This study aims to resolve the century-old debate about the nature of Australian aboriginal societies and the comparability of their structures with the structures of other tribal and kinship-based societies. It begins with a critical evaluation and refutation of the claims that Australians are ???ignorant of physical paternity??? and therefore cannot have systems of kin classification. Professor Scheffler then demonstrates that systems of kin classification are a common feature of Australian languages and that, contrary to the theory proposed by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and others, variation in...

Announcements in the 1970s and 1980s of the death of kinship and descent as subjects of anthropological study were highly premature. These subjects continue routinely to be encountered in the course of empirical ethnographic research and to be reported upon in ethnographies or they are ignored at the peril of ethnographers pathetically unprepared to deal with them. Moreover, considerable evidence has accumulated that systems of social relations built on relations of genealogical connection exhibit a remarkable degree of orderliness about which it is possible already to make a number of...