Comment on Denham's Beyond Fictions of Closure in Australian Aboriginal Kinship

This is an important paper with far-reaching consequences for the analysis of Australian indigenous kinship and social organisation, and potentially for other small-scale societies. At its core are hypotheses about the relationship between societal exogamy and systematic age difference between marriage partners (husbands significantly older than wives), addressed through systematic network modeling and backed up with demographic evidence of the kind rarely examined for Australia. Based on this core, the paper extends to consideration of the reasons for the configuration found in Australia, which include avoidance of lethal inbreeding depression, which would otherwise afflict these small groups, and mitigation of the extreme ecological conditions found in many areas. This paper gives attention particularly to changes in kinship and allied systems (such as sections and subsections), which are claimed to be mechanisms for extending marriage alliances and thus increasing chances of group survival. It is a ground breaking attempt to unify various social and environmental factors, which unlike other approaches of this kind, is very specific about data and methods, and provides a way forward in terms of testable hypotheses.