Kinship, Cohesion, and Space-Time: A Network Analysis of the Indigenous Population of the Murray Darling Basin

Abstract

This thesis presents a formal empirical anthropological analysis of the Indigenous population of the Central Murray Darling Basin (CMDB) region of South East Australia. The first part of the analysis comprises a review of past theoretical assumptions underlying social anthropological models of Indigenous population dynamics generally. The second part comprises a conventional kinship network analysis of a 3138-person population model, and introduces a newly developed spatiotemporal kinship network analysis of the same population model. Results are compared. The mainstream discipline of social anthropology, especially as practiced in Australia, is not a formal science but rather more closely ..