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Hawaiian kinship, also referred to as thegenerational system, is akinship terminology system used to definefamily withinlanguages. Identified byLewis H. Morgan in his 1871 workSystems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, the Hawaiian system is one of the six major kinship systems (Inuit, Hawaiian,Iroquois,Crow,Omaha, andSudanese).[1]
Within common typologies, the Hawaiian system is the simplest classificatory system ofkinship. Relatives are distinguished only by generation and by gender. There is a parental generation and a generation of children. In this system, a person (calledEgo inanthropology) 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".[2]
In this way, a cross-cousin will be referred to as a "sibling". A correlation was found between the Hawaiian system and the prohibition ofcross‐cousin marriage, as theincest taboo is reflected in the semantics.[3]
The Hawaiian system is named for the pre-contact kinship system ofNative Hawaiian people in theHawaiian Islands. Today, the Hawaiian system is most common amongMalayo-Polynesian-speaking cultures; theHawaiian language itself is Malayo-Polynesian.
This system is usually associated withambilineal 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.[4]