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

21

for general social conduct or etiquette, particularly when individuals cannot
establish their specific kin relationship Service 19601423.

Strehlow 1999 also writes, in a manuscript of the early 1950s, that Aranda subsections

are merely “convenient inter-tribal labels for kin-groupings”. They therefore constitute a lingua

fiancu of kinship, a glide in interactions that exceed linguistic and cultural particularities and

allow for appropriate behaviour, be it ceremonial or mundane, between individuals who do
not meet regularly, or have never encountered each other before.

Lawrence 1969 [l937] has already pointed to the “inter-triba ” function of social
categories, but he also underlined a factor that is relevant to the approach developed in this
study: among neighbouring groups, and even among the various groups of a cultural area such
as the Western Desert, there is an Indigenous knowledge and understanding of the various
systems, an understanding that articulates their variety and their terminological and structural
arrangements. With the following words, he implicitly introduces the idea of a “valeur of a
section”, the notion that is of central importance here:

Over distances which, in view of the backwardness of the material culture,
constitute a marvel in anthropology, tribes stand in relations of commercium gt
connubium. In association with these far—flung intertribal contacts—certainly in
part instrumental as well as consequential—there has developed a recognition of
the equivalence of classes the length of the continent. By this is meant that, though
the number of classes increase, though the names of classes he unlike, though
like names be arranged in unlike afliliations, the native nevertheless recognizes
the corresponding divisions in difierent tribes Lawrence, 1969 [1937]:32l-2;
emphasis in original.

Following Service 1960, and in accordance with some of Lawrence’s and Strehlow’s
statements, I will refer below to this characteristic as the external social function of social
category systems. It does, indeed, strongly reflect what I have experienced among Ngaat_i atjarra-
speaking people in the eastern part of the Western Desert, where knowledge and relevance of
section names are more important in contexts that involve people with whom there is no daily
interaction than within local communities, where one hardly hears section names pronounced
at all. Among Ngaatjatjarra-speaking persons, section names, or “skinnames”, as they are
called in English, are referred to as yini a general word for “ e”, “personal name” , or
miri lit. “skin colour”. More accurately, however, one’s section is also tenned yam, a word
that could be translated as “metaphor” or “symbol”? In contrast to Warlpiri people of Central
Australia, for example, Ngaatjatjarra-speaking people do not give dogs section names, and
despite the use of yini i.e. personal name as a translation for sections, they are seldom
applied to people within the community. Sections have a very minor importance in everyday

social interaction.

3 Glass Hackett 2003 translate yara as 1 way, custom and 2 scenario, series of events.