Part four: Social category systems

In the previous chapter, I used ethnographic examples to show how kinship is articulated in an Aboriginal Australian society. However, in the Western Desert, as in many Australian societies, there is a further important layer in this domain: social categories. These social categories are compatible with kinship but must be distinguished from it since they lie at a different level of abstraction from the nature of a relationship. They constitute abstract or normative groups of people with iden..