Land, Language and Social Identity in Aboriginal Australia

Abstract

Views of pre‐contact Aboriginal social groupings have ranged from those which posit a linguistically‐defined, homogeneous ‘tribe’ to others which, more recently, have asserted that language plays little or no role in Aboriginal constructions of social identity. Given the obvious, different degrees of linguistic diversity in different parts of the continent, it seems of interest to look at native linguistic ideologies and the ways in which notions of language and linguistic difference are integrated with other variables in the construction of social identity. This paper begins to look at differential constructions of social identity in three parts of Australia—Cape Keerweer in Cape York, the Western Desert, and western Roper River and suggests some directions for future research.

Law's Anthropology : From ethnography to expert testimony in native title

“…Yet, the 'tribal' level appears again in the 1990s in Glowczewski's work, in a dialectic of identity between an all-inclusive language-identified group (Yawuru) and identities based on dialect, traditional toponym or family. By the time Glowczewski was writing, there had been much debate in anthropology about the utility of the concept of tribe and tribal boundaries (Berndt 1959;Peterson and Long 1986;Sutton 1995a), the appearance in land claims of socalled 'language groups' (Rumsey 1989) and, more generally, the relationship between language, social identity and land affiliation (Merlan 1981). Merlan's and Rumsey's work, in particular, is suggestive of possible further finegrained research into the language referents in traditional myths, particularly those involving travel beyond Yawuru country, to see whether they contain assumptions about the identification of land with a particular language.…”

“…(1974:212) 9 Sutton described this seasonal expansion and contraction as a pulsating movement (see Sutton 1990). 10 See Merlan (1981); and Rumsey (1989).…”

“…(1965:134) This passage is suggestive of further research that could have been undertaken on the sociological reality of Tindale's proposed tribal boundaries within the Western Desert bloc (cf. Merlan 1981;Rumsey 1989 (Tonkinson 1974:9-10). His most intensive work at Jigalong was in 1963-66 for his MA thesis (Tonkinson 1966).…”

“…Thus the estate group is the local descent group. The simplicity and force of this 28 See Douglas (1964; Merlan (1981);and Miller (1971). presentation soon broke down under the weight of necessary exceptions and qualifications: traditional rights to estate areas are not exclusive, or exclusively inherited in a patrilineal way.…”

La muse rugissante : à la recherche des contes de Coyote au nord‑ouest de la Californie

“…40. For the sake of comparison, the reader may wish to compare this situation with more distant places like New Guinea (see Kulick, 1992), Australia (Merlan, 1981), or the Amazon Basin (Sorenson, 1967;Aikhenvald, 2002).…”