The Indigenous Australian system of mapping kinship, while focusing mainly upon marriage, governs all social interaction. The main element is the division of clans with the same language into skin groups. It is considered taboo to marry into your own skin group, which avoids incest while creating bonds across clans though exogamous relations. Although this system makes it possible to determine who will marry whom at birth, love marriages are also acceptable, so long as it’s within the skin system. This system also dictates certain names for a person’s relatives; much different from the method generally accepted by western civilization. ‘Father’ and ‘mother’ refers any relative of the speaker’s parents, including aunts, uncles, and in-laws, ‘Brother’ or ‘sister’ then refers not only to the speaker‘s siblings, but the children of all of their ‘mothers‘ and ‘fathers‘. The actual classification of skin group changes with each new generation; Because of this, one might hear an Aboriginal speak of their ‘daughter’, while they are referring to their great-grandmother.
The broadness of Aboriginal relationships means children are cared for not only by their biological parents, but by the entire community. The responsibility of raising, educating and disciplining children falls upon everyone in the group, regardless of age or gender. An online article I found quoted Carol Kendal’s description of the impact of the Stolen Generation. She said: “In Aboriginal Society the family unit is very large and extended, often with ties to the community... Having that family unit broken down has just opened the floodgates for a lot of problems, a lot of emotional problems, mental and physical turmoil. If you want to use a really hard term to describe the impact that removal of Aboriginal children has had on Aboriginal families, 'attempted cultural genocide' is a good phrase.”
Kendal’s description provides further understanding of the opinions of the Aboriginal man from my last post. Because of the community’s value in their children, the removal of these children would have had substantial negative effects on not just the children and parents, but on every single member of the Indigenous group. The white Australian’s lack of cultural understanding led to a melt-down within Aboriginal Society. This new knowledge made me wonder why the Aboriginals I encountered during my stay in Australia had allowed us to peak at their cultural; then I realized that maybe in these Indigenous Peoples’ opinion, giving the Westerners a glimpse of their culture was a way to give them the understanding I’m seeking in order to prevent any other epics of extreme discrimination.
Kinship Maps: Western vs. Aboriginal
(EGO is a term anthropologists use to refer to the speaker or the person whose kinship is being traced)
Kinship Map - Western Society
Kinship Map - Western SocietyWorks Cited:
Australian Museum Online
2004 Family. Electronic document
http://www.dreamtime.net.au/indigenous/family.cfm
Laurent Dousset
2002 Kinship: an introduction
(part 4: Australian Aboriginal kinship and social organization). Electronic document
http://ausanthrop.net/research/kinship/kinship2.php
Unknown Author
2008 Australian Aboriginal Kinship. Electronic document
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship, accessed Oct 15.
Image Source: http://ausanthrop.net/research/kinship/part3_files/image001.gif,
http://ausanthrop.net/research/kinship/part3_files/image004.gif
1 comment:
This blog talks a lot about kinships and relationships with in a “family”. This is very interesting to this topic because you talk about how in your culture, different titles for certain people are given, but for the indigenous Australians, the same titles can be given but for different people. You talk about how the division of clans into skin groups is how the kinship mapping begins. The mapping of the indigenous Australians with the clans gets very detailed, but is clearly stated. Every generation, the terms used for the specific people in the clan change. This results in one person calling their great grandmother sister, while another calls their uncle, father.
I really like this concept about the indigenous Australians because it helps to show an aspect of a different culture that I have never even heard of. Something that seems to be so simple could actually be so difficult to another. In studying my own topic on the One Child Policy in China, I learned that small aspects in a culture like the importance of a family could vary many other aspects between cultures. In your culture, America, the family is considered to be very important, so depending on how each family member is related, they are given a specific name. For example, mom is for the female that gave birth to you, father is for the male that helped create you, sister is for the female who was also created by your mom and dad and so on. In the indigenous Australians, since there is a mix between clans, it gets hard to know how each person is related to whom. So instead, they came up with a little simpler way to try and make it easier to remember what to call your family members. Each person that is an indigenous Australian that is related to your parents is called mother and father. This way, you know people in a broader sense because each person does not get a specific name. This helps to prove the point that people from America cherish their families a little bit better because they have names for each and every person while in the indigenous Australia, there are more broader terms used. This blog shows how kinship charts can be used in different cultures and how very small differences, can lead to many bigger differences between two cultures. I believe that the small details help to create the end product, and this is exactly what happened between America and Australia.
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