Abstract: |
This collection about the Tiwi consists of 11 documents and a culture summary, all in English. It covers a variety of historical, geographical, and cultural information from 1900 to the 1960s collected primarily by professional anthropologists and government officials. The Tiwi are aboriginal people inhabiting Melville and Bathurst Islands of northern Australia. Anthropologist Jane Goodale provides comprehensive firsthand ethnographic accounts of Tiwi society as observed in 1950s and 1960s. She describes major features of Tiwi society through detailed exposition of the experiences of individual women, men, and children in different groups (households, matrilineal sibs, phratries, and moieties) and a wide variety of social situations relating to puberty rites, marriage arrangements, and funeral ceremonies. Other anthropological studies included examine status manipulation and political behavior, art and religion, kinship and social organization, use of personal names, marriage contracts, puberty and initiation rites, economic activities, and division of labor by gender. There is little information on changes that might have occurred in Tiwi society after 1962 (the year Goodale visited the area for the last time) to the present
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