Moiety Names in South-Eastern Australia: Distribution and Reconstructed History

Abstract

One of the distinguishing features of Australian social organisation is its so-named classificatory system of kinship, whereby a given term may extend to other people, including genealogically distant kin and even strangers. For example, a father’s father’s brother’s son’s son may be called ‘brother’. By extending the kinship terms through regular principles, everybody in the social universe becomes kin of some kind, an arrangement called ‘universal kinship’. So-called skin systems build on classificatory kinship by adding an extra dimension in which a category name is applied to divisions of people, and specific kinship relationships obtain between these social categories. In contrast, kinship terms in Europe are applied only to members of one’s immediate family, with fewer terminological distinctions made as genealogical distance increases. The disjunction between these two social models has been a source of misunderstanding ever since outsiders from Europe began visiting and settling on the continent. In this chapter, we plot the history of settler perspectives on Aboriginal social organisation with special attention given to the rise of comparative kinship as an object of scholarly interest in the West. Although Western scholars in the second half of the nineteenth century became increasingly aware of the global diversity of kinship systems, cross-cultural comparisons of kin systems would also give rise to overreaching and wrong-headed theories of unilinear human ‘progress’. The misanalysis of ethnographic descriptions from Australia laid the foundations for social evolutionist dogmas; however, as we will show, better documentation and analysis of Australian kinship systems would later help to undermine these same ideologies. The twentieth century saw a round rejection of social evolutionism within kinship studies, eventually leading to new diachronic insights that took into account diffusion and transformation. In turn, the ‘new kinship’ of the late twentieth century began to recognise the enduring power of kinship to express and define collective Indigenous identities. Show more