Yasmine Musharbash

Perilous Laughter: Examples from Yuendumu, Central Australia

Against the background of popularisations of Freuds theory of laughter as anxiety release and Lustgewinn (pleasure gain), this paper presents some ethnographic examples of laughter from Yuendumu, central Australia, in which weakness and fear are considered to originate from laughter. Analysing some of the specific conceptual links that Warlpiri people make between laughter and weakness on the one hand, and between laughter and fear on the other, the paper makes a case for recognising both socio-culturally hyper- and hypocognised aspects of laughter.1

Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond

1. Introduction: Monsters, Anthropology, and Monster Studies Yasmine Musharbash 2. Cave Men, Luminoids and Dragons: Monstrous Creatures Mediating Relationships between People and Country in Aboriginal Northern Australia Joanne Thurman 3. Monstrous Transformations: A Case Study from Central Australia Yasmine Musharbash 4. Specters of Reality Mamu in the Eastern Western Desert of Australia Ute Eickelkamp 5. A Murder of Monsters: Terror and Morality in an Aboriginal Religion John Morton 6. Burnt Woman of the Mission: Gender and Horror in an Aboriginal Settlement in Northern New South Wales Mahnaz Alimardanian 7. Demons Within: Maleficent Manifestations in the Hare Krishna Movement Malcolm Haddon 8. Ghosts and the Everyday Politics of Race in Fiji Geir Henning Presterudstuen 9. Entanglements Between Tao People and Anito and LAnyu Island, Taiwan Leberecht Funk 10. When Goblins Come to Town: The Ethnography of Urban Hauntings in Georgia Paul Manning 11. The Workings of Monsters: Of Monsters and Humans in Icelandic Society Helena Onnudottir 12. Afterword: Strangerhood Pragmatics, and Place in the Dialectics of Monster and Norm Rupert Stasch

Telling Warlpiri Dog Stories

ABSTRACT Ostensibly about dingoes and dogs, this paper explores aspects of the contemporary social world of Warlpiri people in the camps of the central Australian settlement of Yuendumu (Northern Territory) through canines. Analyses of dog socialisation, kinds of domestication, and the roles that camp dogs perform (such as protector, family, and witness) provide insights into Warlpiri notions of moral personhood and are employed to reflect about the ethical foundations of how the oppositional categories of Yapa (self, Indigenous, Black, colonised) and Kardiya (other, non-Indigenous, ‘whitefella’, coloniser) are conceptualised.

Evening Play: Acquainting Toddlers with Dangers and Fear at Yuendumu, Northern Territory

Based on research with Warlpiri people at the Aboriginal town of Yuendumu in Central Australia, this chapter provides ethnographic material on and analysis of an Aboriginal extended family group’s nightly play sessions, focusing on three toddlers (between 2 and 2.5 years old). These sessions happen after dinner and before the toddlers fall asleep, when family members spend the evening in the camp, socialising. All action focused on the toddlers during this time has to do with inducing and relieving fear. I relate these sessions to others described in the anthropology of Aboriginal Australia and read them as part of larger processes of social learning through which Warlpiri children acquire understanding of their world and how they fit into it.

Monstrous Transformations: A Case Study from Central Australia

My chapter is ethnographically situated in the Tanami Desert, the home of Warlpiri people and the monsters that haunt, terrorize, and sometimes kill them. Located to the northwest of the center of Australia, first contact came relatively late in this region, and over the past century the Tanami and its human and monstrous inhabitants have experienced dramatic and tumultuous changes. I explore how one particular monster, called Kurdaitcha or Jarnpa, transformed with these changes, and the meanings that flow from this reality.1

Embodied Meaning: Sleeping Arrangements in Central Australia

As evening settles over Yuendumu, an Aboriginal settlement of mostly Warlpiri speakers in central Australia’s Tanami Desert, people get their mattresses, pillows, and blankets and arrange them for that night’s sleep. When I first began to undertake fieldwork, in the mid-1990s, more often than not, people slept outside: in the yards surrounding houses, in humpies, and in bush camps. Today, some sleep outside on verandahs and in yards, but more use the inside of houses (see Musharbash 2008). Whether inside or outside, people arrange themselves in rows of sleepers, called yunta in Warlpiri. Such a row of sleepers is comprised of at least four or five people, often more, and most camps (or houses) have more than one yunta a night. Where these yunta are positioned and who sleeps next to whom within them, change, often nightly. Ethnographically, this chapter is concerned with the “ins and outs” of Warlpiri shared sleep: how people sort themselves into yunta and thus, nightly, create order of a particular kind; and how this order-creating is an expression of meaning (see also Glaskin, this book).

Anthropology and Smoke: Editors’ Introduction to the Smoke Special Issue

ABSTRACT In this introductory paper, we contemplate both a variety of anthropological approaches to smoke and how analyses of smoke – as object, material, phenomenon, practice, or political fact – might contribute to anthropological knowledge. We consider these questions in and through the themes cross-cutting this collection, including: the sensuous aspects of smoke (especially in the olfactory, visual and haptic relations it occasions, entails and denies); the politics of smoke (in particular regard to climate change, public health, and Indigenous knowledge); smoke’s temporal dimensions (from the human mastery of fire via industrial chimneys to vaping e-cigarettes); and its ritual functions (encapsulating transition par excellence, curing ills, placating spirits, and marking time). We conclude by pondering smoke’s inherent capacity to escape the bounds we might set for it, including the imposition of highly politicised spatial, temporal, and intellectual constraints.

Yulyurdu: Smoke in the Desert

ABSTRACT I begin this paper with a nod to ‘the beginning’ by linking smoke to fire, and fire to humankind. Bound up in this deep history of smoke and humanity is a dichotomy cleaving humans from animals and the west from the rest. Taking smoke at Yuendumu, a Warlpiri community in central Australia as my subject, I aim to destabilise some of the certainties entrenched in this dichotomy. Smoke, of course, is nigh impossible to pin down, literally as well as conceptually. So rather than trying to immobilise it, I follow in smoke’s own fashion and waft across different kinds of fires and different kinds of analytical approaches. Ethnographically, I draw a narrative picture of the different ways in which smoke at Yuendumu permeates everyday life by considering the smoke of breakfast fires, signalling fires, cooking fires during storms, caring-for-country fires, and the scent of cold smoke on blankets, clothes, and bodies. Analytically, I move from smoke and how it relates to embodied Warlpiri ways of being in the world, to smoke and childhood socialisation, including baby smoking rituals. From there I shift to the smoke of caring-for-country fires, and on to smoke, memory, odourphilia, and odourphobia. I conclude by pondering the potential of a smoke-like approach.

Introduction: Monsters, Anthropology, and Monster Studies

Every field-site has monsters—spooky, menacing, terrifying beings—who lurk in the shadows and the dark, under beds, in caves and lakes, beyond the line of sight, and in the imagination. Some cause mischief, others protect, a great number of them instill fear, many terrorize, and a few may even kill; all provide substance for conversation and, importantly, for action. Monsters are bloodcurdlingly potent of meaning and anthropology has engaged with them since its inception.1 Yet, and curiously, anthropology has not substantially joined in with the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of monster studies. This is a relatively young field; Cohen’s (1996) Monster Culture (Seven Theses), while by no means the first endeavor, constitutes something of a foundation to the concerted interdisciplinary effort of studying monsters. Over the last decade or so, monster studies has mushroomed as a cornucopia of recent articles, edited volumes, journals, and books about monsters attests (including two new compendia, see Mittman and Dendle 2012; Picart and Browning 2012b; and an encyclopedia, see Weinstock 2014).2