Pointing the Phone: Transforming Technologies and Social Relations among Warlpiri Petronella Vaarzon-Morel New York University Sydney Many central Australian Aboriginal settlements have recently gained access to mobile phones and the Internet. This paper explores ways in which Aboriginal people engage with this technology outside of institutional settings. Drawing on long-term research among Warlpiri, I reflect on people’s responses to earlier communication media such as the two-way radio and radio–telephone and compare them to patterns of use emerging around new technologies. Attending to the social landscape surrounding the uptake of new media and the social network- ing site ‘Divas Chat’, I consider how transformations in material structures of communication interact with changing demographics, embodied socio-spatial relations, sorcery beliefs and mobility to reinforce, refigure and/or disrupt patterns of conflict and connectedness that hith- erto have structured Warlpiri relational ontology. I suggest that the way people engage with these technologies illuminates and intensifies fault-lines arising from contradictions between older established social orders and changing relations with the state and modernity. INTRODUCTION In Divining a Digital Future, Dourish and Bell (2011: 110) discuss customary Warlpiri spatial practices to illustrate how people’s ‘experience of space’ is ‘coextensive with the cultural practices of everyday life’ and suggest that digital technologies can disrupt and transform this space. While they draw on the work of earlier ethnographers of Warlpiri such as Munn (1996) and Bell (1983) they do not explore the effects of digi- tal technologies on contemporary Warlpiri practices. This paper explores ways in which Warlpiri engage with digital technology outside of institutional settings. It takes up Dourish and Bell’s suggestive discussion and considers how mobile phone use is reshaping Warlpiri people’s experience of space and mediating their social relations in new ways. An underlying issue of the paper is how changes in technology articulate with or disrupt other social practices that, as Myers (2000: 78) observes, mediate between Indigenous subjects and their lifeworlds. To illuminate this topic I draw on long-term research among Warlpiri in central Australia, and reflect on people’s responses to earlier media of communication such as the radio–telephone and two-way radio (whereby people’s conversations were transmitted via radio) and compare them to patterns of use emerging around more recently introduced technologies. I consider how transformations in material The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2014) 25, 239–255 doi:10.1111/taja.12091 © 2014 Australian Anthropological Society 239