Yolngu Country as a Multidimensional Tangle of Relationships How ‘Everything is Linked to One Another’

Abstract

This paper explores how Australian Indigenous people express their mutual life‑giving bonds with other‑than‑humans such as animals, plants, natural features, and land in terms of kinship relationships. I will describe an ‘ontology of connectivity’ and a ‘mutuality of being’ among living beings in terms of reciprocal responsibility, interdependence, cooperation and care. In reference to my ethnographic research in Northeast Arnhem Land, I insist on the priority of relating, and on the affective nature of multispecies relationships, and illustrate how these are celebrated, maintained and reactivated through ceremonial songs, as well as new forms of music.