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

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and socio—structural system cannot be reduced to the diffusion of its individual components.
Indeed, the existence of a greater number of terms used in the Western Desert than is
formally necessary adds a supplementary difliculty to attempts to understand the principles
of dispersion. It is thus necessary to add to the analyses of linguistic transformations one
focused on the rules of combination and mutual substitution of the terminology. The section
system and its components not only diffused by undergoing transfomiations of cognate terms
but were also modified by the emergence of lexicological items that were not existent in the
system’s “original” form. While McConvell has, as we shall see, enriched his analyses of the
ditfusionist pattern of subsections and sections in the northern areas of Western Australia and
the Northern Territory with such “combinatory" questions, this has remained to be undertaken
for the Western Desert cultural bloc. Such a study has to question the “logic” inherent in the
difiiision and substitution of section names in an area where, from a global point of view,
available terms exceed in number the necessary terms. This is what I have endeavoured to do
here.

The questions asked and the explanatory concepts proposed will be discussed in detail
throughout this work. It is nevertheless useful to flame its aim within a simple interrogation
and to introduce one of its key notions: are there “valeurs of sections” progressing in space
and reflecting the history of previous combinations of sections within the system? A “valeur of
a section” would be more than a section, as it merges various terms that, during their diffiision,
came to substitute for one another while retaining a common structu.ral—semantic value. This
structural-semantic value is defined only in relation to other terms or “valeurs” within a
local system, as well as in relation to other systems within a regional social network. Where
the notion of “valeur of a section" can be demonstrated to have an ethnographic substance,
one will be likely to propose hypotheses concerning specific regional networks that can with
reasonable accuracy be characterised both as having pre-dated Western colonisation and as
being particularly intense. Hence, in addition to its phenotypical value as a section, the valeur
of a section also includes its own history.

In this introductory chapter, I shall, as a first step, illustrate the theoretical and ethnographic
context in which the diffusion and substitution of the terminology took place. The formal and
pragmatic aspects of the section system are presented. Next, I will provide a brief overview of
the history of anthropological approaches to, and interpretation of, this system. A further step
will describe the Western Desert cultural bloc, that is, the geographical as well as cultural area
that is the focus of this study. Thereafier, I will explain theoretical considerations concerning
the idea of dilfusion and its application, and the methodology applied in this work.

Following the Introduction, I deal with the spatial disnibution of individual terms
Chapter II, of pairs of terms Chapter III and of the logical system Chapter IV. Each
presents the analytical results obtained as a consequence of increasing complexity, which is
understood as the result of the combination of an increasing number of factors, either terms
or structural relations, being taken into account. As complexity increases, the power of global
or general statements and definitions decreases, but the accuracy of the description of local
or regional relationships increases. The last of these three chapters will therefore illustrate