This book is an attempt to demonstrate that the categories by which the aboriginal peoples of Australia order their social lives are predominantly kin categories – a moot point in social anthropology – and, beyond this, to reveal the structures and the relations among the structures of Australian systems of kin classification. The project is, in a way, a continuation of one initiated by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in 1910 and to which he devoted much of his professional attention for many years thereafter.

Radcliffe-Brown aspired to demonstrate, as he said in 1951, that all Australian “kinship and marriage systems” are “varieties of one general type.” Although his language was taxonomic, his vision was more in keeping with the contemporary structuralist program which, in the area of kinship studies, may be described as an attempt to isolate a set of elementary structures of which, in varying combinations, all kinship systems are constructed, and to order the empirical diversity among these systems by showing how any one may be derived from any other by certain rules of transformation or permutation. I will argue that Radcliffe–Brown did not accomplish what he set out to do, largely because of certain misconceptions about the structural principles he supposed all Australian kinship systems have in common, and because he (like so many other anthropologists before and after) fell into the methodological trap of confounding structural semantic and sociological accounts of systems of kin classification.