ABSTRACT
IN recent years the discussion of cross-cousin marriage (XCM)l has concentrated upon the prescribed forms, and much ink has flowed in arguments about preferences and prescriptions, about the differences between normative rules and rates of occurrence (statistical 'norms'), and about the relation between these two aspects of social behaviour, and exactly what it is that prescriptive marriage prescribes (i.e. is it marriage with a particular person, sibling group, descent group, or category ofkin, for in each case the social implications will differ?). The concentration on prescriptive forms is linked with the central role that Australia has in the comparative study of kinship. This antipodean dominance derives partly from the timing and nature of European expansion in the area and partly from certain assumptions about the value of the Australian material as providing evidence for the origins of
man's social institutions. Technologically, the Australian aborigines have the simplest living (or recently living) culture, so that those social institutions that are closely entailed with technology might be expected to reflect this fact. But Australian societies (as we have often been reminded) have had as long a past as any other human group, and when one compares certain aspects of their kinship institutions and religious beliefs with those of other parts of the world, one is impressed not so much by their 'elementary forms' (pace Durkheim and Livi-Strauss) as by their highly specialized, morphologically complex nature.
