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I explore by way of a thought experiment the temporality of waterways in the context of restorative art interventions. As a substance that moves and gives form, and as a medium that retains and discharges, connects and divides, water that flows can make tangible the experiential flow of return and anticipation. Arguably, this bi‐directional structuring of time is pivotal to transformative and reparative action. If restoration means 'going back' to memories of ecologies and places, it does so with a generative thrust forward. This is the life‐enabling orientation of recuperation that I discern connects diverse phenomenological concepts: Deborah Bird Rose's 'multispecies knots of ethical time', the idea of 'afterness' as developed by Gerhard Richter, Gaston Bachelard's 'rhythmic time', and Gerald Vizenor's 'survivance'. I bring these concepts to: (a) artistic water restoration projects that make imaginable, palpable, and real sustainable human‐water relationships, with a focus on the public works in Sydney by Turpin + Crawford Studio; (b) perspectives on water and time that Australian Indigenous thinkers have shared during my ethnographic research; and (c) the re‐naturalization of a river in Germany's postindustrial Ruhr region. I propose that thinking with water ethically and recognizing its temporal diversity opens up perspectives on the deindustrialisation of rivers and other bodies of water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue is part of a shift in social science and humanities thinking and in public awareness towards planetary water concerns. As societal and scholarly attention to the wet element – and its political import and its cultural constitution – is growing, we ask, how can we rethink our relationships with water in Australia now and into the future? The collection of papers in this issue shows that water responds to human practices which in turn are grounded in cultural imaginaries. Water is thus real in diverse ways, and makes possible diverse material, political and cultural relationships. Taking our lead from the ideas that contributors have developed from this and other questions posed for the issue, our introductory discussion considers three themes that are key to the understanding of water futures in Australia: materialities, temporalities and imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a work of insight and scope that non-Aboriginal anthropologists cannot produce but must engage with as a major form of knowledge production - even if it is first and foremost addressed to the young and future generations of the Ward family. In Nura Nungalka Ward's case, three non-Indigenous women who have spent most of their working lives at Anangu organizations in Alice Springs helped her compile the book over the span of a decade - interpreter Linda Rive, historian Julia Burke (both at I Ara Irititja i digital archive), and health expert Suzanne Bryce who leads the nutrition team at the NPY Women's Council. (78) Looking back to her early childhood and youth, Nura clearly distinguishes the Anangu and the Western domains, but this is not cast in terms of profound cultural change or overbearing conflict. Nura laments the disconnection in the present generation from old subsistence skills and embodied immersion in the life of the bush. [Extracted from the article]

Introducing Oceanic Societies in COVID-19 The Oceanic region sustains the lowest number of coronavirus infections worldwide, with Pacific Island Countries and Territories registering 3,057 COVID-19 cases as of 8 September 2020, Australia counting 26,651 and Aotearoa/New Zealand 1,797 - a small fraction of the 28,789.698 reported cases across the globe (but disregarding the 260,000 cases in the Philippines not covered here). Oceanic societies, including northern Australian families, are reviving small-scale, traditional subsistence practices, anchored in an ethos of exchange, self-reliance, kinship, reciprocity, as well as a deep connection to land (Dean; Leweniqila and Vunibola; Randin; Tagialofa et al.; Kearney et al.). [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines how Australian Aboriginal children present and re-present experience in their symbolic play. Based on anthropological field research in one location and therapeutic work in another, it reports from a psychodynamic perspective how the Indigenous children create meaning on the personal and social level in two distinctive play forms. These are a traditional sand story game played by Anangu Pitjantjatjara girls in a remote Western Desert community in Central Australia, and the European sand play therapy that was introduced as part of an intervention program in a Tiwi Islands community off the northern coast. In phenomenological terms, both techniques draw on the symbolizing activity of the lived body (Schilder, 1950, 1951; Merleau-Ponty, 1961; Scheler, 1973) or, in the language of organismic-developmental theory, physiognomizing processes (Werner and Kaplan, 1984). These processes are seen to rest on the primary human capacity for imagination (Castoriadis, 1987). However, the schematizing activity that creates a meaningful relationship between symbol and referent (Werner and Kaplan, 1984) is specific to each play form. Set up retrospectively as a comparison, the discussion leads to the observation that the self-directed play in the natural social setting is of a higher symbolic order (re-presentational) than the externally induced play in the artificial social setting that indicates spontaneous linkages between symbol and referent (presentational). It is suggested that this raises certain questions about the potentially therapeutic effect of children's symbolic play. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores from a psychoanalytic point of view some of the many ethnographic references to cannibalistic figures in Aboriginal societies of the Central and Western parts of Australia. The purpose is to show how dynamics of splitting originating in early infancy (love-aggression, incorporation-expulsion, inside-outside, self-other) continue to exist in culture-specific expressions of cannibalistic fantasies and incestuous desires. On a continuum where communication becomes sociality, which in turn becomes predation and incorporation, aggression has no fixed place. It cannot be defined in an absolute fashion, for it is cultural factors that order this continuum and, in each particular case, establish the thresholds differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists increasingly express links between individuals or collectivities through the discursively convenient prefix '-inter'; inter-personal, inter-subjective, inter-cultural, inter-textual. However, attempts to describe the psychodynamics that effect the linkings that are integral to human social experience have not held pace. I want to suggest that a regard for the ontogenetic primary forms of encounter--looking, eating, playing--can substantiate the analysis of being a self among other selves within and across the boundaries of social worlds. Engaging a phenomenological and psychoanalytic perspective, this paper examines how We-relationships have been variously structured by Pitjantjatjara Aborigines in encountering others at home and in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]