Paper short abstract:

Reflecting on decades of ethnography with Indigenous Australians, this paper explores the praxis of ‘keeping company’, a multi-dimensional art of connection that links people to non-human species. This relational ontology inspires thinking through human resilience in times of ecological precarity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on a larger project, entitled, ‘Keeping Company: An anthropology of being in relation’. It anthropologises the praxis of relating, that is, expands the horizon over which understandings of the self and non-self/other in relation are engaged. The drive is to seek out relational lifeworlds of distinction (that is cross-cultural examples), which support and enrich the field of potentials for new ways of thinking through relationships which will support life and being with difference.

I ask, how might there be a return to appreciating the human in relation? Reflecting on decades of ethnography with Indigenous Australians, specifically the Yanyuwa people in northern Australia, attention is given to the praxis of ‘keeping company’, a fine-tuned and multi-dimensional art of connection that links people to one another, to ancestors, to places and non-human species. Yanyuwa have a cultural habit through which they are capable of more-than-human entanglements across the entire field of their land and seascape. This relational ontology and its epistemic roots create the conditions for Yanyuwa resilience amidst experiences of historic violence and prevailing coloniality. This relational ontology provides fascinating points of engagement for thinking through human resilience at a time when ecological crises are becoming crushingly prevalent. Broadening ontologies of relating may prompt more expansive approaches to human interactions with the world, a step that may in turn encourage better acceptance of difference, enchantment with what lays beyond the human and a flexibility in how we exist. This is explored as a praxis of resilience.