YOLNGU COUNTRY AS A MULTIDIMENSIONAL AND INTERSPECIES TANGLE OF RELATIONSHIPS. How ‘everything is linked to one another’, North Australia.

This paper explores how Australian Indigenous people express their mutual life‑giving bonds with other‑than‑humans such as animals, plants, natural features, and land in terms of kinship relationships. I will describe an ‘ontology of connectivity’ and a ‘mutuality of being’ among living beings in terms of reciprocal responsibility, interdependence, cooperation and care. In reference to my ethnographic research in Northeast Arnhem Land, I insist on the priority of relating, and on the affective nature of multispecies relationships, and illustrate how these are celebrated, maintained and reactivated through ceremonial songs, as well as new forms of music.