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Paper short abstract:

Ancestral beings form Yolŋu Country through the act of naming. In an analogue of ancestral action, relatives 'place' names from Country onto infants. Thus persons are constituted through names, while Country is continually renamed and reconstituted through intergenerational networks of persons.

Paper long abstract:

In Yolngu ontology, ancestral beings are not so much creators as namers: they give form and meaning to Country through naming it and the things that they find there – flora, fauna, winds, weather and clouds, and in the case of sea Country, currents, waveforms and underwater features. They put people into Country – or find them there – and give them language and law, to become rirrakay yirralka 'the voice of Country'. Country and its associated names, in their thousands, are voiced through the song cycles of Yolŋu ceremony, and personal names are, in turn, drawn from this stock of names. In an analogue of ancestral action, particular adult relatives of a child 'place' or 'put' names onto them, giving them form as Yolngu persons who are at once unique (in terms of the set of names that each person 'stands with'), but also inextricably woven into the social and spiritual fabric of Yolngu life. The paper will briefly outline the enduring features of the Yolngu 'system' that structure the placing of names onto people. It will argue that this particular way of naming has powerful recursive properties: while persons are constituted through their names, Country is also continually renamed and reconstituted through intergenerational networks of persons.