Aranda people

The Arrernte ( Aranda or Arunta also ) are a tribe of Aborigines in Central Australia, who live on the Macdonnell mountain range and in Alice Springs. They are divided into western, eastern, northern, southern and central Arrernte. In the town of Alice Springs about 20 percent of the 28,000 inhabitants trace their ancestry back to the Central Arrernte. Known representative of this people was the artist Albert Namatjira.

The records of their myths of Carl Strehlow, Moritz von Leonhard, Theodore George Henry Strehlow, Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen were of great influence on the later work of the French philosopher Lucien Lévy -Bruhl (La mythology primitive ) and the views on the transformation in Elias Canetti study Crowds and Power ( self- propagation and self-consumption. the double form of the totem ).

At the same time Arrernte is also the language of Arrernte; it belongs to the language group Arandic and is thus a Pama - Nyunga language.