Predicaments of Proximity. Revising Relatedness in a Warlpiri Town

Drawing on ethnographic material from participant observation-based research with Warlpiri people at Yuendumu (180 miles northwest of Alice Springs), I heed the editors’ call to rethink contemporary Aboriginal personhood in its normative and experiential dimensions by putting forward two propositions: (1) Most theorizations of Aboriginal personhood, including the most renowned one by Myers, understood Aboriginal subjectivity as “grounded in the practical activities of band life” (Myers 1986a, 107). I propose that there is a need to consider the shaping of the person under new colonial and neocolonial conditions; and (2) that some of these transformed practices and experiences of being are of a different quality, affecting personhood in ways seldom explored (but see, among others, Burbank 1994; Burbank 1994, 2011; Moisseeff 2011).