Yolŋu

The Yolŋu or Yolngu are an aggregation of Aboriginal Australian people inhabiting north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. Yolŋu means "person" in the Yolŋu languages. The terms Murngin, Wulamba, Yalnumata, Murrgin and Yulangor were formerly used by some anthropologists for the Yolŋu.
All Yolŋu clans are affiliated with either the Dhuwa or the Yirritja moiety. Prominent Dhuwa clans include the Rirratjiŋu and Gälpu clans of the Dangu people, while the Gumatj clan is the most prominent in the Yirritja moiety.

Name

The ethnonym Murrgin gained currency after its extensive use in a book by the American anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, whose study of the Yolŋu, A Black Civilization: a Social Study of an Australian Tribe quickly assumed the status of an ethnographical classic, considered by R. Lauriston Sharp the "first adequately rounded out descriptive picture of an Australian Aboriginal community." Norman Tindale was dismissive of the term, regarding it, like the term Kurnai, as "artificial", having been arbitrarily applied to a large number of peoples of northeastern Australia. The proper transliteration of the word was, in any case, Muraŋin, meaning "shovel-nosed spear folk", an expression appropriate to western peripheral tribes, such as the Rembarrnga of the general area Warner described.
For Tindale, following recent linguistic studies, the eastern Arnhem Land tribes constituting the Yolŋu lacked the standard tribal structures evidenced elsewhere in Aboriginal Australia, in comprising several distinct socio-linguistic groups in an otherwise integral cultural continuum. He classified these as the Yan-nhaŋu, Djinang, Djinba, Djaŋu, Dangu, Rembarrnga, Ritharngu, Dhuwal and the Dhuwala.
Warner had deployed the term "Murngin" to denote a group of peoples who shared, in his analysis, a distinctive form of kinship organisation, describing their marriage rules, subsection system and kinship terminology. Other researchers in the field quickly contested his early findings. T. Theodor Webb argued that Warner's Murngin actually referred to one moiety, and could only denote a Yiritcha mala, and dismissed Warner's terminology as misleading. A. P. Elkin, comparing the work of Warner and Webb, endorsed the latter's analysis as more congruent with the known facts.
Wilbur Chaseling used the term "Yulengor" in the title of his 1957 work.
Since the 1960s, the term Yolŋu has been widely used by linguists, anthropologists and the Yolŋu people themselves. The term applies to both the sociocultural unit and the language dialects within it.

People

Yolŋu comprise several distinct groups, differentiated by the languages and dialects they speak, but generally sharing overall similarities in the ritual life and hunter-gathering economic and cultural lifestyles in the territory of eastern Arnhem land. Early ethnographers studying the Yolŋu applied the nineteenth-century concepts of tribe, horde and phratry to classify and sort into separate identities the units forming the Yolŋu ethnocultural mosaic. After the work of Ian Keen in particular, such taxonomic terminology is increasingly seen as unsuitable and inadequate because of its eurocentric assumptions. Specialists are undecided, for example, whether the languages spoken by the Yolŋu amount to five or eight, and one survey arrived at eleven distinct "dialect" groups.

Language

Yolŋu speak a dozen languages classified under the general heading of Yolŋu Matha.

Kinship system

Yolŋu groups are connected by a complex kinship system. This system governs fundamental aspects of Yolŋu life, including responsibilities for ceremony and marriage rules. People are introduced to children in terms of their relation to the child, introducing the child to kinship from the beginning.
Yolŋu societies are generally described in terms of a division of two exogamous patrimoieties: Dhuwa and Yirritja. Each of these is represented by people of a number of different groups, each of which have their own lands, languages, totems and philosophies.

Moiety	Clan groups
Yirritja	Gumatj, Gupapuyŋu, Waŋurri, Ritharrngu, Maŋalili, Munyuku, Maḏarrpa, Warramiri, Dhalwaŋu, Liyalanmirri, Mäḻarra, Gamalaŋa, Gorryindi.
Dhuwa	Rirratjiŋu and Gälpu ; Golumala, Marrakulu, Marraŋu, Djapu, Ḏatiwuy, Ŋaymil, Djarrwark, Djambarrpuyŋu.

A Yirritja person must always marry a Dhuwa person. Children take their father's moiety, meaning that if a man or woman is Dhuwa, their mother will be Yirritja.
Kinship relations are also mapped onto the lands owned by the Yolŋu through their hereditary estates – so almost everything is either Yirritja or Dhuwa – every fish, stone, river, etc., belongs to one or the other moiety. For example, Yirritja yiḏaki are shorter and higher-pitched than Dhuwa yiḏaki. A few items are wakinŋu.
The term yothu-yindi literally means child-big , and describes the special relationship between a person and their mother's moiety. Because of yothu-yindi, Yirritja have a special interest in and duty towards Dhuwa. For example, a Gumatj man may craft the varieties of yiḏaki associated with his own clan group and the varieties associated with his mother's clan group.
The word for "selfish" or "self-centred" in the Yolŋu languages is gurrutumiriw, literally "kin lacking" or "acting as if one has no kin".
The moiety-based kinship of the Yolŋu does not map in a straightforward way to the notion of the nuclear family, which makes accurate standardised reporting of households and relationships difficult, for example in the census. Polygamy is a normal part of Yolŋu life: one man was known to have 29 wives, a record exceeded only by polygamous arrangements among the Tiwi.

Avoidance relationships

As with nearly all Aboriginal groups, avoidance relationships exist in Yolŋu culture between certain relations. The two main avoidance relationships are:
Brother–sister avoidance, called mirriri, normally begins after initiation. In avoidance relationships, people do not speak directly or look at one another, and try to avoid being in too close proximity with each other.

Prominent family names

Gurruwiwi – Gälpu clan
Marika – Rirratjingu clan
Yunupingu – Gumatj clan
Yolŋu culture, law and mythology

Law

The word for "law" in Yolŋu is rom, and there are particular ceremonies associated with Rom, known as Rom ceremony. The complete system of Yolŋu customary law is known as Ngarra, or as the Maḏayin.
Maḏayin embodies the rights of the owners of the law, or citizens who have the rights and responsibilities for this embodiment of law. Maḏayin includes all the people's law ; the instruments and objects that encode and symbolise the law ; oral dictates; names and song cycles; and the holy, restricted places that are used in the maintenance, education and development of law. Galarrwuy Yunupingu has described Rom watangu as the overarching law of the land, which is "lasting and alive... my backbone". This law covers the ownership of land and waters, the resources on or within these lands and waters. It regulates and controls production and trade and the moral, social and religious law, including laws for the conservation and the farming of plants and aquatic life.
Yolŋu believe that living out their life according to Maḏayin is right and civilised. The Maḏayin creates a state of Magaya, which is a state of peace, freedom from hostilities and true justice for all.
The story of Barnumbirr, depicting the first death in the Dreamtime, is the beginning of Maḏayin, the cycle of life and death.
A document listing various Yolŋu laws, authorised by both Dhuwa and Yirritja political leaders and described as "brief and incomplete in both depth and scope", was published "for guests attending the Narra' at Galiwin'ku" on 3 September 2005.

''Gaṉma''

A Deakin University study published in 2000 investigated Aboriginal knowledge systems in reaction to what the authors regarded as Western ethnocentrism in science studies. The author argues that Yolŋu culture is a system of knowledge different in many ways from that of Western culture, and may be broadly described as viewing the world as a related whole rather than as a collection of objects. The relationship between Yolŋu and Western knowledge is explored by using the Yolŋu idea of gaṉma, which metaphorically describes two streams, one coming from the land and one from the sea engulfing each other so that "the forces of the streams combine and lead to deeper understanding and truth".

Sacred objects

Raŋga is a name for sacred objects or emblems used in ceremony.

Mythology

Wangarr

The concept of Wangarr is complex. Attempts to translate the term into English have called the Wangarr beings variously "spirit man/woman", "ancestor", "totem", or various combinations. The Yolŋu believe that the Wangarr ancestor-beings not only hunted, gathered food and held ceremonies as the Yolŋu do today, but also that they created plants and geographical features such as rivers, rocks, sandhills and islands, and these features now incorporate the essence of the Wangarr. They also named species of plant and animal, and made these sacred to the local clan; some Wangarr took on the characteristics of a species, which then became the totem of the clan. Sacred objects and certain designs are also associated with certain Wangarr, who also gave that clan their language, law, paintings, songs, dances, ceremonies and creation stories.
In 2022 Rirratjŋu lore man Banula Marika advised choreographer Gary Lang and his NT Dance Company on a new work called Waŋa, performed in collaboration with MIKU Performing Arts and Darwin Symphony Orchestra, which shows the story of a spirit's journey after death.