such rare cases as to prove the rule. Therefore there was no social organisation in this tribe in the sense in which I use the term.
Looked at from the standpoint of marriage, the organisation of the Kurnai on a geographical basis, in local groups, contrasts strongly with the Dieri organisations in class divisions. A Dieri by birth becomes one of a group of the same class, and is of the same local group as his father. One of the Kurnai belongs only by birth to that group of people of the local organisation to which his father and father's father belonged. As there is no class organisation, he cannot, to use a Dieri term, be Noa to any group of women of the other class; but, what amounts to much the same in principle, he belongs to a local group which marries only with certain other local groups, and to which, to apply the Dieri term, he is Noa. As he obtains a wife from one of those groups, so does his sister go as a wife to some man of one or other of them. In this diagram the two inter-marrying local groups are designated A and B.
| Group A | Group B | |||
| 1. m. A | 5. m. B | |||
| 2. f B | 6. f. A | |||
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| 3. m. A | ← brother and sister → | 7. f. B | ||
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| 4. m. A | ← brother and sister → | 8. f. B | ||
1 and 6 are brother and sister, own or tribal; so are 5 and 2. Although 2 is the Mummung of 7, who is her Benduk, and 5 is the Barbtuk of 3, yet 3 and 7 are brother and sister, 3 being the Lit, or child, of 5. The same is the case as to the two lower levels, the fraternal relation counting between those in each level.
In consequence of this restricted system of relationship the whole community was, so to say, enclosed in a net, the meshes of which were so small that very few could escape. That such cases were very rare can be understood when one
