Sided with Omaha but no Twist: Three Logics of Alyawarra Kinship *

This paper derives from an experiment in quantitative fieldwork, conducted in Central Australia in 1971-72, that was designed explicitly to explore differences between what Aborigines actually did and what they said they did when anthropologists interviewed them. Here we use genealogical network analysis in relation to data collected in this experiment to examine descent, marriage and kinship, including which kinship terms were applied to which relatives for a large sample of informants. The rich cognitive and network ethnography of the Alyawarra offers a test of and counterargument to the proposition that for any given culture to operate coherently, only a single logic is possible. Here, three logics are operative. Examining relationships amongst these three logics at the level of practice shows that they form a coherent dynamical system oriented towards demographically and strategically inflected adaptation. A strictly normative approach to modeling Alyawarra kinship would be misleading as a theoretical paradigm. We argue for broader frameworks that take into account the interplay of multiple cultural logics as integral within a networked system of kinship practices. In Logic1 the Alyawarra strictly adhere to marriage rules and ‘normative’ kinship terms that conform to marriage sections (cross-cutting exogamous sides) and unnamed endogamous matrimoieties that unify interleaved alternating generations. In Logic 2, the axiom of generational closure – that successive sibling-in-law links close into cycles in an endogamous group – does not apply because female age at marriage is significantly lower than that of males, as is common in Australian systems. The resulting extra-normative age bias yields recurrent patterns of marriage between patrilineages that are much more likely to be asymmetric (classificatory MMBDD marriages) than symmetric (as with sister exchange, for example). In addition, patterns of marriage among the deceased are quickly forgotten, and no longer cast their shadow as a constraint on future behaviors. Thus wife-givers and wife-takers may engage in exceptional marriages that