Ian Keen – författare

This book describes the control of religious knowledge in north-east Arnhem Land, primarily from the point of view of Yolngu men. Ian Keen examines the framing of religious forms and the control of the dissemination of knowledge in three contexts: age and gender relations; among social networks centred on patrifilial group identity; and in relationships with people of a wider region, including the use of more universal symbols such as those from Christianity to forge links with non-Aboriginal community. He concludes by discussing the effect of post-colonial social and religious changes on Yolngu power relations, especially on the power of older men, which had its basis in the control of secret religious knowledge. Yolngu religious practice is constituted in indeterminacy and ambiguity; people co-operate in enacting common religious forms while interpreting those forms differently. Dr Keen draws on recent post-structuralist social theory to discuss this heterogeneity of culture and practice.It is, he argues, the pervasive indeterminacy and contestability of meaning that makes it possible to conceptualize the embedding of north-east Arhem Land social life in wider social formations, while recognizing the relativity of Yolngu perspectives on social and religous reality.

Kinship systems are the glue that holds social groups together. This volume presents a novel approach to understanding the genesis of these systems and how and why they change. The editors bring together experts from the disciplines of anthropology and linguistics to explore kinship in societies around the world and to reconstruct kinship in ancient times. Kinship Systems presents evidence of renewed activity and advances in this field in recent years which will contribute to the current interdisciplinary focus on the evolution of society. While all continents are touched on in this book, there is special emphasis on Australian indigenous societies, which have been a source of fascination in kinship studies.One key argument in the book is that linguistic evidence for reconstruction of ancient terminologies can provide strong independent evidence to complement anthropologists’ notions of structural kinship transformations, and ground them in actual historical and geographical contexts. There are principles that we all share, no matter what kind of society we live in, and these provide a common “language” for anthropology and linguistics. With this language we can accurately compare how family relations are organised in different societies, as well as how we talk about such relations. Because this concept has often been denied by the trajectories in anthropology over the last few decades, Kinship Systems represents a reassertion of, and advances on, classical kinship theory and methods. Innovations and interdisciplinary methods are described by the originators of the new approaches and other leading regional experts.