Time Wounds: Death, Grieving and Grievance in the Northern Kimberley

This chapter continues some recent discussions of the mutual elicitation of cultural identities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians (Merlan 1998; 2004; Hinkson and Smith 2005; Weiner and Glaskin 2006; Lea, Kowal and Cowlishaw 2006). Contemporary Kimberley Aboriginal funerals make this kind of elicitory action particularly explicit. In the course of exploring this interaction in the Kimberley region I address the more general processes through which personhood is produced (and extinguished) through a psychophysical incorporation and expulsion of other selves.