Lévi-Strauss’s
work on †cross-cousin marriage clearly owes a considerable debt to Radcliffe-Brown’s
work on Australia. He both adopts Radcliffe-Brown’s three types of cross-cousin
marriage as the three possible †elementary structures of kinship, and
reanalyses Australian material in the first of the ethnographic sections of The
Elementary Structures of Kinship. While Radcliffe-Brown regarded kinship as
an extension of familial relationships to the tribal community in such a way as
to achieve progressively higher levels of social integration, Lévi-Strauss
regarded kinship as the product of a mode of thought which operated at a global
(tribal) level, ordering people into opposed relationship categories such as ‘father’s
father’ and ‘mother’s father’. Lévi-Strauss followed Radcliffe-Brown in
hypothesizing that the various types of Australian kinship system offered
different scales of social integration, but considered the Murngin system provided
the greatest potential for extensive social networks, because the chains of †matrilateral
marriage alliance could be indefinitely extended, whereas the †bilateral Kariera
and Aranda systems tend toward closure.
Warner
had shown that the Murngin had †patrilineal †moieties, but recognized seven patrilines
in their kinship terminology. The two ‘outer’ lines, furthest from ego, both
belonged to the opposite moiety to ego’s and therefore could not marry
each other. This generated a notorious controversy, as to how many lines of
descent actually existed in the Murngin kinship system. Although much of the
Murngin debate was arcane, it did highlight an important ambiguity in
Radcliffe-Brown’s model, where the line of descent in the kinship terminology,
the land-owning group and the foraging band appear to be identicallyconstituted.
This ambiguity was resolved, at an academic level, in papers by Hiatt and †Stanner,
but resurfaced in anthropological evidence presented on behalf of the first
attempt by Aboriginal people to claim legal recognition of their title to land.