Homeland Emotion: An Emotional Geography of Heritage and Homeland

Abstract

Drawn into a discussion of emotional environs, this paper offers up an emotional geography of the social and sensory relations that define a group’s heritage and traditional homelands. It focuses on the homelands and heritage of the Yanyuwa, the Indigenous owners of land and waters throughout the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia. This discussion provides an insight into homelands that are deemed ‘too strong to ever not be there’, recognising ‘home’ and ‘country’ as the embodiment and containment of all forms of heritage, tangible and intangible. Emotive narratives informed by cultural habit and experience are what connect people to their ancestors and homelands. I propose emotional geography, as informed by ethnoarchaeology, as a means to explore the manner in which emotions and sensory experience affect the way that cultural groups sense the substance of their past, present and future.