Paper short abstract:

Based on Nicolas Peterson’s model of the Indigenous domestic moral economy, I examine the role of Christianity in the coordination of sharing practices and market behaviors at Galiwin’ku. I explore how re-appropriated Christianity responds to new cultural values of individualism and to traditional tensions between autonomy and relatedness.

Paper long abstract:

Nicolas Peterson's model of the Indigenous domestic moral economy accounts for the ways in which Aboriginal people continue the centrality of sharing practices as they engage with the cash economy to reproduce social relationships. Personhood in this social context, Peterson argues, is constituted through the tensions between Aboriginal individual autonomy and relatedness as opposed to the individualism that emerges from affluence and high consumer dependency. In this paper, I examine the role of Christianity in the coordination of sharing practices and market behaviors in the Yolngu Aboriginal settlement of Galiwin'ku. Over the last six decades, Galiwin'ku inhabitants have taken part in ongoing re-appropriations of missionary Christianity to produce the "Yolngu-conceived Christianity" that is practiced in the settlement today. I explore how this Yolngu-conceived Christianity responds to new cultural values of individualism and to traditional tensions between autonomy and relatedness. Yolngu-conceived Christianity, I argue, creates new potentials for relation-making and encourages the growth of individualism.