ABSTRACT
This chapter comprehends how language as a social artifact can be vital to sustaining political structure in Pintupi-speaking Aborigines of Australia's Western Desert small-scale society. In analyzing the relationship between speech and sociopolitical context, then, author emphasis is on the structural necessity of sustaining that context. The Pintupi polity has an emergent character, marked by enormous flexibility yet apparent to the observer and participants as it is constituted through activities of speaking. In such actions, the relationship of Pintupi political culture to subjective feeling and a sense of shared identity is manifest. This relationship between feeling and polity is not accidental. Such a temporary polity as the Pintupi maintain, as with many small-scale societies, is constituted by "feeling" in the sense that people residing together consider themselves to share identity. Life in contemporary Pintupi communities depends largely on regular social service payments to the unemployed, widows, and pensioners and some limited employment by the administration of the communities.
