The AusAnthrop site is dedicated to research and resources in anthropology, for academics as well as the layman. Special accent is on Aboriginal Australia, and more specifically on the Aborigines of the Western Desert cultural bloc. However, other resources are, and future resources will be, of interest to a wider public, whether anthropologists or not.

New books by the author of this website
Laurent Dousset Australian Aboriginal Kinship: An introductory handbook with particular emphasis on the Western Desert. Pacific-credo Publications, 2011 Click image to enlarge		Since the very early years of anthropology, Australian Aboriginal kinship has fascinated researchers in the field as well as theorists. Its complexity is considerable and, as some have remarked, its mechanical and logical beauty is astonishing. This complexity has however discouraged many scholars, students and people working in Aboriginal communities from actively and intellectually engaging with indigenous ways of conceiving and producing relationships based on kinship, despite the fact that it is a domain deeply embedded in everyday life and interaction. This handbook attempts to bring the principles of kinship in general, and Australian Aboriginal kinship in particular, closer to the reader in an understandable and pedagogic way. Aimed at Aboriginal people themselves, students in the social sciences and humanities or, in fact, any other person eager to learn more about Aboriginal Australia, while also discussing some issues of interest to even accomplished anthropologists, the book is divided into four general parts each tackling specific questions. Part 1 deals with the historical and ethnographic background against which the discussions on kinship are framed in later sections. Important concepts in anthropology such as ‘culture’ or ‘hunter-gatherer societies’ are looked at. Part 2 develops the basic tools and concepts needed to understand kinship. It discusses its main domains, such as terminology, marriage, descent and filiation. Part 3 applies the material considered up to this point to actual ethnographic examples from the Australian Western Desert and elaborates on other important concepts such as ‘family’, ‘household’ and ‘domestic group’. Part 4 explains social organisation and, in particular, generational moieties, patri- and matrimoieties, sections and subsections, all of which are central to Aboriginal peoples’ ways of interacting. Finally, the concluding chapter discusses in a more critical fashion the concept of kinship itself and elaborates on the idea of relatedness as a meaningful expansion of formal kinship studies. Order information
Laurent Dousset Assimilating Identities: Social Networks and the Diffusion of Sections. Oceania Monograph 57, 2005 Click image to enlarge		Assimilating Identities is the study and reconstruction of social networks in the Australian Western Desert, covering about 600 000 square kilometers. It is an historical and anthropological analysis of the way Western Desert people, with their over 40 dialectal groups, related to each other through space an time, in particular through the study of the diffusion of one particular aspect of their social organization, the section system, but including also aspects of other cultural and material affinities. (Published as Oceania Monograph No. 57, Oceania Publications, University of Sydney) It is reminded that this monograph is not an introduction into Anthropology or Australian Studies Order information (follow the link to Oceania Monograph and download order form