Thus there is no uncle term; mother's and father's brothers are included in the same category as father. All cousins are classified in the same group as brothers and sisters. Lewis Henry Morgan, a 19th century pioneer in kinship studies, surmised that the Hawaiian system resulted from a situation of unrestricted sexual access or "primitive promiscuity" in which children called all members of their parental generation father and mother because paternity was impossible to acertain.
Anthropologists now know that there is no history of such practices in any of the cultures using this terminology and that people in these societies make behavioural, if not linguistic, distinctions between their actual parents and other individuals they may call "father" or "mother".
Morgan's theses was based on an ethnocentric assumption that the term for relatives in ego's parents' generation had the same meanings that father and mother have in English. Hawaiian kinship semantics are now thought to be related to the presence and influence of ambilineal descent systems.
The Hawaiian system can be illustrated by actual Hawaiian terms. The Eskimo system is marked by a bilateral emphasis - no distinction is made between patrilineal and matrilineal relatives - and by a recognition of differences in kinship distance - close relatives are distinguished from more distant ones.
Another feature of Eskimo terminology is that nuclear family members are assigned unique labels that are not extended to any other relatives, whereas more distant relatives are grouped together on the basis of collateral degree.
This process is called collateral merging. Because of predominant marking of immediate family members, Eskimo terms usually occur in societies which place a strong emphasis on the nuclear family rather than on extended kin or larger kinship groups. Kung San kin terms. The Iroquois system is based a principle of bifurcate merging.
This probably reflects the more generic, blended term for aunts and uncles in both these categories. Similar differences are found in Croatian names for other relatives. Side of the family is important, at least for close relatives. Becoming the mother of a married son is higher in social status than becoming the mother of a married daughter.
In most regions, typically brothers stayed together in adulthood. Some Chinese families still live this way, but urbanization and changes in housing and economic livelihood have made large extended families increasingly less practical. The term clan refers to a group of people who have a general notion of common descent that is not attached to a specific ancestor.
Some clans trace their common ancestry to a common mythological ancestor. Because clan membership is so important to identity and to social expectations in Navajo culture, when people meet they exchange clan information first to find out how they stand in relationship to each other. People are expected to marry outside the clans of their mothers or fathers. Individuals have responsibilities to both sides of the family, but especially to the matrilineal clan.
I recently had the experience at the community college where I work in Central Arizona of hearing a young Navajo woman introduce herself in a public setting. She began her address in Navajo, and then translated. Her introduction included reference to her clan memberships, and she concluded by saying that these clan ties are part of what makes her a Navajo woman.
The least complex kin naming pattern is found in the Hawaiian system. The nuclear family is de-emphasized. Relatives within the extended family are distinguished only by generation and gender.
This results in just four different terms of reference. Ego's father and all male relatives in his generation have the same kin name 1. Likewise, ego's mother and all female relatives in her generation are referred to by the same kin term 2.
Similarly, all brothers and male cousins are linked by giving them the same kin term 3. Sisters and all female cousins are also referred to by the same term 4. Not surprisingly, marriage of cousins is generally forbidden since they are treated like brothers and sisters. The Hawaiian terminological system is used by about a third of the world's societies , though they are relatively small ones.
It is found widely in the islands of Polynesia where it is usually associated with ambilineal descent. Since both sides of the family are treated equally, an individual's choice of ancestral line to trace is less biased. Sudanese System. At the opposite extreme in complexity is the Sudanese system. Most kinsmen are not lumped together under the same terms of reference.
Each category of relative is given a distinct term based on genealogical distance from ego and on the side of the family. There can be eight different cousin terms, all of whom are distinguished from ego's brother and sister.
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