ARUNTA. In Central Australia, around Alice Springs, are still found representatives of the Arunta tribe—a typical stone age hunting people with peculiar beliefs, ritual and customs. The tribe is divided into two patrilineal, exogamous intermarrying sections which are split into two, and in some cases into four. The natives believe that the tribe is composed of two groups with differing physical characters. They are totemic in their own fashion. A child has the totem from the spot where its mother believes the child to have been conceived. The totems are there fore localized in distribution. Marriage is regulated by the child's position in the moiety, section, or sub-section to which he or she belongs by birth, and a man marries the daughter of his mother's mother's brother's daughter. Complicated ceremonies, closely associated with the breeding of the totem animals or the flowering of the totem plants, are held when conditions seem to be favour able—as when there is promise of the approach of a good season. Initiation rites—circumcision, sub-incision and head biting are practised in prolonged ceremonies. Women have their analogous rites. The authority of custom—the power of the elder men—the belief in magic, the presence of a quasi-hereditary local headman (Inkata) with a vague, indefinite power, which, if he possess personality and ability, may be great, the belief in the sacred nature and magically efficacious association of the Churinga, are among the more prominent features of this group, whose peculiarities have lent weight to the criticism that in them we approach most nearly to primitivity. They may, however, be degenerates, or freaks, whose philosophizings have drawn them to strange conclusions. (See AUSTRALIA : Ethnology.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Sir B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Arunta (1927).Bibliography.-Sir B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Arunta (1927).