Series editors ’ Preface: Kinship, Process and history

Sally babidge’s study in this volume concentrates on the kinship practices of urban dwelling Murri (‘Aboriginal’) people, belonging to Gudjala country, who are situated in Charters towers, north Queensland, Australia. babidge’s writing helps significantly to reshape analyses of the workings of kinship in comparable urban contexts in Australia, and also to advance the discussion of kinship in general terms. her main argument is that kinship among these people must be seen as process, shaped by forces of history: a point that is eminently capable of being generalized to other cases. the contexts of history into which her study is set involve the earlier forcible relocations of people onto stations and reservations, the constraints of government regulations, and more recently the opportunities and further constraints offered by native title legislation and the creation of a bureaucratically legitimized category of ‘Traditional Owners ’ of land (TOs). Concomitantly there is the pervasive economic circumstance of a shortage of monetary resources that continues to affect people’s lives, and with which they deal in creative ways. babidge, using nicholas Peterson’s original phrase, describes