“Dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom means ‘sharing feelings’. Or maybe we could call it ‘the law of feelings’… What I’m talking about is that experience of connection that you can get through feelings. That’s what we are doing here. Sharing feeling from inside us and giving them to you. So you can feel and you can know.”.
_ Paul Gurrumuruwuy
Yuta is the Yolŋu 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 multi-voiced 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 Yolŋu 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.
You will find the open access digital version of Phone & Spear here.
Endorsements:
Phone & Spear is a uniquely powerful work of anthropology in and through art practice. Few works expand the depth and breadth of collaboration to produce such revelation and pleasure. Fewer still are as affecting, poignant, and downright enjoyable. Bravo!
_Steven Feld, School for Advanced Research
This is a remarkable book. Phone and Spear is destined to become a classic of its time. The images are mesmerising, supercharged with colour and creative spark. The interplay between image and text on the page is absorbing and often moving. The writing throughout is fresh, lively, extending the vitality of the visual material. The sense of an intercultural family of voices brings a dynamism and richness that is often missing in scholarly texts
_Melinda Hinkson, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University
A profoundly original project, an experiment in collaborative writing and cross-cultural insights based on the longstanding work of this group on a number of exciting projects involving cut-and-paste/remix phone-made media as well as films about Yolŋu use of mobile phones, particularly revolving around the truly brilliant short film that they made on this topic, Ringtone. I think this is a fantastic contribution to an anthropology that is constantly pushing for both experimental forms and collaborative work, but so rarely really delivering on those ideas. Having the rich layering of phone-made images throughout, with a range of explanations about them, gives Phone & Spear its vitality.
_Faye Ginsburg, Professor of Anthropology, New York University
Reviews:
Phone & Spear does not make an argument but performs it. Its form is perhaps the most inventive of any ethnography I’ve read. In fact, I did not read Phone & Spear, I encountered its pages and they interpellated me…Miyarrka Media have given us “an intercultural instruction manual for the senses”, a timely gift, a lifeline for lives we are somehow supposed to live meaningfully while together apart.
_ Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, American Anthropologist