The Politico-Historical Construction of the Pintupi Luritja and the Concept of Tribe‪.‬

INTRODUCTION This paper explores the history of the emergence of Pintupi Luritja as the dominant language in the Central Australian community of Amunturrngu (Mr Liebig) traced from the people's first encounters with settlement in the 1940s through to the present. It is a political history, as movement toward settlement demanded a re-structuring of social relations within a newly settled polity. Within this re-configuration of people and place Pintupi Luritja developed as the language that best served the needs of this new grouping. (1) These people came together primarily from the neigbbouring country in the west onto a country that had been apparently 'vacated'. Through classical processes of succession, over the following generations, some of these new settlers succeeded to land in this country of the Mayutjarra language. Although not all Luritja are land holders, there is nowadays a correlate between language territory and language ownership. This correlate is not a neat overlap reminiscent of Tindale's 'tribe' (1974) or Birdsall's 'dialectical tribe' (1976:96). Berndt had previously presented a widely accepted model (1959/1966) opposing this notion of a bounded tribe for the Western Desert, emphasising the fluidity of social organisation and group composition, with which I concur. Hamilton, (drawing on Elkin 1940), argued that this fluidity of local organisation was due to the constant migration in this region, so that life was in a 'state of flux' (1982:93).