Australian Aboriginal Kinship: An introductory handbook with particular emphasis on the Western Desert - Paperback

by Laurent Dousset (Author)

This handbook brings the principles of human kinship in general, and Australian Aboriginal kinship in particular, closer to the reader in an understandable and pedagogic way. Aimed at a large public, including anthropologists, the handbook is divided into four parts: the historical and ethnographic background of important concepts such as 'culture', 'hunter-gatherer societies' etc.; the basic tools and notions needed to understand kinship (terminology, marriage, descent and filiation); an ethnographic analysis of the Australian Western Desert kinship and notions such as 'family', 'household' and 'domestic group'; a presentation of social organisation, in particular generational moieties, patri- and matrimoieties, sections and subsections. The concluding chapter discusses in a critical fashion the concept of kinship itself and elaborates on the idea of relatedness as a meaningful expansion.

Author Biography

Laurent Dousset is an anthropologist trained at the EHESS in France where he submitted his PhD in 1999 under the supervision of Maurice Godelier. After his studies, he was enrolled as a postdoctoral fellow and then as an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Australia, before returning to France where he obtained a permanent position as an Associate Professor at the EHESS and where he is currently the director of the CREDO (Centre for Research and Documentation on Oceania) in Marseilles. Working since 1994 on Australian Aboriginal cultures, he is particularly interested in kinship, social organisation and social transformations, as well as conceptions and issues of land tenure and inter-cultural relationships. Besides the numerous papers he has published in scientific journals, he has also written two books (Assimilating identities, Oceania Monograph 2005; and Mythes, bombes et cannibales, Société des Océanistes 2011) and co-edited another volume (Kinship and Change in Aboriginal Australia, Anthropological Forum 2002). He is also the author of several scientific websites.