Asymmetrical marriages in Aboriginal Australia: an annotated bibliography

This bibliography lists a large but incomplete selection of materials that deal directly or indirectly with Australian systems of asymmetrical descent, marriage and kinship. These systems seem to be significantly different from bilaterally symmetrical Kariera and Aranda models that have dominated Australian Aboriginal anthropology for more than a century. Several key items listed below are doctoral dissertations that are difficult to locate, and most of the items have a mathematical orientation. The asymmetry that concerns me has been labeled in many ways. Minimally, if the asymmetry is simply a unidirectional horizontal flow of spouses in an endogamously closed society, it contrasts easily with the bidirectional flow in Kariera and Aranda systems and has been called a circulating connubium. In it a chain of siblings-in-law form a closed circle that links multiple descent lines by marriage, typically with mother's brother's daughter (MBD) but not with father's sister's daughter (FZD). Through the generations, a mechanical representation of these relationships assumes the appearance of a cylinder with horizontally stratified generations stacked on top of each other and spouses flowing in one direction. The terminological problem becomes more complex when we take into consideration the 14+ year mean age difference between wives and husbands (W<H) that seems to characterize many or most Australian Aboriginal societies. The resulting age bias in same-generation cross-cousin marriages is reflected in systematic differences in father-child and mother-child generation lengths, wife-husband age differences and age differences at first marriages for men and women. It lends its name to sibling-in-law chains that assume the appearance of age biased generations

RESPONSE TO MACT COMMENTS ON DENHAM’S “ALYAWARRA KINSHIP, INFANT CARRYING, AND ALLOPARENTING”

I am delighted with the broad range of Comments submitted to MACT concerning my paper on kinship, infant carrying and alloparenting among the Alyawarra. I thank all of the authors for their contributions. Although some topics were addressed by only one author, several were addressed by most or all of them, so I have directed my responses to selected topics rather than to individual Comments. I have not attempted to respond to all of the issues addressed in the Comments, but have chosen a representative sample for special attention.

SOCIALITY IN E. O. WILSON’S GENESIS: EXPANDING THE PAST, IMAGINING THE FUTURE

In this article, I critique Edward O. Wilson’s (2019) Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies from a perspective provided by David Christian’s (2016) Big History. Genesis is a slender, narrowly focused recapitulation and summation of Wilson’s lifelong research on altruism, eusociality, the biological bases of kinship, and related aspects of sociality among insects and humans. Wilson considers it to be among the most important of his 35+ published books, one of which created the controversial discipline of sociobiology and two of which won Pulitzer Prizes. Big History is Christian’s recent attempt to graphically depict the history of the universe in a massive, sprawling, well-documented volume that opens with the Big Bang and terminates now, about 13.8 billion years later.I take four disparate approaches to enhance the strengths of Wilson’s and Christian’s important books. Part 1. Expanding the past examines 1. contextual data for numerous transitions in sociality in the distant past, and 2. ethnographic data pertaining to kinship and warfare in Australian Aboriginal hunter-gatherer societies in the recent past. Part 2. Imagining the future speculates about 1. predictive applications of sociality research as we approach another mass extinction in the near future, and 2. social research concerning globular star clusters in the remote future. Small scale case studies feature, among other things, two species of colonial microorganisms, the Alyawarra speaking people of Central Australia, and social insects as a background for all else. Although Wilson’s extensive quantitative research deals mainly with kinship and related topics among ants, bees, wasps and termites, it is not limited by time, space or species

KINSHIP, OPENNESS AND REDUCTIONISM AMONG THE ALYAWARRA: A SUMMARY

Between 2012 and 2015, I published four long articles or short monographs (Denham 2012, 2013, 2014a, 2015a) in Mathematical Anthropology and Cultural Theory concerning kinship and related topics among the Alyawarra speaking people of Central Australia in 1971-72. They contained a great deal of data and had a total length of 400 pages plus comments and replies. The article that you are reading now is a 28-page overview of that four item set. It can serve as an introduction for people who are new to my work and want a brief introduction to my data and methods, or as a summary for those who are familiar with my work and want to see new interconnections that emerged after the separate items and accompanying comments were published. The paper deals broadly with methods, data, theory and findings.

 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE / MACHINE LEARNING RESEARCH USING THE AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL ALYAWARRA KINSHIP DATASET: PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 2004-2020 

This paper describes methods used at the interface between anthropology and machine learning research. Charles Kemp, a graduate student at MIT in 2004, discovered my numerically coded Alyawarra kinship term applications data (Denham 1973; Denham, McDaniel and Atkins 1979; Denham and White 2005) and received my permission to use the data in his machine learning research. Since then, his co-authored papers (Kemp et al. 2004, 2006, 2010), and other works that cite his papers and mine, have played significant roles in the development of unsupervised pattern detection and machine learning technology as subsets of Artificial Intelligence research. Part 1 of the paper outlines how I produced the Alyawarra (Alyawara) kinship term applications dataset and introduces the structure and content of the dataset and supporting files. Part 2 briefly describes some simple ways to analyze the dataset either manually or with machine learning technology. Minimally these examples demonstrate some ways in which the ethnographic dataset is useful to the machine learning community now. More speculatively, the machine learning technology introduced here may enhance ethnographic research in the future. Part 3 provides links to a sample of 24 papers by Kemp et al. and other AI colleagues, all of which utilize the Alyawarra Kinship dataset. Part 4 contains links to some of my Alyawarra kinship data and documentation files that are available online. Part 5 briefly acknowledges support that I have received for this project over the last half-century.&nbsp