matrilineal
IPA: mætrɪɫˈɪniʌɫ
adjective
- (anthropology) Tracing descent only through female ancestors.
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Examples of "matrilineal" in Sentences
- 93The institution of marriage represents another persistent feature in matrilineal Ruvu communities.
- Iroquois society was matrilineal, meaning descent was traced through the mother rather than through the father, as it was in colonial society.
- The narrator then went on to say that this is why male prosperity depends on the power wielded over a man's sister's children, a common view and associated practice in matrilineal societies.
- The attentiveness Ruvu people gave, particularly Ruvu women, to guaranteeing successful births and infant survival is an example of the importance placed on bearing children in matrilineal Ruvu societies.
- Mitochondrial Eve (mt-mrca) [Right: An artist's rendition] is the name given by researchers to the woman who is defined as the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for all currently living humans.
- Such an emphasis, or reasoning, for the * mwali life position would make far more obvious sociocultural sense in matrilineal and matrifocal societies than imagining that marriage and male sexual pleasure were most important.
- The attention given to the new mother by her matrilineage foregrounds the importance of children to the maintenance of clan and lineage in matrilineal societies. 22 Fittingly, the women involved in this were those clanswomen who had given birth to the young women themselves and guided them through later female initiation instruction, which itself aimed above all at securing fertility, a topic we will return to later in the chapter.
- And it intimates that in matrilineal societies, as has been suggested by other researchers, grandmothers personified power and importance in their communities. 25 Such research may begin to shed some light, for instance, on the missing pieces of our understanding about women in these societies, which have been usually only gleaned by the prominent role that grandmothers commonly have in marriage negotiations for their granddaughters.
- Their method consisted of studying two distinct social groups: the Maasai in Tanzania, a “textbook example of a patriarchal society” in which women and children are considered “property,” and the Khasi in India, who are matrilineal, meaning female-dominated through inheritance laws, household authority, and social structures — though still distinct from “matriarchal,” since, as the authors point out, “the sociological literature is almost unanimous in the conclusion that truly matriarchal societies no longer exist.”
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