The Legacy of Radcliffe-Brown's Typology of Australian Aboriginal Kinship Systems

I review A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s approach to the classification of Australian Aboriginal kinship terminologies and marriage systems, including revisions by A. P. Elkin. I contrast Radcliffe-Brown’s approach to typology with those of Lévi-Strauss and Scheffler, and I trace the way in which certain of Radcliffe-Brown’s categories have become standardised in the anthropological literature. Following a discussion of approaches to classification, I propose a new classification of Australian systems and examine the frequency and spatial distribution of the proposed types.