Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self [antikvár]

PrefaceMy field research with the Pintupi has always been both joyous and exhaustingand for the same reason, namely that the Pintupi have expected me to take on the obligations appropriate to community membership. This has been true from the beginning.I arrived in Australia's Northern Territory in June 1973 to ask the Pintupi for permission to conduct my study in Yayayi, a small breakaway community they had just established twenty-six miles west of Papunya. These people from the Gibson Desert had been coming east to Northern Territory settlements for the past forty years. That they had at last set up their own community, largely isolated from government supervision, provided a novice anthropologist with an opportune situation. I hoped to learn how the Pintupi organized themselves and their own destiny, in terms of their concerns and values.Even with this aim, I must confess that a long time passed before I began to comprehend what my Pintupi friends were telling me. Once I understood that they were indeed tryLig to explain themselves to me in a Pintupi fashionand that there was a Pintupi fashionmy confusion and struggles became more directed. None of this would have been possible without the friendliness and warmth of the Pintupi and their acceptance of me into the community as a member, as a "one-countryman" with my own responsibilities to them. This interaction and the difficult but rewarding emotional awareness I gradually gained of a Pintupi way of life inform the explanations and interpretations I offer in this book. I came to see that the "feel" of Pintupi life was central to any understanding.Throughout my field stays I have struggled with the problem of imposing my ideals and expectations on the people I studied. I felt this all the more deeply because the Pintupi remain in a semicolonial situation that still emphasizes the values and expectations of the white Australian majority. This conflict and its anthropological significance forced me to come to grips with the continuity and persistence of Pintupi cultural concepts.Since my initial twenty-one months at Yayayi, I have lived for intervals with Pintupi people as they have shifted their residence further and further west toward their own country. These stays at Yayayi and Yinyilingki for two months in 1979, at New Bore and Papunya for eight months in 1980-81, and short visits to Balgo in7