Marriage networks among Australian Aboriginal populations

Most people do not marry people who are too close, household members for example. However, nor do they marry people who are too far, such as total strangers for themselves or their family. In other words, they typically marry people with whom they have some sort of previous connection. In certain post-industrial settings, and perhaps elsewhere as well, prior linkages relating to employment, schooling, religious affiliation and so on undoubtedly intervene in the orientation of marriage choices. However, in most places, most of the time, such considerations remain subordinate to the role played by other types of relationship, namely those deriving from kinship and marriage themselves. In short, as a general rule, most people marry people with whom some sort of direct or indirect kinship or in-law relationship already exists. This commonplace observation has far-reaching implications. As many of the previously related spouses of each generation give birth to children who themselves marry persons with whom they are directly or indirectly related, a higher-order social entity comes into being: a dense network of interlocking consanguinal and affinal ties. Such a network can be likened to a particularly complicated tangle of strings (of consanguinity) knotted together (by marriages) in a variety of ways to form a single intricate, unravelable whole. This higher-level entity persists through time, not as a static configuration but as a continually unfolding one in which certain connections are forgotten, others are renewed and new ones are forged. Developing in accordance with changing circumstances, it is shaped, generation after generation, by the aggregate influence of antecedent marriages upon the determination of marriages to come. Such a network thus embraces, in an approximate yet unmistakable fashion, the evolving social field in which individuals are embedded and though which their past and future are indissociably bound. The study of marriage networks favours an approach to kinship and marriage in which primary emphasis is given neither to classificatory schemes nor to normative precepts, but to the patterning of actual consanguinal and affinal connections. Douglas White and I have tried to show elsewhere (Houseman and White 1996, 1997, in press; White and Houseman n.d.), notably with regard to a number of Amazonian and South Asian populations, the value of such a perspective. The intention of the present paper is to outline certain aspects of this approach and to apply it to the study of Australian Aboriginal societies. It aims to suggest some …