Yina

Yina, 'the Old Man', is among the most charged ancestral figures of Pintupi country. In the Tjukurrpa he travelled to the rock hole Yumari, whose name means 'mother-in-law place', and there entered into an illicit union with a woman of the classificatory mother-in-law relation, a bond forbidden under Pintupi kinship law. A sorcerer of great power, his desire proved so violent that his testicles and penis separated from his body and became rocky outcrops, a rock hole and markings still visible within a few hundred metres of the site, which lies between the communities of Walungurru (Kintore) and Kiwirrkurra. The episode fixes in the land both the potency and the peril of transgressive desire, and Yumari remains a men's sacred site whose custodianship passes through the local patriline.

Domains

• sorcery
• kinship law

Powers

• transforms his body into landscape
• wields ancestral sorcery

Epithets

• Yina — the Old ManFred R. Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self (Smithsonian, 1986) (primary)

Sources

• Yina is a revered Pintupi ancestor who had an illicit liaison with his classificatory mother-in-law at the rock hole Yumari, a forbidden union under Pintupi kinship law.: National Museum of Australia, Papunya Painting: Out of the Australian Desert (2007), entry on Uta Uta Tjangala's Yumari (secondary)
• The Yumari (mother-in-law place) narrative and Yina's transformation into landscape features between Walungurru and Kiwirrkurra is custodial Tjukurrpa knowledge held by the Tjangala/Tjampitjinpa patriline.: Vivien Johnson, Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists (IAD Press, 2008) (secondary)