hold­ing sev­er­al threads at once, fig­ur­ing a future together

String fig­ur­ing is thought to have exist­ed almost as long as string itself. Accord­ing to Rir­ratjin­gu elder Wand­juk Mari­ka, for the Yolŋu peo­ple string was first made by the two Wawa­lik Sis­ters when they were on a long jour­ney. At one point, ​“the sis­ters sat down, look­ing at each oth­er, with their feet out and legs apart, and both men­stru­at­ed… Each one made a loop of the oth­er one’s men­stru­al blood, after which they put the string loops around their necks.”(1) Con­nect­ed like this to them­selves and to Coun­try, the sis­ters made ​“a record in string of all the ani­mals, plants and oth­er things they saw, as well as their own activities.”(2) The first accounts of the world were made in string figures.

String fig­ures are under­stood to have been prac­tised by many dis­tant and diverse soci­eties around the world. Yel­low­man, a Nava­jo man explained that string fig­ur­ing helps ​“to relate our lives to the stars and the sun, the ani­mals, and to all of nature, or else we will go crazy, or get sick.”(3) For the Nava­jo string games are a ​“kind of pat­tern­ing for restor­ing hózhó, a term imper­fect­ly trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish as ​‘har­mo­ny,’ ​‘beau­ty,’ ​‘order,’ and ​‘right rela­tions of the world.’” 

Kom­bumer­ri philoso­pher Mary Gra­ham describes the deep his­to­ry and prac­tice of the rela­tion­ship between humans and the land:​“The reflec­tive and quest­ing Abo­rig­i­nal mind is always aligned with what every­one in the group wants, in order to have and main­tain har­mo­nious relationships.”(4)

And Amer­i­can philoso­pher Don­na Har­away says​“string fig­ures are think­ing as well as mak­ing prac­tices.”(5) Per­haps they are a way of think­ing and mak­ing har­mo­nious rela­tion­ships too.

hold­ing sev­er­al threads at once, fig­ur­ing a future togeth­er ties knots with these ideas.

Louisa Bufarde­ci, 2023

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1. Chris Knight, Blood Rela­tions (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1991), 445.

2. String fig­ur­ing is entan­gled with coloni­sa­tion in a com­plex web of loss and par­tial recu­per­a­tion. Accord­ing to Aus­tralian anthro­pol­o­gist Robyn McKen­zie this account of cre­ation along with over two hun­dred string fig­ures made by the Djapu woman Ngar­rawu Munung­gurr were col­lect­ed by the Aus­tralian anthro­pol­o­gist and archae­ol­o­gist Fred­er­ick McCarthy in 1948. Robyn McKen­zie, ​“The String Fig­ures of Yir­rkala Exam­i­na­tion of a lega­cy,” in Explor­ing the Lega­cy of the 1948 Arn­hem Land Expe­di­tion, ed. Mar­tin Thomas and Mar­go Neale (Can­ber­ra: ANU Press, 2011), 192, 201, 205.

3. Barre Toelken, ​“The Folk Per­for­mance,” in Dynam­ics of Folk­lore (Logan: Uni­ver­si­ty Press of Col­orado, 1996): 124.

4. Mary Gra­ham, ​“Some Thoughts About the Philo­soph­i­cal Under­pin­nings of Abo­rig­i­nal World­views,” World­views: Glob­al Reli­gions, Cul­ture and Ecol­o­gy 3, no. 2 (1999): 108.

5. Don­na Har­away, Stay­ing with the Trou­ble : Mak­ing Kin in the Chthu­lucene (Durham: Duke Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2016), 14.