All Kinship Institutions

The major patterns of kinship systems that are known which Lewis Henry Morgan identified through kinship terminology in his 1871 work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family are: Iroquois kinship (also known as "bifurcate merging") Crow kinship (an expansion of bifurcate merging) Omaha kinship (also an expansion of bifurcate merging) Inuit kinship (referred to by Morgan as "Eskimo kinship" and also referred to as "lineal kinship") Hawaiian kinship (also referred to as the "generational system") Sudanese kinship (also referred to as the "descriptive system")

In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated.