Kinship & Family Structures

The Iroquois kinship system, with a chart of who is called what

The Iroquois kinship system explained: a chart of bifurcate merging terms, parallel and cross cousins, the generation below, and how Dravidian systems differ.

Portrait of Ines ValderaInes Valdera · · 9 min read
The Iroquois kinship system, with a chart of who is called what

In the Iroquois kinship system, your father's brother is called by the word for father and your mother's sister by the word for mother, while your father's sister and your mother's brother get words of their own. The children follow suit: cousins through your father's brother or mother's sister are your brothers and sisters, and cousins through your father's sister or mother's brother get a separate cousin term. The parents' half of the pattern has a name of its own, bifurcate merging.

Notation, used throughout: F father, M mother, B brother, Z sister, S son, D daughter, strings read outward from the speaker (Ego). MBD is the mother's brother's daughter.

The Iroquois kinship chart

Here are the 16 relatives of a male Ego drawn on our kinship terms chart, which opens on the Iroquois view. The middle column gives the chart's English gloss. The last column gives the Seneca word Lewis Henry Morgan recorded for the same relative in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871, pp. 154 to 159), in his own spelling. Morgan used the Seneca as the standard form of the Iroquois systems.

Relatives Iroquois term (chart gloss) Seneca, as Morgan recorded it
F, FB father Ha'-nih
M, MZ mother No-yeh'
FZ aunt Ah-ga'-huc
MB uncle Hoc-no'-seh
B, FBS, MZS brother Ha'-je (elder) or Ha'-ga (younger)
Z, FBD, MZD sister Ah'-je (elder) or Ka'-ga (younger)
FZS, FZD, MBS, MBD cross cousin Ah-gare'-seh

Count the chart's glosses and you get 7 terms for 16 relatives, as the chart's result line says. Count Morgan's Seneca words and you get 9, because Seneca has no word for brother or sister in the abstract: each sibling term also says whether the person is older or younger than the speaker. The chart's glosses leave that out, which is worth knowing before you compare it with any real vocabulary.

What "bifurcate merging" means

Two distinctions do the work in the parents' generation. Bifurcation separates the father's side from the mother's side. Collaterality separates parents from their brothers and sisters. Robert Lowie (1928) and Paul Kirchhoff independently used these two to sort terminologies into four kinds, and George Peter Murdock laid them out in Social Structure (1949, pp. 141 to 142). Bifurcate merging recognizes bifurcation and ignores collaterality:

  • bifurcate: the father's side and the mother's side are named differently (FB is not called what MB is called)
  • merging: within each side, a parent's same-sex sibling is merged with the parent (FB with F, MZ with M)

English makes the opposite choice, recognizing collaterality and ignoring bifurcation; our guide to the Eskimo kinship system draws that pattern on the same family.

Everything in Ego's generation then follows by one step of reasoning. If FB is a "father", his children are the children of a "father", so they are "brothers" and "sisters". The same goes for MZ, a "mother". FZ and MB are not parents in this vocabulary, so their children cannot be siblings and get their own term.

Murdock defined the Iroquois cousin type on its own terms: FZD and MBD share a word, kept apart from both sisters and parallel cousins, with parallel cousins usually, though not always, classed with sisters (1949, p. 223). The bifurcate merging parents' row and the Iroquois cousin row usually travel together, but they are separate features, and a language can have one without the other.

Parallel and cross cousins in one line

A parallel cousin is linked to Ego through two siblings of the same sex (FBD through F and FB, MZD through M and MZ); a cross cousin through a brother and a sister (FZD, MBD). In the Iroquois pattern the parallel cousins share sibling words and the four cross cousins share one term. Our explainer on cross and parallel cousins works through the test and what it means for marriage rules.

One generation down: the part the chart leaves out

The chart stops at Ego's generation, but the same logic runs into the next. Morgan's Seneca record (pp. 156 to 159) gives the terms for the children of Ego's siblings and cousins, and it depends on whether Ego is a man or a woman.

Child of Ego's... Man speaking Woman speaking
brother, or male parallel cousin son, daughter (Ha-ah'-wuk, Ka-ah'-wuk) nephew, niece (Ha-soh'-neh, Ka-soh'-neh)
sister, or female parallel cousin nephew, niece (Ha-ya'-wan-da, Ka-ya'-wan-da) son, daughter
male cross cousin son, daughter nephew, niece
female cross cousin nephew, niece son, daughter

Read the table by rows and a single rule appears. What matters is whether the child's parent is the same sex as Ego. A man calls the children of any male relative of his generation "son" and "daughter", and the children of any female one "nephew" and "niece", whether that relative is a brother, a parallel cousin or a cross cousin. A woman's terms are the mirror image. Notice also that a man and a woman use different words for nephew and niece, a detail Morgan pointed out (p. 156).

How Dravidian systems differ

Morgan's comparison of Seneca with Tamil was one of the central claims of his book. He judged the two systems substantially identical, with one exception that he found hard to explain. In his Tamil record (pp. 391 to 392), a man calls his male cross cousin's children nephew and niece, and his female cross cousin's children son and daughter: the reverse of the Seneca rows above. He called this "the only particular in which it differs materially from the Seneca-Iroquois form" (p. 391).

Male Ego's relative Seneca (Morgan, p. 158) Tamil (Morgan, p. 391)
MBS's son son nephew
MBS's daughter daughter niece
MBD's son nephew son
MBD's daughter niece daughter

Later analysis turned Morgan's exception into the defining difference. Louis Dumont argued in 1953 that Dravidian terms are best read as an expression of marriage, with the cross side as the side of in-laws, and Mauro Barbosa de Almeida's 2010 rules make that explicit by identifying opposite-sex cross cousins with opposite-sex affines (p. 26). A man's female cross cousin then belongs with potential wives, so her children fall with his own children; his male cross cousin belongs with brothers-in-law, whose children are the ones his own children may marry. Iroquois terms carry no such link to in-laws and simply follow the sex of the parent.

The two rules part again among second cousins. Take FFZDS, the father's father's sister's daughter's son:

  1. The sibling pair at the top, FF and FFZ, is a brother and a sister.
  2. The pair at the bottom, F and FFZD, is a man and a woman.
  3. Iroquois rule: look only at the bottom pair. Opposite sex, so FFZDS is a cross cousin.
  4. Dravidian rule: count the opposite-sex pairs on the way down. Two of them cancel, so FFZDS is parallel, a "brother".

Barbosa de Almeida gave both rules a precise form: the Dravidian verdict is the parity of a permutation that puts a kin-type word into standard order, and he stated a separate counting rule of thumb for the Iroquois case (pp. 17 to 18). Our note on the structure of Dravidian terminology walks through the parity rule by hand.

The Haudenosaunee behind the name

"Iroquois" is not the people's own name. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy's own site explains that the French called it the Iroquois Confederacy and the English the League of Five Nations, while its proper name, Haudenosaunee, means people of the longhouse. The original nations are the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca; the Tuscarora joined later as the sixth.

The same site describes the clan system that sits behind the kin terms. Clans are matrilineal, linked through a common female ancestor, and passed from mother to child: if a Turtle Clan man marries a Wolf Clan woman, their children are Wolf Clan. Clan members count as relatives across nations, marriage within one's own clan is forbidden, and the number of clans varies from three among the Mohawk to nine among the Oneida. Its page on family structure says children called their mother and their mother's sisters "mother", and called cousins brothers and sisters. Morgan's schedule is more specific: the cousins called brother and sister are those through the father's brothers and the mother's sisters. The site also notes that the clan system survives among those who follow the traditions, and that the nations are working to keep their languages in use.

Morgan's earlier book, League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851), is dedicated to Ely S. Parker, Ha-sa-no-an'-da, a Seneca whom Morgan credits with a share of the materials and with invaluable help throughout. In the D-PLACE database, which publishes Murdock's later Ethnographic Atlas codes, the Seneca entry describes a focal year of 1750 and carries the Iroquois cousin code. The type is named from that record, made by outsiders working with Seneca colleagues at particular dates, and not from a survey of Haudenosaunee families today.

Where else the pattern turns up

D-PLACE codes 256 societies with Iroquois cousin terms, more than any type except Hawaiian. By continent, grouping its regions ourselves: 94 in Africa, 55 in North America, 41 in the Pacific and island Southeast Asia, 35 in Central and South America, 23 in Asia, 8 in Australia and none in Europe.

The descent rules attached to those 256 are a surprise if you expect the type to follow its namesake:

  • patrilineal: 116 (45%)
  • matrilineal: 56 (22%)
  • bilateral: 43 (17%)
  • other or mixed: 41 (16%)

So a pattern named after a matrilineal confederacy appears more than twice as often with patrilineal descent (116 against 56). Murdock had already allowed for this in 1949. His scheme gives the same Iroquois cousin terms three names depending on descent: the Yuman type when descent is bilateral, the Dakota type when it is patrilineal, and the Iroquois type only when it is matrilineal or double (pp. 224 to 225). He called the Dakota type the most widespread form of patrilineal organization (p. 236). A plausible reading is that the pattern needs only a reason to tell the two sides of the family apart, and descent through either line supplies one. To see the pattern, open the kinship terms chart on its default Iroquois view: father's brother shares a color with father, and the four cross cousins share a color with no one else.

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