Historical views of kinship and matrilineal societies

According to some scholars, matriliny has historically existed in different parts of the world, although it was mostly restricted to isolated communities within the non-Western world. In the late 19th century, under the growing influence of social Darwinism, early European and American anthropologists began to explore different kinship systems on a global scale. One aspect of that study focused on delving into the nature of human social evolution.

A substantial proportion of historical research on European societies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries focused on the family unit. Whereas earlier research in that area was limited to the search for the Western family structure, later analyses highlighted the error of presuming historical continuity in that structure and argued that the term family was fundamentally ambiguous. Notions of family and kinship are based on the existence of marriage, and in that context most later studies examined gender differences only as an expression of a particular cultural system. Consequently, they failed to include ideological nuances behind the concepts of “marriage” or “family” within those social groups.

Non-Western scholars have also argued that the distinction between household and family is grounded in Western conceptions. The household is regarded merely as a coresident group, whereas the family is made up of those household members who also share kinship. That normative distinction assumes that the family, including a heterosexual couple as parents, is the natural unit, a generalization that ignores differences of class and race. It also fails to account for the fact that household could refer to members outside the family, such as landlords, tenants, and family retainers. Hence, only large property-owning households that include all these external family members can provide sufficient data to study the complex relationships between class, caste, gender, and kinship.

The current definitions and paradigms of matrifocal domestic systems (where a female is the central stable figure of the family unit) are also based on the classic kinship theory’s focus on marriage and the heterosexual couple. That encourages the assumption of heteronormativity in households—i.e., that sexual and marital relations are “normal” only when between people of different sexes. It also assumes that as married heterosexual couples, men and women have certain natural functions in life, with men as “heads.” Matrifocal domestic systems are seen as troublesome departures from this norm because they are not structured around a heterosexual couple or are viewed as temporary solutions to the absence of male household heads instead of functional households headed and managed by women.

According to scholar Evelyn Blackwood, Western norms about marriage and where the husband/father stood in the family encouraged anthropologists to question the validity of matrilineal kin groups that embodied the function of the husband and the married couple even when there was no such relationship (or one that did not meet the norm). Within Minangkabau matrilineal groups, for example, it was the matrilineal line, including members of the external family descended through that line, that represented kinship; conjugal and marital ties were considered secondary.

Blackwood also pointed out the anthropological attention devoted to the “plight” of husbands in matrilineal societies, again based on normative assumptions about men’s place as husbands. In such scholarly work the marital tie was assumed to be weak, owing to, for example, power struggles between husbands and interfering mothers-in-law, pressures from the husband’s own lineage, and the overly prominent position of the mother-in-law’s brother. Women’s economic independence, particularly control of the land, was attributed to unreliable husbands or those who had chosen to leave the household. Thus, in that view, matrilineal systems are only the result of “weak husbands” or “missing men.” Blackwood’s research on the Minangkabau extended households, however, indicates that matrilineal practices come first and marital relationships and the husbands’ roles are of secondary importance.

In the study of matrilineal societies, classic kinship theory develops normative structures to contextualize heterosexuality and male domination, failing to include the wider social nuances and connotations. Those normative structures form the rhetoric of what Blackwood calls “the specter of the Patriarchal Man,” which persistently dominates concepts of kinship, marriage, and family. Classic kinship theory has been challenged by feminist scholars, who have succeeded in shifting the focus from gender and kinship to social constructs in kinship relationships.