Omaha Kinship Terminology

Omaha kinship terminology is one of the six major kinship-terminology systems Lewis Henry Morgan classified, first studied together with the Crow system in 1859 and formally set out in his 1871 Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. It is found in patrilineal societies and is structurally close to a mirror image of the matrilineal Crow system: on the father's side, relatives are grouped by sex and generation as usual, but on the mother's side the terminology collapses generational distinctions, a pattern called patrilineal skewing, so that the mother's brother, the mother's brother's son, and the mother's father can all be grouped under a single term regardless of the actual generation gap between them. The system is named for the Omaha people and has also been documented among the Dani of New Guinea, the Igbo of Nigeria, Indigenous groups in Mexico, the Mapuche of Chile and Argentina, and the Shona of Zimbabwe; some linguists have proposed it as the reconstructed pattern underlying Proto-Indo-European kinship.