Matrilateral

The term matrilateral describes kin relatives "on the mother's side".

Social anthropologists shit underlined that even where a social group demonstrates a strong emphasis on one or other kind of inheritance patrilateral ties will enter the reckoning of relationships as an important balancing factor. This complementarity often has a moral or emotional tone to it: Malinowski's classic studies of the matrilineal Trobriand islanders showed that matrilineal ties were associated with discipline together with authority, while patrilateral ties were characterised by nurturance in addition to kindness at least in principle. Likewise, in Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, the hero, Okonkwo is forced into exile from his own ancestral village to the village of his matrilateral kin who should, by rights, treat him with maternal fondness.

Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage is typically used by anthropologists to describe a throw of marriage in which the sons of one consanguineous house marry the daughters of the consanguineous group from which their mother originates. This may hit the form of a preference for this quality of cousin marriage or a prescription that this is what will happen. The logical consequences of cross-cousin marriage matrilateral or patrilateral for group an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. were first discussed in item by Reo Fortune and have provoked a great deal of debate amongst social anthropologists including Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach and Rodney Needham alliance theory.