YANYUWA CONCEPTS RELATING TO “SKIN”

Abstract

Yanyuwa1 of the Northern Territory are among the Australian Aboriginal ethnic groups which refer to their subsection or semimoiety groups2 by the term skin. If a Yanyuwa meets a fellow-Aborigine from the Northern Territory (or certain areas further afield) who does not understand his Yanyuwa language but to whom he wishes to relate, his question in English will be, What is your skin? And from the answer, the two will be able to identify the equivalent social groups to which they belong, establish kin relationship, and be ready to communicate as kinsmen. This usage of is comprehensible to these two but may well mislead a non-Aboriginal speaker of English into thinking that there is some relationship between in this sense of social and in its literal sense. The usage of English certainly fails to convey the understood meaning that is in the mind of the Yanyuwa speaker. The purpose of this paper is to distinguish between the two Yanyuwa concepts of translated by a single English word, and to discuss some of the Yanyuwa connotations of as it relates to social groups. Inalienable possession is recognized and marked linguistically by the Yanyuwa.3 A person's family is an inalienable possession and kinship terms are marked by possessive marker sets. The parts of a person's body are also an inalienable possession but of a different kind and so these are marked with a separate set of possessive prefixes. A person's name and also his social are classified as being possessed in the same way as parts of his body. And so as a body covering and skin group share the same possessive