ound remains permanently frozen with the exception of a few months in summer when several inches of topsoil thaw enough to permit the growth of low-lying bushes and other plants. The inhabited areas are low and flat and generally covered with snow and ice. Fishing in rivers and hunting caribou can be a major or a minor aspect of some Eskimos' food supplies. But the majority live from the sea, hunting whales, seals, walrus and sea birds. Eskimos generally live in large groups during the winters and break into smaller familial hunting parties during the summers.
The Arunta, like every Aboriginal group in Australia, have a very complicated system of kinship that defines the nature of "the relationship of every individual to every other individual member of the tribe" and to every other individual with whom a tribe member may potentially have social relations (Montagu 23). The Arunta, like every tribe, belong to totemic clans. The Arunta organization of the totemic groups is not, as it is in so many other Aborigine tribes, involved in the regulation of marriage. All tribes are divided into moieties, intermarrying exogamous groups, but in most the totemic system is tightly tied in with the construction of the moieties.
Among the Arunta the moieties are further subdivided into two groups each and, in some Arunta groups, the four sections are further divided, producing a total of eight classes. The Arunta also, in common with other tribes, view the regulation of marriage as necessarily being a relationship between alternating generations. Thus a man and his father's father, and his son's son are in one class while his father and son are in the other class. Within this system of localized exogamy the Arunta "have limited the range of partners in marriage to a degree that most other peoples would think exaggerated" (Maddock 45).
Within the eight-class system of the Arunta not only does a man have to marry into the opposite ...