Australian Aboriginal Ethnometeorology and Seasonal Calendars

This paper uses a cultural anthropological approach to investigate an indigenous Australian perspective on atmospheric phenomena and seasons, using data gained from historical records and ethnographic fieldwork. Aboriginal people believe that the forces driving the weather are derived from Creation Ancestors and spirits, asserting that short term changes are produced through ritual. By recognizing signals such as wind direction, rainfall, temperature change, celestial movements, animal behaviour and the flowering of plants, Aboriginal people are able to divide the year into seasons. Indigenous calendars vary widely across Australia and reflect annual changes within Aboriginal lifestyles

Analogical reasoning and the content of creation stories : Quantitative comparisons of preindustrial societies

A long-standing question in sociology concerns preindustrial societies and the relationship between their subsistence technology and ideas about god. This article proposes a shift from questions regarding gods who now and then create to questions about creations that sometimes involve a god. For preindustrial societies, it addresses the relation between their subsistence technology and the content of their creation stories. This article’s answer combines Hume’s general hypothesis that people reason by analogy with Topitsch’s specification that invokes vital, technical, and social analogies. This conjunction yields concrete hypotheses about the substance of creation stories in societies with varying levels of subsistence technology according to Lenski’s typology. To test these hypotheses, the authors used Murdock’s Standard Cross-Cultural Sample and the Human Relations Area Files. Field reports were coded for 116 preindustrial societies. The findings show that people use different thought models to explain the unknown, depending on the society’s level of subsistence technology.