J Scott Hill's List: marriage and kinship

• There are potentially eight different  cousin terms.
• They are  generally correlated with societies that have substantial class  divisions.
• The Hawaiian system is the least descriptive and merges many different relatives  into a small number of categories. Ego  distinguishes between relatives only on the basis of sex and generation. Thus there is no uncle term; (mother's and father's brothers are included in the same category as father). All cousins are classified in the same group as brothers and sisters.
• people in these societies make  behavioural, if not linguistic, distinctions between their actual parents and  other individuals they may call "father" or "mother".
• Hawaiian kinship semantics are now thought to be related to the presence and influence of   ambilineal descent  systems.
• Because of predominant marking of immediate family members,  Eskimo terms usually occur in societies  which place a strong emphasis on the nuclear family  rather than on extended kin or larger kinship groups.
• This terminology occurs in societies that are organized on the basis of   unilineal descent, where distinctions between father's kin and mother's kin are critical.
• Parallel cousins are merged with siblings, however cross-cousin terms are  quite peculiar and cut across generational divisions. Ego uses the  same terms  for his mother's brother's son as he does for his mother's brother (F)  and the same term for mother's brother's daughter as for his mother (B)
• This pattern has the effect of stressing common membership of relatives in  patrilineal lines;
• Omaha terminologies are associated with societies that have a strong patrilineal emphasis in their social organization.
• This system is generally found in societies with strong matrilineal kinship  emphases.

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