Dingo Makes Us Human
Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture

This ethnography explores the culture of the Yarralin people in the Northern Territory.

Deborah Bird Rose (Author)

9780521794848, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 August 2000

264 pages, 53 b/w illus. 6 maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.39 kg

This original ethnography brings indigenous people's stories into conversations around troubling questions of social justice and environmental care. Deborah Bird Rose lived for two years with the Yarralin community in the Northern Territory's remote Victoria River Valley. Her engagement with the people's stories and their action in the world leads her to this analysis of a multi-centred poetics of life and land. The book speaks to issues that are of immediate and broad concern today: traditional ecological knowledge, kinship between humans and other living things, colonising history, environmental history, and sacred geography. Now in paperback, this award-winning exploration of the Yarralin people is available to a whole new readership. The boldly direct and personal approach will be illuminating and accessible to general readers, while also of great value to experienced anthropologists.

1. Remembrance
2. Expectations
3. Earthborn law
4. Living and dead bodies
5. An emu is not a catfish
6. The gift of life
7. Dream country
8. To have and to hold
9. Freehold
10. Testing
11. Jacky Jacky
12. Life time
13. This earth.

Subject Areas: Biography: historical, political & military [BGH]