Birds and the Spirit World of the Lower Murray, South Australia

Abstract

Beliefs in bird spirits are still widely held by the Indigenous people in the Lower Murray of temperate South Australia despite an overall decline in the perceived significance of creation ancestors since British colonization in the early nineteenth century. This paper investigates these cultural beliefs in avian spirits. Birds are seen as possessing transformative powers and being mediators between human society and the invisible world. Contemporary Aboriginal people utilize their bird spirit folklore to connect with their past and to highlight their cultural distinctiveness, from both other Indigenous groups and the modern settler society. They draw upon this ornithological body of knowledge that is framed outside of Western science for cultural maintenance, education, and the re-defining of the relationships between knowledge-holders and the broader society.

WITHDRAWN: A new perspective on the SDGs nexus: ethnobiology’s contribution

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Wounaan Storying as Intervention: Storywork in the Crafting of a Multimodal Illustrated Story Book on People and Birds

“…In ecology, environmental studies, and anthropology, there is renewed attention to birds among people, including work throughout Latin America and beyond. Some of this work is explicitly ethno-ornithological, often separating birds from other relationships and with a more descriptive focus (e.g., de Freitas and Pasa 2011; Ibarra and Pizarro 2016;Medrano et al 2017;Sarmiento 2010;Sault 2020;Tidemann and Gosler 2010;Vásquez-Dávila 2014;Wyndham and Park 2018), and some is more ontological, addressing birds as part of the reality of lifeworlds (Clarke 2016;Dove 1993;Kane 2015;Martínez Mauri et al 2014;Medrano 2017;Simon 2020;Watts 2013). In some work, such as our own, non-Indigenous bird watchers supported research, unintentionally strengthening an outside gaze: enumerating species, developing lists of their local names, and recording their roles in cultures.…”