Moiety Names in South-Eastern Australia: Distribution and Reconstructed History

Abstract

<p>This report1 forms part of the project 'Skin and kin in Aboriginal Australia: linguistic and historical perspectives on the dynamics of social categories', whose object is to document and map the Australian systems of social category names and reconstruct their prehistory.2 Social category systems include subsections, sections and moieties. Here, we report on the moiety names in six of the terminological sets found in south-eastern Australia— identified on the basis of (near-)identical names.3 Typically, these terminological sets extend over a number of different languages, including languages that are not closely related linguo-genetically to one another. Moreover, the terminologies may differ between languages that are closely related to one another.</p>