[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]

10

I. Introduction

The social organisation of Australian Aboriginal society, in the past as well as in the
present, is oflen associated with the existence of social category systems, such as moieties,
sections and subsections. These are a limited number of groups or named classes into which
society is divided and among which relations are organised by rules of marriage and filiation.
The Kariera, or Kariyarra, people on the Australian west coast, to name one of the most cited
examples, possess four named sections Panaka, Purungu, Karimarra and Palyani, whose
relations are such that a person of the Panaka section marries a person of the Purungu section,
and a person of the Karimarra section marries a person of the Palyarri section. The children
of a Panaka woman are Karimarra and vice versa, and the children of a Purungu woman are
Palyarri and vice versa. These social categories, ascribed by birth, function both as an overlay
compatible with kin categories and as personal labelling devices.

What is less often realised is the fact that, in the Western Desert cultural bloc at least, but
presumably in many other regions as well, the diffusion of these socially structuring devices
is relatively recent. The widespread existence of section and subsection systems in Australia
today is not a heritage from time immemorial, but, quite the opposite, testifies to the dynamics
of change among Australian cultures. In the Western Desert see Map 1, the spread of the
system as we know it today was completed in the 1930s and 1940s, superimposing itself on
to a social organisation that hitherto was dominated by generational moieties alone. Another
characteristic rarely mentioned is that the Indigenous names for these sections, for which I
have given those of the Kariera above, are not identical among all groups knowing this form
of social organisation. Thus, although the structural principles of the system have diffused
over thousands of kilometres, the terminology associated with it was not always adopted “as
is”, and has sometimes been considerably modified. As will be seen, these modifications are
not solely the result of linguistic transformations, for they are associated with a complexity
resulting firom the existence of a greater number of linguistically independent terms than are
structurally necessary.

In this study, I analyse how section system nomenclature may have progressed through
the Western Desert cultural bloc, and attempt to locate possible regions of entry into the desert
of the diverse terminologies associated with the system.‘ The aim is not to draw a precise
temporal chronology of the difiusion, but to elaborate, through a comparison of observed
systems and nomenclatures of the 20"‘ century, how sections diffused into and through the
desert. In this sense, it is a reconstruction of the past through an analysis of the present, with
all the problems such extrapolations involve. To avoid at least some of these problems, the
conclusions will not depict a reconstructed past, but discuss the historical mechanisms behind
the diffusion of section systems in the Western Desert as they are observed today.

‘ Section systems are not limited to the Western Desert but are lcnown in many parts of Australia, such as vast areas
of Queensland see Berndt Bemdt 1992 [l964]:46t1" for a discussion and a map, as well as in other parts of the
world, such as Amazonia, Vanuatu or China. In this study, however, I only deal with the Western Desert and some
surrounding systems.