The Law of Sharing

After a long dusty drive, the old man asks us to stop. We walk a little way through the tall grass, just beyond a strip of vivid ochre earth, and come to two piles of stones laid almost side by side. Nothing else. “This may be the most important site for Aboriginal life,” says David Mowaljarlai, Ngarinyin elder and lawman of the Kimberley. Here, he tells us, two Nightjar Men—Wodoi, the spotted owl, and Djingun, the small brown-grey owl—did something that still holds the whole country together.

English

At this place the great Wunnan, the Sharing System, and the Marriage Law, came into being.

English

In this place came into being the great Wunnan, the Sharing System, and the Law of marriage.

One word, then, for two things we keep apart: the circulation of goods and the alliance of families. And Mowaljarlai is insistent: this is not one morality among others, but the law under which everything else falls. Everything is under the single word, Wunnan. What Wodoi and Djingun instituted is not a kindly custom of good neighbourliness, but the very framework of society—who marries whom, and thus who owes what to whom.

English

Wodoi and Djingun, these two Nightjar Men, they made the law for men and women.

English

Wodoi and Djingun, these two Nightjar Men, made the law for men and women.

The law assigns each person a “skin”—their kinship section. A Wodoi marries a Djingun, a Djingun a Wodoi; never one’s own skin. From this rule arises a network of obligations that does not stop at the clan’s boundaries. Mowaljarlai offers proof by experience: he can cross the continent, and everywhere the law recognizes him.

At the other end of the country, he says, in Yirrkala, Arnhem Land, the elders come to meet him and ask a single question: “What’s your skin?” He answers: “Wodoi.” And immediately: “Go over there, that’s the Wodoi group.” “This goes all the way to Mornington Island, Arnhem Land, Weipa—anywhere.” To name oneself here is not to state a personal identity: it is to declare at once one’s place in the fabric of sharing, from whom one receives and to whom one owes. Wunnan does not connect generous individuals; it connects positions.

And at each node of the network stands a precise function. Where the paths of exchange intersect, someone decides on just distribution—Mowaljarlai calls this figure the duat, the one who adjudicates the commerce of Wunnan. Sharing is not a spontaneous flow: it has its crossroads, its arbiters, its rules of passage.

This is where the difference must be marked, before any comparison. We, too, have words for this—sharing, generosity, solidarity. But for us, they name a quality of the heart: a disposition one may or may not possess, praised in the virtuous and lamented when absent in others. Sharing remains an afterthought, a moral supplement added to a society that rests, first and foremost, on property and accumulation. Mowaljarlai inverts the order. Wunnan is not added to society: it is society, its primary framework. One does not follow it out of kindness; one is bound to it as a beam is bound to a roof. What circulates must circulate, and keeping surplus for oneself is not a lack of virtue—it is to withdraw from the world, to become an isolate whom the law no longer recognizes.

Our gift-giving often expects a return: we give so that one day it may come back, and the exchange balances the ledger. Wunnan does not function like a debt to be settled. It functions like kinship: one does not “repay” one’s parents; one belongs to the same body as them. There lies the rupture. Our sharing assumes individuals first separate, who choose to bind themselves; Wunnan assumes a bond first given, of which each is but a point. The first begins with property and tempers it; the second has never posited it.

This leaves one question that these two piles of stones leave open. When we call sharing a fine quality—something we hope to find in people—do we not already admit that, for us, it is but an exception? And that beneath our words, it is the other law that holds: the law of keeping?.