A visually striking intercultural exploration of the use of mobile
phones in Aboriginal communities in Australia.
Yuta is the Yolngu word for new. Phone & Spear: A Yuta Anthropology
is a project inspired by the gloriously cheeky and deeply meaningful
audiovisual media made with and circulated by mobile phones by an
extended Aboriginal family in northern Australia. Building on a ten-year
collaboration by the community-based arts collective Miyarrka Media, the
project is an experiment in the anthropology of co-creation. It is a
multivoiced portrait of an Indigenous society using mobile phones
inventively to affirm connections to kin and country amid the difficult
and often devastating circumstances of contemporary remote Aboriginal
life.
But this is not simply a book about Aboriginal art, mobile phones, and
social renewal. If old anthropology understood its task as revealing one
world to another, yuta anthropology is concerned with bringing
different worlds into relationship. Following Yolngu social
aesthetics--or what Miyarrka Media translate as "the law of
feeling"--the book is a relational technology in its own right: an
object that combines color, pattern, and story to bring once distant
worlds into new sensuously mediated connections.
