Paper short abstract:

Australian Indigenous songs and dances are considered ways of celebrating and reactivating relations of mutual care among living forms, re-enlivening the past, and transmitting knowledge to the younger generations.

Paper long abstract:

Ritual songs and dances in Indigenous Australia have been mainly studied as expressions of a complex cosmogony distributing groups across vast regions, celebrating their unique cultural identity, and a way of asserting and negotiating their political authority over others. Yet the significance of music and dance in recording, sustaining, renewing, and transmitting ethnobiological knowledge has been neglected (Curran et al. 2019). Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in Northeast Arnhem Land, the paper explores how Indigenous song and dances are a repository of environmental knowledge as they describe in detail the complex mutual physiological, social, and emotional interdependence and cooperation among people, places, other beings, and life forms. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which songs and dance celebrate relationships of nurturance, care, and affect in order to re-enliven the past, transmit knowledge to the young generations and nourish the land so that the land can keep on nourishing people.