Spirituality and Society

Skin / Skin Name

In many Aboriginal societies, skin names (often simply called “skins”) are classificatory terms assigned at birth that locate a person within a highly structured kinship system. A skin name is not a personal name but a social category that determines how an individual should relate to others: who they may marry, how they address different relatives, and what behavioural obligations apply in particular relationships. Skin systems vary regionally, but they function as an abstract social grammar, allowing people to situate strangers immediately within a known network of rights and responsibilities.

Moiety

Closely related to skin systems is the concept of moiety, the division of society into two complementary halves. Every person, animal, plant, and ancestral being belongs to one moiety or the other, and social balance depends on the interaction between them. Marriage is typically exogamous at the moiety level, ensuring continual exchange between the two halves. Moieties are not merely social categories but cosmological ones, often associated with opposing yet interdependent principles and ancestral groupings.

Kinship

Kinship in Aboriginal Australia is an expansive and highly elaborated system that extends far beyond the nuclear family. Kin terms classify people by generation, gender, and skin or moiety status, producing a dense web of reciprocal obligations. These relationships regulate everyday behaviour, including patterns of respect, avoidance, cooperation, and authority. Kinship is inseparable from Country, as rights to land, stories, and ritual knowledge are inherited through kin relations rather than held as individual property.

Elders

Within this system, Elders hold recognised authority based on accumulated cultural knowledge, ritual standing, and demonstrated moral responsibility rather than formal office. Elders are custodians of Dreaming narratives, ceremonial practice, and Law, and they guide teaching, dispute resolution, and communal decision-making. Their authority is contextual and relational: it is strongest where their lineage, Country, and knowledge are directly implicated.

Law (Lore)

Aboriginal Law, often rendered as Lore to distinguish it from European legal systems, refers to the body of ancestral rules established in the Dreaming that govern social conduct, ritual practice, and relations to Country. Law is not written or legislated but transmitted through story, ceremony, and lived practice. It encompasses moral norms, ecological responsibilities, and spiritual obligations, and its authority derives from the ancestral order itself rather than from human institutions.

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