Re-reading Ronald Berndt: Exploring the depths of his Yolngu ethnography

The title of this essay sets its dialogic structure. Ronald Berndt's writing at times obscured the core insights that he had about Yolngu society, and partly as a consequence Australian anthropology has not yet made the best use of the immense richness of his ethnographic legacy. In retrospect, in many areas of their research the Berndts were pioneers addressing themes and topics that had been for too long ignored. They opened up new fields of study and redressed some of the imbalances associated with functionalism, the dominant paradigm of their early years as anthropologists. In this essay I examine two areas of Ronald Berndt's writings in which he had insights that were not fully appreciated at the time: the analysis of Yolngu social organisation and the analysis of Yolngu sexual symbolism. In both cases, his absorption in Yolngu ethnography made him aware that his predecessors had overlooked important themes of Yolngu society, yet in both cases his analysis was less convincing than it might have been.