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

71

VII. Distributional pattern of alternate generational moieties

Named generational moiety levels are known in many areas of Australia. Moreover, the
recognition of such levels, whether named or not, is a structural feature of all Australian
kinship systems, as they intrinsically underlie the kin-category system.” This characteristic
was recognised by some of the earliest writers, among them Mathews 1903—04:61; see also
Lawrence 1969[l937], who presumably coined the expression “altemating generations” later
adopted by Radcliffe-Brown 0930-3 1 2443, albeit without acknowledgement.

It is safe to hypothesise that generational moieties or, as they are also called, merged
alternate generational levels, have been known in the Western Desert for much longer than
sections, because their distributional pattern is a much more even one, and because, as I
mentioned in a previous chapter, sections were in their early phases of adoption by eastern
groups applied in accordance with the generational level distinction only. All Western Desert
groups know and use these moieties, and their terminological variation is far less important
than among section names. This is, of course, a hypothesis based on the general assumption
that common words among dialects are older—and point to the proto-language from which
these dialects evolved—than words that are dialect-specific.

A further indication of the moieties’ antiquity is their strong social functions. They have
important external functions, similar to those described for sections, as the levels summarise
kinship relations to a certain extent and, therefore, determine behavioural expectations.
However, their full range of social importance emerges in contexts in which concrete matters,
in both everyday and ritual life, have to be organised among persons who already interact on
a regular basis. What are generational moieties?

Society, and in fact humanity, is divided into two sets of people. From an egocentric point
of view, Ego and all his or her co-generationals, his or her grand-parents and all their co-
generationals, and his or her grand-children and all their co-generationals belong to the first
set or moiety, while Ego’s parents and their co-generationals, as well as Ego’s children and
their co-generationals all belong to the second and opposite moiety.

Generation has, of course, nothing do to with age, but is a concept memorising a person’s
sequential position in the chain of filiation.‘° Ego’s grand-children’s children will be in Ego’s
parents’ moiety, and the former’s children in Ego’s moiety, and so on, irrespective of their

age.

Aboriginal people sometimes refer to persons of the same moiety as mobs, indicating a
certain unity or identity. However, all dialectal groups of the Western Desert also have a specific
absolute or relative nomenclature for each moiety. It is this unity or identity among people of

39 An illustration of the intrinsic nature of these levels in the organisation of Australian and all bifurcate-merging
types 00 systems is that when kin classification and terminology deviate firom a strict concordance with the distinction
of generational levels, a feature that is largely conceived as an exception, the pattern is described among scholars by
the use of specific terminology such as generation skewing.

4° See Testart 1995 for explanations on the distinction between age and generation.