Kimberly Ann Christen

This dissertation examines cultural preservation and innovation in practice, and is based on fieldwork carried out in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory, Australia and explores one community's entanglements with national land rights legislation, transnational interests in mining, and global/local shifts in cultural tourism. It traces the emergence of coexisting forms of Aboriginality - through material objects, cultural performances, and unexpected alliances. Within these collaborations - old and new - the Warumungu sense of " properness" recasts contested sets of actions and events that align with an ideal notion of past. Local concerns intersect with and redefine global indigenous debates over commercial land use, cultural reproduction, intellectual property rights, and non-Aboriginal access to Aboriginal cultural knowledge.