Co-authored with Indigenous Elders from Yanyuwa Country in the SW Gulf of Carpentaria and a team of anthropologists, this book strives to recount and understand Indigenous Law in Australia. It pays close attention to the realpolitik and high-level political functioning of Indigenous Laws, which inspires a discussion of how this Law models the relational, influences governance and emplaces people in an ordered kincentric lifeworld.  

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"At a time when the nation is seeking reconciliation with First Nations people through truth telling, treaty and settling previous injustices such as the Stolen Generations, it is timely that the future of this country embraces, amplifies and empowers Indigenous Law into the future design and culture of our country. This book presents a pathway for that to occur from the most remote parts of this continent. It is of paramount importance that this book’s message becomes part of the lingua franca of a new nation, formally known as Australia." - Joe Morrison, Group CEO, Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation. 

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Fully illustrated, Jakarda Wuka (Too Many Stories) draws on a combined 70+ years of collaborative research involving Yanyuwa Elders, anthropologists, and an archaeologist to tell a unique story about the rock art from Yanyuwa Country in northern Australia’s southwest Gulf of Carpentaria.  

Jakarda Wuka highlights the multidimensional nature of Yanyuwa rock art: it is an active social agent in the landscape, capable of changing according to different circumstances and events, connected to the epic travels and songs of Ancestral Beings (Dreamings), and related to various aspects of Yanyuwa life such as ceremony, health and wellbeing, identity, and narratives concerning past and present-day events.

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This book offers up a study of relational habits in a moment of increasingly vexed identity politics. It takes inspiration from the art of keeping company. Diving deep into this multidimensional art of relating, the book critically engages with the counter habit of reductive identity politics and the flattening qualities that come with exceptionalism, individuated rights, limited empathic reach and a lack of enchantment in the other. 

"This is a brave, beautifully written exploration of the nature of human lives, showing that it is possible for us vulnerable, fragile creatures to live together in a shared world. Kearney raises fundamental questions about trust and difference, showing what thoughtful anthropology can achieve." - Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

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A revealing account of ethnographic fieldwork, this innovative work combines personal and professional accounts of the challenges and benefits of long-term collaboration and ethnographic encounters with Indigenous peoples. It explores critical reflexivity through ethnographic approaches of “responsive reflexivity,” “bracketing,” “introspection,” “inter-subjective reflection,” “mutual collaboration,” and “ironic deconstruction'.

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“This moving book offers a profound vision of all that reflexive ethnography can be if carried out with sensitivity, humility, and respect for the multiple layers of history in which our work is always enmeshed.”

―Ruth Behar, Professor at the University of Michigan, USA, and author of Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in Between Journeys

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Human life is intimately woven into place. 

Much attention has been given to the impact of trauma and violence on human lives across generations, but what of the spaces in which it occurs? Why does competition for space and place take up so much human energy? How does culturally prescribed violence impact upon place and a sense of belonging? By identifying violence in place as a crisis of our times, and by encouraging both the witnessing and the diagnosing of harm, this book reveals the greater effects of cultural wounding. It problematises the habit of separating human life out from the ecologies in which it is held. This book seeks pathways to recover from conflict by embracing the place world, our living environments and sites of emotional importance. It explores ethics and responsive reflexivity as commitments that reduce the likelihood of harm born of a failure to care.   

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Today, there is new appeal in the analysis of ethnicity, not merely as innate and fixed identities or fragmented and lost identities, but rather as always emerging and creatively reclaimed. Presenting examples of cultural wounding and healing this book provides a close reading of how people survive hardship to redefine and reclaim identities and aspirational futures of hope and cultural strength. 

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​"In this impressive volume, Amanda Kearney provides a searching analysis of the consequences of systematic violations of people's cultural identities, while placing equal emphasis on actions designed to repair the injuries of inter-ethnic conflict and redress past and present wrongs. For her success in synthesising cultural wounding and cultural healing, so creating a better understanding of the conditions for ethnic recuperation, we owe Kearney a considerable debt." - Professor Michael Pickering, Loughborough University, UK

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In collaboration with Yanyuwa people in the SW Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia, this book explores the politics of the past as they map out in the present. Utilising critical social theory Kearney unpicks the ways in which multiple interpretations of the past and present compete for space and audibility in contemporary Australia. This book is an exploration of the beauty and richness of Yanyuwa Country and the challenges people have faced in asserting their emotional geography over these lands and waters.