What factors in history determined whether a culture became matrilineal or patrilineal?
All I know is that many cultures in Africa were matrilineal before becoming patrilinial. Jewish culture is rooted in matrilineal culture. Chinese culture (from what I read) is for the most part patrilinial, though I don’t if we can say that about modern industrial societies anymore.
The level of industrialization and religion/belief systems seem to have a lot to do with it. I look forward to your feedback.
"Actually, the United States has Bilateral Descent not Patrilineal. The term Patrilineal has greater implications anthropologically than just taking on your fathers last name. Unilineal descent groups (patrilineal and matrilineal) serve social, economic, religious and political functions that are not necessary, or maintained in societies with large governments in place.
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I have often wondered why old societies became patrilineal. When a child is born, there is no doubt who the mother is, but there was almost always the possibility of doubt about the father.
Human societies have historically tended to evolve to serve the needs of the most aggressive members. Which by and large tend to be male.
We have made some progress in the last few hundred years going the other way. It’s arguable whether we’re now giving a bunch of that back up in the most recent few decades.
Thanks LSLGuy. What I’m trying to determine (although intuitively I can guess) is why matrilinial/matrilocal societies arose in the first place in non-industrialized societies? Why would a man throw in his lot with his wife’s family instead of the other way around?What was the reasoning behind that? Obvious are the rearing done by women (while the husband hunts for food), education, women were often the keepers of traditions/beliefs/teachings, administrators. Is that all there is to it?
I would expect that some of the influence would reside in the danger associated with the occupation of male members of the society. Where men went to sea, or to war, or other activities with a high risk of death, it made more sense for a matrilinear society to cement together the family ties. And for women to oversee the daily affairs of family life.
In the pioneer days in the American West, it was very common for the mayor of a town and all the elected councilmen to be women, as the men of the society were too busy or too labor-exhausted to concern themselves with the matters of municipal governance.
Groups of humans, both small and large, have tended to serve the needs of the most aggressive members under conditions of scarcity of resources or danger or other similar threatening stress. Aggression is a benefit under circumstances of competition, far less so in environments where cooperative communication is how things mostly get done.
It may be useful to think of patriarchy as a response to stress, and of our 9000 year experience with agricultural existence as the main overarching example of that. (It appears that we only adopted agrarian life when scarcity of resources made hunter-gatherer lifestyle problematic, i.e., too many clumps of people doing it in a confined area = not enough food to hunt and gather). Paradoxically, the last remaining places where people subsist as hunter-gatherers are mostly places of scarce resources, such as the Kalahari Desert; but agrarian civ mostly blossommed in rich fertile areas surrounded by far less bountiful regions, so people congregated there, overpopulated, then weren’t well situated to spread out into adjoining areas.
Thanks for that piece of information jtur88. I hadn’t read that. I would really like to find a comprehensive study on the question of what factors lead a society to become matrilineal or patrilinial. I’ve gotten some interesting answers here.
Some very ancient cultures would be matrilineal because female parentage is much easier to determine. I would suggest that patrilineal society evolved coincident with more strict social controls on women and their opportunities to confound paternity.
I might also suggest that patrilineal societies evolve from more warlike cultures, where the opportunities for men behaving badly to use force to control their women, and punish those who stray, leads to more certainty about paternity. Plus, warlike societies give more power and wealth to men, so they become the dominant leaders and rich - able to support multiple wives - and polygamy by the upper class becomes more common.
Here’s a useful article to put the position of men in a matrilinial society in perspective.
“According to Valentina Pakyntein, an anthropologist at Shillong University, the matrilineal system goes back to a time when Khasis had several partners and it was hard to determine the paternity of children. But SRT members have another explanation, claiming that their ancestors were away from home for too long fighting wars to be able to look after their families.”
It looks to me as if linearity of descent is being mixed with other things such as property ownership and decision making.
The Basque have been patrilinear for as far as we have records, but also much less patriarcal than many of our also-patrilinear neighbors (and with a lot less gender division - as in other examples mentioned already, you just can’t say that “cooking is women’s work” or forbid women from buying and selling big-ticket items when the men spend half their time away from home). The Portuguese are matrilinear for naming, but I’ve never heard of them being particularly matriarchal.