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Of the 325 people who lived on the island, he photographed 219, then used the photographs to ask them how they were related to others. He made 25,000 kinship identifications, at which point he had only scratched the surface of a bewilderingly intricate classificatory system.⁶⁵

It was not until he moved to the other side of the continent, to the meteorological station in Broome, that Rose started to make sense of his data. In Broome, he made friends with a young resident medical practitioner, Alec Jolly, newly arrived from the south. Jolly had already scandalized the locals by refusing to have different surgery hours for Aborigines.⁶⁶

Had Rose read Friedrich Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State? asked Jolly. No, he hadn’t.⁶⁷ Jolly explained that late in his life, Engels’ long-time friend and colleague, Karl Marx, had taken an interest in the foundational writings of the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan. Marx honored the relative absence of inequalities of the first human societies by naming them “primitive communism.”

After Marx died, Engels took Marx’s notes and wrote the Origin of the Family. Engels’ focus was on the material conditions of life in these first societies. These were matrilineal, he argued, as a consequence of the role women played in the reproduction of life itself. These forms of family life came to an end with the arrival of private property and the state. “The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man seized the reins in the house also, the woman was degraded, enslaved, the slave of the man’s lust, a mere instrument for breeding children.”⁶⁸

Using Rose’s data from Groote Island, Rose and Jolly wrote an article that was published in 1942 in Man, the prestigious journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. There, they concluded that although Anindilyakwa women and men were able to marry multiple husbands and wives and have other sexual relations without sanction, a complex system of kin classification created an intricate pattern of sexual taboos that limited the possibilities of consanguinity in a small population, and thus the emergence of recessive genes. In Australia, some tribes were matrilineal, and even when others appeared to be patrilineal, these, they argued, must originally have been matrilineal. In any event, they at least remained indirectly matrilineal.⁶⁹

Rose and Jolly followed this up with a long article in the Annals of Eugenics analyzing with help of elaborate diagrams the major kinship systems in Australia, quite different in their schematic forms, but to the same genetic effect and with underlying matrilineal architectures.⁷⁰ In presenting this thesis, they were following Engels, though they didn’t cite him – presumably that wouldn’t have helped them to get their paper published in prestigious scholarly journals.

Jolly was a member of the Communist Party of Australia, and Rose’s experience of the shocking conditions of life of Aboriginal people on the margins of colonial society prompted him to join as well. The Communist Party published a 64-page booklet they had written together, under the pseudonym “Jagara,” Frederick Engels, Lewis Morgan and the Australian Aborigine.

“Throughout the Capitalist world today the diplomaed flunkies of the Capitalist State unite in chorus against Morgan and his work and there is hardly an anthropologist of any official standing outside of the Soviet Union, who is not anti-Morgan.” In the booklet, they outlined for the benefit of comrades and fellow travelers the elaborate systems of Aboriginal kinship, manifest in “a continual fitting of everybody he meets into his own classificatory system.”⁷¹

After leaving Broome, Rose became a public servant in the Department of Territories in Canberra. Here he was regarded with suspicion and continuously followed by the secret state police, ASIO. In an official government inquiry, he was accused of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Unable to keep his public service job and blocked from getting an academic job, Rose fled Australia.

In 1956, Rose managed to secure a university position in East Berlin. In order to become a professor there, he wrote up his Groote Elyandt research and submitted it for the postdoctoral degree of Habilitationsschrift to the Faculty of Philosophy, Humboldt University – “in the democratic sector of Berlin,” he said in the introduction. It was published as a 572-page book in 1960, Classification of Kin, Age Structure and Marriage Amongst the Groote Eylandt Aborigines: A Study in Method and a Theory of Australian Kinship. Rose dedicated the book “To the Australian working class who alone can ensure the full emancipation of Australian Aborigines.”⁷²

Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Marxist intellectual orthodoxy was on the move. Engels came under fire for regarding the conditions of reproduction of the family as foundational, rather than the means of material production or economic life in so-called “primitive communism,” which for Engels – also in retrospective error from a newly minted Soviet point of view – was a subject of “romantic idealization.”⁷³ By his 1960 book, Rose had been forced to toe the party line and Engels, once again, barely gets a mention.⁷⁴

When we visited Groote Eylandt to do our literacy work,^§MS0.0a a missionary linguist, Julie Waddy, was translating the Bible into Anindilyakwa. An Anglican Mission had been set up on Groote in 1943, and one of its first agendas was to build dormitories for girls to prevent what was considered “promiscuity.” Christian ideas of monogamy were based on a different and far simpler kin classificatory system than the Anindilyakwa. The notion of promiscuity itself failed to recognize the presence of an elaborate and strictly rule-governed Anindilyakwa system of kin.

Rose called these rules of kin polygyny and gerontocracy, where both men and women who lived their whole lifespan would have at least four marriages, and where the age differences were vast in both directions, older/younger men and women marrying younger/older men and women. All of this was regulated by elaborate marriage promises and incest taboos, as well as an economic logic related to the work of men and women, and the reproductive age of women.⁷⁵

If the missionaries failed to see this, they did nevertheless find a bewilderingly complex system in the language – which also expressed, unbeknown to them, evidence of pre-dormitory kinship practices.

“Anindilyakwa is the world’s hardest language,” Julie Waddy’s missionary assistant told us when we were doing our research there. “There are five noun classes for non-human things, eighteen personal pronoun prefixes, including distinctions such as between first-person inclusive and first-person exclusive … There is lots of redundancy. For example, both pronouns and verbs indicate person. In writing the Bible down, a lot of the redundancy is removed, edited out.” The “editing out” was not just linguistic. The dormitories and the Bible translation together were editing out a way of life.⁷⁶

This brings us back to our multimodal grammar. Rose showed, in the case of the Anindilyakwa, Aboriginal kinship systems were extraordinarily complex, and for a systematic purpose. This is the “context of situation” of a complicated set of relationship classifiers. Rose found thirty-three Anindilyakwa relationship words during his research, including dadidja or mother’s mother’s brother’s daughter, and nabura, father’s sister’s son. This was the contextual basis for the plethora of pronouns encountered by the Bible translators and the elaborate redundancy through syntactic inflection. These were not mere figments of language, nor singularly conceptual. They were deeply written into the material experience of life – the meanings in bodies and words were at one.

And even more in the Anindilyakwa grammar of multimodality: the structures of lineage that governed marriage and taboos – clans, moieties, sections, and subsections – were marked by totems. By transposition, groups and persons in those groups are the wind, a bird, the central hill on the island. People live at the classificatory intersection of their co-presence as totemic animals, as representatives of place. These meanings are tied together into “Dreamtime” accounts of the genesis of the universe, pasts that are also manifest as destinies eternally to be re-enacted in every present.

Still more complicated, the names are fluid – different people known and named according to the namer’s relation to them. And when someone dies, the world must be renamed. Not only exceedingly complex, these meanings were far more fluid than static systems of meaning in the modern world where signifier–signified relations are relatively stable, stable enough to afford, as Saussure did,^§MS3d priority to structure over history in meaning.

In terms of our typology of materialization, Anindilyakwa kin is a system of abstraction. Kin and totemic meanings are not formed on the basis of resemblance or direct pointing; they are as purely arbitrary as Peirce’s and Deacon’s “symbols.”^§AS1.1.3a The difference between these and modern abstractions is their integrated multimodality, the essential synesthesia of their materialization. Abstractions like Bertrand Russell’s ^§MS1a or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s^§MS2.1.1a are isolated in text, idealizations with tenuous connections to the material world that they might be expected to encompass. Aboriginal kinship classifications, no less abstract, subsist in a continuous dialogue between the ideal and the material.

Not that some of the most famous anthropologists have been able to notice this complexity in the ways Rose did. Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss conceded that Aboriginal kin was indeed a classificatory system, albeit “simple.”⁷⁷ Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was impressed enough by so-called “primitive mentality” to write about it extensively, but still considered it “pre-logical.”⁷⁸ Perhaps the twentieth century’s most famous anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss,^§AS1.4.7a drew a distinction between the “savage mind” and the modern mind, the former like the “bricoleur” cobbling together “the oddments left over from human endeavors,” the latter like an engineer with abstract projects and conceptual plans that transcend immediate experience. He invokes Saussure to say how the savage mind conflates image/signifier and concept/signified, and Peirce to indicate its serial directedness.⁷⁹ But when Rose’s Classification of Kin book came out, Lévi-Strauss did write him a nice note: “As far as I know your inquiry into age structure, associated with a series of marriage rule and kinship systems is something quite new.”⁸⁰

Notwithstanding the ideological pressure, Rose never fully recanted his support for Engels. In a book published in Australia near the end of his life, he quoted him again, this time to restate his case “that regularities were certain to be found in Australian kinship systems, these regularities were the concrete expression – or the philosophical necessity – of the reciprocity and cooperative nature of Aboriginal society.”⁸¹ In Aboriginal society work, sex, and philosophy were a unitary system. The differences between First Peoples and modern people is not their degrees of abstraction, but the kinds of multimodal transposition they practice.

The Australian working class proved unable, and also likely unwilling, to emancipate Aboriginal people. The German Democratic Republic^§AS2.3d imploded the year Rose died. However, recent thinking in anthropology has vindicated Morgan’s, Engels’, and Rose’s proposition that the societies of First Peoples were matrilineal.⁸²

The missionaries are gone from Groote now. When we were working there, random gunshots rang out through the night. The policeman told us that it had the highest rate of crime per capita in the world. Police wouldn’t even go to Umbakumba, he said, nor the ambulance, it was too dangerous. The ambulance people say that if you can’t get yourself out to the medical center in white settlement near the manganese mine, you’re not going to survive anyway.⁸³

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⁶⁴ Peter Monteath and Valerie Munt, 2015, Red Professor: The Cold War Life of Fred Rose, Mile End, Australia: Wakefield Press, pp. 19–20, 40–42; Frederick G.G. Rose, 1968, Australia Revisited: The Aborigine Story from the Stone Age to the Space Age, Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, pp. 50, 119–59.

⁶⁵ Frederick G.G. Rose, 1960, Classification of Kin, Age Structure and Marriage Amongst the Groote Eylandt Aborigines: A Study in Method and a Theory of Australian Kinship, Berlin: Academie-Verlag.

⁶⁶ Peter Monteath and Valerie Munt, 2015, Red Professor: The Cold War Life of Fred Rose, Mile End, Australia: Wakefield Press, p. 53.

⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 55.

⁶⁸ Friedrich Engels, 1892, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, New York: International Publishers, p. 47.

⁶⁹ Frederick G.G. Rose and A.T.H. Jolly, 1942, “An Interpretation of the Taboo between Mother-in-Law and Son-in-Law,” Man 42:15–16; Frederick G.G. Rose, 1987, The Traditional Mode of Production of the Australian Aborigines, Sydney, Australia: Angus and Robertson, p. 205.

⁷⁰ A.T.H. Jolly and Frederick G.G. Rose, 1943, “The Place of the Australian Aboriginal in the Evolution of Society,” Annals of Eugenics 12:44–87.

⁷¹ Jagara (pseudonym), 1946(?), Frederick Engels, Lewis Morgan and the Australian Aborigine, Sydney, Australia: Current Book Distributors, pp. 7, 25.

⁷² Frederick G.G. Rose, 1960, Classification of Kin, Age Structure and Marriage Amongst the Groote Eylandt Aborigines: A Study in Method and a Theory of Australian Kinship, Berlin: Academie-Verlag, p. v.

⁷³ L.A. Leontiev, 1944, “Political Economy in the Soviet Union,” Science & Society 8(2):115–25, pp. 115–16.

⁷⁴ Peter Monteath and Valerie Munt, 2015, Red Professor: The Cold War Life of Fred Rose, Mile End, Australia: Wakefield Press, p. 88.

⁷⁵ Frederick G.G. Rose, 1965, The Winds of Change in Central Australia: The Aborigines at Angus Downs, 1962, Berlin: Academie-Verlag, pp. 1–2, 100; Frederick G.G. Rose, 1987, The Traditional Mode of Production of the Australian Aborigines, Sydney, Australia: Angus and Robertson, pp. xiii–xiv.

⁷⁶ Bill Cope, 1998, “The Language of Forgetting: A Short History of the Word,” pp. 192–223 in Seams of Light: Best Antipodean Essays, edited by M. Fraser, Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin; Velma J. Leeding, 1996, “Body Parts and Possession in Anindilyakwa,” pp. 193–249 in The Grammar of Inalienability: A Typological Perspective on Body Part Terms and the Part–Whole Relation, edited by H. Chappel and W. McGregor, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter; R.M.W. Dixon, 1980, The Languages of Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 84.

⁷⁷ Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, 1903 [1963], Primitive Classification, translated by R. Needham, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

⁷⁸ Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, 1910 [1985], How Natives Think, translated by L.A. Clare, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, 1921 [1923], Primitive Mentality, translated by L.A. Clare, New York: Macmillan.

⁷⁹ Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962 [1966], The Savage Mind, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 16–22.

⁸⁰ Peter Monteath and Valerie Munt, 2015, Red Professor: The Cold War Life of Fred Rose, Mile End, Australia: Wakefield Press, p. 183.

⁸¹ Frederick G.G. Rose, 1987, The Traditional Mode of Production of the Australian Aborigines, Sydney, Australia: Angus and Robertson, p. 203.

⁸² Chris Knight, 2008, “Early Human Kinship Was Matrilineal,” pp. 61–82 in Early Human Kinship, edited by N.J. Allen, H. Callan, R. Dunbar, and W. James, Oxford: Blackwell.

⁸³ Bill Cope, 1998, “The Language of Forgetting: A Short History of the Word,” pp. 192–223 in Seams of Light: Best Antipodean Essays, edited by M. Fraser, Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin. Also at: http://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/cope-on-indigenous-australian-language-change

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 42–47. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Anindilyakwa Kin Classification §AS1.1.3c