Aborigines: An Cultural Description
The scope of this essay is to offer an objective description of the non-Westernized culture of the Australian Aborigines. This essay shall address and provide information relevant to the three relationships of cultural anthropology within Aboriginal culture. These three anthropological relationships are defined as the following: people and their environment (economic aspects of life), people and each other (social aspects), and people and the supernatural (religious aspects). For the purpose of a clearer illustration of the aforementioned, examples of customs exclusive to Aboriginal culture, and thus unique and interesting in nature, shall be cited interspersingly throughout the essay as well. As it is worth noting, the culture of the Aborigine as it is herein depicted is that which was in existence in the few hundred years just before European settlement occurred during the 16th century (Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, sec. IV) and thus created an influential Western climate among the indigenous inhabitants. Hence, it is purely that traditional Aboriginal culture untouched by European hands that the researcher portrays in this essay.
Trade, then, may be viewed as an interaction between individuals or groups, and thus relegated to the confines of the social machinery of a culture. In this way did the religious aspect of totemism play and integral part in the social aspect of defining one's property from another's. Wooden tools consisted of spears, spear-throwers, boomerangs, clubs, shields, and sticks for digging (sec. The most significant element in the initiation process is the complete removal of the individual from society; all these measures are taken to ensure that the initiate will remember the knowledge passed on to him by the elders once he is on his own, as this is detrimental to the nonliterate Aboriginal culture (668). Aborigines utilized a plethora of natural resources for refinement into rather complex tools: fishing hooks from shell, animal fur and human hair to make rope and nets, bone needles used to stitch animal skins, and tree bark, reeds, and palm leaves to make baskets (sec. Regarding male initiation rites, the elders of a village decide the time for initiation and thus are the boys taken from the village while the women cry and make a show of resistance as required by ritual (Haviland 668). Kinship ties had great influence in the daily social relations of the Aborigine. In religious ceremonies, the character of a Dreaming is taken on by an Aborigine and the Dreamings wanderings are carried out; the paths followed and the places visited by the Dreaming held great spiritual significance to the Aborigines and also served as a territorial marker for a clan, or group of individuals that are descendants of a common ancestor (sec. The honeys of Trigona bees, being highly concentrated, represent a high in the Aboriginal concept of sweetness in that the pursuit of the honey had important effects on the economics of Aborigines; this is explained by ethnographic evidence that highlights the limiting factor of the spread of edge-ground stone axes being a function of the area of distribution of Trigona bees, which declined as one traveled westward away from shelter-offering trees (Hiatt 161). Objective observation and subsequent description of a non-western culture certainly allows for a greater avenue of scientific discovery of other cultures in that such an activity serves to highlight the constant relationships (economy, society, and religion) that are readily discernable in all human cultures.
Common topics in this essay:
Encarta Encyclopedia,
Firstly Aborigines,
Inland Aborigines,
Australian Aborigines,
Aborigine Dreamings,
III Kinship,
William Haviland,
South Wales,
Land Aborigines',
Traditional Aborigines,
sec iii,
microsoft encarta,
encyclopedia sec,
encarta encyclopedia sec,
microsoft encarta encyclopedia,
encarta encyclopedia,
aboriginal culture,
encyclopedia sec iii,
sec iii 1,
iii 1,
sec ii,
sec iii 2,
iii 2,
european settlement,
plant fibers,
|
Acceptance Essays
