Matrilineality
Matrilineality – from the Latin mater, meaning “mother,” and linea, meaning “line” – also referred to as matrilineal descent or matrilineal filiation, is a kinship system that establishes descent through the mother’s, or female, line. Under this system, the mother’s name, property, and sometimes status are inherited.
Matrilineality is opposed to patrilineality.
Matrilineality is characteristic primarily of pre-industrial societies. In societies where matrilineality fully determines social relations, marriage is either not contracted at all or is organized in such a way – often under conditions of polyandry and duolocal or matrilocal residence – as to deprive the husband, or husbands, that is, the real father of a woman’s children, of legal rights over her, her offspring, and her property. The woman and her marital or sexual partners do not have common property and often do not maintain a common household. Children are subordinated to the mother’s brother, or brothers, who often have the status of father.
For a long time, the question of the historical relationship between matrilineal, patrilineal, and other forms of kinship structures provoked sharp debate in Russian-language scholarship. Following some Western evolutionists of the nineteenth century, structures based on maternal filiation were regarded as historically earlier than structures based on paternal filiation. The idea of the primacy of matrilineality was grounded in the notion of promiscuity and group marriage as the original forms of relations between the sexes, which supposedly excluded the fixation of kinship ties between children and the father.
It was also argued that the primary forms of economy – hunting and gathering – necessarily presupposed exceptionally close ties between children and mothers, and weak ties with fathers, or even the complete absence of such ties. However, the hypotheses of promiscuity and group marriage can hardly be substantiated, while ethnographic analogues of primordial hunters and gatherers often reveal developed forms of paternal kinship organization.
The above considerations, together with the comparative rarity of matrilineal systems, especially in comparison with patrilineal ones, and their prevalence mainly among relatively complex agricultural peoples, lead many researchers either to insist on the historical equivalence of maternal and other forms of reckoning kinship, or to assume the relatively late emergence and locally limited spread of matrilineality. Such approaches predominate in Western ethnology.
At the same time, there is no doubt that a considerable number of so-called patrilineal societies were characterized by matrilineality in the past, and ethnography has recorded numerous cases of transition from matrilineality to patrilineality, while direct reverse transitions are practically unknown. The latter may perhaps be explained by certain regularities in the structural formation of kinship systems, as George P. Murdock argued, and in itself cannot be regarded as an argument in favor of the universal primacy of matrilineality.
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