The Gift of Song: Performing Exchange in Western Arnhem Land

The Gift of Song: Performing Exchange in Western Arnhem Land tells the story of the return of physical and digital cultural materials through song and dance. Drawing on extensive, first-person ethnographic fieldwork in western Arnhem Land, Australia, Brown examines how Bininj/Arrarrkpi (Aboriginal people of this region) enact change and innovate their performance practices through ceremonial exchange. As Indigenous communities worldwide confront new social and environmental challenges, this book addresses the questions: How do Indigenous communities come to terms with legacies of taking and collecting? How are cultural materials in digital formats received and ritualised? How do traditional forms of exchange continue to mediate relationships? Combining ethnomusicological analysis and linguistically and historically informed ethnography, this book reveals how multilingualism and musical diversity are maintained through kun-borrk/manyardi, a major genre of Indigenous Australian song and dance. It retheorises the core anthropological concept of ’exchange’ and enriches understanding of repatriation as a process of re-embedding tangible objects through intangible practices of ceremony and language.

Reuben Brown is a non-Indigenous (Settler/Balanda) applied ethnomusicologist specialising in Indigenous song and dance practices from western Arnhem Land (kun-borrk/manyardi). Brown has co-authored publications with Indigenous Australian ceremony leaders as well as musicologists, linguists, anthropologists and historians on the relationship between language and song and the re-use of archival recordings to support transmission of Indigenous knowledge. Brown is an ARC DECRA Research Fellow at the Research Unit for Indigenous Languages, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne. His DECRA project investigates how ceremonial performance at Indigenous festivals in northern Australia enacts diplomacy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants, and between different clan and language groups.