Kinship, Marriage and Age in Aboriginal Australia
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MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL VOLUME 4 NO. 1 MAY 2012 KINSHIP, MARRIAGE AND AGE IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA WOODROW W. DENHAM, PH. D. RETIRED INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR [email protected] COPYRIGHT 2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY AUTHOR SUBMITTED: JANUARY 30, 2012 ACCEPTED: MARCH 15, 2012 REVISED: MAY 19, 2012 MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ISSN 1544-5879 DENHAM: KINSHIP, MARRIAGE, AND AGE WWW.MATHEMATICALANTHROPOLOGY.ORG MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL VOLUME 4 NO. 1 MAY 2012 KINSHIP, MARRIAGE AND AGE IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA WOODROW W. DENHAM, PH. D. RETIRED INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR Abstract: McConnell (1930) first described and attempted to explain an “age spiral” in Australian Aboriginal systems of descent, marriage and kinship over eighty years ago. Since then, ethnographic and theoretical research concerning this matter has been sporadic and inconclusive, with societies that display this feature most often being treated as anomalous, transitional, hybrid or aberrant. Atkins (1981) attributed the failure to understand these societies to a lack of realism in the models; specifically to the widely accepted supposition that any ‘normal’ kinship system must entail an infinite or open series of successive genealogical generations each of which is both discrete and closed. Since that supposition can apply only to societies in which mean husband-wife age differences are zero or negligibly small, he suggested that the age spiral, reported in Australian Aboriginal societies where husband-wife age differences generally exceed 14 years, rests on a finite set of open generations rather than an infinite set of closed generations. His proposal means that the concept of generations as an infinite series of discrete, closed strata may not reflect a human universal, but rather may be an example of European ethnocentrism and over-simplification being interpreted mistakenly as self- evident scientific truth. This paper compares models of Australian Aboriginal kinship based on traditional generational closure with models based on generational openness as embedded in age spirals or, more accurately, age biased helices. The objective is to salvage generational openness if it has any merit and to reject it if it does not. The research is based on my own and others’ fieldwork as well as archival research and comparative studies of Aboriginal societies in Central Australia, Cape York Peninsula, Arnhem Land and Western Australia. Analytical methods include formal mathematical models; mechanical, statistical and network models; and computer simulations. The approach is primarily nonverbal, demographic and quantitative rather than verbal and cognitive. The findings show that open and closed models entail radically different expectations about the structure and operation of Aboriginal societies in areas including but not limited to: genealogical frameworks, language group endogamy and exogamy, inbreeding coefficients, MBD vs. FZD marriage, prescriptive vs. proscriptive marriage rules, directed marriage cycles and classificatory kinship. In addition to comparing the strengths and weaknesses of open and closed models, the paper also evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of open models by themselves, in search of deficiencies that might justify their rejection. Several significant problems are introduced and discussed, but seem not to constitute fatal flaws. The findings are likely to be of greater interest to scientists who are concerned with the survival of Aboriginal societies over the last 50 millennia and of lesser interest to those who focus exclusively on structures of systems of kin classification. The impact of these findings on the broad study of Dravidian and Dravidian-like kinship terminologies may be significant, but I am not qualified to investigate that issue and leave it to others. An extended and detailed analysis of relationships between openness and language group exogamy is in preparation. DENHAM: KINSHIP, MARRIAGE, AND AGE WWW.MATHEMATICALANTHROPOLOGY.ORG MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL VOLUME 4 NO. 1 PAGE 2 OF 79 MAY 2012 KINSHIP, MARRIAGE AND AGE IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA Contents 1. Preliminaries ........................................................................................................................ 3 1.1. Objectives ................................................................................................................3 1.2. Atkins’ statement of the problem ............................................................................4 1.3. A dismal history of age biased marriage systems ....................................................6 1.4. Generation intervals .................................................................................................8 1.5. Descent and generation moieties ...........................................................................10 2. Mechanical approaches to asymmetric generations ........................................................... 12 2.1. Circulating connubia..............................................................................................12 2.2. Horizontally and vertically asymmetric generations .............................................13 2.3. McConnel’s Wikmunkan .......................................................................................13 2.4. Rose’s Wanindiljaugwa .........................................................................................15 2.5. Guhr’s Northern Aranda ........................................................................................15 2.6. Denham’s Alyawarra .............................................................................................18 2.7. Wraparound ...........................................................................................................19 2.8. Hammel’s mechanical model of asymmetric cross-cousin marriage ....................20 2.9. Ethnographic determinants of age and matrilateral biases ....................................21 2.10. Possible invisibility of age biased marriage systems .........................................22 2.11. Tjon Sie Fat’s family of age biased helical structures .......................................24 2.12. Internal flexibility ..............................................................................................29 2.13. Slope and chirality .............................................................................................30 3. Statistical and network approaches to asymmetric generations ......................................... 34 3.1. Alyawarra fieldwork ..............................................................................................34 3.2. Scattergrams ..........................................................................................................36 3.3. Sibling-in-law chains .............................................................................................40 3.4. Directed marriage cycles .......................................................................................43 3.5. Generation moieties and Directed Marriage Cycles ..............................................49 3.6. Kunstadter’s cross-cousin marriage simulations ...................................................51 3.7. Hammel’s stochastic model of asymmetric cross-cousin marriage .......................52 3.8. Kinship terms and helices ......................................................................................54 3.9. White’s network diagram ......................................................................................59 3.10. Reification ..........................................................................................................61 3.11. Missing links ......................................................................................................62 3.12. Exogamy ............................................................................................................65 4. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 68 Appendix. Alternate spellings with locations .......................................................................... 71 References cited ........................................................................................................................ 72 DENHAM: KINSHIP, MARRIAGE, AND AGE WWW.MATHEMATICALANTHROPOLOGY.ORG MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL VOLUME 4 NO. 1 PAGE 3 OF 79 MAY 2012 KINSHIP, MARRIAGE AND AGE IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA1 1. Preliminaries 1.1. Objectives This paper is an attempt to make sense of what have been called, among other things, aberrant, asymmetric or age biased systems of descent, marriage and kinship in Australian Aboriginal societies. It is an exercise in pattern detection whose objective is to describe the structure and operation of these systems. It examines how they work locally and speculates on their history. A second paper, in preparation, deals with their operation regionally, and possibly continent wide. My work focuses primarily on the Alyawarra with whom I conducted fieldwork in 1971, and secondarily on the Northern and Eastern Aranda of Central Australia, the Kariera of Western Australia, the Wanindiljaugwa of Groote Eylandt, and the Wikmunkan of Cape York Peninsula (see Appendix for alternate spellings and locations). By