The last first year essay
(note: this essay has already been marked and is stored on the database against plagiarism)
'How do reciprocity and kinship structures maintain balance in Indigenous societies? To support your answer please include examples from the spiritual, economic and social aspects discussed in the course.'
The purpose of this Case Study is to analyse how kinship structures and patterns of reciprocity contribute to the maintenance of balance in indigenous societies. Each will be described and examples given from the spiritual, economic and social aspects of life in Aboriginal communities.
Western social scientists have long sought to name and identify the institutions and practices by which societies or cultures maintain balance. Giddens (2009, pp. 23-24) describes the functionalist perspective of sociology which asserts that societies produce stability and solidarity by means of the contribution each ‘part’ makes to the whole, and reciprocity and kinship may be identified as such parts. Also according to this frame, kinship consists of the particular set of ‘ties in blood, marriage or adoption’ (Johnson 2000, p. 165) recognised in a particular society and which may also operate as an economic unit. Similarly, reciprocity may be thought of as a system of exchange where knowledge, goods, behaviours, relationships or environmental access of value are distributed amongst actors (Turner 2006, pp. 183-184). In the modern West, many reciprocal exchanges involve commodification (Johnson, p. 51), or exchange within an abstracted marketplace or capitalist economy, a system mediated though that fungible device and standardised store of account: money (Turner, p. 396).
In traditional Aboriginal cultures, however, The Dreaming cosmogony describes a holistic, interconnected and living universe (Grieves 2008, p. 362) in which all parts are entities permeated with moral agency (Bird Rose, 1987 p. 261) and mystically interconnected (Grieves 2008, p. 367) in timeless yet cyclic patterns (Grieves 2008, p. 369) which are radically immanent. Bird-Rose states that this system has a moral goal: to reproduce and therefore maintain itself both as a whole and in its parts (1987, p. 260). The four key elements in this active reproduction, she relates, are response, balance, symmetry and autonomy (p.260). Entities assert strength, autonomy and boundaries in interconnective and reciprocal processes as responsible moral agents seeking continuation of both themselves and the world. Aboriginal people as entities within this system partake of the rights and consequent obligations their embedded, interconnected positions entail and, through interactions viewed as reciprocal, also contribute to the active reproduction of this pattern according to Law, coming as it does from the Dreaming, in a continuous exchange maintaining all. People are located within this system through their position in kinship relative to others, and their tribal and geographical relationships.
Kinship structures are central to indigenous Australian Aboriginal cultures, as Edwards states. Social identities are ascribed according to sex and patterns of descent, generation and marriage through which the obligations and expectations of others are created (Edwards 1998, pp. 52-56). These well-organised, highly structured systems (pp. 58-60) serve to determine the logic of reciprocity and exchange by which these hunter-gatherer societies maintain their human interpersonal relationships and their spiritual responsibilities.
Spiritual life
Where Western, Abrahamic religious traditions tend to emphasize worship, propitiation and adherence to god-given laws as revealed to prophets, Aboriginal spirituality is different. Western anthropologists have referred to it as animist, for spirit is believed to reside in many things, and totemic, for Aborigines with traditional beliefs hold various responsibility for the maintenance of their totems’ existence, commonly through ritual at particular sites (Scott & Marshall 2009, pp 765-766). Neither term fully reflects the holistic conceptualisation of the Dreaming, or clearly illustrates the way all of Aboriginal life may be seen as a religious, connected, active multidimensional pattern where each moral entity balances, bounds, reflects and reproduces the whole. As Edwards states, The Aboriginal Dreaming provided a unity and a moral system patterning all of life (1998, p. 88). There was little that could not be found to be spiritual in some way in Aborigines’ lives, although the Western eye took long to see it. Mowaljarlai & Malnic, for instance, describe how persons are inseparable from their totems. During the time of creation human beings were one with their totems, and the totemic principle still resides within the persons whose obligation it is to maintain, through ritual at the appropriate sacred site or during a particular occasion, the continued renewal and well-being of the food totem with which, at first, they were one (1993, p.137). This is a supernatural conception of reciprocity, and its consequence is that each totemic group within a kinship structure held within its purview part of the whole, and the actions of each was necessary in the maintenance of balance.
Access to all spiritual knowledge was, therefore, not universal in Aboriginal cultures: important aspects of knowledge were held by particular groups, Another division of spiritual knowledge requiring reciprocity was reflected in the differing wisdom properly held by men and by women, and granted a novice when considered appropriate to the recipient, or enacted when certain life events occurred. Initiation in the Torres Strait islands, Bani writes (2004, pp. 230-232) for instance, was begun when youths reached a certain age, state of development or readiness. As part of this process they were given sex-appropriate and totemic instruction, with the aim of becoming proper adults within their group. Edwards(1998), describes successful male initiation as the death of the boy and the birth of the man (p. 88), who now bears responsibility for his part the in the reproduction, through rites and proper conduct, of the timeless world as it was intended to be. In these situations and many others, persons were obligated to engage in reciprocal behaviour with individuals, groups, and the unseen each according to their role in the kinship structure, and everything was linked inextricably in a timeless, cyclical, immanent and organic whole. Today, however, many Australian Aborigines live without much of their earlier spiritual knowledge. Bani describes how the Torres Straight indigenous folk hold great respect for the older relatives who were initiated into their correct roles and hold traditional knowledge (2004, p. 232), and so it is in many places these days.
Economic life
For at least forty thousand years, indigenous nations of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers lived in sustainable balance within the environments of the Australian continent and Tasmania. This was the foundation of their economy: through good times, drought or other hardship a sustainable economic relationship was maintained with the environment through practices ensuring the continuance of species such as the limiting of foods to certain groups, the imposition of sanctions and the creation of temporary restrictions. As in other subsistence economies there was a division of labour according to sex, and sometimes age (Edwards 1998, pp. 35-37).This division resulted in resource exchange, a necessary reciprocity. Munyurran, Dhurrkay and others (1995) write of the complex web of factors, including the proper roles of women according to Law, which came to bear on their people’s interaction with and management of the coastal environment. Women’s contribution to the group economy was essential, for instance: their knowledge, experience, stewardship and particular roles were critical for the survival of both the group, and possibly for their environment as it existed. Toussaint describes Kayberry’s study of how women in their roles as gatherers in the Kimberly region found and prepared foods such as honey, roots, fruit and small animals (1999 p. 30).‘ male example There was, thus, an intricately balanced system of economic exchanges mediated through patterns of kinship.
Aboriginal peoples did not see themselves as superordinate to other moral entities or in dominion over their world. Where purposeful fire-management practices were, for instance, enacted systematically and carefully in the savannah regions of northern coastal Australia (Russell-Smith et al, 1997, p. 159), the people were better provisioned in the dry season, but the response of other entities in their world was a matter of their reciprocal agency, according to The Dreaming. Correct fire management, then, was a reciprocal act within the context of a highly inflammable environment: regularising, balancing and serving the ongoing reproduction of humans and those animals and plants which were both their food and fellows.
Even where displaced and subjected under inimical white government, Aborigines sought to live in balance, a reciprocal harmony within the environment in their new homes. Those descendants of white, often former-convict Straitsmen and their tyeelore, -Aboriginal wives- now living on the islands off Tasmania strove, for instance, to maintain their new yet sustainable mutton-bird economy against the imperious decision of officials and White law (Ryan, 2012, pp 61-63). Colonising authorities, of course, had no such intention: acting under falsehoods such as ‘White man’s burden’, ‘terra nullius’ and other convenient assertions, power, prestige and property were sought without thought to sustainability, indigenous inhabitants or, often, honest conduct; disrupting balance, often to catastrophic effect.
Social life
As Edwards (1998) relates, interpersonal behaviour in traditional Aboriginal cultures was strongly dependent upon social identity, its rights and obligations. Unlike the modern industrial Western model of the nuclear family where two adults come together freely and commonly find their own separate home within which to raise their children; for Aborigines family is extended: well-organised, complex structures of kinship, obligation, entitlement, residence, avoidance and descent determining the kinds of reciprocal conduct, respect, obligations or exchange required, including the marriage partners permitted each member of an Aboriginal clan (p. 58). In these societies interaction is constantly occurring between people who are identified by their relationship-term relative to the self, each of these terms carrying with it defined reciprocal conduct required between the two persons.
Social reciprocity ought not to be confused with sameness or, necessarily, immediacy. Testart (1989, pp 3-4), for instance, describes the way a traditional Aboriginal hunter may not have had the disposal and distribution of his kill at his command: possibly the entire animal and likely certain parts would be, by obligation, the property of others with whom he had particular kinships relationships. He was himself, in return, the recipient of parts of others’ kills, and the parts he was given depended upon how he was kin to that person. There was no ownership of the prey by its successful hunter; all was subject to a systematic division according to the social structure. This reciprocity served to organise social life and benefit the group members economically, binding the hunters and recipients together and, ideally, balancing the whole.
Under such kinship systems marriage is not perceived the way the modern West has come to define it: that is, a happy consequence of idealised romantic love. Fundamentally distinct from this newer idea, in traditional Aboriginal cultures there would have been a structurally-reciprocated exchange of individuals as marriage partners between groups of various kinds, qualities and levels. Edwards (1998, pp. 61-66), for example, notes that partner choice was influenced by rules according to membership of social categories such as moieties, generation levels, sections and subsections. This exchange of persons in marriage served to forge obligations and bonds, tying communities together in a balanced, generational pattern. The details and degree of flexibility varied amongst tribes and language groups, in part as a consequence of environmental limitations, and reflects diversity in Australian indigenous cultures and their distinct solutions to the need for balanced, sustainable life.
Post-invasion, Aborigines were subjected to dispossession, dislocation, religious missions, forms of apartheid, attempted genocide and massacres, the theft of generations of children and still-extant general systemic racism. Even so, the remains of traditional kinship and social reciprocity may bring benefits to those fortunates who enjoy it: Anderson & Kowal (2012) relate how the retention of social and cultural structures in a community they call ‘Utopia’ ‘strengthened psychosocial determinants of health’ (p. 438).They attribute this outcome to late occupation, pastoral practices, the absence of a mission or government post and ‘the personalities of those involved’. In an urban setting, Browne-Yung, Ziersch et al (2013, p. 27) found some Aborigines with stronger Aboriginal identity and therefor more traditional connections gained health benefits from their ‘social capital’ or access to reciprocal support in their communities, coming from their still somewhat traditionally-‘extended’ family relationships. Indigenous kinship relationships and reciprocity may still promote balance in lives and in community today.
In the time before the invasion of country, indigenous Law came from the Dreaming: ‘laid down during the creative epoch’ (Edwards, 1998 p70). Edwards also tells us (p. 68), that such societies are termed ‘acephalous stateless societies’, for there was no political organisation analogous to Western hierarchical structures and their formal establishments of statehood. Instead, under Law each individual had obligations in relation to persons, society and the land according to kinship, age, moiety, sacred sites and any other local mores. MacDonald notes, for example, that the Wiradjuri people still see themselves as part of and within society rather than as distinct and separate persons in the Western way (1998, p. 301) . Even so, in any society there will be some who do not adhere to its law, however it is established. Edwards (1998, pp.73-74) categorises Aboriginal Law-breaking into offenses against etiquette, property, persons, the lives of others, marriage laws and ‘offenses against sacred knowledge and ritual’ (p. 74). One way infractions were traditionally punished is known in English as ‘payback’: a response by community members to Aboriginal law-
breaking. It is not quixotic, but established, defined and expected. Finnane (2001, pp. 295-6) notes that the white colloquial meaning of the word ‘payback’ does not capture the fact that it may be in fact a form of customary, often ritualised corporal sanction, and elaborates on how this may exacerbate conflict with the law of the coloniser when its imposition disrupts or forbids established and legitimate indigenous punitive balancing activities.
Conclusion
Reciprocity is central to traditional Aboriginal culture: it is a core principle, the impelling motivator of the connections and interactions in a holistic and immanent cosmogony. Ecological sustainability practices, social organisation and control and spiritual practices too are all governed by the need for active response, balance, symmetry and autonomy which, together, are seen as reproductive of the whole living pattern, its maintenance. Kinship structures embedded within Aboriginal societies are central to the enactment of these practices and to social life: they govern the position of each person and thence the disposition of their expected, fitting and appropriate conduct within continuously balancing and highly complex Australian indigenous societies.
In our colonised country, much has been lost and perhaps most patterns are destroyed. The Dreaming founders as the land is divided, appropriated and ruined for profit; peoples are dispossessed, generations stolen and the right traditional social order defiled. Traditional Law comes into conflict with imposed hierarchical white notions and judgements, and critical spiritual knowledge is lost or usurped by proselytization. Balance is broken, perhaps irreparably. In time and with the will to ethical and humane consideration of the colonising culture, however, a new balance might be created where mutuality, respect and sharing of knowledge and ideas may be found, and another balance generated.
Reference List
Anderson, H, & Kowal, E. 2012, ‘Culture, history and health in an Australian Aboriginal community: the case of Utopia’, in Medical Anthropology: Cross-cultural Studies in Health and Illness, Routledge, London.
Bani, E 2004, ‘Initiation’ in Davis, R. (ed.), Woven histories, dancing lives: Torres Strait Islander identity, culture and history, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.
Bird-Rose, D. 1987, ‘Consciousness and responsibility in an Australian Aboriginal religion’, in Edwards, W H (ed.), in Traditional Aboriginal Society: a reader, MacMillan, South Melbourne.
Browne-Yung, K., Ziersch, A., Baum, F., & Gallaher, G. 2013, ‘Aboriginal Australians’ experience of social capital and its relevance to health and wellbeing in urban setting’ in Social Science & Medicine, vol. 97.
Edwards, W. H. 1998, An introduction to Aboriginal societies, second edition, Cengage Learning Australia, South Melbourne.
Finnane, M. 2001, ‘“Payback”, customary law and criminal law in colonised Australia’ in International Journal of the Sociology of Law, vol. 29.
Giddens, A. 2009, Sociology, sixth edition, Polity Press, Maldon, Massachusetts.
Grieves, V. 2008, Aboriginal spirituality, a baseline for indigenous knowledges development in Australia’, in Canadian Journal of Native Studies, v. 28 no, 2.
Johnson, A. G. 2000, The Blackwell dictionary of sociology: a user’s guide to sociological language, second edition, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, Massachusetts.
McDonald, G. 1998, ‘’Continuities of Wiradjuri tradition’ in Edwards, W. H. (ed.) Traditional Aboriginal Society, MacMillan, South Melbourne.
Mowaljarlai, D. & Malnic, J. 1993, ‘Creation in the Kimberley’ in Yorro yorro = everything standing up alive: spirit of the Kimberley, Magabala Books, Broome, W.A.
Munyurran, D.W., Dhurrkay, G.B., Bukulatjpi, H.N. et al 1995, ‘Environmental management: a matter of kinship’ in Ngoonjook: Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, no. 11.
Russell-Smith, J., Lucas, L., Gapindi, M. et al 1997, “Aboriginal resource utilisation and fire management practices in western Arnhem Land, monsoonal northern Australia: notes for prehistory, lessons for the future’ in Human Ecology, vol 25, no. 2.
Ryan, L. 2012, Tasmanian Aborigines: a history since 1803, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest.
Scott, A. & Marshall, G. 2009, Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
Testart, A. 1989, ‘Aboriginal social inequality and reciprocity’ in Oceania, vol. 60 no. 1.
Toussaint, S. 1999, Phyllis Kayberry and me: anthropology, history and Aboriginal Australia, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria.
Turner, B. S. 2006 (ed.), The Cambridge dictionary of sociology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
November 2014.
'How do reciprocity and kinship structures maintain balance in Indigenous societies? To support your answer please include examples from the spiritual, economic and social aspects discussed in the course.'
The purpose of this Case Study is to analyse how kinship structures and patterns of reciprocity contribute to the maintenance of balance in indigenous societies. Each will be described and examples given from the spiritual, economic and social aspects of life in Aboriginal communities.
Western social scientists have long sought to name and identify the institutions and practices by which societies or cultures maintain balance. Giddens (2009, pp. 23-24) describes the functionalist perspective of sociology which asserts that societies produce stability and solidarity by means of the contribution each ‘part’ makes to the whole, and reciprocity and kinship may be identified as such parts. Also according to this frame, kinship consists of the particular set of ‘ties in blood, marriage or adoption’ (Johnson 2000, p. 165) recognised in a particular society and which may also operate as an economic unit. Similarly, reciprocity may be thought of as a system of exchange where knowledge, goods, behaviours, relationships or environmental access of value are distributed amongst actors (Turner 2006, pp. 183-184). In the modern West, many reciprocal exchanges involve commodification (Johnson, p. 51), or exchange within an abstracted marketplace or capitalist economy, a system mediated though that fungible device and standardised store of account: money (Turner, p. 396).
In traditional Aboriginal cultures, however, The Dreaming cosmogony describes a holistic, interconnected and living universe (Grieves 2008, p. 362) in which all parts are entities permeated with moral agency (Bird Rose, 1987 p. 261) and mystically interconnected (Grieves 2008, p. 367) in timeless yet cyclic patterns (Grieves 2008, p. 369) which are radically immanent. Bird-Rose states that this system has a moral goal: to reproduce and therefore maintain itself both as a whole and in its parts (1987, p. 260). The four key elements in this active reproduction, she relates, are response, balance, symmetry and autonomy (p.260). Entities assert strength, autonomy and boundaries in interconnective and reciprocal processes as responsible moral agents seeking continuation of both themselves and the world. Aboriginal people as entities within this system partake of the rights and consequent obligations their embedded, interconnected positions entail and, through interactions viewed as reciprocal, also contribute to the active reproduction of this pattern according to Law, coming as it does from the Dreaming, in a continuous exchange maintaining all. People are located within this system through their position in kinship relative to others, and their tribal and geographical relationships.
Kinship structures are central to indigenous Australian Aboriginal cultures, as Edwards states. Social identities are ascribed according to sex and patterns of descent, generation and marriage through which the obligations and expectations of others are created (Edwards 1998, pp. 52-56). These well-organised, highly structured systems (pp. 58-60) serve to determine the logic of reciprocity and exchange by which these hunter-gatherer societies maintain their human interpersonal relationships and their spiritual responsibilities.
Spiritual life
Where Western, Abrahamic religious traditions tend to emphasize worship, propitiation and adherence to god-given laws as revealed to prophets, Aboriginal spirituality is different. Western anthropologists have referred to it as animist, for spirit is believed to reside in many things, and totemic, for Aborigines with traditional beliefs hold various responsibility for the maintenance of their totems’ existence, commonly through ritual at particular sites (Scott & Marshall 2009, pp 765-766). Neither term fully reflects the holistic conceptualisation of the Dreaming, or clearly illustrates the way all of Aboriginal life may be seen as a religious, connected, active multidimensional pattern where each moral entity balances, bounds, reflects and reproduces the whole. As Edwards states, The Aboriginal Dreaming provided a unity and a moral system patterning all of life (1998, p. 88). There was little that could not be found to be spiritual in some way in Aborigines’ lives, although the Western eye took long to see it. Mowaljarlai & Malnic, for instance, describe how persons are inseparable from their totems. During the time of creation human beings were one with their totems, and the totemic principle still resides within the persons whose obligation it is to maintain, through ritual at the appropriate sacred site or during a particular occasion, the continued renewal and well-being of the food totem with which, at first, they were one (1993, p.137). This is a supernatural conception of reciprocity, and its consequence is that each totemic group within a kinship structure held within its purview part of the whole, and the actions of each was necessary in the maintenance of balance.
Access to all spiritual knowledge was, therefore, not universal in Aboriginal cultures: important aspects of knowledge were held by particular groups, Another division of spiritual knowledge requiring reciprocity was reflected in the differing wisdom properly held by men and by women, and granted a novice when considered appropriate to the recipient, or enacted when certain life events occurred. Initiation in the Torres Strait islands, Bani writes (2004, pp. 230-232) for instance, was begun when youths reached a certain age, state of development or readiness. As part of this process they were given sex-appropriate and totemic instruction, with the aim of becoming proper adults within their group. Edwards(1998), describes successful male initiation as the death of the boy and the birth of the man (p. 88), who now bears responsibility for his part the in the reproduction, through rites and proper conduct, of the timeless world as it was intended to be. In these situations and many others, persons were obligated to engage in reciprocal behaviour with individuals, groups, and the unseen each according to their role in the kinship structure, and everything was linked inextricably in a timeless, cyclical, immanent and organic whole. Today, however, many Australian Aborigines live without much of their earlier spiritual knowledge. Bani describes how the Torres Straight indigenous folk hold great respect for the older relatives who were initiated into their correct roles and hold traditional knowledge (2004, p. 232), and so it is in many places these days.
Economic life
For at least forty thousand years, indigenous nations of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers lived in sustainable balance within the environments of the Australian continent and Tasmania. This was the foundation of their economy: through good times, drought or other hardship a sustainable economic relationship was maintained with the environment through practices ensuring the continuance of species such as the limiting of foods to certain groups, the imposition of sanctions and the creation of temporary restrictions. As in other subsistence economies there was a division of labour according to sex, and sometimes age (Edwards 1998, pp. 35-37).This division resulted in resource exchange, a necessary reciprocity. Munyurran, Dhurrkay and others (1995) write of the complex web of factors, including the proper roles of women according to Law, which came to bear on their people’s interaction with and management of the coastal environment. Women’s contribution to the group economy was essential, for instance: their knowledge, experience, stewardship and particular roles were critical for the survival of both the group, and possibly for their environment as it existed. Toussaint describes Kayberry’s study of how women in their roles as gatherers in the Kimberly region found and prepared foods such as honey, roots, fruit and small animals (1999 p. 30).‘ male example There was, thus, an intricately balanced system of economic exchanges mediated through patterns of kinship.
Aboriginal peoples did not see themselves as superordinate to other moral entities or in dominion over their world. Where purposeful fire-management practices were, for instance, enacted systematically and carefully in the savannah regions of northern coastal Australia (Russell-Smith et al, 1997, p. 159), the people were better provisioned in the dry season, but the response of other entities in their world was a matter of their reciprocal agency, according to The Dreaming. Correct fire management, then, was a reciprocal act within the context of a highly inflammable environment: regularising, balancing and serving the ongoing reproduction of humans and those animals and plants which were both their food and fellows.
Even where displaced and subjected under inimical white government, Aborigines sought to live in balance, a reciprocal harmony within the environment in their new homes. Those descendants of white, often former-convict Straitsmen and their tyeelore, -Aboriginal wives- now living on the islands off Tasmania strove, for instance, to maintain their new yet sustainable mutton-bird economy against the imperious decision of officials and White law (Ryan, 2012, pp 61-63). Colonising authorities, of course, had no such intention: acting under falsehoods such as ‘White man’s burden’, ‘terra nullius’ and other convenient assertions, power, prestige and property were sought without thought to sustainability, indigenous inhabitants or, often, honest conduct; disrupting balance, often to catastrophic effect.
Social life
As Edwards (1998) relates, interpersonal behaviour in traditional Aboriginal cultures was strongly dependent upon social identity, its rights and obligations. Unlike the modern industrial Western model of the nuclear family where two adults come together freely and commonly find their own separate home within which to raise their children; for Aborigines family is extended: well-organised, complex structures of kinship, obligation, entitlement, residence, avoidance and descent determining the kinds of reciprocal conduct, respect, obligations or exchange required, including the marriage partners permitted each member of an Aboriginal clan (p. 58). In these societies interaction is constantly occurring between people who are identified by their relationship-term relative to the self, each of these terms carrying with it defined reciprocal conduct required between the two persons.
Social reciprocity ought not to be confused with sameness or, necessarily, immediacy. Testart (1989, pp 3-4), for instance, describes the way a traditional Aboriginal hunter may not have had the disposal and distribution of his kill at his command: possibly the entire animal and likely certain parts would be, by obligation, the property of others with whom he had particular kinships relationships. He was himself, in return, the recipient of parts of others’ kills, and the parts he was given depended upon how he was kin to that person. There was no ownership of the prey by its successful hunter; all was subject to a systematic division according to the social structure. This reciprocity served to organise social life and benefit the group members economically, binding the hunters and recipients together and, ideally, balancing the whole.
Under such kinship systems marriage is not perceived the way the modern West has come to define it: that is, a happy consequence of idealised romantic love. Fundamentally distinct from this newer idea, in traditional Aboriginal cultures there would have been a structurally-reciprocated exchange of individuals as marriage partners between groups of various kinds, qualities and levels. Edwards (1998, pp. 61-66), for example, notes that partner choice was influenced by rules according to membership of social categories such as moieties, generation levels, sections and subsections. This exchange of persons in marriage served to forge obligations and bonds, tying communities together in a balanced, generational pattern. The details and degree of flexibility varied amongst tribes and language groups, in part as a consequence of environmental limitations, and reflects diversity in Australian indigenous cultures and their distinct solutions to the need for balanced, sustainable life.
Post-invasion, Aborigines were subjected to dispossession, dislocation, religious missions, forms of apartheid, attempted genocide and massacres, the theft of generations of children and still-extant general systemic racism. Even so, the remains of traditional kinship and social reciprocity may bring benefits to those fortunates who enjoy it: Anderson & Kowal (2012) relate how the retention of social and cultural structures in a community they call ‘Utopia’ ‘strengthened psychosocial determinants of health’ (p. 438).They attribute this outcome to late occupation, pastoral practices, the absence of a mission or government post and ‘the personalities of those involved’. In an urban setting, Browne-Yung, Ziersch et al (2013, p. 27) found some Aborigines with stronger Aboriginal identity and therefor more traditional connections gained health benefits from their ‘social capital’ or access to reciprocal support in their communities, coming from their still somewhat traditionally-‘extended’ family relationships. Indigenous kinship relationships and reciprocity may still promote balance in lives and in community today.
In the time before the invasion of country, indigenous Law came from the Dreaming: ‘laid down during the creative epoch’ (Edwards, 1998 p70). Edwards also tells us (p. 68), that such societies are termed ‘acephalous stateless societies’, for there was no political organisation analogous to Western hierarchical structures and their formal establishments of statehood. Instead, under Law each individual had obligations in relation to persons, society and the land according to kinship, age, moiety, sacred sites and any other local mores. MacDonald notes, for example, that the Wiradjuri people still see themselves as part of and within society rather than as distinct and separate persons in the Western way (1998, p. 301) . Even so, in any society there will be some who do not adhere to its law, however it is established. Edwards (1998, pp.73-74) categorises Aboriginal Law-breaking into offenses against etiquette, property, persons, the lives of others, marriage laws and ‘offenses against sacred knowledge and ritual’ (p. 74). One way infractions were traditionally punished is known in English as ‘payback’: a response by community members to Aboriginal law-
breaking. It is not quixotic, but established, defined and expected. Finnane (2001, pp. 295-6) notes that the white colloquial meaning of the word ‘payback’ does not capture the fact that it may be in fact a form of customary, often ritualised corporal sanction, and elaborates on how this may exacerbate conflict with the law of the coloniser when its imposition disrupts or forbids established and legitimate indigenous punitive balancing activities.
Conclusion
Reciprocity is central to traditional Aboriginal culture: it is a core principle, the impelling motivator of the connections and interactions in a holistic and immanent cosmogony. Ecological sustainability practices, social organisation and control and spiritual practices too are all governed by the need for active response, balance, symmetry and autonomy which, together, are seen as reproductive of the whole living pattern, its maintenance. Kinship structures embedded within Aboriginal societies are central to the enactment of these practices and to social life: they govern the position of each person and thence the disposition of their expected, fitting and appropriate conduct within continuously balancing and highly complex Australian indigenous societies.
In our colonised country, much has been lost and perhaps most patterns are destroyed. The Dreaming founders as the land is divided, appropriated and ruined for profit; peoples are dispossessed, generations stolen and the right traditional social order defiled. Traditional Law comes into conflict with imposed hierarchical white notions and judgements, and critical spiritual knowledge is lost or usurped by proselytization. Balance is broken, perhaps irreparably. In time and with the will to ethical and humane consideration of the colonising culture, however, a new balance might be created where mutuality, respect and sharing of knowledge and ideas may be found, and another balance generated.
Reference List
Anderson, H, & Kowal, E. 2012, ‘Culture, history and health in an Australian Aboriginal community: the case of Utopia’, in Medical Anthropology: Cross-cultural Studies in Health and Illness, Routledge, London.
Bani, E 2004, ‘Initiation’ in Davis, R. (ed.), Woven histories, dancing lives: Torres Strait Islander identity, culture and history, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.
Bird-Rose, D. 1987, ‘Consciousness and responsibility in an Australian Aboriginal religion’, in Edwards, W H (ed.), in Traditional Aboriginal Society: a reader, MacMillan, South Melbourne.
Browne-Yung, K., Ziersch, A., Baum, F., & Gallaher, G. 2013, ‘Aboriginal Australians’ experience of social capital and its relevance to health and wellbeing in urban setting’ in Social Science & Medicine, vol. 97.
Edwards, W. H. 1998, An introduction to Aboriginal societies, second edition, Cengage Learning Australia, South Melbourne.
Finnane, M. 2001, ‘“Payback”, customary law and criminal law in colonised Australia’ in International Journal of the Sociology of Law, vol. 29.
Giddens, A. 2009, Sociology, sixth edition, Polity Press, Maldon, Massachusetts.
Grieves, V. 2008, Aboriginal spirituality, a baseline for indigenous knowledges development in Australia’, in Canadian Journal of Native Studies, v. 28 no, 2.
Johnson, A. G. 2000, The Blackwell dictionary of sociology: a user’s guide to sociological language, second edition, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, Massachusetts.
McDonald, G. 1998, ‘’Continuities of Wiradjuri tradition’ in Edwards, W. H. (ed.) Traditional Aboriginal Society, MacMillan, South Melbourne.
Mowaljarlai, D. & Malnic, J. 1993, ‘Creation in the Kimberley’ in Yorro yorro = everything standing up alive: spirit of the Kimberley, Magabala Books, Broome, W.A.
Munyurran, D.W., Dhurrkay, G.B., Bukulatjpi, H.N. et al 1995, ‘Environmental management: a matter of kinship’ in Ngoonjook: Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, no. 11.
Russell-Smith, J., Lucas, L., Gapindi, M. et al 1997, “Aboriginal resource utilisation and fire management practices in western Arnhem Land, monsoonal northern Australia: notes for prehistory, lessons for the future’ in Human Ecology, vol 25, no. 2.
Ryan, L. 2012, Tasmanian Aborigines: a history since 1803, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest.
Scott, A. & Marshall, G. 2009, Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
Testart, A. 1989, ‘Aboriginal social inequality and reciprocity’ in Oceania, vol. 60 no. 1.
Toussaint, S. 1999, Phyllis Kayberry and me: anthropology, history and Aboriginal Australia, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria.
Turner, B. S. 2006 (ed.), The Cambridge dictionary of sociology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
November 2014.