Emotions and the Self A Theory of Personhood and Political Order Among Pintupi Aborigines

Between 1973 and 1975 I did field work with the Pintupi at a settlement called Yayayi, 180 miles west of Alice Springs. ¹ At this time, the Pintupi were no longer living a traditional hunting-gathering life in the desert; for the past 40 years, the Pintupi have been drifting eastward from the Gibson Desert homeland, although the majority “came in” the 200–400 miles to European missions or settlements between 1954 and 1966. They were living, then, on the Australian equivalent of a “reservation” and not on their own land. A few months before I arrived, however, the Pintupi moved from a large government settlement (Papunya) comprising Aborigines of several different language groups to Yayayi, the site of a windmill-driven pump that was their own place (“all Pintupi”), and where about 300 people lived with little more than the windmill, some government-granted tents, and a few vehicles for transport. In theory, they were “governed” by a democratically elected Village Council, a notion introduced by the government.