Avoidance Relationship

An avoidance relationship is a kinship-based social custom, documented across a wide range of societies worldwide, in which specific categories of relatives, most commonly a man and his mother-in-law, are expected or required to limit direct interaction, sometimes including avoiding direct eye contact, physical proximity, speaking to one another directly, or even being present in the same room, as a mark of respect and a mechanism for managing the potential tension inherent in the relationship the marriage has created. Anthropologists studying kinship systems, notably A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in his structural-functionalist analyses of Australian Aboriginal and African societies, have documented avoidance customs, sometimes formalized as extensively as requiring separate speech registers such as mother-in-law languages among some Australian Aboriginal groups, as a widespread structural solution to the strain that in-law relationships, and particularly the son-in-law and mother-in-law tie, place on a kinship system built around marriage alliance. Avoidance relationships are frequently analyzed alongside their structural opposite, the joking relationship, as complementary mechanisms by which kinship systems manage the different kinds of social tension created by different categories of relatives.