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Article Excerpt
It is common sense that the advancement of science is cumulative, that each generation builds upon the findings of previous ones, and that revealed mistakes are revised rather than repeated. This, however, is common sense; and common sense does not necessarily have to be what is most widespread. Indeed, there seem to be some questions related to the study of kinship, and in particular Australian kinship, that do not appear to follow the general pattern of cumulative advancement of knowledge. That some believe the study of kinship is dominated by an ethnocentric extrapolation of the Euro-American mode of reckoning relationships, or that it is an error altogether, is one thing. That others, however, depict some particular, but in the end quite important, aspects of kinship as if there had not been any consensus or even progress over the last 50 years, is a matter for great concern.
Among these aspects there is one I am concerned with in this paper and that was the subject of lengthy debates, decades ago, but that for some thinkers seems to have remained within the nebula of worthwhile studying and writing. Let us consider this subject once again and, hopefully, terminate it and return to the cumulative process anthropological knowledge supposedly follows. The subject that had been a problem at some stage in the evolution of kinship studies, that seemed to have been resolved, but that re-emerged as an old-new question can be formulated in two ways. One is simple, straightforward and resolved: social category systems in Australia, among them sections and subsections, have to be distinguished from systems of kin classification. The last 30 and more years of research in the domain of kinship in Australia have been breaking away from the former structuralist and structuro-functionalist approaches that saw in sections and subsections the crystalline beauty of Australian kinship and marriage, to paraphrase Levi-Strauss.
The second way to formulate the problem follows a more distinguished but also obscure construction, and is interestingly elaborated by non-Australianists such as Viveiros de Castro (1998). It is this construction this paper is concerned with. What is really at stake in this second approach is the hypothesis that what are summarised under the notion of 'global' social categories (sections and subsections) are seen as necessary devices in the recognition of kin. Viveiros de Castro and others claim that these 'global' social categories are in every case latently or covertly the necessary means through which people's kin categories are determined in Aboriginal Australia. The 'global' refers here to Dumont's (1983, 1997 [1971]) mode of characterising Kariera-like (Australian) kinship and section systems, while its opposite, the 'local', stands for Dravidian-type systems which lack social category systems. In the context of shallow genealogical memory, these global categories are thought to function as devices that pragmatically allow people to determine in which kin category they stand in relation to each other. As such, sections and subsections are considered devices inherent in systems of kin classification. Australianists, on the other hand, agree that these global categories are not needed in everyday processes of kin classification.
As already foreshadowed, in this paper I shall enter once again into a debate that to a certain extent has accompanied Australian anthropology since its early years, that has disappeared from the scientific arena, but that is re-emerging in non-Australianist writings. After a brief discussion of some of the most basic features of Dravidian ('local') and Australian ('global') systems, I shall argue that sections, which are the principal devices inherent in Dumont's and Viveiros de Castro's 'global' formula, neither reproduce terminological structure nor act as mechanisms involved in pragmatic kin-recognition. Since the illustration of pragmatic kin-recognition cannot easily be generalised, I will use a particular example from the Australian Western Desert.
As an alternative model to the 'global' formula, and as an answer to those who highlight its necessity in the Australian context, this paper will propose a straightforward schematisation of some of the cognitive processes at work in kin category determination. These processes proceed by way of what I call the relational triangle, a device inherent in everyday interaction and discourse, as well as being a model reproducing Indigenous peoples' mode of conceptualising relations via the idiom of kinship. As we will see, this model is strongly correlated to Greenberg's hypotheses on the universal features of kin terminologies, which he associated with the factor of markedness: the categories that are contained within the application of the relational triangle are those that Greenberg would classify as being unmarked, while marked categories are avoided. A second theoretical issue relates to the congruency between d'Andrade's (2000) depiction of cognitive schemes as 'simplified worlds' and Greenberg's (1990 [1980]) hypotheses just mentioned. I will endeavour to show that the categories constituting the paradigmatic choices which can be depicted as being unmarked constitute a 'simplified world'. Both the idea of the simplified world and its congruency with the unmarked characteristic show that cognition seems, even in the domain of kinship, to be heavily based on a principle of economy, reflecting the need to order and organise a complex world by eliminating or resolving redundancies, contradictions and indirect relationships.
THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL FORMULAE
Many of the better known current theoretical writings mentioning Aboriginal Australian kinship predominantly refer to the ethnographies of Radcliffe-Brown and Elkin, and have lately been summarising the various Aboriginal kinship systems under the heading 'Australian', usually associated with Kariera-type systems, and 'Normal Australian', somehow based on the Aranda-type (see Godelier et al. 1998). (2) With some exceptions, such as the Murngin type (Yolngu of Arnhem Land) and the Aluridja type of the Western Desert, both usually dismissed as anomalous or at least unexpected and complex (see Dousset 2002, 2003), there is only rarely any reference to Dieri, Karadjeri or other types, or to skewing, although the latter is widely found alongside other types of classifications throughout large areas of Australia, especially in northern Queensland (e.g. McConvell & Alpher 2002; Powell 2002).
Moreover, the 'Australian' and 'Normal Australian' types are defined and illustrated in ways that correspond only with difficulty to the ethnographic material. These ideal-types of formally determined kinship models elaborate on a minimal set of features and terms, neglecting the pragmatic usage of the system and the structural variations and nuances these usages involve. As we shall see below, these theoretical approaches seem to have remained blocked at an analytical level that conflates social category systems, such as sections and sub-sections, and the interrelational and egocentric kinship terminology. Such analyses, which disregard many more social processes than they include, are hardly appropriate in current Australian anthropological practice, where research undertaken for Native Title purposes has considerably accentuated the need for detailed ethnographies and comprehensive explanatory models (see Sutton 1998).
Although the above-mentioned 'global' approach has constantly recurred throughout Australian ethnology--starting with Morgan's 'marriage classes'--it finds its modern roots in some of Levi-Strauss' writings, which were later considerably reinforced by Dumont. As Viveiros de Castro explains (1998), it was Radcliffe-Brown (1953) who, in response to Dumont (1953), defined an Australian-Dravidian type of kinship system, with which--in reference to the Kariera (Radcliffe-Brown 1913)--he associated bilateral cross-cousin marriage and a conflation of the affinal and the consanguinal terminology. Dravidian and Kariera-type systems would usually not need a specific set of affinal terms, for cross relatives are automatically or mechanically affines as well.
Dumont (1983, 1997 [1971]), however, wanted the distinction between Indian-Dravidian and Australian-Kariera underlined and maintained; and he did so by introducing the concepts of the 'local' and the 'global' formulae, the former corresponding to Indian Dravidian types, the latter to the Australian type. There is an important difference marking Australian and Dravidian systems, explains Dumont (1997 [1971]: 149 note 1), which reflects a difference in the presence or absence of a global system of intermarriage, a notion that is ultimately not significantly distinct from what was previously termed the consequence and function of 'marriage classes' (see Dumont 1997:119).
Viveiros de Castro, notably an 'Americanist' albeit with widespread theoretical interests, perpetuates Dumont's legacy (3) and writes that:
The basic Australian terminological type is consistent with a sociocentric bipartition or quadripartition--that is, a logical consistency, not mutual implication or sociological causation (1998:339; see also pp 333,370).
By way of an elegant detour through Scheffler's claim that section systems are reifications of terminological superclasses, Viveiros de Castro (1998:339) reiterates a claim that had been abandoned in Australia since Radcliffe-Brown: 'such reifications do imply that the terminology is organised according to principles formally equivalent to a sociocentric calculus of marriage "classes"'.
Like Dumont, Viveiros de Castro adds other characteristics distinguishing Dravidian and Australian systems, supposedly justifying the definition of the 'global' and the 'local' formulae. For example, while both terminological systems express marriage alliance relations (and in Dumont's words, 'marriage alliance' is what Levi-Strauss termed 'direct exchange'), they differ from each other in the mode of classifying relatives in G[+ or -]2:
[T]he neutralization of the consanguine/affine opposition in these generations, in the Dravidian case, reveals a linear generational time and an ego-centered vision of alliance, whereas the maintaining of the opposition and of the autoreciprocity of the terms in G[+ or -]2 (i.e., same terms for grandparents and grandchildren) in the Kariera case expresses a circular conception of time and a collective sociocentric intermarriage relation between the terminological 'moieties' (Viveiros de Castro 1998:336).
As Shapiro (1970:385) explained, and as Viveiros de Castro reiterates himself in the paper quoted above, the autoreciprocity in G[+ or -]2 is sociologically rather trivial. Moreover, it could be argued that the circular conception of time is not necessarily grounded on, or linked to, the 'global' formula. Pitjantjatjara-speaking people in the Northern Territory and in north-western South Australia, for example, have auto- or self-reciprocal terms, but no sections or subsections. Dumont also includes aspects of lineality in the discussion of Dravidian and Australian systems. I shall not, however, further elaborate these theoretical propositions, as kin classification terminology--be it with or without specific affinal sets--and marriage prescription, whether jural (Leach 1965) or structural (Needham 1973), have no direct influences on ethnographically recognisable principles of lineality in Australia.
The terminological auto-reciprocity and circular conception of kinship time are, I believe, characteristics used to reinforce, albeit unconvincingly, Dumont's distinction of the global and the local formulae as based on the existence or absence of social category systems, especially in a society which has an unlimited range for the extension of kin categories, as we shall see below. In this paper, I argue that neither this extension, nor the determination of the cross-parallel distinction necessitates the existence of global categories. I claim that...
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