The moral lexicon of the Warlpiri people of central Australia

Australian Aboriginal Studies, Spring, 2007 by LR Hiatt

1. Introduction
2. Words that match 'Good' and 'Bad'
3. Examples of 'Good' and 'Bad'
   behaviour
      Good
      Bad
4. Analysis
      Proper/Improper
         Sexual relationships.
         Affinal reserve.
         Cannibalism.
      Generous/Selfish
      Unaggressive/Aggressive
         Importunate.
         Jealous.
         Pusillanimous.
         Brave.
         Homicide.
      Cooperative/Uncooperative
         Compassionate.
         Protecting the weak.
         Helping relatives.
         Hard-hearted.
         Maltreating the weak.
         Helping relatives.
         Neglecting, hurting, and exploiting
         relatives.
      Honest/Deceitful
         Speaking true or telling lies.
         Saving self or harming others.
         Stealing.
         Accidental misappropriation.
5. Morality and law
6. Egalitarianism and dominance
7. Comparison with Gidjingarli (Burarra)
      Proper/Improper
      Generous/Selfish
      Unaggressive/Aggressive
      Cooperative/Uncooperative
      Honest/Deceitful
8. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References

1. Introduction

Moral considerations enter into practically every type of human social relationship we know about. Yet morality is not specified in any of the main reference works on the Indigenous peoples of Australia. The topic does not appear in the index of the Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia (Horton 1994), the 'Australian Aborigines' section of The Australian Encyclopaedia (Appleton 1988), John Greenway's Bibliography of the Australian Aborigines (1963), or The Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws (ALRC 1986). Typing in 'morality' or 'moral' or 'morals' in the AIATSIS Mura Catalogue produces 314 titles, most of which are concerned with moral issues arising from British colonisation. (1) A large subclass deals with the subject of professional ethics in Aboriginal studies. Several articles discuss the relationship between Indigenous moral values and Indigenous religion or mythology (R Berndt 1970, 1979; C Berndt 1988); one paper analyses the effects of modernisation on Indigenous morality (Peterson and Taylor 2003); and two essays approach the material from the perspective of human evolution (Priest 1986; ter Weer 1973). For the most part, however, the relevance of the listed works to Indigenous morality would appear to be diffuse or non-existent. (2)

For the purposes of a recent conference session on the history of anthropology, I revisited Edward Westermarck's long-buried magnum opus, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906) (Hiatt 2004). This gave me the opportunity to present the moral ideas of the Gidjingarli people of Arnhem Land on the basis of my field obser-vations beginning in 1958 (Hiatt 1965), and Katherine Glasgow's Burarra-Gunnartpa Dictionary (Glasgow 1994). (3) Later I began to think about amplifying the investigation to take in other parts of Indigenous Australia. By good fortune, in 2003 David Nash drew my attention to an electronic Warlpiri-English dictionary called Kirrkirr (meaning 'click'). As yet unpublished, it contains some 10 000 entries in the Warlpiri-to-English section and is notable for definitions provided by native-speakers, multiple exemplifications in the vernacular, and extensive cross-referencing. (4) The unprecedented sophistication and richness of the lexical material more than compensated for my lack of first-hand knowledge and made Warlpiri the obvious choice for a complementary analysis.

My primary objective in this paper is to establish from the data the types of behaviour regarded by the Warlpiri as morally good and bad. By this expression I mean ways of acting towards others that are conventionally approved or disapproved. (5) Kirrkirr provides an appropriate starting point in as much as it articulates a large degree of consensus. Later in the paper the results of my lexical analysis will be augmented by a review of relevant ethnography. In the final sections I compare Warlpiri moral values with those of the Gidjingarli and sign off with some not particularly original conclusions about the purpose of morality.

2. Words that match 'Good' and 'Bad'

How would a person without a knowledge of English proceed if they wanted to determine the sorts of behaviour regarded by the English as morally good and bad, and the only source of information available was a bilingual dictionary? One way would be to look up terms of moral approbation and disapprobation in their own language in the hope of finding not only equivalents in English but empirical examples as well. That is how I began my own investigation of the Warlpiri moral lexicon.

When asked to find words that match 'good' and 'bad', Kirrkirr produces lists of fourteen and six terms respectively. Examination of the entries for each list indicates that the most commonly used counterpart for 'good' is ngurrju; and that three terms maju, ngawu, and punku are used more or less interchangeably as the most common counterparts for 'bad'. It is also evident that, like their English counterparts, many of the terms may be used in non-moral as well as moral senses e.g. 'good news', 'good health', 'bad country', 'bad smell'.