ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationships between style and social strategy as manifested in art of an Aboriginal community located in the Barunga region of the Northern Territory, Australia. Perhaps the archaeological breakthrough in terms of conceptualizing style as social strategy emerged from the extended debate on style between Wiessner and Sackett. Wiessner developed Wobst's notion of style as a means of communicating identity, to identify a behavioural basis for style in the fundamental human cognitive process of personal and social identification through comparison. Macdonald proposes a model of style that is based on a distinction between panache, which is the stylistic expression of separateness by the individual, and protocol, which is the stylistic expression of group identity and membership. The philosophy is inherently conservative, one that looks toward the ancestral past for direction and validation. It should be apparent that Western conceptualisations of art in terms of aesthetic value are not congruent with those that exist within remote Aboriginal communities.
