Hunters, collectors and anthropologists

A researcher is uncovering the link between Aboriginal societies and food resources.

Ian Keen went to a remote Aboriginal community to study traditional songs. The last thing he expected to hear on arrival was a rock band.

“The shock was going to tropical Darwin, which had a frontier flavour about it. This was just before Cyclone Tracey. The heat was the big impression. We stayed at the Seabreeze Motel, which had concrete rooms, ceiling fans, no air conditioning, and the largest t-bone steaks you’ve ever seen.”

Soon afterward, Keen and his young family made the long journey east of Darwin to Milingimbi, an island mission run by the Uniting Church. As he stepped off the small plane, the first thing he recalls is hearing the clamour of electric guitars.

“Later, I came to appreciate that the band’s music was an interesting cultural hybrid,” Keen says. “But at the time, it sounded like kids’ rock and roll to me. I’m not a specialist in that kind of music.”

Despite the unexpected welcome, Keen began his manikay study. This gradually expanded into a broader analysis of traditional social structures: cosmology, kinship, marriage, and associated ceremonies. This inquiry has formed the bedrock of a 30-year career in which Dr Keen, now a visiting fellow at the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology, has carried out research in several regions of Australia. Lately, he has sought to trace social relations in Aboriginal communities around the country prior to European settlement. He has been pondering why it is that pre-colonial Aboriginal societies tended to be more egalitarian than some of their counterparts elsewhere in the world.

In a paper published in the journal Current Anthropology, Keen argues that for any society to develop lasting social hierarchies, it must have access to plentiful, localised resources that could be defended. In this event, some people can assume authority over others. On the northwest coast of North America, for example, recent hunter-gatherers enjoyed a stable climate and concentrated, defendable resources, especially plentiful salmon. As a consequence, these societies developed such enduring inequalities as inherited chiefly office and marked social classes, while some even kept slaves.

In contrast, Aboriginal societies did not develop such enduring inequalities. There is no widely accepted anthropological evidence that any Indigenous Australian society had chiefs, marked social classes, or kept slaves. Keen argues this relative egalitarianism was the result of constraints arising from variable food resources and an unstable climate, meaning there was limited scope for people to assume dominion over others by asserting exclusive access to territory and resources.

“It’s not exactly an environmental determinist argument, but it is suggesting that those conditions imposed restraints,” Keen says.

“I make the assumption that wherever they can, some humans will take the opportunities given to them to establish some kind of dominion over others. So my paper argues that even if people knew how to dominate one another, and wanted to do so, the opportunities were not there.”

Keen says the idea that resources could be key to constraining Aboriginal social structures occurred to him when he encountered the work of archaeologist Brian Hayden, who attributed the enduring social inequalities among the peoples of the northwest coast of North America to resource abundance.

“At that point, my ears metaphorically pricked up. I thought, ‘If that’s the case, then perhaps unreliable resources in Australia were responsible for the relatively egalitarian societies.’”

Keen was able to investigate this hypothesis using data drawn from across his career, particularly his book Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia on the threshold of colonisation, which was awarded the Stanner Prize this year. This work looked at seven Indigenous communities from geographically diverse areas of Australia, covering the tropical north to the temperate south, and points east to west. Keen found that while none of these groups exhibited enduring inequalities, some of them did develop transient inequalities, particularly around matters of kinship and marriage.

“Take the Yonglu system in the Northern Territory,” Keen says. “It results in a much greater likelihood of a man’s potential wives being the right age. If you want very high polygyny, on average the man’s wives have to be 10 to 15 years younger than he.

“If your father was 15 years older than your mother, then your mother’s ‘brother’s’ children (a category including a man’s potential wives) are, on average, going to be 15 years younger than you. It falls out generation after generation. The reality is more complicated than that, but as a model, it’s quite clear.”

“What it means is that because a man’s wives are that much younger, you get the right conditions for polygyny, which is to say, more ‘wife years’ than ‘husband years’. Men are waiting until they’re in their mid-twenties, while women are marring in their early to mid-teens.”

Keen says the expressions of polygyny could become very marked; one man with more than 20 wives was recorded in northeast Arnhem Land.

“High polygyny is not only an index of inequality because you’ve got these inequalities around the number of wives a man has, but also because it leads to inequalities between patri-groups [clans]. A man with many wives engenders a growing group. You get disparity of group size, which matters in your relationships with other clans, because you’ve got physical support from your children.”

So while a high-polygyny clan would prosper given the right resource and kinship structures, Keen argues it would be kept in check by “demographic vicissitudes”. If only daughters were born to a generation, for example, the patri-group would weaken as there would be no males to pass on membership.

“Another constraint is that growing groups tend to split. There’s no central government keeping them together, and they’re dispersed anyway through the food quest. They are not very cohesive, on the whole.

“As a consequence, you assume that power relations between groups were always in flux. There is evidence in the ethnographic record to suggest that kind of flux in Arnhem Land.”

Keen believes that understanding the social structures at work in pre-colonial Indigenous societies is important for a number of reasons. First, it adds to the “deep history” of humans, which is in many respects a story of power within and between societies and cultures. Second, it can help to explain differences in the way various Aboriginal groups reacted on first encountering newcomers. He also views his work as a chance to raise awareness about the diversity evident in Indigenous cultures.

“In general works on Aborigines, you tend to get homogenisation. I’ve always been interested in comparative studies – particularly since arriving in Arnhem land and hearing the rock music, it was totally unexpected.

“Getting at the nature of variation within what seems to be a homogenous society is particularly exciting and will, I hope, provide a better understanding of Aboriginal society both within Australia and in a global context.” 

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ANU Reporter
Winter 2006