Communicating with the Dead in an Australian Aboriginal Culture: The Tiwi from Melville and Bathurst Islands

Abstract

The interaction between the living and the dead takes a prominent position in Tiwi society and culture. The dead need the living for a safe passage to the world of the dead, whereas the living need the dead to sustain life. The dead see to it that their descendants are nurtured by their land as well as being protected against illness and bad luck. In spite of various changes and modernization most Tiwi Aborigines continue to consider their attendance of mortuary rites for close relatives as their most important obligation. The spirits of the dead are supposed to be present and to perform the death rites as well. Not only ritual gestures but also song and dance performances entail an interaction between the living and the dead. Mourning songs and the lyrics accompanying dances are made for the occasion. Quite often these songs consist of a dialogue between the performer and the spirit of the dead. Simultaneously, this entails an indirect communication amongst the living in this small-scale, close-knit society, for the dead can make claims and say things that the living would find hard to convey directly due to their many-stranded relations and interdependencies. The significance of the dead in Tiwi society surpasses the importance of the mythological ancestors, which also in part might be explained by the relatively high mortality rate and hence a higher incidence of unfinished business. These concerns are inseparably linked to an ongoing social discourse amongst the living. Introduction: NecrosocialityDoing anthropological fieldwork in the Swiss mountain village of Bosco Gurin in the mid-1980s, I learned about the close relationships the inhabitants maintained with their dead. In this small-scale, close-knit community the villagers had manystranded relations, their interdependencies making it difficult to deal with E. Venbrux (*)