Australian aboriginal higher order social organization and the late holocene

Abstract

The first generation of Australianist anthropologists described an over-arching level of social organization they variously described as nations, confederacies or messmates. The existence of this level of social organization received some support in the later work of Meggitt (1962) and Hiatt (1965) in respect of the Warlpiri of Central Australia and the Gidjingali of Arnhem Land respectively, and also in the theoretical work of Sutton (1990). However, an insuperable barrier to accepting its existence has been the lack of evidence for this institution from the field. I argue in this thesis that a level of higher order social organization (as named by Sutton 2003) did exist and its absence in modern communities can be explained by them having been subsumed under the Australian nation state. To explain their purpose and structure I reconstruct the demographic conditions of the Late Holocene. This, I argue, was a period of great vitality, of rapid population growth and a host of economic and technological advances. Historical linguistics provides evidence that goes beyond what can be learnt about the Late Holocene from archaeology to demonstrate that it was a time of broad and pervasive language expansion. This expansion was accomplished by demic migration, that is by the expansion of populations distinguished by common language and culture, into new territory both unoccupied and occupied. The latter implies that for the Late Holocene, there was conflict with the smaller populations in the path of expanding groups, and, at a later stage, between other expanding populations. These demographic pressures led to the innovation or modification of many of the social institutions and activities now recognised as features of classical Aboriginal culture and society. Areas affected include kinship, warfare, trade and initiation ceremony. The peak sociological transformation was the emergence of institutions of higher order social organization. These were regional alliances designed either to further, or mitigate, demic expansion. I dichotomise these alliances as those that were aggressive, and those that were defensive. The former are usually populations of the same language and culture in the act of demic expansion; the latter, composed of peoples not necessarily closely related linguistically or culturally, was more a contingent response to the aggressive expansion of others.