I can't Follow You on This Horde-Clan Business at All': Donald Thomson, Radcliffe-Brown and a Final Note on the Horde‪.‬

Until Les Hiatt published his critical assessment of Radcliffe-Brown's classic 1930-1 formulation of Australian territorial organization in 1962, the model had remained virtually unchallenged. (1) It is true that W.E.H. Stanner (1933) in the Daly River area, Lauriston Sharp (1934) and Donald Thomson (1939: 211-12) working in Cape York, and Phyllis Kaberry (1939:30-1, 136) and Theodore Hernandez (1941) working in the Kimberley, had all indicated that some aspect of the model did not apply to groups of bush dwelling Aboriginal people they worked with, prior to 1962, but it was only with Hiatt's critique that the evidence was marshalled, and a compelling and coherent case made for the incoherence of Radcliffe-Brown's formulation of the concept of the horde. (2) In the terminology of today, the horde is referred to as the band or land-using group, as opposed to the clan or land-owning group. Although Radcliffe-Brown tried to maintain this distinction, he used the term horde inconsistently, sometimes for the land-using and sometimes for the land-owning group, and asserted that the land-using group was made up of males only from the landowning group (clan). (3) Hiatt clearly demonstrated the falsity of this assertion by showing that no such land-using group had been reported in the Australian literature. Outside native title applications and land claims, and ethnographic reconstruction, this debate is only of historical importance today, but in the middle 1960s it was heated and significant. If Hiatt was correct, it meant the elegant and aesthetically appealing fit between Aboriginal social and local organization, was disrupted. The purest expression of this fit was Claude Levi-Strauss's (1949) model of Aboriginal society, in which the males of each patrilineal clan lived on their own clan's estate and were linked to surrounding clans by the exchange of sisters. Hiatt compounded his 1962 attack on this orderly system at the Man the Hunter symposium in 1966 (Hiatt 1968) by telling Levi-Strauss that Gidjingali women, and by implication many other Aboriginal women, were not exchanged between patrilineal clans, but were bestowed by individuals outside their own clan, namely their mothers and mother's brothers. After the symposium the editors of the Man the Hunter volume invited Levi-Strauss to comment on Hiatt's work, which he did dismissing it on the grounds of the recency of his fieldwork (1958-1960), which meant that he was dealing with 'what is left of a collapsing tribe' (1968:210-211). These fighting words are a good measure of the significance the debate had at that time. Joseph Birdsell provided his own version of Levi-Strauss's argument in 1970, in what was the last defensive sally in this debate.