A Black Civilization.

Nunggubuyu Myths and Ethnographic Texts

“…I have some myth material in Ritharngu but it did not appear in my published text collection because my principal Ritharngu informants regarded all mythical material as at least slightly secret. For more northerly Yuulngu groups, and to some extent for the whole Yuulngu area, see Berndt (1951Berndt ( , 1952 and Warner (1969).…”

“…Some general works on Australian Aboriginals are Elkin (1938) and its subsequent editions, R. M. and C. H. Berndt (1965), and Maddock (1974). Relatively general ethnographic works on neighbors of the Nunggubuyu are Turner (1974) and Warner (1969), both already cited (Warner's book was originally published in 1937), and Thomson (1949) is also worth examining. On material culture of the nearby Groote Eylandters see Tindale (1925-26) and forthcoming pUblications by D. Levitt on ethnobotany.…”

“…Farther north in Arnhem Land, there are other versions of the Madayin based on different local myth traditions. These are described by Warner (1969) as the "Nara" rituals (cf. Nunggubuyu nga:rag, another term for Madayin).…”

Menstruation as medicine

“…Using evidence mainly from California, Amazonia and northern and north-western Australia, I will argue that the cultural assumptions underlying shamanism or 'medicine' in these areas run roughly as follows: (1) health is dependent upon the maintenance of a correct 'balance' between states or forces such as heat and cold, wetness and dryness, blood and fire, kinship unity and sex, or 'rawness' and the state of being 'cooked' -forces, that is, which are conceptualised as polar opposites of the kind which make up the structure of the world; (2) nature achieves her own health by alternating in a balanced way between these opposites -as between dry season and wet, full moon and dark, day and night, life and temporary or periodic 'death'; (3) the health of the human individual presupposes the ability correctly to reduplicate, within the body itself, these rhythms of periodic renewal; (4) ideally, women should do this by menstruating in synchrony with one another and with the moon, thus providing a collective social rhythm through which human society can keep 'in phase' with the self-renewing processes of the wider cosmos; (5) failing this, men themselves must learn to 'menstruate' in some symbolic sense in order to safeguard the rhythms on which human health depends.…”

Conceptual Dynamism and Ambiguity in Marrangu Djinang Cosmology, North-Central Arnhem Land

“…10 Keen (1995: 514-5) describes similar applications of the term 'ba:purru'. This kind of configuration has been called 'phratry' by Warner (1937Warner ( /1958 and 'totemic unions' by Shapiro (1981: 23). 11 I recognise that the labels noted here are not used in an entirely consistent way to denote a singular 'level' of social organisation.…”