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UCLA Mathematical Anthropology and Cultural Theory UCLA Mathematical Anthropology and Cultural Theory Title Beyond Fictions of Closure in Australian Aboriginal Kinship Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7d69w4sk Journal Mathematical Anthropology and Culture Theory, 5(1) ISSN 1544-5879 Author Denham, Woodrow W Publication Date 2013-05-01 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL VOLUME 5 NO. 1 MAY 2013 BEYOND FICTIONS OF CLOSURE IN AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL KINSHIP WOODROW W. DENHAM, PH. D RETIRED INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR [email protected] COPYRIGHT 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY AUTHOR SUBMITTED: DECEMBER 15, 2012 ACCEPTED: JANUARY 31, 2013 MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ISSN 1544-5879 DENHAM: BEYOND FICTIONS OF CLOSURE WWW.MATHEMATICALANTHROPOLOGY.ORG MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL VOLUME 5 NO. 1 PAGE 1 OF 90 MAY 2013 BEYOND FICTIONS OF CLOSURE IN AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL KINSHIP WOODROW W. DENHAM, PH. D. Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 2 Dedication .................................................................................................................................. 3 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... 3 1. The problem ........................................................................................................................ 4 2. Demographic history ......................................................................................................... 10 Societal boundaries, nations and drainage basins ................................................................. 10 Exogamy rates ....................................................................................................................... 12 Small-world networks ........................................................................................................... 17 Geographical distribution of exogamy .................................................................................. 20 Population sizes ..................................................................................................................... 26 Population stability ............................................................................................................... 26 Implications of demographic patterns ................................................................................... 29 3. Inbreeding avoidance ...................................................................................................... 29 Diagrammatic conventions ................................................................................................... 30 Measuring Alyawarra endogamy .......................................................................................... 30 Primary inbreeding avoidance in canonical Kariera ............................................................. 33 Enhanced inbreeding avoidance in canonical Kariera .......................................................... 34 Incremental Changes ......................................................................................................... 35 Marriage with tribal kin instead of proper kin .............................................................. 35 Alternate generation-level marriage .............................................................................. 35 Omaha kin term skew ................................................................................................... 35 Phase Transitions .............................................................................................................. 39 Skin term transformations ............................................................................................. 39 Circulating connubia ..................................................................................................... 48 Endogamous helical generations ................................................................................... 49 Exogamous horizontal and vertical asymmetry ............................................................ 50 4. Ecological history ............................................................................................................ 55 Habitat features and stochasticity .......................................................................................... 55 A different pulsating heart .................................................................................................... 57 Firestick farming and the food crisis in prehistory ............................................................... 58 Ecological and social cycles.................................................................................................. 64 5. Testing the proposal ........................................................................................................ 67 6. Summary and conclusions .............................................................................................. 68 Appendix 1. Glossary of basic concepts in inbreeding avoidance ........................................... 74 Appendix 2. Alyawarra data used in preparing this paper ....................................................... 78 Appendix 3. Preferred and traditional spellings with locations ............................................... 79 References ................................................................................................................................. 80 DENHAM: BEYOND FICTIONS OF CLOSURE WWW.MATHEMATICALANTHROPOLOGY.ORG MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL VOLUME 5 NO. 1 PAGE 2 OF 90 MAY 2013 Abstract: There is a contradiction between the fact that societal endogamy characterizes most models of Australian Aboriginal systems of descent, marriage and kinship, while societal exogamy, which is freely acknowledged by most observers, widely reported in the ethnographic literature and necessary for Aboriginal survival, is commonly missing from those models. In a field characterized by the modeling of formal relational systems of enormous complexity within societies, surely it is remarkable that representations and analyses of comparable complexity rarely address relations between and among Aboriginal Nations and their constituent societies. The tradition of building endogamous, generationally closed cognitive models of exogamous, behaviorally open societies is valuable for some purposes but is lacking in realism. Drawing on research in demography, genetics, kinship, historical linguistics, ecology and archaeology, I advocate moving beyond cognition and dealing with the facts of life as well. I use small-world networks, directed marriage cycles, the geographical distribution of exogamous marriages and additional measures to demonstrate that generational closure and societal closure, which define boundaries around traditional units of analysis in Australian Aboriginal kinship research, are not simplifying assumptions that enhance our understanding, but rather are fictions that distort our understanding. When we impose defective boundaries, perhaps due to over-zealously applying the organic analogy or comparable European folk theories, we cannot clearly discern what happens within each unit of analysis, how the units interact with each other, or how they collectively interact with the world around them. My central question concerns inbreeding avoidance: How did Australian Aboriginal people and societies achieve a balance between ancestral law that stipulates canonical Kariera/Aranda descent, marriage and kinship patterns, or something similar to them, and biological “law” that demands viable inbreeding coefficients? My tentative answer focuses on reproductive strategies that systematically reduce societal closure while increasing societal complexity, including marriage with tribal (classificatory) kin instead of proper kin, alternate generation-level marriage, Omaha kin term skewing, a broad spectrum of systematic changes in skin terms, circulating connubia, endogamous (perhaps helical) generations and exogamous horizontal and vertical marriage asymmetry. I suggest that Australian Aboriginal societies responded uniquely when confronted with the food crisis in prehistory. Facing hostile environments throughout most of the continent, and possessing multiple levels of adaptive kin relationships and a worldview that emphasized economic cooperation more than competition, they did not move toward domestication, technological innovation, social stratification and ownership of personal property. Instead, at least two innovations characteristic of Australia occurred; viz., the emergence of section and subsection systems and the adoption of firestick farming, both of which had the benign effect of imparting integration, stability, persistence and abidingness to ever-changing Aboriginal societies. In this context, statistically analyzable marital ties that span multiple generations and interlink diverse section and subsection systems among the Alyawarra; Eastern, Northern and Western Aranda; Wailbri, Kaititja, Warramunga, Anmatjerra and other language groups in Central Australia may be recent legacies of successful attempts to maintain stable regional populations in the face of 19th and 20th century
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