Embodied Meaning: Sleeping Arrangements in Central Australia

Abstract

As evening settles over Yuendumu, an Aboriginal settlement of mostly Warlpiri speakers in central Australia’s Tanami Desert, people get their mattresses, pillows, and blankets and arrange them for that night’s sleep. When I first began to undertake fieldwork, in the mid-1990s, more often than not, people slept outside: in the yards surrounding houses, in humpies, and in bush camps. Today, some sleep outside on verandahs and in yards, but more use the inside of houses (see Musharbash 2008). Whether inside or outside, people arrange themselves in rows of sleepers, called yunta in Warlpiri. Such a row of sleepers is comprised of at least four or five people, often more, and most camps (or houses) have more than one yunta a night. Where these yunta are positioned and who sleeps next to whom within them, change, often nightly. Ethnographically, this chapter is concerned with the “ins and outs” of Warlpiri shared sleep: how people sort themselves into yunta and thus, nightly, create order of a particular kind; and how this order-creating is an expression of meaning (see also Glaskin, this book).