Tracing change in family and social organisation in Indigenous Australia, using evidence from language

Indigenous society has been founded on kinship systems quite different from those of the Europeans and on social categories unique to Australia, like sections and subsections, binding distant people together in family-like relationships. The project will reconstruct Australian indigenous social organization over the last several millennia using comparative linguistics and anthropology. It builds on an ethnographic sample across Australia, together with a large database of family and social vocabulary from Indigenous languages, which will be automated to provide rapid data entry, analysis and mapping. It will show how these social systems have changed, and the impact on indigenous people s lives.