# Hawaiian kinship

Part of a series on the :
Anthropology of kinship :
Basic concepts
Family
Lineage
Affinity
Consanguinity
Marriage
Incest taboo
Endogamy
Exogamy
Moiety
Monogamy
Polygyny
Polygamy
Concubinage
Polyandry
Bride price
Bride service
Dowry
Parallel / cross cousins
Cousin marriage
Levirate
Sororate
Posthumous marriage
Joking relationship
Clan
Cohabitation
Fictive / Milk / Nurture kinship
Descent
Cognatic / Bilateral
Matrilateral
Lineal
Collateral
House society
Avunculate
Linealities
Ambilineality
Unilineality
Matrilineality
Patrilineality
Household forms and residence
Extended
Matrifocal
Matrilocal
Neolocal
Nuclear
Patrilocal :
Terminology
Kinship terminology
Classificatory terminologies
By group
Iroquois
Crow
Omaha
Eskimo (Inuit)
Hawaiian
Sudanese
Dravidian (debated) :
Case studies
Australian Aboriginal
Burmese
Chinese
Philippine
Polyandry in Tibet / in India
Feminist
Chambri
Mosuo
Sexuality
Coming of Age in Samoa :
Major theorists
Diane Bell
Tom Boellstorff
Jack Goody
W. D. Hamilton
Gilbert Herdt
Don Kulick
Roger Lancaster
Louise Lamphere
Eleanor Leacock
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Bronisław Malinowski
Margaret Mead
Henrietta Moore
Lewis H. Morgan
Stephen O. Murray
Michelle Rosaldo
Gayle Rubin
David M. Schneider
Marilyn Strathern :
Related articles
Alliance theory
Matrilineal / matrilocal societies
Feminist anthropology
Sex and Repression in Savage Society
Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship
"The Traffic in Women" :
Social anthropology Cultural anthropology :
vte :
Hawaiian kinship, also referred to as the generational system, is a kinship terminology system used to define family within languages. Identified by Lewis H. Morgan in his 1871 work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, the Hawaiian system is one of the six major kinship systems (Inuit, Hawaiian, Iroquois, Crow, Omaha, and Sudanese).

## Kinship system

Within common typologies, the Hawaiian system is the simplest classificatory system of kinship. Relatives are distinguished only by generation and by gender. There is a parental generation and a generation of children. In this system, a person (called Ego in anthropology) refers to all females of his parents' generation (mother, aunts, and the wives of men in this generation) as "Mother" and all of the males (father, uncles, and husbands of the women in this generation) as "Father". In the generation of children, all brothers and male cousins are referred to as "Brother", and all sisters and female cousins as "Sister".
In this way, a cross-cousin will be referred to as a "sibling". A correlation was found between the Hawaiian system and the prohibition of cross‐cousin marriage, as the incest taboo is reflected in the semantics.

## Usage

The Hawaiian system is named for the pre-contact kinship system of Native Hawaiian people in the Hawaiian Islands. Today, the Hawaiian system is most common among Malayo-Polynesian-speaking cultures; the Hawaiian language itself is Malayo-Polynesian.
This system is usually associated with ambilineal descent groups, where economic production and child-rearing are shared between the genders. The Hawaiian system is found in approximately one-third of the world's societies, although usually small societies.