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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Warlpiri people engage with digital technology to reconnect with ancestral images and reconstitute their knowledge of places. It asks how unequal access to infrastructure and shifting notions of property are articulating with the circulation of cultural knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

While anthropologists have long used recorded and transcribed ethnographic material to construct analyses, the peoples from whom they obtained that information - and particularly the descendants of their original informants - are now increasingly turning to digitized collections of such material to interpret and affirm their place in the world. Yet, the social contexts in which the material was originally recorded— for example, regarding such things as local organization, relational personhood and practices of memory— have often been radically transformed by socio-historical processes. At the same time, people have unequal access to the infrastructure that supports new forms and circulation of cultural media. Drawing on an ethnographic case study conducted at Willowra, this paper explores how middle aged and younger Lander Warlpiri people are engaging with digital technologies to reconnect with ancestral voices (individual histories, song, myth and ritual) and images (still and moving) to reconstitute their knowledge of, and identity with, places. It asks how shifting notions of property and forms of social relatedness are influencing (and articulating with) the objectification and circulation of cultural knowledge and assertions of rights to it. In doing so, it explores how anthropologists and anthropology are implicated in this process.