Seminar Series: Abstract

09:30
April 29 2009
Seminar Room A

Splitting the Atom of Kinship: The Symbolic Economy of the Warlpiri Fire Ceremony
John Morton, Anthropology, La Trobe University

The Warlpiri fire ceremony, in its various guises as 'Ngatjakula', 'Buluwandi' and 'Jardiwarnpa', has become ethnographically famous. In his 1970 paper on 'Buluwandi' (in Ron Berndt's Australian Aboriginal Anthropology), Nic Peterson clarified the meaning of the fire ceremony's conflict resolution, teasing out the pattern of ceremonial interaction and relating it to tensions between matrikin and patrikin in the bestowal of nieces/daughters. But why should tension between matrikin and patrikin be mediated by the aggressive use of fire? Why is it appropriate for certain classes of relatives to be dramatically 'torched' in a manner which once caused Frank Gillen to liken ritual antagonists to 'fiends escaped from Hades'? Although Nic Peterson once suggested to me that psychoanalytic takes on Aboriginal ritual symbolism seemed to be 'right for all the wrong reasons', I show how Gaston Bachelard's The Psychoanalysis of Fire contains much which clarifies the symbolism of the Warlpiri fire ceremony in relation to kinship and marriage. Fire, it appears, is emblematic of the contradictory forces, both creative and destructive, articulated by incestuous desire. The Warlpiri fire ceremony, I suggest, dramatises these forces and their resolution.