ABSTRACT
The Yolngu people in Australia's northeastern Arnhem Land regulate access to food and other natural resources through strategies that derive their jural status from the Yolngu system of land ownership. Individuals call on a number of principles, all ultimately rooted in myth, to indicate their social identity, and these principles entail rights of access to resources and control over access. The rights are expressed in terms of correlated religious and kin-defined sanctions. Spelling out the nature of boundaries both geographic and social is crucial to understanding how access is regulated. Yolngu do not conceptualize boundaries in terms of rights of exclusive enjoyment so much as of rights to allocate use to others. They define, affirm, and challenge such boundaries through seeking and granting permission for specific and/or limited purposes. In many ways, some very subtle, these rights are continuously being acted out, challenged, confirmed, and conflicts concerning them resolved.
