Two non-literate cultures: A Discussion

Two non-literate cultures, the Arunta of central Australia and the Eskimos of the sub-Arctic region, display similarities and differences in their approaches to kinship, marriage and child-rearing. Though they live in opposite extremes of hot and cold, dry and wet, the two peoples engage in hunting and gathering and manufacture only what they need for their semi-nomadic lives. Their kinship systems are strikingly different, yet both serve to distribute marriageable partners fairly widely. Both peoples also take similar views toward their children, whom they regard as the bearers of spirits of ancient Aborigines or of Eskimo relatives. In neither case is there any written code that describes their kinship systems and the nature of their relations with older spirits. But, in both cases, this knowledge becomes a part of their lives and their views of the people they meet depend largely on the manner in which they are related or, for the Eskimos, related or not related to others.

The Arunta (or Aranda) are the most centrally located of all Aborigine tribes in Australia. Their territory, in the Higher Steppes region of the Macdonnell Ranges near Alice Springs, runs north and south for 700 miles and is 450 miles wide. The land ranges from below sea level at Lake Eyre to an elevation of 2,000 feet. There are only three significant watercourses in the territory and they usually flood violently and quickly subside. For the rest of the year the landscape is hard, yellow soi

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confers a number of new responsibilities on the parties and is viewed as a social and an economic arrangement. Women are essential, of course, to procreation which has several social and economic roles. Aside from the continuation of the group and the potential for continuing alliance among moieties, the social value of procreation derives from the Arunta belief in the reincarnation of ancestral personages or sages. In the process of reincarnation the spirit is believed to be "an entity perfectly independent in origin of any physiological causes [and] the spirit-child merely enters a woman whom it considers sufficiently attractive and who is of the right moiety" (Montagu 327). Both parents, almost always the biological father and mother of the child, are responsible for "the entertainment, amusement, and instruction" of their children and much of the learning process takes the form of games as, for example, children learn to identify animal tracks or sounds as a form of play (Montagu 346). The economic value of child-bearing is high since children are taught to participate in the family's work from a very early age. The Arunta live an open life and children are quickly exposed to every facet of life. The boys set off by th

Category: History - T