Australian Aboriginal Kinship
An introductory handbook with particular emphasis on the Western Desert
Since the very early years of anthropology, Australian Aboriginal kinship has fascinated researchers in the field as well as theorists. Its complexity is considerable and, as some have remarked, its mechanical and logical beauty is astonishing. This complexity has however discouraged many scholars, students and people working in Aboriginal communities from actively and intellectually engaging with indigenous ways of conceiving and producing relationships based on kinship, despite the fact that...
Éditeur : pacific-credo Publications
Lieu d’édition : Marseille
Publication sur OpenEdition Books : 17 mai 2018
ISBN numérique : 978-2-9563981-1-0
DOI : 10.4000/books.pacific.556
Collection : Manuels du Credo
Année d’édition : 2011
ISBN (Édition imprimée) : 978-1-4637-4041-2
Nombre de pages : 144
The purpose of this book and how to read it
The concept of relatedness
Since the very early years of anthropology, Australian Aboriginal kinship has fascinated researchers in the field as well as theorists. Its complexity is considerable and, as some have remarked, its mechanical and logical beauty is astonishing. This complexity has however discouraged many scholars, students and people working in Aboriginal communities from actively and intellectually engaging with indigenous ways of conceiving and producing relationships based on kinship, despite the fact that it is a domain deeply embedded in everyday life and interaction. This handbook attempts to bring the principles of kinship in general, and Australian Aboriginal kinship in particular, closer to the reader in an understandable and pedagogic way. Aimed at Aboriginal people themselves, students in the social sciences and humanities or, in fact, any other person eager to learn more about Aboriginal Australia, while also discussing some issues of interest to even accomplished anthropologists, the book is divided into four general parts each tackling specific questions.
Part 1 deals with the historical and ethnographic background against which the discussions on kinship are framed in later sections. Important concepts in anthropology such as 'culture' or 'hunter-gatherer societies' are looked at.
Part 2 develops the basic tools and concepts needed to understand kinship. It discusses its main domains, such as terminology, marriage, descent and filiation.
Part 3 applies the material considered up to this point to actual ethnographic examples from the Australian Western Desert and elaborates on other important concepts such as 'family', 'household' and 'domestic group'.
Part 4 explains social organisation and, in particular, generational moieties, patri- and matrimoieties, sections and subsections, all of which are central to Aboriginal peoples' ways of interacting. Finally, the concluding chapter discusses in a more critical fashion the concept of kinship itself ad elaborates on the idea of relatedness as a meaningful expansion of formal kinship studies.
Laurent Dousset is an anthropologist trained at the EHESS in France where he submitted his PhD in 1999 under the supervision of Maurice Godelier. After his studies, he was enrolled as a postdoctoral fellow and then as an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Australia, before returning to France where he obtained a permanent position as an Associate Professor at the EHESS and where he is currently the director of the CREDO (Centre for Research and Documentation on Oceania) in Marseilles. Working since 1994 on Australian Aboriginal cultures, he is particularly interested in kinship, social organisation and social transformations, as well as conceptions and issues of land tenure and inter-cultural relationships. Besides the numerous papers he has published in scientific journals, he has also written two books (Assimilating identities, Oceania Monograph 2005; and Mythes, bombes et cannibales, Société des Océanistes 2011) and co-edited another volume (Kinship and Change in Aboriginal Australia, Anthropological Forum 2002). He is also the author of several scientific websites.
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