Familiar Forms: Homologues, Culture and Gender in Northern Australia

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Abstract
This article challenges the argument that gender is a wholly cultural category, and proposes a potential point of reconciliation between universal and cultural processes. It suggests that there is a critical relationship between the physical embodiment of gender and the creation of fundamental cognitive categories. It argues that these categories are universal, being based on anatomical difference, and that they permeate all cultural categories. The discussion is grounded in a particular ethnographic context, an Aboriginal community in northern Australia, and focuses on the ways in which gender categories and their perceived qualities and values are symbolically encoded in material culture, modes of representation and the physical environment. Though the ethnographic data emphasize the potential for cultural adaptations to build upon universal foundations with unlimited diversity, they also point to the persistent influence of homologous, and thus universal, cognitive associations.

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