Invisible to the state: kinship and the Yolngu moral order

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Invisible to the state: kinship and the Yolngu moral order

Frances Morphy, Fellow, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, TheAustralian National University

(Paper presented at the conference, Negotiating the Sacred V: Governing the Family,

Monash University, 14–15 August 2008)

Introduction

This paper concerns the ways in which the Australian settler state makes the kin-basedmoral order of the Yolngu people invisible. I have worked with the Yolngu of the Yirrkalaand Laynhapuy homelands region of north-east Arnhem Land [Fig. 1] off and on since1974, but it was not until the late 1990s that I began to reflect seriously on what

happens in the border zone between the encapsulating settler society and the Yolngusocial field. I use ‘border zone’ in James Clifford’s (1997) sense to designate contexts inwhich two relatively autonomous socio-cultural systems meet and interact and where

hybrid or intercultural forms arise, often as a result of contestations over meaning andvalue. In speaking of two systems I am echoing the Yolngu conceptualisation of therelationship, for they often say, ‘we live in two worlds now’.

Fig. 1 Yirrkala and the Laynhapuy homelands

The institutions of the border zone areheterogeneous and exist at differentlevels of organisation; at a national

level they include the ‘recognitionspace’ created by the native title

legislative framework (Mantziaris andMartin 2000) and national

instruments such as the census, wherethe state attempts to capture factsand figures about the Indigenous

‘population’ which allow it then tocompare that population with the

mainstream. This in turn informspolicy. I have conducted research in

both these institutions of the borderzone. The catalyst for this paper isresearch on the 2001 and 2006

censuses undertaken in collaborationwith colleagues at CAEPR, lookingspecifically at the enumerationprocess in remote Australia (Martin etal. 2002; Morphy 2004, 2006, 2007a,

2007c). In both census years my case-study area was north-east Arnhem



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Land, but in 2006 I also did fieldwork at the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) Census

Management Unit in Darwin and at the ABS Data Processing Centre in Melbourne. So in2006 I was able to monitor the journey of data from north east Arnhem Land, from the

point of collection, right through to the coding process that produces the final output(see Morphy 2007a). But my analysis here is also informed both by my long associationwith Yolngu as a cataloguer of their social field as they see it , and by my research in

other institutions of the border zone. With Howard Morphy, I worked on the Blue MudBay case, in the southern part of the Laynhapuy homelands region (see Morphy 2007b,2008). It is anthropological field data and census data from this region, suitably tweakedto preserve the anonymity of individuals, that forms the basis of the paper.

Yolngu kinship

In the Yolngu-matha languages of north-east Arnhem land, the character trait renderedin English as ‘self-centered’ or ‘selfish’ is expressed by the idiomgurrutu-miriw , literally‘kin-lacking’—acting as if one had no kin. The English (settler Australian) expressionarticulates the idea of the individual self in tension with, sometimes in opposition to, thewider demands entailed by the individual’s identity as a social being. Selfishness is anambiguous character trait, because we acknowledge that, often, to succeed in life it is

necessary to be selfish—to ‘put ourselves first’ as we say. For instance we agonise over the‘work-life balance’, and in doing so we implicitly acknowledge that work partly defines

our identity as individuals, and that its imperatives compel us to act in ways that are intension with our desire for relatedness. Whereas the Yolngu expression articulates theprimacy of relatedness. In the Yolngu view, any action that shows that a person is

‘working just for themselves’ is a sign of that person beinggurrutumiriw , and this isunambiguously undesirable. People will say of such a person: ‘he’s not a Yolngu any

more—he’s acting like a Ngäpaki [white person]’. These differences in theconceptualisation of the relationship between the self and its surrounding social fieldhave profound consequences.

I’ll begin by teasing out some of the structuring principles of the Yolngu social order,before considering its moral aspect. Fig 2 is a partial representation of the Yolngu kinshipand bestowal system, one of the most complex in Aboriginal Australia. I am not going tosubject you to a detailed analysis—there are just a few general principles of the systemthat I want to get across.

The building blocks of Yolngu social organisation are patrilineal, estate owning clans. Aperson belongs to the clan (bäpurru ) of their father. In Fig 2, the members of thepatrilineal clan are in red, with ego, the male person from whose point of view thediagram is drawn, as the square in the middle. The Yolngu universe is divided into twoexogamous patrimoieties called Dhuwa and Yirritja. Each clan and its estates and creatorwangarr beings belong either to one moiety or to the other. By definition then, clans arealso exogamous.

In the Yolngu marriage system a mother’s mother’s brother (märi ) bestows his owndaughter as a mother-in-law (mukul rumaru ) to his sister’s daughter’s son (gutharra ). Thus a man marries an actual or classificatory matrilateral cross cousin—his mother’smother’s brother’s daughter’s daughter (galay ), who may also be his actual mother’s



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brother’s daughter. In Fig. 2, the people in ego’s matriline, from his mother’s mother

and her brother’s generation through to his sister’s daughter’s children are shown in blue.So the complete marriage cycle centered on ego involves relationships between a set of

five clans, including two of the same moiety and two of the opposite moiety to ego’s ownclan: hismäri clan (own moiety), mother’s clan (opposite moiety), own clan, sister’schildrens’ clan (opposite moiety) and gutharra clan (own moiety). His sister’s marriage

involves a different set of clans, since this is an asymmetrical system: she marries anactual or classificatory patrilateral cross-cousin (dhuway ).

Fig. 2 The Yolngu kinship and bestowal system

So, viewed over time, the Yolngu marriage system constructs long-term relationships ofbestowal and marriage that link groups of both moieties. A relationship is formed

between two clans of the same moiety who are said to stand in a relationship of märi andgutharra to one another, because over time themäri clan bestows many mothers- in-law

on members of thegutharra clan.

The relationship between a person and their mother’s clan (of the opposite moiety) issome times referred to asyothu-yindi (child–big (one)). Just as a person iswaku to theirmother and her brother, so they stand in awaku relationship to their mother’s (ngändi )clan as a whole.Waku have special responsibilities to their ngändi clan. In fulfilling theseresponsibilities they are termed djunggayarr (ordjunggayi ), often translated into English

as ‘manager’ or ‘caretaker’ or sometimes ‘policeman’. In essence they have a duty of careto their mother’s estate, and this involves helping—or sometimes ensuring that—the



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ngändi clan members look after their country properly, both in mundane and ceremonial

contexts.

In the past, and to a considerable extent in the present, most marriages tend to take placebetween members of clans with geographically contiguous estates, and so over time

‘connubia’—that is, regional groupings of clans that are linked in sets of marriagebestowal relationships—tend to emerge. And this is reflected in today’s settlement

geography, because each clan estate tends to have an outstation settlement on it. Fig. 3shows the most salient kinship links between some of the Blue Mud Bay clan settlements. The existence of connubia is not merely statistical—they are not simply an emergent

property of the local system of kinship and marriage. They are recognised by Yolngu as asocial fact. Connubia are often associated with regional names. For example the northern

Blue Mud Bay clans are the Djalkiripuyngu. These cultural properties of connubia are afactor in their reproduction over time. The genealogies from Blue Mud Bay show that

Djalkiripuyngu has existed as a connubium since at least the late eighteenth century.Despite the challenges posed by colonisation and its aftermath, the underlying principlesof the Yolngu gurrutu system are largely intact.

Fig. 3 Kinship links between the settlements of Blue Mud Bay

Note: the numbers in the text of this figure (9, 10, 11, 13) refer to individuals who live at Community A.

The termbäpurru , which I have translated as ‘clan’, encompasses not just the livingrepresentatives of the group but also its spiritual essence located in the clan estate, the



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product of ancestralwangarr activity. Clan members arewänga-wat angu (‘place-belongs

to’ [people]); i.e. those to whom the place belongs, and who belong to the place) withrespect to their clan’s estates.

The main points to be made from this quick gallop through Yolngu social organisation

are: a) the complexity and highly structured nature of the relationships not just betweenindividuals but between groups; b) the groundedness of the system in the relationship

between clans and their ancestral estates; c) the resilience and persistence of this kin-based social field.

The complex system of rights and obligations entailed in this kin-based universe far

transcends the boundaries of any ‘nuclear’ family. This category, which is vested with suchmoral force in the Anglo-Celtic culture of the Australian mainstream, is not a ‘natural’category in Yolngu society, either as a social or as a residential unit. Let me illustratebriefly. There is an assumption deeply embedded in the psyche and culture of the Anglo-

Celtic mainstream that the nuclear family is a ‘natural’ and universal building block of allhuman societies everywhere. Anglo-Celtic cultures thus tend to take the nuclear family asthe ‘norm’, and to describe all other household types as variations on, or deviations from

that norm. Anglo-Celtic kinship terminology (Fig 4), with its unique reciprocal terms forthe members of the nuclear family, reinforces the view of the nuclear family as somehow‘natural’.

Fig. 4 Anglo-Celtic kinship terminology and the nuclear family



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In Fig. 4, each circle represents an ego. The terms within the circle are those by which

other members of the Anglo-Celtic nuclear family address each other. The nuclear familyand its constellation of relationships only comes into being with a marriage and with thesubsequent births of the children. It is a bounded and finite unit that comes into beingthrough the choice of previously unrelated individuals (or this is most usually the case),and so has no prior existence. It is also portable, as a discrete unit.

The Yolngu kinship terminology, in contrast, privileges lineages, not nuclear families (Fig.5). Ego and ego’s siblings constitute a point of intersection between apre- existing patrilineage and matrilineage. The boxes in Fig. 5 do not represent individual egos. Rather,each contains a set of relationships that occur within the intersection of a patrilineageand a matrilineage in a particular generation.

Fig. 5 Yolngu kinship terminology and the intersection of lineages

These relationships exist prior to and independent of any particular marriage because thedhuway–galay relationship between two people exists before a marriage does, and in this

classificatory kinship system every person has manydhuway andgalay . It is simplyimpossible to draw a box around a set of reciprocal terms that apply exclusively within a‘nuclear family’. The siblings in the bottom box are gäthu with respect to their patrilinealparent (and his siblings), andwaku with respect to their matrilineal parent (and hersiblings). And since a fundamental principle of the system is the equivalence of siblings, sothat for example a child uses the same kin term for their father and their father’sbrothers, and so on, all children have manyngändi ,bäpa ,yapa andwäwa . So the nuclear

family is not picked out by Yolngu kinship terminology as a bounded unit. The most wecan say is that there are conjugal units and parent-child units. These are produced from



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and are embedded in a much wider network of kin, and this network is essentially

unbounded.

The Yolngu moral orderWhat of the values and behaviours that produce and are produced by this system? Kin-based obligations structure the Yolngu moral order: everyone in a person’s social universeis classified as kin, and how one ought to behave to others is framed in terms of one’srelationship to them. One thing that is immediately obvious if one sits with any group of

Yolngu that contains an infant that is able to sit up and take notice of the world aroundit, is that every time a new person comes into view the baby is told ‘here comes [insertappropriate kin term]’ and the term is repeated several times. The person will greet the

baby affectionately, addressing it by the reciprocal term. When a child is beginning tospeak, any effort to produce a kin term in response to seeing a person, or anything that

can be interpreted as such an effort, is greeted with delight and extravagant praise. As aresult, by the time a child is speaking, they will know the correct kin term by which toaddress a very large number of people—amounting to every person in their socialuniverse. This includes non-Yolngu who have any kind of ongoing relationship with thechild’s kin, for such people will have invariably been adopted into the system as

someone’s sibling. The power of relatedness to comfort is evident, even for very youngbabies, for it is common for them to cry when they see a white person, but to stop whenthey have been ‘introduced’ as kin. If the child continues to cry the adults will cajole:‘Hush this is your [insert appropriate kin term].’ In this way, from a very early age—evenfrom before birth, because a child’s spiritual essence is believed to come from a

conception site in its clan territory—personhood is constituted through relatedness.

So how should one behave with kin? There is much in the anthropological literature onthe moral order of Aboriginal societies, and I can only mention a few relevant

characteristics here, borrowing heavily from Nic Peterson and John Taylor’s (2003) paperon ‘The modernising of the Indigenous domestic moral economy’. Their general commentsapply well in the Yolngu case. Sharing with kin is at the heart of this domestic moraleconomy, and it has a ‘central constitutive role that arises from:

• an ethic of generosity informed by a social pragmatics of demand sharing [a term

that signifies that people very rarely offer to share, but frequently ask others toshare]

• a universal system of kin classification which requires the flow of goods and

services to produce and reproduce social relationships [so these are economies ofcirculation, not of accumulation]

• personhood constituted through relatedness but valuing an egalitarian autonomy

[This is not the same as western individualism, but rather assertion of equality. It isnot a given—it is something that the person has to build for themselves within afield of relatedness.]

• an emphasis on polite indirectness in interaction that makes open refusaldifficult.’



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They conclude their summary by saying that ‘Combined with the practical economic

significance of sharing, this account of its place at the heart of the Indigenous domesticmoral economy helps explain the resilience and persistence of sharing and the strong

anti-accumulation pressures associated with it’ (2003: 110).

In other words this is a moral order that is profoundly non-market and non-individualistin its orientation. It informs a social order characterised by networks of relatedness and

in which personal identity is deeply grounded in ancestral space.

Making the Yolngu kinship system and moral order invisible

Yet the state, through mechanisms such as the census, insists on representing Indigenoussocial formations through the lens of mainstream categories. I will illustrate this briefly

from my research on the 2001 and 2006 Censuses.

Let us first take a bird’s eye view of a particular community. Fig 6 shows the kin relations

between the people who were designated as the heads of households at a particular Yolngu homeland (‘Community A’) in 2001. The male and female household ‘heads’ are inblack, and deceased relatives who provide links between them are in white.

Fig. 6 Relationships between heads of households at Community A, 2001

The majority of the ‘household heads’ are members of one of the two lineages of the clan

on whose land the homeland community is situated. In brief, everyone living in thiscommunity of over 100 people is related to everyone else. Although there are discretedwellings it is problematic to view them as ‘households’. For example we have two caseswhere the ‘household head’ is the wife of another ‘household head’. These are cases ofpolygamous unions, where a senior wife lives in a separate dwelling, but where the two



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dwellings function in many respects as a single household. On the left of the Figure are

three dwellings occupied by a man and two of his adult sons. The occupants of thesedwellings wanted to put the father down as ‘household head’ for all of these dwellings,

‘because he is the boss for all of them’.

The categories that frame the census questions are founded in certain settler Australianassumptions about what is ‘normal’. All things being equal, the boundaries of the

‘dwelling’ and the ‘household’ are assumed to coincide, and the failure to ask questionsabout relatedness to other households in a community rests on the assumption that suchinformation is irrelevant and that the self-contained (nuclear) family is the unit ofmeasurement relevant to the users of census data such as politicians and governmentdepartments who formulate and administer policy. Let’s drill down now into the next level. Fig. 7 shows the people present at the 2006census count in one dwelling at one of the Blue Mud Bay homelands. It also shows the

key relationships between those present and the absent people through whom they aresignificantly related. 16 (with the arrow pointing towards her) is a ‘visitor’—she is anelderly woman who usually lives on her own clan homeland, even though her husband is

still alive. But presently she visiting her husband’s community and is spending some time,as she often does, with herwaku (two sons (1 and 13) and a daughter (7), all of whom areliving in this house.

Kin relationships between the co-residents of a dwelling, 2006

1 and 13 have their spouses and children with them, whereas 7’s spouse is away. Thethicker lines in the diagram trace the kinship connections (through people now mostlydeceased) that make the marriages of 1 and 13 ‘correct’ marriages according to the Yolngu system. 7 has a twowaku (a son and daughter) and agutharra (daughter’s son)with her. The remaining members of the household are one of 7’s close classificatorywaku (10), who is also calledwaku by her brothers 1 and 13, and two more distant



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classificatory gutharra of 7, 1 and 13 (they are the actual great-grandchildren of 16’s co-

wife, and they are more closely related in purely genealogical terms to the inhabitants ofanother dwelling in the community). It is commonplace for such more ‘distant’ (in our

terms) relatives to be present in dwellings.

Fig. 8 shows how this dwelling got coded at the data processing centre (DPC) inMelbourne. The data coder at the DPC operates according to a complex set of ordered

rules. It is imperative to form couple and single parent families within the ‘household’, tochoose one family as the ‘primary family’, to which ‘other relatives’ are attached, and torelate the families within a household to the primary family, using a single ‘reference

person’ for each family. The model allows, arbitrarily, for a maximum of three ‘families’per household, and for a maximum of three generations. Households that fall outside

these parameters, such as this one, are handled according to a further set of orderedrules. Here the ‘family’ represented by the two hatched circles has been dismembered and

(17) has been attached as an ‘other relative’ to the ‘primary family’. (16) does not figureat all because she is a visitor, so the coder did not have to solve the four-generationproblem in this instance. But this is at the price of eliminating from the ‘family’

information the person who actually connects the adult members of the household toone another. Had she been a resident, this would have changed the coding of the entirehousehold, which just goes to show how arbitrary the whole exercise is.

Fig. 8 ‘Family’ coding at the Data Processing Centre

So this complex extended familyhas been dismembered by the

coding process. In the output datathey are recorded as two ‘couple’

families, one with grandchildrenand an ‘other relative’ present, and

one ‘lone parent’ family.

Now this problem could be fixed,and the Yolngu system made

partly visible, if only the ABSwould allow another type offamily into its lexicon, namely the

‘extended family’. But even thatsolution can do nothing to address

the data shown in Fig. 9 which juxtaposes the complexity of therelationships within and betweenthree contiguous households —modelled on Yolngu kin categories

elucidated through anthropology’sgenealogical method —with the census representation of the same households as a set ofbounded nuclear families. The family that we have been looking at is on the right.



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Fig. 9 The coding of ‘families’ in 3 contiguous dwellings, 2006

The top part of the diagram shows the genealogical links between the people designatedas the heads of these three households for the purposes of the census. We can see thatfrom the Yolngu point of view the kin connections that link these households and explaintheir contiguity and composition go back two generations before the oldest living people

on the chart. And we saw from an earlier Figure (6) that in fact all the households in thiscommunity are linked by kin ties. The ABS coding is an impoverished representation (theresult, nevertheless, of considerable intellectual effort on the part of the data analyst and

the data coder). It is also a misleading representation because it masks the socialdynamics that lead to the formation of these communities and households. And inrendering them invisible it simultaneously obscures the moral order that supports thestructure.



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The policy consequences

Does this matter? I believe so, because, having rendered Indigenous socio-moral systems

invisible through a process of mistranslation, the state then proceeds, in policy directedtowards Indigenous people, to act as if these systems do not exist. The lens through whichthe state persists in viewing these social fields has the effect of making the surfacemanifestations of the Yolngu moral order appear incoherent—a ragbag of ‘traditional’customs and attitudes that can be targeted selectively. The new ‘mainstreaming’ agenda,initiated by the Howard government and continuing under the Rudd Labor government,

with its emphasis on the ‘individual’ as ‘worker’ has seen the re-emergence in a new guiseof an old colonial discourse about desirable and undesirable forms of mobility andimmobility. Indigenous forms of immobility —constituted through attachment to countryand kin —are implicitly undesirable because they hamper ‘good’ mobility, that is themovement of individuals (with or without their nuclear families) to places where there is

a job market.In the latter days of the Howard government this discourse was overt and couched inneo-assimilationist terms. Outstation communities were labelled ‘cultural museums’, anddiscourse about Indigenous cultural forms (insofar as they were recognised at all) wasoverwhelmingly negative. The only salvation for remote Indigenousindividuals , it seemed,was to join the ‘mainstream’, conceived narrowly as the full-time job market in places

where there was a ‘real’ economy. Couched in the rhetoric of ‘choice’, the implicitassumption was that when ‘freed’ by education and training to choose the mainstream,

all but the old and the unfit would do so. The ‘choice’ increasingly on offer was betweenmainstreaming or remaining on increasingly neglected and underfunded remotecommunities.

With the new Labour government this discourse shows signs of becoming more complex,with a willingness once again to accord positive value to at least some aspects ofIndigenous cultures. But the lens remains. The avowed policy of ‘closing the gap’ willfounder, just as did John Howard’s ‘practical reconciliation’, unless Indigenous socialformations and their moral orders are first of all recognised and secondly taken seriously.

They cannot simply be dismissed as an undesirable barrier to economic development and job creation. If change is necessary, and some change probably is, its implications for

Indigenous socio-moral systems need to be understood and negotiated over —both Yolngu and the state need a recognition space in which this negotiation can take place.For these are indeed encapsulated, complex, socio-moral systems. They aregurrutu-mirr(having the property of kinship), not simply aggregations of individuals who happen tobe ‘Indigenous’.

ReferencesClifford, J. 1997.Routes: Travel and Translat ion in the Twentieth Century , Harvard University

Press, Cambridge, MA.

Mantziaris, C. and Martin, D. 2000. Native Tit le Corporat ions: A Legal and AnthropologicalAnalysis , The Federation Press, Sydney, in co-operation with National Native Title Tribunal, Perth.



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Martin, D.F., Morphy, F., Sanders, W.G. and Taylor, J. 2002. Making Sense of the Census:Observat ions of the 2001 Enumerat ion in Remote Aboriginal Australia , CAEPR ResearchMonograph No. 22, ANU E Press, Canberra.

Morphy, F. 2004. ‘Indigenous household structures and ABS definitions of the family: whathappens when systems collide, and does it matter?’CAEPR Working Paper No. 26 , Centre forAboriginal Economic Policy Research, The Australian National University, Canberra.

Morphy, F. 2006. ‘Lost in translation? Remote Indigenous households and definitions of thefamily’, Family Matt ers , 73: 23–31.

Morphy, F. (ed.) 2007a.Agency, Cont ingency and Census Process: Observat ions of the 2006Indigenous Enumerat ion Strategy in Remote Aboriginal Australia , CAEPR Research MonographNo. 28, ANU E Press, Canberra.

Morphy, F. 2007b. ‘Performing law: the Yolngu of Blue Mud Bay Meet the native title process’, inB. R. Smith and F. Morphy (eds),The Social Effects of Native Tit le: Recognit ion, Translat ion,

Coexistence , CAEPR Research Monograph No. 27, ANU E Press, Canberra. [Available athttp://epress.anu.edu.au].

Morphy, F. 2007c. ‘Uncontained subjects: “population” and “household” in remote AboriginalAustralia’, Journal of Populat ion Research , 24 (2): 163–84.

Morphy, F. 2008. ‘Enacting sovereignty in a colonized space: the Yolngu of Blue Mud Bay meetthe native title process’, in D. Fay and D. James (eds), ‘Restoring What Was Theirs’: the Right s andWrongs of Land Rest it ut ion , Routledge, London.

Peterson, N. and Taylor, J. 2003. ‘The modernising of the Indigenous domestic moral economy:kinship, accumulation and household composition’,The Asia Pacif ic Journal of Anthropology , 4 (1and 2): 105–122.

Documents

Invisible to the state: kinship and the Yolngu moral order