Hawaiian kinship

Kinship system

Within common typologies, the Hawaiian system is the simplest classificatory system of kinship. Relatives are distinguished only by generation and by gender. There is a parental generation and a generation of children. In this system, a person (called Ego in anthropology) refers to all females of his parents' generation (mother, aunts, and the wives of men in this generation) as "Mother" and all of the males (father, uncles, and husbands of the women in this generation) as "Father". In the generation of children, all brothers and male cousins are referred to as "Brother", and all sisters and female cousins as "Sister".

In this way, a cross-cousin will be referred to as a "sibling". A correlation was found between the Hawaiian system and the prohibition of cross‐cousin marriage, as the incest taboo is reflected in the semantics.

Usage

The Hawaiian system is named for the pre-contact kinship system of Native Hawaiian people in the Hawaiian Islands. Today, the Hawaiian system is most common among Malayo-Polynesian-speaking cultures; the Hawaiian language itself is Malayo-Polynesian.

This system is usually associated with ambilineal descent groups, where economic production and child-rearing are shared between the genders. The Hawaiian system is found in approximately one-third of the world's societies, although usually small societies.

References

• William Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Wadsworth Publishing, 2002.
• Archnet: Hawaiian kinship

References

1. Read, Dwight. (2015). "Kinship Terminology". Elsevier.
2. Schwimmer, Brian. (August 24, 2011). "Hawaiian Kin Terms".
3. (2020). "Social Practice and Shared History, Not Social Scale, Structure Cross-Cultural Complexity in Kinship Systems". Topics in Cognitive Science.
4. "The Nature of Kinship: Kin Naming Systems (Part 1)".