Aranda and Alyawara kinship: a quantitative argument for a double helix model

Australian aboriginal descent, marriage, and kinship are topics that have fascinated anthropologists for nearly a century. During that time, they have been examined by descent, alliance, evolutionary, and decision theorists, transformational and componential analysts, and a host of other people who have tended to see each explanatory approach as a critical competitor with all other approaches. It might be worthwhile, however, to look at them as complementary rather than as mutually exclusive ways to analyze aboriginal social organization. In order to do that effectively, we need data that can be examined from multiple perspectives, and especially we need data on actual marriage practices and kinship term applications to supplement those that are available concerning ideology. This article introduces one such set of data and explores some of its implications for the study of Australian aboriginal societies. In 1971-1972, field research was conducted among the Alyawara tribe of Central Australia.1 The Alyawara are Arandic-speaking people whose traditional territory is northeast of and adjacent to Aranda territory. Spencer and Gillen (1899, 1927) had numerous contacts with the Alyawara near the end of the nineteenth century and stated that Alyawara social organization was virtually identical with that of the Aranda. In the first section of the paper, we introduce and review Aranda subsections from the perspective provided by Radcliffe-Brown (1930) and others who have accepted his basic model of subsection systems, but we substitute Alyawara terms for Aranda terms in the model. Next, we briefly describe the data on Alyawara kinship term applications, geneaologies, and demography and use those data in several tests of the Radcliffe-Brownian model of Aranda/Alyawara subsections, kinship terms, and marriage patterns. We conclude with a discussion of the findings and introduce an alternative model that seems to accommodate better most available data concerning both the ideology and the practice of Central Australian descent, marriage, and kinship. Quantitative analysis of descent and marriage practices and kinship term applications among the Alyawara tribe of Central Australia reveals that traditional Radcliffe-Brownian models of Kariera and Aranda (section and subsection) systems fit the Alyawara in superficial ways but are entirely inappropriate in more fundamental ways. The problems that we encountered in analyzing the data suggest that the Radcliffe-Brownian models contain basic and fatal flaws. The alternative model that we suggest for the Alyawara is a three-dimensional structure that incorporates age relations as one of its principal features. Our proposed model is a double helix.