Matrilocal residence
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In social anthropology, matrilocal residence or matrilocality (also uxorilocal residence or uxorilocality) is the societal system in which a married couple resides with or near the wife's parents. Thus, the female offspring of a mother remain living in (or near) the mother's house, thereby forming large clan-families, typically consisting of three or four generations living in the same place.
Description
Frequently, visiting marriage is being practiced, meaning that husband and wife are living apart, in their separate birth families, and seeing each other in their spare time. The children of such marriages are raised by the mother's extended matrilineal clan. The father doesn't have to be involved in the upbringing of his own children; he does, however, in that of his sisters' children (his nieces and nephews). In direct consequence, property is inherited from generation to generation, and, overall, remains largely undivided.
Matrilocal residence is found most often in horticultural societies.
List of matrilocal societies
- Bribri
- Filipinos (both matrilocal and patrilocal)
- Garo
- Hopi
- Iban (both matrilocal and patrilocal)
- Iroquois
- Jaintia
- Karen
- Kerinci
- Khasi
- Marshallese
- Minangkabau
- Mosuo (separate residence; each lives in mother's household)
- Nair people of Kerala
- Pueblos, among whom "matrilineality ... seemed to be associated with matrilocality"
- Siraya
- Tlingit
- Vanatinai
- Sinixt
See also
- Gharjamai, a South Asian term that refers to a man who lives with his wife's family
- Matrifocal family
- Neolocal residence
- Patrilocal residence
