Kinship and Connection: Genealogy and Geography in Indigenous Australia

Dear Colleagues,

You are warmly invited to contribute an article to the forthcoming Special Issue of the MDPI journal Genealogy, titled “Kinship and Connection: Genealogy and Geography in Indigenous Australia”. This Special Issue of Genealogy will present contributions from experts working at the intersection of kinship research, tangible and intangible cultural heritage preservation, customary land rights, child custody, legal pluralism, and community development with Indigenous Australian peoples. Across these professional domains, contributors are united by their recognition that customary kinship culture functions as the generative core of cohesive human social culture (Leach, 1965; O’Brien, 2017; Read, 2007; Rose, 2017; Taylor & Davis, 2018).

In this model of cultural cohesion, kinship is more than a genealogical folk model, extending beyond a semantic resource for assigning terms to individuals and relations between them. More expansively, this model construes the grammar of kinship as the extensible foundation for all aspects of human social culture, tying together language, religion, and economics into an emergent, mutually reinforcing web of cohesive social culture. In this model, kinship thus takes on a generative role within human social culture more broadly, whereby the grammar of kinship forms the foundational semantic repertoire for other forms of distinctive aspects of social culture (Bennardo, 2016; Leaf & Read, 2020; Read, 2007; Read & El Guindi, 2022; White, 2014).

While the generative role of kinship may be considered a universal feature of all human social cultures, it plays an especially important role for Indigenous Australian cultures with respect to the culturally distinct concept of ‘connection to country’ (Godden, 2020; Thorpe et al., 2023; Yashadhana et al., 2023). Connection to country expresses a systemic feedback between, on the one hand, continuously unfolding kinship relations linking hundreds of generations of Indigenous descendants together, and on the other hand, the continuous transmission of fundamentally coherent linguistic, religious, and economic ties to specific localities across Australia.

In its generative role, kinship forms the causal centre of this systemic phenomenon, linking individuals and communities not only to one another, but to the locations at which constituent genealogical relationships are formed, reinforced, celebrated, and renegotiated. These include not only the locations of birth, death, and marriage familiar to canonical genealogical research, but also locations distinctive to Indigenous Australian cultures. These include conception sites, religious ceremonies and other sacred sites, natural resource clusters, and customary asset repositories or ‘keeping places.’

As with any cultural concept, connection to country encodes intuitive, commonsense yet sophisticated meanings, forming an integral part of personal and collective identity for Indigenous Australian peoples. At the same time, it also forms a complex scientific phenomenon that can be modelled and analysed in terms of the distribution of kin-based Indigenous populations across the Australian continent.

This Special Issue of Genealogy will explore the ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers bring their various perspectives and expertise in cultural heritage preservation, population health, forensic and expert social anthropology and history to a multivalent, inclusive, and ultimately coherent understanding of the dynamics of kinship culture.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editors Dr James Rose (james.rose@unimelb.edu.au) and Dr Joel Liddle (jlidd1984@gmail.com), or to the Genealogy editorial office (genealogy@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

References

Bennardo, G. (2016). Frames of Reference and Kinship Terminology Systems. Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.5070/SD992032324

Godden, L. (2020). Legal Geography – Place, Time, Law and Method the Spatial and the Archival in ‘Connection to Country’. In T. O’Donnell, D. F. Robinson, & J. Gillespie (Eds), Legal geography: Perspectives and methods. Routledge.

Leach, E. R. (1965). Culture and Social Cohesion: An Anthropologist’s View. Daedalus, 94(1), 24–38.

Leaf, M. J., & Read, D. (2020). Introduction to the science of kinship. Lexington Books.

O’Brien, K. (2017). Social Cohesion and Resilience in First Australian Family and Kinship Networks. Journal of Family History, 42(4), 440–451. https://doi.org/10.1177/0363199017725347

Read, D. W. (2007). Kinship Theory: A Paradigm Shift. Ethnology, 46(4), 329–364.

Read, D. W., & El Guindi, F. (2022). What is Kinship About? Again. Critique of the Cambridge Handbook of Kinship, Edited by Sandra Bamford. Kinship, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.5070/K72156496

Rose, J. W. W. (2017). Kinship, Cohesion, and Space-Time: A Network Analysis of the Indigenous Population of the Murray Darling Basin [The University of Melbourne]. http://hdl.handle.net/11343/191247

Taylor, J., & Davis, A. (2018). Social Cohesion. In H. Callan (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology (1st edn, pp. 1–7). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396

Thorpe, A., Yashadhana, A., Biles, B., Munro-Harrison, E., & Kingsley, J. (2023). Indigenous Health and Connection to Country. In A. Thorpe, A. Yashadhana, B. Biles, E. Munro-Harrison, & J. Kingsley, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Global Public Health. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190632366.013.436

White, D. R. (2014). Kinship, Class, and Community. In J. Scott & P. Carrington, The SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis (pp. 129–147). SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446294413.n10

Yashadhana, A., Fields, T., Liu, E., Serova, N., O’Leary, M., Kenning, G., Kuchelmeister, V., Lockhart, J., & De Leeuw, E. (2023). Therapeutic aspects of Connection to Country and cultural landscapes among Aboriginal peoples from the Stolen Generations living in urban NSW, Australia. Public Health Research & Practice, 33(4). https://doi.org/10.17061/phrp3342332

Dr. James Rose
Dr. Joel Liddle
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• kinship
• population health
• cultural heritage preservation
• social anthropology
• history
• linguistics
• forensic and expert social anthropology
• FESA
• legal pluralism