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This volume presents papers written about Aboriginal Australia for the AustKin project. By way of definition, ‘kin’ refers to kinship terminology and systems, and related matters of marriage and other behaviour; and ‘skin’ refers to what is also known as ‘social categories’ and what earlier anthropologists (e.g. Fison & Howitt 1880) called ‘social organisation’: moieties, sections, subsections and other similar categories. Kinship terms are ‘egocentric’ in anthropological parlance and skin terms are ‘sociocentric’. Different kinship terms are used depending on the ego (propositus) and who is being referred to. Conversely, skin terms are a property of the person being referred to and the category to which he or she belongs—not of their relationship to someone else. However, membership of a skin category does imply a kinship relationship. For example, I was assigned the skin (subsection) name Jampijina by the Gurindji, which means that I am classified as brother (kinship term papa) to other people of Jampijinaskin, father to Jangala and Nangala, and so on.

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