Matrilineal Descent

The Akan of West Africa are one of the most frequently cited textbook examples of a matrilineal descent society, with inheritance and clan membership passed through the mother line.

The Ashanti of Ghana are among the most frequently cited textbook examples of a matrilineal society, with royal succession, inheritance and clan (abusua) membership passed through the mother's line.

In matrilineal societies, formal authority over children commonly rests with the mother's brother rather than the biological father, which is exactly the residence pattern avunculocal residence names; the two commonly co-occur, though neither entails the other.

Cherokee society is historically organized around matrilineal clans, with clan membership, property and social standing traced through the mother's line.

The Crow system is associated with matrilineal societies and collapses generational terms on the father's, non-matrilineal, side.

Double descent systems reckon descent matrilineally for some purposes, commonly ritual standing or personal identity, alongside a separate patrilineal line for others.

Duolocal residence, in which spouses continue to live separately with their own natal kin after marriage, occurs characteristically in strongly matrilineal societies such as the Akan and the Minangkabau.

Named for and first described among the historically matrilineal Haudenosaunee, though the terminology pattern also occurs in patrilineal unilineal societies.

Matrilineal descent is frequently conflated with matriarchy in popular usage; anthropologists treat the two as conceptually distinct.

Matrifocal families, centered on a mother and her children with a marginal or absent male partner role, occur with particular frequency in societies that also practice matrilineal descent.

An increase in female subsistence contribution tends to produce both matrilocal residence and matrilineal descent together, though not by logical necessity.

Navajo (Dine) society is organized around matrilineal clans, with clan identity, land use and inheritance traced through the mother line.

Walking marriage, practiced by the Mosuo of southwestern China, occurs within a strongly matrilineal descent system in which children remain in the mother household and lineage.

Lévi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) analyzed descent and alliance rules, including matrilineal systems, as structural permutations of a limited set of underlying relations.