Meyer Fortes (1969: 120), following Radcliffe-Brown, has aptly characterized Australian society in general and Walbiri society in particular as “an incontestable limiting case of a social order wholly comprised within a framework of kinship institutions.” Meggitt (1972) disagrees and argues that “an approach through kinship analysis alone” – which he attributes to Radcliffe-Brown – is inadequate to produce a coherent and intellectually satisfying account of Walbiri or any other Australian society. As Meggitt sees it, by focusing on kinship and attempting to generate “broader social groupings” such as descent groups, moieties, sections, and subsections “from the kinship system itself by regarding them simply as aggregates of like kinship relationships,” we cannot bring together “materials on totemism, kinship, and broader social groupings” except “by means of various ad hoc functional explanations whose logical or systematic connections with [the] kinship analysis are at best strained or analogical.” A more satisfactory account, Meggitt argues, would show how these various institutions are articulated without artificially reducing one to another by relating them all to certain fundamental metaphysical postulates of Australian cultures.

The argument of this chapter is that the evidence presented in Meggitt's Desert People – in my estimation, the single most outstanding social anthropological account of an Australian society – may and must be interpreted as supporting Fortes' proposition.