The Anthropology of Kinship in Kamilaroi and Kurnai

Abstract

This chapter follows up consideration of the decisions made by Fison and Howitt about the gathering and selection of data in the 1870s with an analysis of how these decisions played out in the shape of the book Kamilaroi and Kurnai. Various factors converged to push them in the direction of making moieties and particularly sections central to the book, even though one of the groups named in the title has neither of these (Kurnai). Apart from that, we have already canvassed the topicality of the new ‘discovery’ of sections at the time, and Fison’s disappointment with his results in gathering kinship terminology data in Australia (which we have argued, in Chapter 11 and elsewhere, were not as disastrous as he thought). Another factor was the choice to debate the institution of marriage and its origins with the leading evolutionists of the day, who had offered different conjectural solutions about its ultimate origin. Sections were an institution that was largely about the regulation of marriage, and so fitted into the book plan. Fison was rightly sceptical of conjectures about ultimate origins, and offered a corrective in terms of actual facts about Australia. However, the contribution of Fison and Howitt was read as, and probably did amount to, an intervention in the debate with their own conjecture that the organisation of marriage through sections was a reflection of the imagined primeval COMMUNAL MARRIAGE. They knew very well that this was and is not how sections operated, but left the door open to this being an earlier state.