restthey are not anchored
in place in the same way. Rather, circulated among the living toward powerful ends,
their excess of being is in the register of the Life Instinct. It is these dangerous pow-
ers that more fundamentalist Christians reject as satanic and by the same token ac-
cept as real, while they may renounce as imaginary or made up the place-based
Tjukurpa creative beings.
What is alien to both Tjukurpa-thinking (Brooks 2011) and by extension,
Christian thought, is the idea of species evolution. I have heard accounts of An-
cestral metamorphosis and shape-shifting similar to those mentioned in the Wati
Ngintaka Story. Such transformations are marked by the suffix -ringu (past tense of
what Goddard [1992] refers to as the mood character -ringanyi); became, which in
these contexts the Anangu gloss in English turned into. Ancestral procreative pow-
ers continue to cut across the human-nonhuman divide as their life-force lodged in
those sites of abiding transformation can be activated by people today in order to
stimulate the growth of the species that had come from or out of these Ancestors.
What I have never heard and what seems inconceivable is that one kind or spe-
cies comes from (-nguru) another. To the contrary, with the single exception of a
science-oriented young ranger, everybody responded with puzzlement and sheer
disbelief to my inquiry about the soundness of Darwinian theory.
White fellas think were like frogs, but people come from people, dogs from
dogs, the only ever ordained Anangu minister of the (Uniting) Church, the late
Peter Nyaningu, explained in 2014 in a conversation about origins. At one level,
this stark affirmation of his humanity must be understood as oppositional speech
activisma claim as boss for, as he put it, the kingdom of the Anangu world,
and a rejection of white occupation. Throwing into relief the political ramifications
of evolutionary views on life, he installs in the place of the subhuman the white
man, thereby asserting the ontological superiority and political sovereignty of his
own people:6
I found a [dinosaur] bone, he went on, and brought it to the museum,
pitinguru [from a hole in the ground/ from its place of origin], before the
people, but thats white mans story. People are not from dinosaurs but
from man and woman.7
6. Appropriations of a white mans story that is returned to sender with a twist, namely
with the added expectation of reciprocal acceptance of the Indigenous convention,
have been observed within vernacular Christianity (e.g., McIntosh 1997).
7. I have not been able to ascertain if a dinosaur bone was found on the APY Lands.
More significant here is that the located-ness of the fossil in the grounda trace not
unlike Ancestral marksbrings it further into the orbit of traditional truths, which
Nyaningu asserts over and above that of the scientists. The literal meaning of piti, hole
in the ground, is associated with the idea of emplaced origin and often appended to
an animal name to form a proper place name. In his dictionary, Cliff Goddard (1992)
gives the example Kalayapiti, Emu-hole, meaning the place where emus come from,
that is, where an Ancestral emu being entered the ground and left behind a life force
from which future generations of emus can spring. Such designations that signal incor-
poration into the Dreaming apply to certain introduced fauna like the dingo and dog

253 Finding spirit
On the other hand, the idea that physical and temperamental traits are trans-
mitted from Ancestral creator beings and family members is fundamental and
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck would perhaps be more welcome than Charles Darwin with
his wrong way theory, since for the Anangu, all life-forms come from (the first)
people. According to Nyaningu, to come from means from a union of opposites,
namely,
from man and woman joined together. That Eve came from Adams rib
is ngunti tjukurpa [made-up story]. Sex kutju [only]makes life, not
magic. Trees, out of the ground and watermanta kapi [ground and
water], like sex.
We used to make things grow...

The participation of mind in matter and matter in mindnotions I concede are a
Western importnow interacts with science, namely in the context of land man-
agement and specifically endangered species protection programs. APY Rangers
have successfully crossbred waru, black-footed wallabies kept on a fenced-off rocky
outcrop, out of reach of feral cats and foxes. Here is Nyaningus comment (again,
an existential statement infused with political indignation) on the program that has
seen much support from other men and women:
We used to eat them. They put a fence around them, but we got inma
[song] to protect waru, in the mind. Pulkaringkuntjaku wantinyiwe let
them grow, like Sam Biblangka, inmatjara [in the Bible, having a song].8
... The scientists now, like the missionaries with the sheep, give them to
us to look after. Sheep, donkeys Jerusalemanguru [are from Jerusalem],
malu [red kangaroo] from here.
As in so many parts of Aboriginal Australia, the proliferation of species has been
secured through increase ceremonies, paluntja in Pitjantjatjara. This term now
also means creation according to Genesis 1 and 2; and the transitive verb, cre-
ate, is paluni. Perhaps for the Anangu, the leap from the one to the other is actu-
ally small. Pulkaringanyi, paluniwe used to make things grow, proliferate trees,
kangaroos, explained a woman in her 50s who is an active church member, in
response to my query about it, by going to a rock, rubbing it, singing during a
drought, ailurungka. We still do it sometimes, but maybe we need the Holy Spirit
to help.
The significance of spirit that can be activated by ritual (devotional acts, testi-
mony, prayer, song) to move nature is also part of the Anangu Christian imagina-
tion. This was clearly articulated by my closest friend, the most radical renouncer
of the Dreaming I know and senior member of the Pitjantjatjara Bible translation
project, when she told me:
(papa), or to more recent introductions such as the buffalo in Arnhem Land (Altman
1982), as well as to extinct species (cf. Walsh 2008: 305n277).
8. He may be referring to Hannahs song of thanksgiving for the birth of her son; that is,
proliferation through Gods intervention, in Book of Samuel 1:2.

Ute Eickelkamp 254
When you speak to lead the [church] service, it must come from the
spiritJesus speaks through you. I spoke and prayed, and pointed out
tiny white clouds. All of a sudden, a big wind came and it started to rain.
... It poured and poured and everyone was happy.
I point out the subject-object distinction inherent in the idea that something is
made to grow (or to release rain) by someone. Traditionally, the Anangu did not
make an absolute ontological distinction between maker and made. Rather, the
relationship between subject and object appears more continuous (i.e., metonymic)
than in Christian theology and the Western philosophy of nature, where it grew
into the major problem of dualism: that of creator and created, freedom and neces-
sity. But a distinction is there and I think becoming more pronounced precisely
through the orientation toward an all-powerful timeless God-image: They are
worshipping the creation, instead of the Creator! my Christian sister commented
disapprovingly when I asked how it is that some Anangu participate in both church
and bush ritual.
Here I have arrived back at my original question if nature has arisen as a new
object, that is, as pure externality, in Anangu thought. Is a shift occurring from
subject to object status of the nonhuman, the nonsentient, and the nonanimate
phenomena? And is the creativity of the Christian God outrivaling that of the un-
conditioned Tjukurpa beings, thereby muting their abiding power in the land and
the world built upon it?
From duality to dualism?

I began my argument about an incipient ontological rupture for the Anangu with
the observation that people have ceased to be the makers of their own world. Lost
is their autonomous political economy, and with it the unfettered production of
meanings in and on their own terms. Others have explored this condition of living
creatively an oppositional culture (Cowlishaw 1988; McIntosh 1997) or under
occupation (Biddle 2016). My specific interest here has been to see if the external
power to determine (or define the consequences of) the discourse about reality
and, more fundamentally, the prevalent semiotic modality, is transforming the self-
world relationship for the Anangu. Seeking to pinpoint further how I might con-
tribute to an ethnographic theory of ontological monism under pressure, I relate
in this last section older anthropological discussions of the subject-status of the
land in Aboriginal thought to the contemporaryand markedly heterogeneous
Anangu discourse about an increasingly disenchanted world.
In a conversation about Munns much-used model of the transformation of sub-
jects into objects in desert thought, Geoffrey Bagshaw (pers. comm.) commented
on what he regards as an erroneous distinction on her part: From an Aboriginal
viewpoint, there are only subject-subject relationships. He did not mean that peo-
ple live in an entirely mentalized or animistic universe where everything is a sen-
tient self, or that objectification per se (just consider language!) was not always part
of the picture. Rather, as he subsequently explained in a further personal commu-
nication, he was referring to what he had thirty years earlier (in a confidential 1983

255 Finding spirit
report on land tenure) called polymorphic consubstantiality between humans,

other life forms, environmental features, and sacrathat is, a sharing of ontological
essence or spirit, namely on account of their common origin in specific concentra-
tions of Tjukurpa in certain places. Knowledge of this state of being, he observed,
belongs to humans alone. This anthropocentric position of the epistemic subject is
crucial, as I explain below. I here merely observe that this explanation is very close
to Margaret Bains (197879: 320, 323, 325) intuition of the oneness of spirit across
forms and appearances that she put forward in contestation of Munns transforma-
tion hypothesis, which presupposes a degree of separation between self and world,
permanence and impermanence, inside and outside. Such a view also resonates
with Ken Libermans (1978: 157) reflections, penned while posted at Docker River
in the late 1970s, that the presentation to the world of the ontological categories of
subject and object is a unique historical achievement of Western civilization, where
everyday things [have been elevated] to the status of objects whose attributes exist
apart from the being from whom essence flows (158). Statements by Aboriginal
people, from the desert to the coast, about the all-pervading presence of Dreaming,
of Story and Song in land, sky, and waters, substantiate such observations. For in-
stance, John Bradleys Singing Saltwater Country (2010: 1), opens with these words
by his Yanyuwa friend Eileen McDinny: That meathes got a song. Everything
got a song, no matter how little ... plant, bird, animal, country, people, everything.
However, as already indicated above, conversations with the Anangu show tell-
tale signs that a shift from a subject-subject relationshipwhat William Stanner
(1960, 1979) couched after Martin Buber I-and-thouto a subject-object relation-
ship is on the horizon. Not all perceive this move toward dualism as a threat to
their legal entitlement to land based on a recognized ontology of dwelling and
its ritual enactment. Rather, some of the women demand in consultations with
land council staff that forms of attachment to place outside the ritual domain and
thus not indexically linked to Dreamings be taken seriously. They mention family
histories, childhood memories, frequent bush trips that present occasions to hunt
and obtain materials for making art objects, employment, and other work histories,
including in the art center at a time when Tjukurpa was not put onto canvas. While
I heed Fred Myers (2012: 3) warning about the political risks that the ethnographic
documentation of shifting attachments to place entail, I would make a stronger
case for the free expression of alternative and novel ways of belonging. Some of the
women I have worked with speak of a liberation, a freeing up of Country through
God now and into the future, including beyond death: When time comes, we will
be free, atanpa [also meaning calm]. Rather than mere loss, these women see
spiritual reward:
Tjukurpa mantatja (Story of the land]for this world, but we should be
looking ilkaritja [to heaven]. Were looking forward, not backward; theres
nothing where I come from, only lizards and rubbish. ... TjukurpaI
left it behind, wantima. One day, I was a teenager walking home and
I looked toward the rocks near Amata. I saw how beautiful it all is. It
looked different, my spirit was happy.
Yet others see in leaving behind Tjukurpa an Entzauberung of the world that results
from ontic loss: Everything had Tjukurpa, a young mother who had moved from

Ute Eickelkamp 256
Pukatja to the township of Alice Springs told me in 2013 (see also Yengoyan 1993:
239), but now that we dont know anymore, this ant [which had just bitten me] is
just an ant!
If the metaphysical dualism of subject and object that has plagued Western phi-
losophy at least since Descartes and that, as recognized more recently, accounts for
much of the techno-cognitivist rationalism, which has destroyed landscapes and
people, is alien to classical Anangu (and Aboriginal) thought, the notion of dual-
ity or two-ness is not. Again, this is where I see affinity with Schellings monistic
conception of nature, in which duality proceeds in unity (Merkur 1993: 355).
Not unlike the electromagnetic bipolarity that seems to have influenced Schellings
ideas, as a principle of life, kutjara (two, a pair) is foundational to the holistic
ontology of Tjukurpa, which thrives on duality as a primary form of differentia-
tion within unity.9 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1958: 123), starting with the Eaglehawk
and Crow symbolism of the Darling River region (and ending with the Yin-Yang
philosophy of ancient China), found it to be a general pattern of a union of op-
posites in Aboriginal social behavior; Elkin (1970: 7046) observed it as a wide-
spread phenomenon in myth and ritual and central to an ethics of cooperation;
Gza Rheim ([1945] 1971) saw it as dual unity grounded in the mother-child
relationship; and Meggitt (1987: 12930) identified binary thinking as underlying
the fundamental categorical assumptions of complementarity, reciprocal interac-
tion, and equivalence. Whether as older and younger sibling, skinny nervy lizard
and fat lazy one, or emu and bush turkey in Stories, or as nganantarka (we-bone)
and tjanamilytjan (they-flesh) in reference to moieties, dual unity engenders
motion and hence aliveness of the world; without it, life would remain in eternal
slumber.
What, then, woke up the first people? Whence did sentience or consciousness
and therewith existence proper arise? The question of how mind could become
matter, and inversely, have come out of matter is at the heart of evolutionary
epistemology (Delbrck 1986). I think the question of how real life began also
prompted Nyaningu to ask, naturally from within his own historical horizon of
understanding: How did our ancestors first know how to make men? Who told
them? This was in 2005, in the course of a conversation he had initiated about
the relationship between the symbolism of male initiation rites and milpatjunanyi,
a traditional sandstory-telling practice confined to girls and women. If the juxta-
position of the high-end knowledge of the most important Anangu tradition with
the nave knowing of young girls was revealing in itself, his answer to what was
a rhetorical question posed in the highly reflective stance so characteristic of this
old man astonished me. Inhaling and in a whisper, he uttered just this one word:
Unconscious.
In what was to be our last conversation, (a few weeks later, in October 2014, he
died in a car crash), Nyaningu, whose intellectual and indeed spiritual journey as
the only ever ordained Anangu church minister I have begun to trace elsewhere,
touched again on the question of first stirrings of consciousness. My eighty-four-
year-old friend was sitting outside the community store chatting with a white man
9. See also my detailed analysis of the psychological function of duality in Anangu child
development (Eickelkamp forthcoming).

257 Finding spirit
with whom he had worked on the Pitjantjatjara Bible translation project some twen-
ty years earlier. I briefly joined them to say I would much like to talk again soon.
Seeing my arms filled with groceries for other friends waiting for a lift, Nyaningu
only threw me this snippet: I was just saying to so-and-so here, in Genesis, life was
in the still water and it began to movelike a baby in the tummy.
In the secularized mythology of Freuds Beyond the pleasure principle, the Ich-
or Lebenstriebe (Life Instincts), which are identified with sexual reproduction and
aggression, had emerged from primordial stillness, a state of perfect equilibrium
(after Fechner). Impingement on this unselfconscious being institutes displeasure
in the world, thereby awakening being to itself. Action is required to redress the
disturbance and thus mentation begins, but only to launch life onto the long detour
toward death, a return to passive being. Purkaringanyi, the cooling down of the
Ancestors as they exhaust themselves at the end of their sojourns, comes to mind.
Regardless of whether this is best understood as a transformation from one state
of being and register of temporality to another (Munn), or as shape-shifting within
continuity of being (Bain), the end has to do with rest and passivity, or perhaps
more aptly, with a return to a state of potency. If the creative world-shaping era is
thought to have finished up with the cooling of the Ancestors (and why not liken
this mythic intuition of place-making petrification as the beginning of the world
as we know it to the astrophysicists belief in the condensation of primeval cosmic
gas into local pockets of matter that were to harbor life?), their spirit agency is far
from over. Tjukurpa are the source of the worlds continuity that must be activated
through human action and that is part and parcel of the Anangu intersubjectivity,
including as negative affirmation in rejection. Until about ten years ago, old people
who accompanied me in the car used to speak and gesticulate in a most lively man-
ner with Ancestors in Country as soon as we had left the settlement and the vehicle
hit the dirt road. This is something I only see rarely now, and mostly in fluent alter-
nation with memory accounts of events by the roadside. But I still hear about soul-
to-soul encounters in song, dance, and nocturnal dreams, or when camping on
Country during bush trips (or indeed when a night is spent involuntarily by the
roadside after a car breakdown). Whether as social occasion such as a visit to rela-
tives with the aim of sharing news, as food quest, work-related travel, or ritual event
that sees Ancestral journeys reiterated in dance and song, the duality of movement
and stopping prevails. Here is located the ontological duality of action and reflec-
tion, of the self-inscriptive exercise in the figurative mode. One might also say rest
and motion are conceived of as a cosmic rhythm that structures being and engen-
ders life. It is this that manifests in the movement of people in space and time, in
Ancestral travels, in the structure of mythic narratives and in the iconography of
circle and line in the visual arts. Barbara Glowczewski (2007: 100) emphasized the
existential dimension of walking in the desert Aboriginal world, especially the sor-
row and anguish of constant departure, but Rheim ([1945] 1971: 916) had much
earlier noted the libidinization of feet, tracks, and walking in the movement of the
Ancestors, making the land fecund by leaving behind spirit children as they stop
for ceremony on their journey. The parallel in the Biblical story of creation has not
gone unnoticed. One of my key advisors in the research, Anangu educator and
Bible translator, Katrina Tjitayi, explained that the Sabbath was like the customary
rest, ultu, after a few days of hunting.

Ute Eickelkamp 258
But this is where the parallel might end. Given the Anangus immersion in
Christian ideas that hold spirit within the world, the question arises: Is the hu-
man participation in what Schelling called natural productivity diminished? My
suspicion is yes. As stated above, the overt delegation of life-giving power to the
Almighty has to do with the less frankly stated fact that the Anangu have long
ceased to be the makers of their own world and the totemic Ancestors are no longer
the unconditioned. For the Anangu, the process of the Verdinglichung (reification)
long familiar to Western cultural subjects has not paid off. Concomitantly, their
epistemic stance and sovereign position as knowing subjects has been compro-
mised in the face of intellectual marginalization (cf. McIntosh 1997). The concern
with finding spirit is therefore not surprising:
Godaku Tjukurpa kumpini [Gods Word is hiding]. Tjukurpa mantatja
ngarini[The Word of the Land] is visible all around us. We are
searching, ngurini, to find out what he wants us to do. ... We are trying
to understand. (Sandra Lewis; authors field notes)
Conclusion
I have sought to capture something of the dynamics that make and shake the foun-
dations of Anangu thought about being today. The emphasis has been on the intel-
lectual traditions and symbolic-affective mediations underpinning Tjukurpa, the
Dreaming approached here as an Indigenous ontology of emplaced and embodied
spirit. These explorations rest on ongoing focused dialogues with Anangu collabo-
rators, and less on participant-observation of their ritual life and art production.
Specifically, my interest has been to examine if, for the Anangu, nature as ex-
ternality is appearing as a new item on the historical horizon of plausibility. I have
found that there are signs to suggest, with considerable caution, that this is in-
deed the case. For some who view the classical monistic self-world relationship
through the prism of the Christian ontological dualism of creation, the totality of
the Dreaming is coming apart. I do not suggest that Christianity is the primal cause
of an incipient ontological rupture. Rather, I see that a diminished productivity of
Country and premature deaths have put unprecedented stresses on the reciprocal
relationship between people and Ancestors. As a consequence, unwavering trust in
the replenishing power of emplaced spirit is being aligned with faith in the Savior.
I have further argued that with Christ enters a literal mode of symbolization that
is diametrically opposed to the figurative metonymic self-world relationship of old
that has been so fruitful.
As a contribution to recent discussions of animism and (far fewer) of totemism,
I have brought the underexplored romantics ontological monism into the picture.
This movement against modernitys various dualisms was shown to be relevant
in understanding the existential and ontological ruptures Indigenous people are
forced to grapple with, in central Australia as elsewhere. I suggested that the to-
temic Ancestors and their excess of being may be likened to the idea of nature as
the unconditioned, as product and producer, that is, as the self-generative ground
of being. Nature, as Schelling saw it, shares the structure of subjectivity, including

259 Finding spirit
in its destructive aspect. Referring to the parallel conceptualization of human na-

ture in Freuds story of the dual unity of the life and death instincts, I observed
that the Indigenous ontology of emplaced spirit points to the same intuition: being
proceeds as an alternation between entropy or stillness (purkaringanyi, the cool-
ing of the Ancestors who turn into resting places) and regeneration or movement
(pakani, to get up, rise, or come out of the ground). The promise of eternal
life in Christ, through the one and only resurrection of spirit and body, is shifting
this dynamic of being such that the Ancestors may become mortal in its wake. The
importance of understanding more fully such epistemic struggles and novel pos-
sibilities goes beyond academic concerns; they are acutely relevant for globalized
life-worlds facing the destructiveness of their modes of productivity and semiotic
orientation.
Acknowledgments
This article is based on research funded by a Future Fellowship grant (FT120100265)
from the Australian Research Council. I am deeply indebted to my Anangu mentors
and friends, especially the late Peter Nyaningu, Margaret Dagg, Tjimpuna Dunn,
Imuna Fraser, Makinti Minutjukur, Katrina Tjitayi, Angkuna Stevens, Tjunkaya
Tapaya, Rhoda Tjitayi, Nami Kulyuru, Sandra Lewis, Ungakini Tjangala, Ann
Thompson, and Sally-Anne Heffernan. I respect that only some individuals wish to
be acknowledged by name in the text. I wish to also thank Paul Eckert, coordinator
of the Pitjantjatjara Bible Translation Project, for the open-mindedness, welcom-
ing attitude, and many kinds of support he has afforded me. Geoffrey Bagshaw,
Britta Duelke, Gillian Gillison, Jadran Mimica, John Morton, and Benjamin Smith
insightfully commented on an earlier draft.
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Trouver lesprit: Monisme ontologique dans le monde du dsert

aborigne australien contemporain
Rsum : Lintrt rcent de lanthropologie pour la philosophie invite rflchir
aux relations sujet-objet sous contrainte. Je suggre que cette rflexion offre une op-
portunit de recouvrer et dengager a travers le prisme de lethnographie lhritage
des philosophies modernes de lesprit et de la nature. Dans ma tentative daller dans
cette direction, je discerne des alignements pistmiques dans la relation du soi au
monde telle quelle est envisage par les Anangu qui vivent Pukatia, dans lest du
desert australien oriental, dans lide de nature premire chez Friedrich Schelling
et dans les instincts de vie et de mort mis en avant par Freud. Ma discussion, cen-
tre sur les perspectives mergentes des Anangu sur la nature, explore une forme
de monisme ontologique face lincertitude. Janalyse ces vicissitudes travers les
mtaphores de la figuration indigne du lien entre lesprit et ltre, notamment ses
inflexions chrtiennes et leur mise en parallle avec la ralit du rve.
Ute Eickelkamp is an ARC Future Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at

the University of Sydney, examining the links between images of nature and the
nature of selves in the context of profoundly changing life-worlds. Her fieldwork
with Anangu Pitjantjatjara speakers in the Central Australian community Pukatja,

Ute Eickelkamp 264
begun in 1995, has focused on the social and aesthetic history of the local art, im-
ages of destruction (mamu), and representations of kinship. She has studied chil-
drens social imagination and emotional dynamics through a traditional form of
sand storytelling in the desert, after therapeutic Sandplay work with Tiwi children
in Australias north. Her publications include Dont ask for stories: The women of
Ernabella and their art (Aborginal Studies Press, 1999); the coedited Contexts of
child development: Culture, policy and intervention (CDU Press, 2008), and Grow-
ing up in Central Australia: New anthropological studies of Aboriginal childhood and
adolescence (Berghahn, 2011).
Ute Eickelkamp
Department of Anthropology
University of Sydney
A26R.C. Mills
NSW 2006
Australia
ute.eickelkamp@sydney.edu.au

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2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

Ute Eickelkamp, University of Sydney

Anthropologys philosophical interests of late invite reflection on subject-object relationships

 Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind the invisible Nature.

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Ute Eickelkamp.

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

Continuities in a transforming life-world

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

to community life have ebbed. Most notably, a string of initiatives succeeded in

A new symbolic nexus?

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

Figure 1: Easter church banners on cotton and canvas, Pukatja 2015

It is undoubtedly the case that the Anangu conceive of Ancestral presence as an

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

4. My somewhat deviant translation of ngura walytja (owner of a place) is both more

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

the fragmented self of Ancestral beings in classical Arrernte thought. By throw-

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

know of his workcreating this land and giving us ngantja mistletoe

Of kinds and excess of being

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

We used to make things grow...

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

From duality to dualism?

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

report on land tenure) called polymorphic consubstantiality between humans,

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

in its destructive aspect. Referring to the parallel conceptualization of human na-

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

Trouver lesprit: Monisme ontologique dans le monde du dsert

Ute Eickelkamp is an ARC Future Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 235264

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Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind the invisible Nature.

his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Ute Eickelkamp.