Moiety Names in South-Eastern Australia: Distribution and Reconstructed History

This report¹ forms part of the project 'Skin and kin in Aboriginal Australia: linguistic and historical perspectives on the dynamics of social categories', whose object is to document and map the Australian systems of social category names and reconstruct their prehistory.² Social category systems include subsections, sections and moieties. Here, we report on the moiety names in six of the terminological sets found in south-eastern Australia— identified on the basis of (near-)identical names.³ Typically, these terminological sets extend over a number of different languages, including languages that are not closely related linguo-genetically to one another. Moreover, the terminologies may differ between languages that are closely related to one another.