Matrilocal residence

In social anthropology, matrilocal residence or matrilocality (also uxorilocal residence or uxorilocality) is the societal system in which a married couple resides with or near the wife's parents.

Description

Frequently, visiting marriage is being practiced, meaning that husband and wife are living apart, in their separate birth families, and seeing each other in their spare time. The children of such marriages are raised by the mother's extended matrilineal clan. The father does not have to be involved in the upbringing of his own children; he is, however, in that of his sisters' children (his nieces and nephews). In direct consequence, property is inherited from generation to generation, and, overall, remains largely undivided.

Matrilocal residence is found most often in horticultural societies.

Examples of matrilocal societies include the people of Ngazidja in the Comoros, the Ancestral Puebloans of Chaco Canyon, the Nair community in Kerala in South India, the Moso of Yunnan and Sichuan in southwestern China, the Siraya of Taiwan, and the Minangkabau of western Sumatra. Among indigenous people of the Amazon basin this residence pattern is often associated with the customary practice of bride service, as seen among the Urarina of northeastern Peru.

During the Song Dynasty in medieval China, matrilocal marriage became common for wealthy non-aristocratic families.

In other regions of the world, such as Japan, during the Heian period, a marriage of this type was not a sign of high status, but rather an indication of the patriarchal authority of the woman's family (her father or grandfather), who was sufficiently powerful to demand it.