Setting Free the Son, Setting Free the Widow: Relational Transformation in Arrernte Life-Cycle Rituals (Central Australia)

ABSTRACT

In Australian Aboriginal society, personal identity is an evolving process whose successive mutations derive from a person’s capacity to enter into new relationships. Both initiation rites and funerary practices act to mediate such relational transformations. Drawing on Spencer and Gillen’s material on the Arrernte, this paper establishes a parallel between the procedures put into effect to render a son autonomous from his mother in the course of male initiation, and those undertaken to emancipate a widow from her deceased husband. Both ritual operations introduce a relational distancing within a totality. This totality is composed of two individuals whose antecedent close physical intimacy could thwart these persons’ ability to become an autonomous agent. The rituals make the person capable of entering a new intimate relationship: marriage in the case of a son and remarriage in the case of a widow. Both procedures entail the intervention of ritual objects closely connected to an individual’s personal identity: on the one hand, the churinga, a man is joined with at the end of his initiation and which allows him to exercise responsibilities in fertility rites, and on the other hand, the decaying, contaminating corpse a husband leaves behind upon his death.

KEYWORDS:

• Male initiation
• widowhood
• hair
• Arrernte
• intimacy

Acknowledgements

I am very thankful to the organisers, Pascale Bonnemère, James Leach, and Borut Telban, for having invited me to participate in this issue, to John Morton for his well-informed comments, and to Michael Houseman for his invaluable help with my English.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For the sake of consistency, I adopt Spencer and Gillen’s orthography (churinga instead of Strehlow’s tjurunga or the more contemporary tjuringa).

2. Morton speaks of two complementary movements, one from unity to multiplicity which he calls ‘fragmentation’, and the other, from multiplicity to unity, which he calls ‘incorporation’ or ‘individuation’ (1987, 1989).

3. Regarding the use of body painting to promote young men’s masculinity in a contemporary Aboriginal community, see De Largy Healy (2017).

4. Funerary practices have also become a major feature of contemporary Australian Aboriginal life (see Glaskin et al. 2008; De Largy Healy, 2017), comparable in terms of time, effort, and number of participants, to traditional male initiations.