Male-Female Separation and Forms of Society in Aboriginal Australia

Abstract

Ethnographies of Aboriginal Australia attest to a considerable degree of male-female but treat it in different ways, varying with each author's descriptive focus and theoretical framework (see Merlan 1988). Thus, in W. L. Wamer's (1937:132) description of the Murgin of northeast Arnhem Land, separation confirms the position of women, together with children, as members of a status group subordinate to that of initiated men. In striking contrast and also explicit opposition to Warner's interpretation, Kaberry's (1939:275) description of the life of women in the eastern Kimberley emphasizes cooperative differentiation of the sexes, and thus tends to view as an aspect of women's independence in daily routine and in ritual (see, e.g., 1939:23, chap. 10). But whatever questions may be raised by such differences between ethnographies, most descriptions, until recently, have retained the fundamental structural-functional assumption that the study of society is that of an integrated totality. Since about 1970, as in other ethnographic literatures, there has been a proliferation (in some ways a resurgence, see Kaberry [1939] and Goodale [1971] based on earlier fieldwork) of work dealing with Aboriginal gender relations, that is, the particular societal manifestations of sexual difference. Much of this has been done by feminist scholars who seek to bring Aboriginal women into focus as social actors against a background, briefly discussed further below, of what they perceive as earlier ethnographic neglect and theoretical deficiency. In some of this recent work, the earlier assumption of societal integration has been modified in the interests of particular portrayals of gender relations. Diverse though these accounts are in some ways, they seem to me to tend toward a common end: a more or less explicit and consistent claim that structural of men's and women's domains is the appropriate model of Aboriginal social organization. In a certain way, this tendency illustrates Strathern's (1988:36) point that feminist anthropology has a particular potential for quarreling with anthropology's selfdescription as the holistic science of society.