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For three decades now, the cultural and historical status of the Eskaya minority of southeast Bohol has been in dispute. From early 1980, enthusiasts have claimed that the 3000 or so individuals who comprise this community practice an indigenous way of life and speak a distinctive language with its own writing system. Critics from the press and in government institutions—including the National Museum—have argued alternatively that the Eskaya community is a cult and its language a crude fabrication. Rather than seeking to resolve the debate in favor of one side or another I take an historical-ethnographic approach to examine how the debate has been constructed, contrasting media narratives on the group's origins, with traditional Eskaya perspectives, and an historical-linguistic analysis of the Eskayan language. Media reactions to the Eskaya have echoed responses to the Tasaday Affair of the 1970s, in which a presumably uncontacted community of Mindanao was later characterized as a hoax, bringing to the fore mainstream stereotypes of Filipino indigeneity that were at odds with lived realities. Today in Bohol, many Eskaya people have embraced the politics of indigeneity but done so on their own terms, and the friction between incommensurate notions of authenticity will remain a challenge for social scientists and policy-makers for many years to come.

For three decades now, the cultural and historical status of the Eskaya minority of southeast Bohol has been in dispute. From early 1980, enthusiasts have claimed that the 3000 or so individuals who comprise this community practice an indigenous way of life and speak a distinctive language with its own writing system. Critics from the press and in government institutions—including the National Museum—have argued alternatively that the Eskaya community is a cult and its language a crude fabrication. Rather than seeking to resolve the debate in favor of one side or another I take an historical-ethnographic approach to examine how the debate has been constructed, contrasting media narratives on the group's origins, with traditional Eskaya perspectives, and an historical-linguistic analysis of the Eskayan language. Media reactions to the Eskaya have echoed responses to the Tasaday Affair of the 1970s, in which a presumably uncontacted community of Mindanao was later characterized as a hoax, bringing to the fore mainstream stereotypes of Filipino indigeneity that were at odds with lived realities. Today in Bohol, many Eskaya people have embraced the politics of indigeneity but done so on their own terms, and the friction between incommensurate notions of authenticity will remain a challenge for social scientists and policy-makers for many years to come.

Australia is unique in the world for its diverse and interlocking systems of Indigenous social organisation. On no other continent do we see such an array of complex and contrasting social arrangements, coordinated through a principle of 'universal kinship' whereby two strangers meeting for the first time can recognise one another as kin. For some time, Australian kinship studies suffered from poor theorisation and insufficient aggregation of data. The large-scale AustKin project sought to redress these problems through the careful compilation of kinship information. Arising from the project, this book presents recent original research by a range of authors in the field on the kinship and social category systems in Australia. A number of the contributions focus on reconstructing how these systems originated and developed over time. Others are concerned with the relationship between kinship and land, the semantics of kin terms and the dynamics of kin interactions.

AbstractLinguistic systems are hypothesised to be shaped by pressures towards communicative efficiency that drive processes of simplification. A longstanding illustration of this idea is the claim that Chinese characters have progressively simplified over time. Here we test this claim by analyzing a dataset with more than half a million images of Chinese characters spanning more than 3,000 years of recorded history. We find no consistent evidence of simplification through time, and contrary to popular belief we find that modern Chinese characters are higher in visual complexity than their earliest known counterparts. One plausible explanation for our findings is that simplicity trades off with distinctiveness, and that characters have become less simple because of pressures towards distinctiveness. Our findings are therefore compatible with functional accounts of language but highlight the diverse and sometimes counterintuitive ways in which linguistic systems are shaped by pressures for communicative efficiency.

Introduction : Revisiting Aboriginal Social Organisation / Patrick McConvell -- Evolving Perspectives on Aboriginal Social Organisation : From Mutual Misrecognition to the Kinship Renaissance / Piers Kelly and Patrick McConvell -- Part 1. People and Place. Systems in Geography or Geography of Systems? : Attempts to Represent Spatial Distributions of Australian Social Organisation / Laurent Dousset -- The Sources of Confusion over Social and Territorial Organisation in Western Victoria / Raymond Madden -- Disputation, Kinship and Land Tenure in Western Arnhem Land / Mark Harvey -- Part 2. Social Categories and Their History. Moiety Names in South-Eastern Australia : Distribution and Reconstructed History / Harold Koch, Luise Hercus and Piers Kelly -- Patriclan Subsets of the Ashburton River District in Western Australia / Peter Sutton -- The Birds and the Bees: The Origins of Sections in Queensland / Patrick McConvell -- Generic Terms for Subsections ('Skins') in Australia : Sources and Semantic Networks / Patrick McConvell and Maïa Ponsonnet -- The Development of Arandic Subsection Names in Time and Space / Harold Koch -- Part 3. Kinship Systems. Close-Distant : An Essential Dichotomy in Australian Kinship / Tony Jefferies -- Asymmetrical Distinctions in Waanyi Kinship Terminology / Mary Laughren -- Genesis of the Trinity : The Convergent Evolution of Trirelational Kinterms / Joe Blythe.