The Pintupi, a hunting-and-gathering people of Australia's Western Desert, were among the last Aborigines to come into contact with white society. Despite their extended relocation in central Australian settlements, they have managed to preserve much of their traditional culture and social organization. This book presents a comprehensive ethnographic interpretation of the ways in which Pintupi politics, cosmology, kinship systems, nomadic patterns, and social values reinforce and sometimes contradict each other.

Fred R. Myers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University.

"This sensitively written work makes a major contribution to Australian Aboriginal studies and the examination of hunter-gatherer societies, bringing breadth of thinking and careful ethnographic interpretation to a notably difficult field."—Nancy D. Munn, American Anthropologist

"Of the recent books on Australian Aborigines [Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self] is theoretically the most important, ethnographically the deepest, and certainly the most lucid."—Peter Sutton, American Ethnologist

"This is the most important publication in Aboriginal anthropology since Mervyn Meggitt's Desert People appeared in 1962. Like Meggitt's book it is a major ethnography but the approach is quite different. In place of structural-functionalism we have the first complete cultural analysis of Aboriginal society. The result is a refreshing analysis that will broaden the ethnographic and theoretical agenda."—Nicolas Peterson, Man