ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the Kunwinjku Aborigines of western Arnhem Land, north Australia, express their relationship with the world in X-ray paintings representing the human and animal forms of ancestral beings. The analysis focuses on the meanings of X-ray paintings in a number of different social contexts, and shows how the semantically productive quality of the images gradually becomes apparent to young Kunwinjku. X-ray paintings develop a variety of meanings relating to the divided and systematically organized nature of human and animal bodies. A number of writers have seized on the fact that X-ray art is used to show important food parts, and they have gone on to suggest that the primary function of X-ray paintings was for the magical increase in the numbers of food animals. The association between body parts and landscape is developed principally within the Mardayin ceremony and in the X-ray paintings used in the Mardayin.
