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Title: Variation in Australian sibling terminologies
Abstract
Received typologies of Australian kinship systems recognise half a dozen main types of kin terminology. An examination of sibling terminologies in approximately two hundred and fifty kin terminologies recorded in the Austkin database, however, reveals much more variation in the forms of kin classification than is implied by standard typologies. The paper examines diversity in the forms of sibling terminologies, their relationship to the overall patterns of kin terminologies and the languages in which they appear, and the spatial distribution of these patterns. The general picture is one of considerable variation, reflecting perhaps the age of Australian languages.
About the Speaker
Ian Keen is an anthropologist who has conducted fieldwork in northeast Arnhem Land, the Alligator Rivers region, and McLaren Creek in the Northern Territory of Australia, and in Gippsland, Victoria. His research interests include Yolngu kinship and religion, Aboriginal land rights, Aboriginal economy, and language and culture, and the diversity and typology of Australian Aboriginal kinship systems. He is the author of Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion (Clarendon Press 1994), and Aboriginal Economy and Society (Oxford 2004), and he edited Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in ‘Settled’ Australia.