Section counting numbers
From InterSciWiki
The perspective taken in the Social Networks and Cognition paper aligns with Leaf (2008) that it is organizations that have coordination, rules, and indigenous algorithms. Further (2008: 32) the kinship algorithm described here is not an individual but a family algorithm. In a 4-section system, F, M, {S and D}, and {SW and DH} each belong to a different section. Once the section assignment of one family member is known, the others can be assigned accordingly. The organizations to which individuals belong are not only nuclear families but members of the extended family that live for certain periods of time in the same IA Country around the same waterhole and set of resources. Section memberships not only coordinate which people share the role of cosection member but also assign these roles across organizations (Countries), across waterholes, and across those who have different relationships to the Dreamings of theirs and others' Countries. It is these Dreamings that populate the different kinds of things and beings in the world and its local environments, which are differentiated but unified across organizations. In coordinating locally, the fact that common algorithms are "built up and held in common memory by a group of individuals in this way is a large part of what defines them as participants in the organization. When so used, its users are at one and the same time deciding what to do as a collectivity and what each person’s contribution to that collectivity will be. These decisions are not made in absolute detail at one moment in time, of course, but as an ongoing process and within broad and well understood parameters that can be elicited as still further algorithms which concern the ways various specific tasks are performed as well as the way individuals move from task to task on the basis of skill, sex, availability, and deference" (Leaf 200*:32-33).
For sections in Indigenous Australia (IA) this is the Indigenous algorithm for: Can a man A and woman B marry? If they know their section names and which can marry, the answer is evident. Further, if they are unconnected in a kinship network and one belongs to a section, they can marry, so assign the other the right section
Can they determine if they are in the right section if they do not know their section names? I.e., from their genealogical relatedness alone?
1. If they have a common ancestor, e.g., grandparent, then
2. Do they have an odd number of female links in reaching the ancestor?
3. Do they have an odd number of male links in reaching the ancestor?
4. Right section if odd/odd. No otherwise.
If no common ancestor (usually a minority in a small structurally endogamous community), then: 5. Find a married couple C and D in the network where A can trace a path to C and B to D.
6. Do A and C have an odd number of female links? If A/C are opposite in sex reversed odd and even.
7. Do B and D have an odd number of female links? f B/D are opposite in sex reversed odd and even.
8. If the result is odd/odd, then A and B can marry. 1-4 will do in most cases. Where there are contradictory answers depending on the genealogical paths, do not marry. Then only consistent marriages propagate. Auxiliary rules 5-8 may need to be corrected but this means that there is a process that propagates consistent marriages to everyone in a connected network who marries.
Now we have an organization (Countries) where people are cohesively connected and local behaviors (Dreaming) that help to organize local activities and categories, and a set of marriage-section assignments that are self-organizing even in the absence of named sections. To these marriage behaviors we add prohibition of marriages between those with the same Dreaming entities and with Omaha-extended prohibitions.
