Arrernte

Cultural area desert

The Arrernte (also Aranda , Arunta , Arunda or similar) are a tribe of the Aborigines in central Australia who live on the Macdonnell mountain range and in Alice Springs . They are divided into western, eastern, northern, southern and central Arrernte. In the city of Alice Springs, around 20 percent of the 28,000 residents trace their origins back to the central Arrernte. The most famous representative of this people was the artist Albert Namatjira .

The language of the Arrernte is also called Arrernte . It belongs to the Arandic language group and is therefore a Pama-Nyunga language.

Culture

The Arrernte way of life is now often referred to as “ cowboy culture”, as people from rodeo to western music like to identify with it. Since the 1960s, however, there has been a renaissance of tradition like hardly any other tribe in Australia. In the outstations , hunting and gathering again contribute up to a quarter to direct nutrition. Both rifles and spears or fire are used. Likewise, the traditional religion, rites and myths about the time of colonization and missionary work have been well preserved to this day, although in many areas they were influenced by Christian ideas.

The social psychologist Erich Fromm analyzed the willingness of 30 pre-state peoples, including the Arrernte, to use ethnographic records to analyze the anatomy of human destructiveness . He finally assigned them to the “life-affirming societies”, whose cultures are characterized by a pronounced sense of community with great social equality, friendly child-rearing, tolerant sexual morals and a low tendency to aggression. See also: "War and Peace" in pre-state societies .

reception

The records of their myths by Carl Strehlow , Moritz von Leonhardi , Theodore George Henry Strehlow , Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen were of great influence on the late work of the French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl ( La mythologie primitive ) and on the ideas about metamorphosis in Elias Canetti's study Mass and Power (Self-Multiplication and Self-Consumption. The Double Form of the Totem).

literature

Carl Strehlow: The Aranda and Loritja Tribes in Central Australia . Frankfurt am Main (1908 ff.).
Baldwin Spencer, Francis James Gillen: The Arunta . London 1927.
Theodore George Henry Strehlow: Aranda Traditions . Melbourne 1947.
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl: La mythology primitive. Le monde mythique des Australiens et des Papous . PUF, Paris 1935.
Günter Guhr: marriage and kinship system among the Aranda in central Australia. Critique of the so-called Aranda type by Radcliffe-Brown . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin (GDR) 1963. (= Treatises and reports of the State Museum for Ethnology Dresden. Volume 23).

Web links

Commons : Arrernte - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

^ Aboriginal Australia & The Torres Strait Islands . Lonely Planet, 2001
^ ABS Australian Standard Classification of Languages. (PDF; 1.8 MB) p. 55
↑ Richard B. Lee, Richard Daly (Eds.): The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. 4th edition. Cambridge University Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-60919-7 , pp. 329-333 (first printed 1999).
↑ Sibylle Kästner: Hunting foragers and foraging hunters: How Australian Aboriginal women capture animals. LIT Verlag, Münster 2012, ISBN 978-3-643-10903-3 , pp. 231, 233.
↑ Erich Fromm : Anatomy of human destructiveness . From the American by Liselotte et al. Ernst Mickel, 86. – 100. Th. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1977, ISBN 3-499-17052-3 , pp. 191–192.

[1] Aboriginal Australia & The Torres Strait Islands . Lonely Planet, 2001

[2] ABS Australian Standard Classification of Languages. (PDF; 1.8 MB) p. 55

[3] Richard B. Lee, Richard Daly (Eds.): The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. 4th edition. Cambridge University Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-60919-7 , pp. 329-333 (first printed 1999).

[4] Sibylle Kästner: Hunting foragers and foraging hunters: How Australian Aboriginal women capture animals. LIT Verlag, Münster 2012, ISBN 978-3-643-10903-3 , pp. 231, 233.

[Fromm-5] Erich Fromm : Anatomy of human destructiveness . From the American by Liselotte et al. Ernst Mickel, 86. – 100. Th. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1977, ISBN 3-499-17052-3 , pp. 191–192.