Themes
Language, kinship and heritage
Language revitalisation and education
Conference Papers
Session LKH1: Language, kinship, heritage 1
1. L. Dousset: Database Structures for the social sciences: the example of Austkin and an introduction to the Auskin database.
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Abstract
Creating and storing information in electronic form has become an everyday practice in the social sciences, as well as among other scientific domains and the general public. The multiplicity of digital transcriptions, images, films, publications and so on are profoundly reshaping our views and our capacity of analysing information, history, culture and society. While formerly archives were the places of authoritative and selective storage of contemporary events analysable by the historians of tomorrow, today information is recorded and stored at multiple places and in a distributed manner. Archives are now “everywhere”, and “everyone” constitutes archives.
Accessible on-line databases are also providing the means for Indigenous peoples to access, store and add information about their cultures and languages, including tailoring the information to suit needs such as cultural maintenance and revitalisation. While this potentially can provide outreach to remote locations, technical and practical factors currently make the full benefits available mainly to people in towns and cities. This is also where there are a large number of Indigenous people with an interest in cultural maintenance and revitalisation.
The AustKin project and on-line database, compiling information on Australian Indigenous kinship, is one important step in archiving and providing a platform for analysis of cultural information. It is mainly concerned with kinship terminologies and their change in time and space, including the possibility for mapping of linguistic features. This paper will present the AustKin database and its features as they are relevant for archiving, storing and mapping of linguistic elements. The structure and nature of the content will be explained and potential future development of this knowledge system discussed.
Author bio:
Laurent Dousset has done extensive fieldwork in the Australian Western Desert in the domains of kinship, social organization, land tenure and the transformations thereof. He has published widely on these topics, including a book on the diffusion and transformation of the section system in Western Australia (Assimilating Identities: Social Networks and the Diffusion of Sections, Oceania Monographs 2005). After a postdoctoral and an ARC postdoctoral position at the University of Western Australia, Perth, he returned to France in 2003 where he is associate professor at the EHESS (Advanced School for the Social Sciences), teaching mainly on Australian Indigenous cultures. He is currently director of the CREDO (Centre for Research and Documentation on Oceania), as well as in charge of the development of the digital humanities in France for the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research). He is also the author of several on-line databases and knowledge systems.
2. Patrick McConvell: Indigenous kinship systems: tradition and change
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Abstract
Indigenous people have maintained kinship systems and terminologies very different from the standard European systems for many thousands of years. The systems are classificatory, that is a person for instance does not just have one person called ‘mother’ (in the local language) but could have dozens of people that they call call ‘mother’. These include not only the individual’s actual mother, but also her mother’s sister, her mother’s mother’s sister’s daughter or other cousins. While all the systems are like this, they vary among themselves in the terms used in different languages and also in the kinds of relations that are grouped together under one term. For instance in some languages there is one term for ‘grandmother’ and one for ‘grandfather’ much like in English (although being classificatory, these terms cover a lot more people). But in many other languages there are different terms for ‘mother’s father’ , ‘father’s father’, ‘mother’s mother’ and ‘father’s mother’ – in Gurindji for instance jawiji, kaku, jaju, ngapuju – terms extended to their siblings and parallel cousins. In different systems, as among the Yolngu some of these people are grouped together eg ngathi ‘mother’s father or father’s mother’s brother’.
In some urban settings people still do use the old language terms for kinship, either when talking language or talking Indigenous English. In other cases, they use terms that sound like English but have a ‘traditional ‘ meaning related to their old system – many people for instance use ‘uncle’ to mean just mother’s brother because ‘dad’ is used to include father’s brothers. Sometimes people combine Indigenous English terms with language words or with other English words to give a special meaning that relates to the old kinship systems as when people talk about a ‘cousin-mother’ meaning a special mother’s brother’s daughter who you call ‘mother’ because of a special rule in the old local system which anthropologists call ‘Omaha skewing’, which relates to marriage rules and relationships to land. Hearing people using what seem to be English words outsiders often think they are using the general Australian kinship system but in fact they are not. In many cases these days local Indigenous people juggle both the traditional and the introduced English system in their everyday life.
Author bio:
Patrick McConvell is currently Research Fellow in the College of Arts and Social Sciences , Australian National University, working on the AustKin project (http://austkin.pacific-credo.fr) and a project on the dynamics of language change among hunter-gatherers, PI Claire Bowern at Yale. He has carried out linguistic and anthropological fieldwork in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and has worked in indigenous language programs in schools, helping to extablish the Kimberley Language Resource Centre and training Indigenous people in language work. He taught anthropology at the Northern Territory and Griffith Universities and from 2000 to 2008 he worked at AIATSIS as Research Fellow, Language and Society working on projects including the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition project (ACLA), the On-line Language Community Access Program (OLCAP) and the National Indigenous Language Survey (NILS)
3. Joe Blythe: The use of kinship terminology in Wadeye: a multicultural urban Aboriginal community
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Abstract
Wadeye is a multi-ethnic community with a variety of Aboriginal people from different language backgrounds. With a population of around 2500 people, it is the sixth largest Aboriginal town in the Northern territory. As with most of the urban centres in Australia, one particular language has grown to dominate the other languages of the region. Where Wadeye differs from other urban centres is that the dominant language, Murrinh-patha, is a traditional indigenous language.
In conversation, kinship plays a central role in how the Aboriginal people of Wadeye refer to each other. If a personal name is restricted for reasons of taboo, kinterms provide conversationalists with a means of bypassing the restriction. Kinterms are regularly used to associate a non-present person with those actually participating in the current conversation. An omni-relevant issue for participants in conversation is the relationship between the individuals that comprise a group. In the Murrinh-patha language, distinctions are made between groups of males who are not brothers, groups of females (or males and females) who are not all siblings, and groups of siblings. Every time speakers need to refer to a specific group of individuals, they must decide if the group is comprised of exclusively siblings, or otherwise. This study of kinterm usage in conversational Murrinh-patha can inform the analysis of kinship in even larger urban areas, for which there is little information on kinterm usage in everyday conversation.
Author bio:
Joe Blythe has been involved in maintaining and documenting Aboriginal languages for the last fourteen years. For much of this time he lived in Northern Australia where he worked for several community organisations such as the Kimberley Language Resource Centre and the Katherine Regional Aboriginal Languages Centre. In 2004 he joined an ARC project documenting Murrinh-patha language and traditional Murrinh-patha songs. His recently completed doctorate from the University of Sydney is the first in Australia to use Conversation Analysis to analyse everyday conversational talk conducted in an Australian Aboriginal language (Murrinh-patha). He is one of only a handful of scholars in the world undertaking interactional research in communities where endangered languages are spoken. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow participating on the Austkin project where he investigates kin term usage at Wadeye, NT.