The Legacy of Radcliffe-Brown's Typology of Australian Aboriginal Kinship Systems

Abstract

I review A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's approach to the classification of Australian Aboriginal kinship terminologies and marriage systems, including revisions by A. P. Elkin. I contrast Radcliffe-Brown's approach to typology with those of Lévi-Strauss and Scheffler, and I trace the way in which certain of Radcliffe-Brown's categories have become standardised in the anthropological literature. Following a discussion of approaches to classification, I propose a new classification of Australian systems and examine the frequency and spatial distribution of the proposed types. Introduction As Adam Kuper (1983:l45) remarks, there is no doubt that A. R. Radcliffe-Brown made a significant contribution to the understanding of Australian Aboriginal systems of kinship and marriage in his 1931 synthesis, whatever the arguments about his originality and the validity of his claim to have 'discovered' the Kariera system (White 1981; Needham 1982; Radcliffe-Brown 1931). His typology of Australian systems, or rather, a simplification of it, has been the standard for some eighty years. Radcliffe-Brown's analysis classifies Australian kinship systems into a large number of 'types', although he took Kariera and Aranda as prototypes of many systems. He classifies not only systems of kin classification, but also systems of social organization including marriage, moieties and sections etc., and types of 'hordes'. He thought that many other systems were variants of the two focal types, Kariera and Aranda, but he recognized several other main types as well, including Murngin, and Forrest and Lyne Rivers types. Table 1 summarizes his ty-pology. In spite of his recognition of all this variation, Radcliffe-Brown saw the Kariera and Aranda types as focal: