Logging,Women and Submarines: Some Changes in Kamula Men's Access to Transformative Power

In this paper I describe how, for the Kamula, the productive elicitation of both familiar and modern things often requires access to the transformative capacities of ‘bush spirits’. The Kamula narratives I deal with outline how elements of modernity (such as money, logging, guns) are relocated into the domain of these spirits. By the mediation of these spirits, sometimes disturbing, even dangerous, aspects of modernity are transformed and then productively transferred to Kamula men such that they can apparently more effectively negotiate the new forces that now structure their lives. Through these narrative and magical definitions of agency, Kamula men become complicit in a modernity that is increasingly both the source and negation of their power.