Paper short abstract:

This paper builds on Nic Peterson’s analysis of a Warlpiri fire ceremony and his discussion of its method of conflict resolution through ‘trials by fire’. While Nic emphasises structural tensions in the local system of kinship and affinity, I deepen his analysis by looking at how and why this resolution occurs through the aggressive use of fire.

Paper long abstract:

Thanks in no small measure to Nic Peterson, the Warlpiri 'fire ceremony', in its various guises as 'Ngatjakula', 'Buluwandi' and 'Jardiwarnpa', has become ethnographically famous. In his 1970 paper on 'Buluwandi' (in Ron Berndt's 'Australian Aboriginal Anthropology'), Nic clarified the meaning of the fire ceremony's conflict resolution, teasing out the pattern of ceremonial interaction and relating it to tensions between matrikin and patrikin in the bestowal of nieces/daughters. But why should tension between matrikin and patrikin be mediated by the aggressive use of fire? Why is it appropriate for certain people to be 'torched' in a manner which caused Gillen to think of such ceremonies as populated by 'fiends escaped from Hades'? Although Nic once suggested to me that the work of Géza Róheim seemed to be 'right for all the wrong reasons', it is through Róheim's equation of fire and femininity (in 'The Eternal Ones of the Dream') - together with the general association which Aborigines make between (what George Lakoff calls) 'women, fire and dangerous things' - that I seek an answer to these questions.