Strange Relatives: Mutualities and Dependencies Between Aborigines and Pastoralists in the Northern Kimberley‪.‬

INTRODUCTION Kenelm Burridge pointed out thirty years ago that anthropologists had generally approached the much vaunted question of Aboriginal cultural responses to their encounters with Europeans, a subject which by its very nature seemed to call for attention to historical processes, with a synchronic approach aimed at eliciting the kind of social systemics which, since the advent of functionalism, had distinguished our discipline from that of history (1973:36-37). (1) One of the inbuilt assumptions of the synchronic, integrationist approach is the idea of bounded cultural entities. That approach is exemplified in the enclosed 'culture garden' imagery endemic to cultural relativity. From this assumption of self-regulating social systems (organicism) follows (by logical necessity rather than from any ethnographic basis) the notion of an ever-increasing fragmentation or acculturation resulting from intrusions into the assumed internal interdependency of a bounded society's institutions or structures (cf. Burridge 1973:49; Clifford 2001:478; Fabian 1983:20, 39). This paper is an investigation of particular kinds of interactions which occur over the walls of these 'culture gardens' and, in the process, raises some questions about the nature of such walls.