A great deal has been written, over time, about the Aborigines of Australia, yet for the most part this work has concentrated on Aboriginal kinship systems and has said little about the way in which the Aboriginal world is structured from the point of view of the in-dividual. In research with Pintupi-speaking Aborigines of the Western Desert, it became clear that understanding what I call their" concepts of the emotions" and their concept of the self was critical to understanding what it means to be Pintupi. It is to the question of how we are to understand these concepts and their use in Pintupi life that this paper is directed.