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

70

generational levels. Indeed, a reader not accustomed to the Westem Desert might obtain the
wrong impression: that all social category systems known in the central and eastern parts
of the desert, at least, were diffused and recent borrowings from cultural systems or blocs
foreign to the region. Generational moieties, however, are a much older feature of the social
organisation in this part of Australia and, as some have claimed, much older than other types
of social category systems in general, and even older than specific types of kin category
classifications”. The distribution of the generational moiety systems reveals a different
geographical pattern from that of the diffusion of the section system, but its discussion will
enable me to elaborate an even more general picture than that obtained so far.

33 Dumont 1966238 claims that generational structure is older than a conception of kinship as a continual flow of
generations.