Father/uncle and mother/aunt conflation – Kinship question

[vegfarandi]

In languages that conflate parents and parents' siblings, i.e. languages with Hawaiian, Crow, Iroquois or Omaha kinship systems, to what extent does that linguistic conflation extend into real life interaction and what are some ways that these languages disambiguate when necessary? Are there terms such as "birth mother" meaning what English calls mother? Anyone have real life examples whose L1 is like this?

[Zaarin]

Speaking specifically for Iroquois and Crow kinship systems (or more specifically about the Iroquois proper and the Tlingit, who use those systems respectively), it's generally the case that one's maternal uncles will fill the social role of father (discipline, teaching, gift-giving, joking, etc.) since your maternal uncle belongs to your clan and your father does not. Speaking of the Tlingit specifically it was the common wisdom that a father will spoil his son but a maternal uncle or grandfather will raise him properly.

If you can get your hands on Frederica de Laguna's Beneath Mt. St. Elias, her ethnography on the Yakutat Tlingit, you might find her chapter on kinship helpful. (As mentioned above, the Tlingit use Crow kinship.)

[vegfarandi]

Speaking specifically for Iroquois and Crow kinship systems (or more specifically about the Iroquois proper and the Tlingit, who use those systems respectively), it's generally the case that one's maternal uncles will fill the social role of father (discipline, teaching, gift-giving, joking, etc.) since your maternal uncle belongs to your clan and your father does not. Speaking of the Tlingit specifically it was the common wisdom that a father will spoil his son but a maternal uncle or grandfather will raise him properly.

Right, so I understand that part in theory, but in practice what does it mean for the father to not belong to the clan? Does he live elsewhere? How often does he see his offspring? How often does he see his wife?

If you can get your hands on Frederica de Laguna's Beneath Mt. St. Elias, her ethnography on the Yakutat Tlingit, you might find her chapter on kinship helpful. (As mentioned above, the Tlingit use Crow kinship.)

Thank you, I'll take a look!

[Zaarin]

Speaking specifically for Iroquois and Crow kinship systems (or more specifically about the Iroquois proper and the Tlingit, who use those systems respectively), it's generally the case that one's maternal uncles will fill the social role of father (discipline, teaching, gift-giving, joking, etc.) since your maternal uncle belongs to your clan and your father does not. Speaking of the Tlingit specifically it was the common wisdom that a father will spoil his son but a maternal uncle or grandfather will raise him properly.

Right, so I understand that part in theory, but in practice what does it mean for the father to not belong to the clan? Does he live elsewhere? How often does he see his offspring? How often does he see his wife?

As I understand it, in some cases the father does indeed live separately from his wife with his own clan, though I don't think that's typical. Again speaking specifically of the Tlingit, clan relationships were definitely regarded as more significant than any other family ties.

[Whimemsz]

The book actually seems to be available online via the Smithsonian:

https://www.sil.si.edu/smithsoniancontr ... 0007.1.pdf

[Salmoneus]

I checked the ethnographic atlas, cross-reffing descent and residence, and its societies with matrilineal descent (which I know isn't synonymous with a specific kinship classification scheme, but is as close as I think the database gets) seem pretty diverse.

I haven't downloaded the raw data to calculate precise numbers, but impressionistically it seems like matrilineal societies are fairly evenly divided between matrilocal and avunculocal residence patterns. That is, most matrilineal societies seem to either have a married couple live with the wife's mother (who lives with or near related women), or to have them live with the husband's mother's brother. However, there's also a substantial number of virilocal societies (the wife lives with the husband, but the men in the husband's patrilineage don't all live together), and most other possibilities, even including a few outright patrilocal societies (where the men in the patrilineage live together and their wives live with them).

A small percentage of these societies are indeed "separate" - i.e., husbands and wives don't live together. This is a small minority, but much bigger for matrilineal societies than for others - the EA has 638 patrilineal societies, of which 4 have separate residences, compared to only 160 matrilineal societies, of which 4 have separate residences. Of the 362 bilateral societies, and ~160 others (duolateral, ambilineal or with 'quasi-lineages'), exactly zero have separate residences.

Also notable is that although the matrilineal societies with separate residence are a small minority, they include some very prominent examples, including the Minangkabau (perhaps the most commonly-mentioned example of matrilineality), as well as the Fur and the Keralans.

A database of western native american societies has a similar pattern, and shows a very clear geographic tendency: matrilineal societies occur either in the pacific northwest, or in the inland southeast; the former societies (Tlingit, Haida, etc) are predominantly avunculocal, while the latter societies (Hopi, Navajo, etc) are predominantly matrilocal. [actually, technically, that's not looking at matrilineal descent, but at matrilineage kinship groups].

According to the EA, the Crow are (/were) matrilineal, but virilocal. So although descent was reckoned through the mother, their society wasn't organised along large-scale clan lines, and wives generally moved in with their husbands and their immediate family.

[vegfarandi]

Cool, very helpful.

Is this database publicly accessible?