ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on an indigenous Australian case study concerning Bardi people of northwest West Australia. The discussion focuses on ilma, a genre of public ritual, and one Bardi man’s transformation of one of the component parts of this genre into artworks. An important dimension of the ritual is that its intersubjective constitution as a form of property emerges from within Bardi social relations, and these reflect a relational form of personhood. I explore whether the (apparent) transition from rights embedded in a ‘society’ to those exercised by the ‘individual’ entail other kinds of transformation. A closer examination of these issues illuminates the relationship between property, persons and intersubjectivity, and the property(s) between, and reveals that transformations in both property and persons appear to be taking place in this context.
