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Tjukurpa, and What Is Held

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Tjukurpa, and What Is Held

Anangu is what the Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra peoples of the central Australian desert call themselves, and Tjukurpa is their law and their religion in one word. It is not a set of stories about the past. It is the account of how the country was made and of how people are to live in it, and it carries the rules of kinship, of behaviour, of who holds which ground and of who may speak for it.

Tjukurpa is inherited together with responsibility. A person holds particular parts of it through descent and through the country they belong to, and the holding carries a duty to keep it, to pass it on correctly, and to withhold it from those not entitled to it. Some of it is public and some is held to men or to women, and that line is not visible from any published summary.

For that reason the atlas describes the tradition and its custodians rather than retelling any part of it. Anangu also ask that particular places at Uluru and Kata Tjuta not be photographed or depicted at all, and nothing restricted is drawn or repeated here. The custodian body catalogued in the atlas for this region is the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women's Council, whose own publication on ngangkari, traditional healers, is the account given by the practitioners themselves.

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