Ant 101 - Kinship in Aborigines

Kinship in Aborigines

Zach Loveless

ANT 101

Jesse Cohen

July 6th, 2011

Kinship is defined as the relationship between any type of humans, or animals that have the same origin based on their culture, history, or biology. The type of kinship that will be discusses here is based on humans only. Kinship is way of grouping people together, into roles, or groups, or even categories. By grouping people into a group, it helps people know how to act around the group. It is the same thing with grouping people into a role. Most people will not act the same around their friends, as they would their family. Because of this, kinship is very important in any culture, or society.

Based on this definition, that would mean that the Aborigine's kinship is based on their culture, history, and biology. They are all from the same area as well. The Aborigines are native to Australia, and have been there for the past 40,000 years. Their kinship helps them to identify who is who in their group, like American kinship system does. While Americans call our mothers mom, but the Aborigines use mother to talk about anyone in their parent's generation, whether or not they are actually related or not. For example, the Aborigines may call their friends mom mother, because she is in the same generation as their own mother.

The Aborigine kinship system also helped to determine who did what in the group. Females would be in charge of getting food for the group by going out and digging for food underground, and collecting fruits and berries, as well as insects, and small creatures like lizards. The men would be in charge of hunting for larger game, like kangaroos, and emus. Based on this information, this makes the Aborigines a hunter gatherer group.

The Aborigines have a skin system that is related to their kinship system. In this skin system, people of one skin type are to be wed to other types of skin types, and not others. Once they are married, then their children have a skin type that has a name, that is also based on the gender of the child. The skin system is a big mess, because each tribe has different names, and descriptions. Some tribes have a few skin types, where are others will have more. Then each sex, will have different names as well. It can get hard to figure out quickly, especially since there are thousands of groups in the Aborigines. What complicates this even further is that some people belong to multiple groups. Trying to figure out who is who, and what to call them can make is difficult unless you are an expert on the Aborigine skin system.

The kinship in the Aborigines is what makes them who they are. They are hunter gathers