reflections on a meeting: structure, language, and the polity in a small‐scale society

Careful attention to the importance of language shows it to be a constitutive part of Pintupi social life. Accounting for the value and form of this activity leads to reconceptualizing the nature of politics and the polity in an Australian Aboriginal society. Implications of these structural features for the practical experience of a cultural subject are explored through comparison with other societies. The existence of systematic variation argues that we must attend to kinds of structural differences in the polity of small‐scale societies.