Gender Roles On Aboriginal Society

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Gender Perspectives Contrary to many traditional gender perspectives, Aboriginal Australian women held a central role within the aboriginal community. Their central roles included work in family life, government structures and their presence was crucial in spiritual ceremonies. Independence amongst both men and women in the aboriginal community was considered to be the key to a well functioning society. Although such independence was exercised in the majority of their daily lives, men and women both held certain roles unique to their gender, that were vital for their culture’s prosperity. A traditional male role in aboriginal society focused on three key elements, his ability to provide, to protect and ultimately, to procreate. Men provided…show more content…
The community used the symbols of the natural world as tools of identification. Both families and clans would associate themselves with a symbol from the natural world, and the symbol would in turn become the family’s totem. Birds were very commonly used as family totems. Due to the wide variety of birds in Australia, families would associate themselves with a species that best represented their social unit. The final aspect of Australian Aboriginal religion involves the spirits of the deceased, and their control over the natural world and the earth’s elements. A spirit commonly referred to by the aboriginal people as the Rainbow Serpent, has control over precipitation, and decides when rain should fall. The community believed that it was possible to communicate with such spirits, and as a result they performed many culturally unique rituals in an effort to please the spirits so animals and elements essential to aboriginal survival would be supplied in plentiful…show more content…
They met at times of ceremony, when one to several hundred members of a single tribe came together. There were complex social and marriage laws, based on the grouping of people within their society. The complex kinship system adopted by their community is how everyone is related to everyone else. The band consisted of two or more families, this was the basic economic group. This would be the group with which one normally travelled alongside and interacted with on a daily basis. The individual family (hearth group) was the fundamental social unit. Generally, each family cooks and camped separately from other families in the bad. The family could function as an economic unit alone, but they preferred the enhanced sociality made possible by traveling and living together in bands. Most of the Aboriginal people were also members of several kinds of social categories, based on a division of the society into two moieties, four sections or semi-moieties, or eight subsections. People were born into the categories and could not change
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