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

81

applied only to a very few members of the community, or only to the very first generation and
corrected in the following generations. If this were not the case, then we would still encounter
today a significant number of irregular marriages if judged against the section system.“

This leads to the “extensionist" scenario. The majority of Australian Aboriginal kinship
systems have two particular features. One has been labelled by Radcliffe»Brown 1930-31:44
the “non-limitation of range”; the other is the underlying Dravidian bifurcate—merging pattern,
whatever other overlying principles are locally at work. Non-lirnitation of range simply means,
as Tonkinson 1991 :75 writes for the Western Desert, that “the moral universe of the Mardu
is populated solely with relatives”; and, as Testart 1985208 terms it, the system of kinship
is “total”, embracing the entire society. Because kin categories were, and in many parts of
the continent still are, the principal mechanism through which particular and normative
interrelational behaviour is determined in a first approach, every person with whom such
interaction is expected to take place needs to be situated within the kinship system. Human
interaction is framed by a range of culturally appropriate behaviours linked to, or defined
through, a limited number of kin categories or kin types. The mechanisms by which kin
categories are extended from the nuclear or extended family towards the entire society, and
in principle to human kind in general, are inherent in the second feature of Australian kinship
systems, the Dravidian bifurcatevmerging pattern.

A short summary of the principal characteristics of such a system will have to suffice.
Bifurcate-merging means that one’s mother’s brother is distinguished from one’s father
and father’s brother, and that one’s father’s sister is distinguished fiom one’s mother and
mother’s sister. 011 the other hand, one’s father and father’s brother are both fathers, and
one’s mother and mother’s sister are both mothers. It follows that one’s mother’s sisters
and one’s father’s brother’s children are siblings, while one’s mother’s brother’s and one’s
father’s sister's children are cousins, or indeed cross-cousins. Only people of the cross-cousin
category are classificatory spouses; and only people of the mother’s brother and father’s sister
categories are classificatory parents-in—law. These principles are extrapolated throughout
the genealogical grid and beyond, vertically ascendants and descendants and horizontally
collaterals and aflines. The “Dravidian” in the appellation used above simply suggests that
the same principles are at work in every generation: one’s mother’s mother and one’s mother’s
mother’s sister are both mother’s mothers, and one’s mother’s mother’s sister’s daughter is
consequently a mother as well."

The Dravidian bifurcate-merging principle combined with the feature of non-limitation of
range has an important consequence. The system itself stores some aspects of social history.
It is suflicient that there has been at some time past some sort of connection a marriage, for
example between “foreigners”, for all their descendants, as well as their co-residents and their
descendants, to be able to “calculate” the relationship in which they stand to one another. This

“ Among Ngaatjatjarra-speaking people, however, irregular marriages count for less than 3 per cent of all
marriages.

"7 Tjon Sic Fat l998:70, figure 3-4 summarises the relationships and kin categories of a Dravidian type oi'bifurcate-
merging system.