Tracking the Dynamics of Kinship and Social Category Terms with AustKin II

Résumé En

The first AustKin project (AustKin I) collected a large database of kinship terms from Aboriginal languages all over Australia, endeavouring to maintain standards of spelling, kin formulae and group identities, without losing the details of original sources used. An online geospatial interface has been used to map distributions of forms of terms and their polysemies or equations. The patterns of the latter provide identification of kinship systems as defined in ethnology. The project proposed and tested hypotheses about the evolution of such systems in Australia based on knowledge of the common polysemies and related changes. The next stage, AustKin II, builds on hypotheses from the current authors and others, testing these further by adding two more components to the database: the marriage rules and the social categories used by each group. Of the latter, section and subsection systems are unique to Australia. The aim is to gauge how these different systems fit together and propose how they evolved over time and how they influenced each other.