Crow Kinship Terminology

Crow kinship terminology is one of the six major kinship-terminology systems Lewis Henry Morgan classified, first studied together with the Omaha system in 1859 and formally classified in his 1871 Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. It is associated with matrilineal societies and, unlike most kinship terminologies, deliberately collapses generational distinctions on the father's side: relatives of Ego's father's matrilineage are distinguished only by their sex, regardless of their age or generation, while relatives on Ego's own mother's side receive more descriptive, generation-specific terms. Structurally the Crow system is close to a mirror image of the Omaha system, which uses the same generation-collapsing logic on the mother's side of a patrilineal society instead. The system is named for the Crow Nation of Montana and has also been documented among the Hopi and the Navajo Nation of the southwestern United States.