Yuendumu Everyday: Contemporary Life in a Remote Aboriginal Australia

CHAPTER 6
In the jilimi: intimacy

One of Bourdieu’s paramount insights is that the body is a vehicle through which we experience and create the world (see especially 1990 and 2000: 89–96). As he says:

But it is in the dialectical relationship between the body and a space structured according to the mythico-ritual oppositions that one finds the form par excellence of the structural apprenticeship which leads to the em-bodying of the structures of the world, that is, the appropriating by the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world. (Bourdieu 2000: 89)

This is not so different from Heidegger’s series of building–dwelling–thinking. The processes of creating and structuring the world and being created and structured by the thus created world are the same; what differs is the role of the body. It is absent in all but an abstract sense in Heidegger, present as a active/passive force in Bourdieu, where the body acts, experiences, and is acted upon. What is missing in both theories is the person. We find generic man in Heidegger, man and woman as opposites in Bourdieu, but we do not encounter individuals. Yet, it is in exactly this nexus of embodied structures and rules (married people sleep in yupukarra, socially senior people sleep on the outside of a yunta, and so forth) and the actual bodies of actual people doing things in the real world, that Warlpiri intimacy arises.

A most helpful approach to this bridging of the body, the person and the world is found in the French sociologist Marcel Mauss’s idea of body techniques (1979, first published in 1934). He describes body techniques as ‘physio-psycho-sociological assemblages of action’ (Mauss 1979: 120), alerting us to the fact that the body is employed (and read) on three interconnected levels: the physiological, the sociological and the psychological. He provides a list of body techniques in which, listed under ‘sleep’, there is an inventory of sleeping positions and contexts: sleeping lying down or standing up, on a horse, in a bed, on a mat, on the ground, under a blanket, alone, with others, in a circle, and so on. He adds that ‘hundreds of things still remain to be discovered’ (Mauss 1979: 112). In exploring Warlpiri intimacy through ways of sleeping, I am following Mauss’s call to sociologically investigate sleep.

Sleep is a physiological need. Our bodies must sleep in order to live, we get cranky when we are tired, we feel great after a long deep sleep, and so forth. Sleep is sociologically (or socio-culturally) organised, or, as Mauss said, ‘the notion that going to bed is something natural is totally inaccurate’ (Mauss 1979: 112). Sleep in this regard approximates most closely some of Bourdieu’s ideas about embodiment, as sleep is socio-culturally organised in terms of space, gender, protection, ritualisation and forth.

In socio-cultural contexts in which ideas of separating private and public, for example, are given moral priority, the sleeping person is protected through various thresholds and institutions, and the acts of preparing for sleep and re-entering waking life are ritualised (see among others, Aubert and White 1959a, 1959b and Schwartz 1970). At Yuendumu, sociality is formed through webs of personal networks, each of which is established through numerous person-to-person relationships. The distinction of public and private cannot play the same role in a context in which relationships are extensive and always personal, and formed around the tensions of autonomy and relatedness, or being boss for oneself and looking after others.¹ As a result, sleep is shared, within certain limits. Marital status and gender dictate some of the spatial aspects of sleep everywhere, through the ways in which marriage and gender are conceptualised and spatially organised in everyday life. At Yuendumu, as we saw, this happens through the separation of jilimi, yupukarra and jangkayi. Marital sexual relations and marital sleep take place at night in yupukarra, extra-marital sexual relations take place during the day and away from yupukarra. As Warlpiri sexuality is defined purely through heterosexual relations, all other non-sexual sleep, by implication, happens in jilimi and jangkayi, reinforced through the simple fact that in these places, blankets and mattresses are shared without connotations of sexual activity. Put differently, conceptually aligning yupukarra with sexual relations means that there is no need to flag the absence of sexual relations in other types of camps, there is no need for walls or physical distance regimenting sleep — as long as unmarried men and unmarried women sleep in separate camps. This allows for expressions of intimacy that are socio-culturally particular as well as indicative of what Mauss calls the psychological.

Significantly, Mauss placed the psychological in between the other two in his concept of ‘physio-psycho-sociological assemblages of action’. The lens of the psychological as linked to both the physiological and the social throws light on Warlpiri notions of intimacy through examining Warlpiri practices of sleeping (which, of course, is one of many body techniques, all of which could be analysed in similar ways). It allows for exploration of both the meaning of choice within conforming to socio-cultural norms and individuality in physio-psychological terms.

Two issues in regards to sleep thus defined bring into relief the Warlpiri notion of intimacy. Firstly, the over-arching socio-cultural structures allow for (and are perpetuated by) mobility and immediacy, which in practice mean that Yapa co-sleep with a much greater number of others than, say, Kardiya do. This affords Yapa an intimate knowledge of a greater number of other people’s bodies. Secondly, the individual choices specific persons make within the over-arching socio-cultural structures exemplify to themselves and to others their idiosyncratic individuality. Put differently, intimate knowledge is acquired by living in close proximity with others, by paying attention to their bodies, and to how individuals use and position their bodies. Sleeping arrangements are one of many Warlpiri practices of living in close proximity, and I examine them to approach an understanding of Warlpiri forms of intimacy in Bachelard’s sense; I interpret sleeping arrangements as communicating aspects of the innermost protected idea of selfhood, of ways of being and seeing oneself. I begin with a description of the sensuality of knowing other people’s bodies and the sensuality of sleep in the jilimi, and then analyse the particular choices Polly, Joy, Nora and Celeste made in their sleeping arrangements during my first sixty nights in the jilimi.

The sensuality of knowing the bodies of others

When I first arrived at Yuendumu I memorised people by their faces and sometimes by their clothes (bad mistake, as clothes are swapped frequently). As a result, I had great difficulties recognising people at night. When we sat around the fire telling stories and someone or another came toward us in the dark, I used to be perplexed by everybody but me recognising who was approaching long before I could see their faces in the firelight. However, it was not Warlpiri people’s night vision that was superior to mine, but their knowledge of others, and of others’ bodies.

Celeste does not need to see Tamsin’s face to recognise Tamsin; she can identify her by her shape, the way she walks, by her foot tracks, her voice, her breathing, the way she smells, by the way she flicks her hand, by any number of clues deduced from Tamsin’s body. Accordingly, she can identify how Tamsin feels, what mood she is in, if she is ill or healthy, happy, sad, or angry, by the smallest signs. The same is probably true for most intimate relationships (such as mother–child, husband–wife) around the world. At Yuendumu, however, people possess such intimate knowledge about others from a much greater circle of people. Such intimate knowledge is imparted and acquired through many practices. Here I single out sleeping in the jilimi. I am not concerned with the intimacy of sexual relations (in yupukarra), but that of women and children sharing mattresses and blankets in the yunta of the jilimi.

Familiarity finds expression in closeness. The degree of physical proximity of bodies inside a yunta is up to the individuals, and differs from night to night, depending who one is sleeping next to. Parallel to the way in which individual yunta are distributed across the yarlu of the jilimi and spatially express social closeness and distance to each other, so within each yunta sleepers arrange themselves in different degrees of physical closeness to each other. Snuggling up to others provides comfort, expresses sentiments of marlpa, and in the jilimi (as well as in jangkayi) has no sexual connotations. There are no age or generational limitations on who might share blankets with whom: adult sisters, adult mothers and adult daughters, anybody can and does — if they feel comfortable. Children generally climb under their mother’s blankets, or, if they are being looked after by a grandmother, especially a yaparla (paternal grandmother), they grow up sharing the blankets with her. In fact, co-sleeping arrangements between yaparla are one reason why many senior women ‘adopt’ one of their son’s children. In Nora’s case for example, one of the benefits to her close yaparla relationship with Toby was the marlpa (company) he provided, including at night as a co-sleeper. Independent of the nature of Nora’s current relations to any of the other jilimi residents, looking after Toby meant that there was always at least one other body in her swag at night.

Because of the extensive flow of people through camps, and because of the ever-changing nightly arrangements of yunta, who sleeps next to whom and how also is in constant flux. This in turn means that everybody has experiences of co-sleeping with a large (but varying) number of people, resulting in intimate knowledge of those people’s bodies.

Having shared blankets with them, I know how Tamsin will wind her legs around mine, I know what Greta’s arm over my hip feels like, and Monroe snuggling under my arm, I know that Zack will kick off the blankets in the middle of the night, that Marion grinds her teeth when dreaming. Having slept many times next to them, I can imitate Joy’s snore, can pinpoint when Camilla will turn her body around after a particularly loud snore, I know Kiara’s little grunts, and I would be able to identify Celeste’s breathing anywhere. I know the smell of Neil’s hair and how he tosses and turns until he falls into deep sleep, I know the feel of Polly’s skin, I know whose skin is dry, whose feet get sweaty, I know how many blankets Annie likes on a cold winter’s day and on a mild night. I know all these things about all these people because I have co-slept with them.² This knowledge is part of the reason why today I, too, can tell who is approaching our fire at night, or, even with my eyes shut, who has just entered the yunta, or, just by their breathing, who is asleep and who is awake.

Warlpiri people’s knowledge, of course, is much more extensive than mine in terms of the things they know about others (and their bodies) and the numbers of others they possess such knowledge about, as they co-sleep and socialise every day and night of their lives. Because of the ways in which mobility and immediacy underpin their everyday lives, intimacy in the shape of such intimate knowledge about others becomes an inherent part of relating to others and, as a result, of experiencing life. These sensuous ways of knowing others (see also Stoller 1989) and of expressing the self are but a part of how personhood is expressed. Knowledge of others builds on the physiological, such as others’ bodies’ shapes, the particular way they move their bodies, their individual smells, the characteristic sounds they produce and so forth, but also far exceeds these innate features. What one knows about others and who one reveals oneself to, and in what shape, depends as much on personal choices, which are communicated in socio-culturally understandable ways.

Sleeping position choices and intimacy

One form of intimacy, of knowing others and expressing the self, can be found in the choices individuals make in the positioning of their bodies at night. The idiosyncratic nature of such choices and what they say about the person can be illustrated by examining how Joy, Polly, Nora and Celeste positioned their bodies. The four women are well suited for comparison, as they share many socio-culturally determining factors. Since none of them are children, they have more choices of where to sleep and who to sleep next to; since they are not married they do not live in yupukarra, but all four live in the jilimi; and within the jilimi all four hold gravitational positions in respect to the flow of people through the jilimi. Lastly, Polly and Nora are of similar age (in their seventies) as are Joy and Celeste (in their forties). To illustrate forms of intimacy, I compare the choices Joy, Polly, Nora and Celeste made firstly in terms of who (and how many people) they slept next to, and secondly where within the yunta they positioned themselves.

The data on which I base these comparisons derive from the sleeping arrangement maps of my first sixty nights in the jilimi — the same nights of the case studies from the previous chapter. Of those sixty nights, Nora spent 41 nights in the jilimi, Polly 44, Celeste 48 and Joy 55.³ Put differently, during the sixty nights, these women were absent from the jilimi for anything between five nights and almost three weeks, underscoring my earlier point about the frequent absences from what one calls ‘home’.

Their gravitational positions in the jilimi meant that Polly, Nora, Celeste and Joy often had their own separate yunta, sharing it with whoever was staying with them. There were only three exceptions to this. First, on the above-described nights, Joy’s and Celeste’s usually separate yunta combined with me in the middle at the first stage of my stay in the jilimi. Second, when it was cold or rainy, sometimes all jilimi residents formed a single yunta on the verandah. And third, while each of these four women’s yunta seemed to move around the jilimi space according to their own inclinations and usually at some distance to the other women’s yunta, Polly’s and Celeste’s yunta were combined or spatially much closer to each other more often than the others.

Choices of who to sleep next to and what these imply

Collated data for the four women and those people who slept immediately next to them during the sixty nights is shown in Table 4 (p. 102).⁴ In the second column, next to the names of the women, it gives the total number of other people a woman slept immediately next to over the recorded nights. The third column indicates the name(s) of the main person(s) a woman slept next to, and provides the number of nights and genealogical relationship, and the fourth supplies information about the genealogical relationships between each of the four women and their respective immediate sleeping companions.

Looking at the numbers of immediate sleeping companions, Polly and Joy stand out as opposite poles in this table. Polly has 22 sleeping companions, more than twice as many as Joy, exactly twice as many as Nora and distinctly more than Celeste. Joy, who has the lowest number of sleeping companions, spent the most nights (55) of the four women in the jilimi, which puts these numbers further into perspective. These quantitative data can, at least tentatively, be imbued with social meaning. That Polly sleeps next to more people than the other three women, and that she sleeps next to distinctly more people than Nora and Joy, says something about Polly and the range of her personal network, as much as it does about Joy and Nora. The number of sleeping companions can be interpreted as indicative of the range of a person’s personal network, and that there are degrees of scale to these networks.

Polly also stands out as having spent significantly fewer nights sleeping next to one particular person compared to the others. The person she slept next to more often than anybody else, her grandson Neil, spent 15 nights next to her, less than half as many nights as the other three women slept next to their main person. This contrasts sharply with Joy and Nora, each of whom slept 40 nights (out of 55 and 41 nights respectively) next to the same persons: Joy next to Kiara and Nora next to Toby and/or Ray.⁵ In their cases, their choices attest to the strong yaparla bond between Nora and her grandsons, and Joy and her grand-daughter. Celeste, on the other hand slept three-quarters of her nights next to Neil, her sister’s son whom she was bringing up. Neil, however, was of course also the person Polly slept next to most often (15 nights), suggesting firstly that neither Celeste nor Polly had as strong a bond with Neil as, for example, Nora had with Toby and Ray (40 out of 41 nights); and secondly that Polly and Celeste shared the upbringing of Neil.

Table 4: Sleeping companions*

Joy and Celeste contrast with Nora and Polly by having more than one main immediate sleeping partner. Partly, this is due to the fact (discussed in more depth below) that these two slept kulkurru (in the middle of their yunta) more often than did the other two, and hence had more people sleeping next to them anyway. Moreover, in both cases I was one of their immediate sleeping companions (attesting to my initial lack of independence more than to their closeness to me at the time, I suspect).

In terms of the relationships between each woman and her immediate sleeping companions, there are a number of noteworthy similarities. Firstly, and underscoring the fact that the data derive from a jilimi, there are few affinal sleeping companions: one daughter-in-law each, in Nora’s and Polly’s cases, and one son’s son’s wife in Joy’s case. The most prominent companions amongst all four women are mothers, sisters and daughter, and grandchildren. Beyond this, Polly’s and Celeste’s companions come from a wider range than do Nora’s and Joy’s, encompassing more generations and more complex genealogical relationships.

Contextualising these statistical data with ethnographic background, what do they disclose about these four women? Celeste’s entries in the table are a testament to her intensely social nature and her desire to be surrounded by people, especially younger relatives of hers. This is attested by the number of people she slept next to, distinctly more than Joy and Nora and from a wider range of relationships. Further, a lot of these sleeping companions were from descending generations and a lot younger than herself, underscoring the fact that she especially likes looking after children. When putting up yunta Celeste often makes conscious efforts of grouping as many people around her as possible — very successfully.

What stands out about Joy and her data is the small number of people she slept next to and the narrow range of their relationships to her. It is this small sample of sleeping companions that says much about her as a person. To explicate upon the list of relationships: the two ‘daughters’ who slept next to her were Lydia, her sister’s daughter whom she had brought up, and myself. The two sisters were Nora and Polly, next to whom she slept one time each when there was a long yunta on the verandah. The mother was Old Nangala. Her two son’s daughters were Kiara, who stayed with her the largest number of times, and Kiara’s sister Charity, who stayed with Joy often. And lastly, Joy once slept next to Martina, her grandson’s wife, when she was staying in the jilimi. These people come from a small and very close range of relations, attesting to the fact that the ‘gravitational pull’ described for the four women was much less intense in Joy’s case than for the others.

Polly’s entries in the table are illustrative of her independence and her capacity to both be boss for herself and look after people.⁶ Polly is a widow in her seventies, fully in control of her life and resources. Other Warlpiri women of her situation and constitution often choose to form close relationships with another person. They share their lives with either another woman, particularly a close sister, in a similar age and position to themselves, or with a grandchild, most often a son’s child, yaparla (as for example do Joy and Kiara, Nora and Toby, and Greta and her grand-daughter). These women tend to sleep next to and move about with either their sisters and/or their grandchildren. Polly chose not to, and by this exhibits a tendency toward more autonomous and independent behaviour than most. As she often said, she had had two husbands and brought up many children and grandchildren. Now she tremendously enjoyed being her own boss without responsibilities for another person. While she was keenly interested in what was going on in the jilimi and what was happening in the lives of her large number of descendants and age-mates, whenever possible she preferred to be in the position of observer rather than participant. She also lacked the patience to deal in great depth with or spend much time on things she considered trifles in the larger scheme of things. Because she had experienced and witnessed almost everything in her own life, a daughter with a philandering husband, for example, could not expect sympathy from her but only a ‘leave it, and find somebody else’. Her sense of judgment however is keen and greatly admired and this is part of her independence: she is a person other people seek but who does not seek nor needs to seek others herself.

Generally speaking, Nora exhibited more solitary behaviour than the other women (unlike Joy, who had fewer people around her but spent more time with them). Unless it rained, or there were particularly amicable relations, Nora did not join up with other yunta and neither was her yunta regularly joined by others. Largely this was due to the fact that she saw her stay in the jilimi as of short duration and not due to her choice. She was waiting for ‘her’ new house to be built, into which she would move with two of her younger sisters once it was completed. In the meantime, these younger sisters lived in the camp of one of their daughters, which Nora would not join because of differences between her and the daughter’s husband. As she was a widow and some of her older sisters were living in this particular jilimi, this was the obvious residence of choice.

However, Nora, who formerly was a powerful business woman (ritual leader) at Yuendumu, as well as having been keenly involved in community politics, was getting older. She often complained about being constrained by physical ailments from continuing her previously active lifestyle. To be living with her old sisters, who had given up on all that and ‘passed their days gossiping in the jilimi’ to use Meggitt’s phrase,⁷ to not be going anywhere, was hard for her to bear. She consciously chose a peripheral position in the jilimi to mark that she did not really belong, that she was just there for a little while, waiting for her house in the hope of regaining her previous lifestyle. Her sleeping arrangements attest to her rallying against approaching old age; they are a statement of her not giving in (yet), and of not wanting to be associated with those who are warungka — old and without control.⁸

What sleeping yitipi or kulkurru says about the person

I delve deeper into these issues of personhood and intimacy by analysing and comparing the positioning Nora, Joy, Celeste and Polly took in the yunta they slept in during those same sixty nights. Yitipi is the name for the sleeping position on the far side of a yunta, and kulkurru means to sleep inside, or in the middle of a yunta. The yitipi sleepers protect the kulkurru sleepers from dangers from outside. Such dangers include trivial things like a pack of dogs chasing across the yunta to more serious threats like snakes, malevolent spirits and jarnpa. More often than not, a yunta includes more than four people, so there are more kulkurru positions available each night than there are yitipi ones. Note also that today, the decision whether to sleep yitipi or kulkurru is more influenced by and dependent upon the weather than it was before. In the jilimi, for example, when it rained, when it was too windy or particularly cold, people often slept in one long yunta on the verandah, and consequently on those nights there were only two yitipi positions available.

Individual women’s preferences in and choices of the yitipi and kulkurru positions indicate likenesses in their social and gender status on the one hand, and differences which reflect upon them as persons on the other. Table 5 provides information about the relative sleeping positions the women took within a yunta: that is, how often each woman slept yitipi and kulkurru. The first row lists the number of nights each woman was present in the jilimi during the sixty nights. The second and third rows give the number and percentage of nights each woman slept yitipi and kulkurru respectively. The last row provides additional relevant information about positioning, noting, for example, when women slept in a single-person yunta or in a room, in which case yitipi/kulkurru positioning could not be determined.

Table 5: Sleeping positions

Table 5 shows more kulkurru positions than might be expected because this sample was taken in summer, and there often were rainy (and some unexpectedly cold nights) when all jilimi residents slept in one long yunta on the verandah. In these cases, Joy’s mother Nangala always was positioned on the eastern end (so she could ‘make wee on the side’),⁹ and Nora most often on the western end.

Apart from Celeste, who slept overwhelmingly kulkurru, the other women chose yitipi (outside) positions frequently (and much more often than all the other jilimi residents present during this period). Their high rates of yitipi sleeping underscore their gravitational roles within the jilimi. At night, when it was time to put up yunta, these women would take their swags out and put them up in the place of their choice — and the people staying with them would arrange their bedding next to them. While all the activity of putting up yunta would go on, as described previously, without discussion, the fact that these women sleep yitipi so often points towards their authoritative role within the nightly arrangements of the jilimi. The yitipi position is generally taken up by those people requiring the least protection and able to provide others with the maximum amount of security — both in the social and physical senses. As these women are ‘at home’ in the jilimi, they are more acquainted with it and therefore more often sleep yitipi, sheltering those who have come to stay with them. Further, their yitipi positioning is also a manifestation of their social seniority; they are mothers and grandmothers, and with the exception of Joy, active in the ritual sphere, hence knowledgeable in dealing with spiritual threats. They frequently sheltered people in the kulkurru positions who were either younger or much older than themselves, and in both cases the responsibility of looking after lay with them, due to their relative age and their social standing.

From this angle, and considering Celeste’s considerable pull of residents into the jilimi, her low rates of yitipi sleeping are peculiar (she slept yitipi only five nights). She slept kulkurru much more often, having been on the inside position 73 per cent of the nights, which is a much higher rate than any of the other women display (more than twice as often as Nora and distinctly more often than Joy and Polly). These choices, however, underscore Celeste’s nature quite well. Her sleeping kulkurru, in the middle, so often is an expression of her achieving what to her is her ideal of domestic bliss: a neat yunta, snug and warm, filled with people she is close to and ideally with herself in the middle (= surrounded by others). It also points towards another trait: namely, that in daily social interaction Celeste sees herself and is seen by others as less senior and authoritative than, for example, the other three women. Her sleeping kulkurru so much more often than the others testifies to her relative lack of authority.

A further reason why Celeste mainly slept kulkurru is that her yunta was regularly connected to Polly’s. In these cases, Polly would be yitipi on one end, Celeste somewhere in the middle and somebody staying with her on the other yitipi end. While independent of each other in most respects (except for their shared responsibilities in bringing up Neil), Celeste and Polly relied on each other for resources in times of need; and often also pooled resources when people came to stay with both of them. Since they are mother and daughter, many of the people who came to stay with them were equally related to both of them. In the case of adults — for example Marion, who is Celeste’s sister and Polly’s daughter — this did not cause them to move close together and share. Rather, Marion would take up yunta with one or the other. However, there were many instances of children from other settlements coming to stop with them. Generally, these were Celeste’s nieces and nephews and Polly’s grandchildren, and in these cases Polly and Celeste often formed a yunta together. Significantly, this never caused either of them to move into the same yunta with Joy, whose visiting grandchildren were Celeste’s actual nieces and nephews and Polly’s actual grandchildren, but who were socially considered Joy’s by all, since she had adopted and brought up their father, Polly’s son.

Polly’s positioning in yunta attests to her popularity and her capacity to look after people when needed, as well as her independence. This achievement is clearly visible in her sleeping patterns: she often sleeps yitipi, in the position those people sleep who are able to offer the greatest amount of protection. Moreover, she sometimes sleeps in single-person yunta, always of course within the jilimi, as sleeping in a camp on one’s own would be anti-social indeed. Her little yunta, when sleeping alone was always positioned close to another yunta, thus not expressing social disconnection but just independence. Her sleeping patterns illustrate her highly successful (and idiosyncratic) management of the complementary pulls between looking after and being boss for herself. Not only is there a great number and range of people she sleeps next to, by far surpassing the other three women, but she sleeps yitipi often, and sometimes even in her own yunta.

Neither Joy nor Celeste ever slept in their own single yunta (nor can I imagine them contemplating this), Nora did once. While in Polly’s case this kind of sleeping pattern was a choice and a positive expression of independence, in Nora’s case it was an instance of expressing displeasure about and disconnection from the other jilimi residents (on a night that her grandsons were absent). Nora slept yitipi much more often than the other women (65 per cent, as opposed to 50 per cent in Polly’s, 44 per cent in Joy’s and 11 per cent in Celeste’s case) because she slept in small yunta much more often than the other women. On many nights she shared her yunta just with one or both of her grandsons, often at some considerable distance from the other yunta in the jilimi.

Lastly, how can Joy’s statistics be interpreted? Again, we find an idiosyncratic explanation for the fact that she slept kulkurru slightly more often than yitipi. This explanation relates to both circumstance and personality. It is partly determined by the fact that she often had no choice but to sleep with her old mother Nangala on the yitipi side (so she could assist Nangala if she needed help at night), thereby necessitating her grand-daughter’s positioning on her other side. Furthermore, the fact that her personal network was much less extensive than those of the other women perpetuated this sleeping pattern. Her main social contacts were with certain members of her close family and some of her colleagues from work. Her personal network was a lot less extensive than that of most others of her age, partly due to her inclinations, but also allowing for as well as caused by her thriftiness. Through her ceaseless attempts to keep a tight lid on her resources, as well as through her lack of interest in participating in ritual, she manoeuvred herself to some extent into a bit of an outsider’s position. She did not often find people who would help her with Nangala (Celeste would when Joy was away, but not when she was stopping in the jilimi), and as there were less people stopping with her than with the others, she had fewer choices of positioning. Her sleeping patterns attest to her peculiarities in this regard.

Conclusion

In the introduction to this book, I said that clues to understanding the view(s) people take of the world can be revealed by analysing the most routine issues of everyday life; and in this and the two preceding chapters I have used the mundane occurrences of the flow of people through the jilimi, the social composition of yunta and the positioning of individuals within yunta to explicate on mobility, immediacy and intimacy respectively. Naturally, the flow, the composition and the positioning can only be separated in analysis; in real life they happen in tandem. Equally, the three values — mobility, immediacy and intimacy — feed into each other; none can exist in their contemporary shape and form without the others.

Warlpiri people use their bodies to continually communicate these values, to themselves, to others and to the world. The content of this communication is about the state of social affairs. What is expressed from a person-centric view, however, is the internal state of things. Where one sleeps, how close to another one sleeps, where one eats, how one walks, next to whom one sits, and a myriad of other actions express, but never spell out, how one feels — about oneself, about others, and about the world. It seems vital to me that Warlpiri forms of intimacy are understood through the subtlety of the ‘texts’ in which they are expressed, and the oblique manner in which they are performed.

The ‘texts’ themselves are scripted through the series of building–dwelling–thinking; they are contained within and written through the structure of camps. As Bourdieu says:

The house, an opus operatum, lends itself as such to a deciphering but only to a deciphering which does not forget that the ‘book’ from which the children learn their vision of the world is read with the body, in and through the movements and displacements which make the space within which they are enacted as much as they are made by it. (Bourdieu 2000: 90)

The camp does this as well, and in similar ways; it is the contents of the ‘book’ which differ. Warlpiri people through and with their bodies learn ‘their vision of the world’. In regards to intimacy this means that living in camps, no matter whether in olden days or contemporary ones, fosters, imparts and teaches intimacy. Sleeping is one of many possible practices, or, in Mauss’s terms, body techniques, and is both socio-culturally regulated and a sphere for self-expression. That is, the body is not only an instrument of learning but also an instrument that is ‘played’. Nobody is slave to the embodied rules, but everybody finds room within them to express themselves — and the rules allow for others to read such expressions. How much one engages in the pursuit of such knowledge and how many people one opens the self to changes from one person to the next.

As the comparisons suggest, Polly’s positioning in the world is vastly different from that of, say, Joy — a difference that is both expressed in her sleeping arrangements and perpetuated through them. The small numbers of Joy’s co-sleepers are a manifestation of the size of her personal network, which is dwarfed by the size of Polly’s. Personal choice, personal inclination, personal ability as well as age are all contributing factors.

Intimacy, at Yuendumu, means knowing others through understanding (being able to read) how they position their body in the world, and, expressing one’s own selfhood in the same subtle way. This is not to say that verbal communication does not serve similar purposes, but that there are specific ways in which Warlpiri people engage through their bodies with domestic space and the world, as the example of sleeping suggests.

Knowing Celeste, I can make sense of her positioning herself kulkurru more often than yitipi, despite her gravitational pull of others into the jilimi. However, knowing Celeste’s sleeping patterns in turn assists me in making sense of Celeste as a person. And while I communicate such knowing verbally in a book as this, when I am in Yuendumu, it means that I put my swag in the yitipi position if I am sleeping in a yunta with Celeste because I know that she prefers sleeping kulkurru. Equally, if Polly, as happened one day, puts her swag in between Celeste’s and mine, this act alerted us more urgently than words probably could have, that Polly was not feeling well.