Desert Dreamers

Barbara Glowczewski

• Publisher: Univocal Publishing
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781937561765
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In the heart of Australia, on the cracked red earth, among wild vegetation, weathered bush, and dried-up creeks, hundreds of invisible pathways exist that become entangled on the earth's surface, underground, and in the sky, clouds, and wind. The Aboriginal people call them Jukurrpa: “the Dreamings.” This web is the Warlpiri land. Practicing the Dreaming, by ritual art, is for the Warlpiri a way to reactivate their ancestral traditions to connect with the cosmos and respond to current social and political issues.

In 1979, anthropologist Barbara Glowczewski embarked on a journey to study the Warlpiri in the Australian outback. Struggling at once to maintain their traditions and cultural heritage as well as adapting to the continuing secularization and techno-progress of their European Australian counterparts, she takes us into the landscape, artistic rituals, and turmoil of the Warlpiri over three decades. Becoming accepted among Aboriginal families as a translator, and at the same time a negotiator of two vastly different visions of the earth, contemporary Western culture and the ancient indigenous dreaming culture, Glowczewski created a singular document of ethnological fieldwork and of self-transformation and discovery.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Future Dreaming
• Prelude
• Part One (1998)
• A Warlpiri Family
• Lajamanu
• Yapa and Kardiya
• Royalties
• Nostalgia
• Part Two (1979)
• What is Your Skin?
• The Businesswomen
• Kajirri
• Totems and Taboos
• The Truck
• In Search of the Dreaming
• Part Three (1979-1983)
• The Film
• Everything Collapses
• The Trial
• Reunion
• The Warlpiri in Paris
• Part Four (1984)
• A House for Women
• Possum and the Men
• The Revelation
• The Voice of the Nights
• Stories of Spirit-Children
• Part Five (1984)
• The Black Dog
• The Shield Ceremony
• Shamans
• A Ritual Convoy
• Part Six (1988)
• Changes
• Is God a Dream(ing)?
• The Hypercube
• How to Say Afterwards
• Postface to Pocket Edition, Actes Sud (1996)
• Annex (2013)
• We Have a Dreaming