The politics of female identity: warlpiri widows at yuendumu

Abstract

In an attempt to analyze how Australian Aboriginal women have reorganized their lives since sedentarization, I consider here how colonial and postcolonial political economies have affected the roles and status of an important segment of the population, mature widows. The anthropological discourse on remarriage2 and sustained widowhood, particularly in the work of Bell (1980, 1983), provides the stimulus for the present paper.3 Like Bell, I studied the transformation of women's identity in contemporary Aboriginal culture because it offered complex responses to the question: What happens to pre-state social systems dominated by a capitalist society? Bell, following Leacock (1978), suggests that women enjoyed relative autonomy in precontact situation and that their roles had been undermined by the rise of the state. Colonization and sedentarization, Bell (1980, 1983) argues, left women with no alternative but to recreate their solidarity and power away from men. Such a perspective, comparing as it does the nature of women's power with that of men in precontact and postcontact situations, overvalues certain gender imperatives among the Australian Aboriginal societies. I differ with Bell in that I focus my analysis on individuals as social actors (Keen 1978; Von Sturmer 1978; Sutton 1978; Myers 1986 Anderson 1988; Dussart 1988a). This avoids a normative and rule-bound perspective that would depict women categorically and dichotomously vis-a-vis men. Seeing the Warlpiri as social actors enables us to scrutinize the dynamic restructuring of social relations between men and women, men and men, and women and women (Tonkinson 1990; Giddens 1979:56-57). In the literature on precontact social relations, widows are often described as unempowered and obliged to remarry. My data, collected over seven years of fieldwork with the Warlpiri people, compel different conclusions. Far from being denied status, widows played a vital role in the social economy of the Central Australian Desert. I do not mean to imply that widowhood was tremendously valorized prior to settlement; however, even then, as life stories suggest, there were instances when widows would choose not to remarry and still remain integrated in the social life of the group. Sedentarization and its consequences have modified traditional remarriage practices. But these modifications have done little to increase the frequency of remarriage. Quite the contrary, today, almost all mature widows remain single. This transformation sheds light on many of the tensions (and responses to these tensions) existing in contemporary Aboriginal society.