In recent decades, ceremonial objects and recordings made by anthropologists have been gradually making their way back to Anmatyerr communities in central Australia. The reintegration of this material has prompted diverse responses from different communities. At the community of Laramba, a project to record and document male Anmatyerr ceremonial traditions has emerged as a way of recentring contemporary cultural practice and giving necessary context to returned archival materials. This paper examines the significance of male Anmatyerr ceremony today, the spectre of cultural endangerment and why particular genres of song and performance are now at the centre of this community-led documentation project. Set amongst a distinct social world that has made people’s existence difficult – structural racism, ingrained disadvantage, and living primarily upon lands that have been under the control of pastoralists for over a century – the Laramba community celebrate the ceremonial domain as part of a creative strategy to try and cope with the struggles of life and reassert their particularity. Senior men leading the Anengkerr Anmatyerr Ingkantety project have focused on sustained instruction and performance of ceremony but have also embraced what they regard as an equally important ‘new’ tradition of intercultural innovation, modelled by their fathers and grandfathers throughout the twentieth century as they interacted with anthropologists and collectors of art and artefacts, to create a dynamic cultural future. Their emphasis has not been to simply salvage endangered traditions or establish continuity of cultural practice, but to refocus relational attention towards the creation of new relationships for the twenty first century.

Dr Jason Gibson is an anthropologist and historian who has worked with the Anmatyerr community since 2005. His first book Ceremony Men: Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection (SUNY Press, 2020) was awarded the Council for Museum Anthropology Book Prize and the Australian Historical Association’s W.K. Hancock Prize. This book articulated the knowledge-production processes of ethnographic research as a co-production and a property of the relationship between researcher and subject. Jason has recorded and written about Anmatyerr ceremonies, songs and oral histories and has spent years linking up Anmatyerr people with their cultural heritage materials in museums, archives, libraries, and galleries. His most recent book is Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Heritage Experiences of Return in Central Australia (Routledge 2024) offers a timely, critical perspective on current museum practices of repatriation and its place within processes of cultural transmission. He is an ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow at Deakin University.