The Indigenous Australian Marriage Paradox : Small-World Dynamics on a Continental Scale

Closure and Prescribed Marriage. Dousset (2005:13) criticizes Hammel (1960: 15) and in doing so, many other kinship modelers, in suggesting that section systems, so common throughout much of Aboriginal Australia, correspond to three basic assumptions: “first, section organization results from the permutation of lineal kinship affiliations; second, all groups of affiliates are exogamous; and third, the entire model is endogamous. ” Other models of classificatory systems, starting from Weil (1949, 1969), and continuing through Bush (1963, from prior mimeo) and Kemeny, Snell and Thompson (1962), to Harrison White (1963), started from weaker assumptions ―ones that did not include endogamy― and continued to weaken the axioms of their models to better comprehend and fit the ethnographic data. The notion of closure in these models comes to be one of abstract roles, not concrete groups closed under endogamy. Even White, however, like many others, confuses the abstract closure of a classificatory kinship system with prescribed marriage. Dravidian Logic and Open Marriage Chains. The difference between these two concepts —categorical or abstract closure versus actual endogamy— did not become apparent until Lounsbury (1964a), following Morgan (1871), re-discovered the simplicity of Dravidian logic in the computation of kinship ties and kinship terminology. Understanding this logic begins with the observation that if two relatives trace a total of n links upward to a common ancestor, considering single chains of links, there will be f links to fathers and m=n-f links to mothers. In standard Dravidian logic the two relatives are same side if the number of female links is even (like ego’s sister) and opposite side and possibly marriageable if the number is odd (like a sister’s child, which introduces an extra mother link to sister; brother’s child would be same-side). Many kinship systems have since been shown to have a Dravidian logic based on alternation of sides through maternal-links, and still others a logic based on alternation of sides through paternal links (Houseman and White 1998a, 1998b). It is also possible to have both kinds of sidedness simultaneously, as in a 4-section system. Kay (1967) produces a variant but mostly equivalent reckoning to that of Houseman and White. We have every reason to say, then, that the logic employed by many Australian groups eluded that of many of the finest kinship algebraists up to Lounsbury and remains elusive in the anthropological literature generally. What is saddening is that since ethnographers have accepted Lounsbury’s discovery of Dravidian logic, there has been a certain difficulty in separating the concepts of endogamy, prescription, and abstract closure as they apply to Australia. The difficulty seems to be that the number f can vary from one to infinity without altering the abstract closure of a dichotomously sided classificatory system. Every ego could have an infinite pool of potential kin-types for mates if arbitrarily long chains of ancestry are allowed, or if the number f is also computed for relationships that include multiple links involving in-laws 8 The models of Dumont (1983), among many others, continue the assumptions of closure and endogamy. 9 Standard Dravidian has a patrilineal bias in which ZD but not BD may be marriageable but in Dravidian with a matrilineal bias the marriageable niece is reversed.