Punaluan family
Hawaiian form of group marriage
Punaluan family is a polygamous and polyandrous heterosexual family structure formed by an individual, his spouse, his siblings spouses, the siblings of his spouse and their siblings spouses and their children. This type of group marriage is called a Puanulan marriage. The relationship can be considered a form of paramour.
Description
The term originated in Lewis H. Morgan's book Ancient Society (1877), based on several reports, including a 1860 letter from Judge Lorrin Andrews, describing the Hawaiians system of consanguinity called punalua.
In this type of system, a man is married with his wife and also with his brother's wives. The opposite is also true, where a woman is married with her husband and with her sister's husbands. The marriage is sometimes extended to the rest of the family. For instance, in the Hawaiian case, a man would be also married with his wife's sisters. But the husbands of his wife's sisters are called a punalua. The relatives, their spouses and their children form a family nucleolus named Punaluan family.
“Punaluan family” enters the record as hawaiian form of group marriage. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Punaluan, family and Hawaiian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Punaluan family” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Punaluan, family and Hawaiian provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5855811. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1877 and 1860.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Punaluan family” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.