Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the tensions surrounding the transformation of objects, traditionally used in corporate ritual, into individual artworks, for what they reveal about notions of property, creativity and intersubjectivity in an Indigenous Australian community.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on a case study in which a genre of dreamt material, locally understood as ancestrally revealed and incorporated into ritual form, is transformed into artworks and sold. The commodification of one ritual component and the failure to 'bring out' the others - and the (apparent) accompanying transition from rights embedded in a society to those exercised by the individual, can, I argue, be interrogated further than this apparent societal/individual divide, to reveal more nuanced understandings of property, creativity and intersubjectivity in an Indigenous Australian community.