Bilateral Kinship Anthropology
A all kinship is said to be bilateral in the sense that whatever the principle of descent an individual has kinship ties to and through both parents.
Bilateral kinship anthropology. Anthropologists believe that a tribal structure based on bilateral descent helps members live in extreme environments because it allows individuals to rely on two sets of families dispersed over a wide area. Speaking anthropologically bilateral descent is the tracing of kinship through both parents ancestral lines. As we will see below the descent groups. In a purely bilateral culture every individual belongs to two different clans and is expected to contribute to both.
A kinship rule that ties people together on the basis of reputed common ancestry. Anthropological data suggests that cognatic descent arose in cultures where warfare is uncommon and there is a political organization that can organize and fight on behalf of the members. Bilateral descent means that families are defined by descent from both the father and the mother s sides of the family. All of the relatives a person recognized in a bilateral kinship system bilateral systems give rise to a situation in which no two individuals except siblings have the same kindred.
Bilateral kinship organization presents something of a classification problem as all societiesrecognize and interact with a variety of maternal and paternal kin on a regular basis. Kinship traced to relatives through both father and mother. A type of kinship system in which individuals emphasize both their mother s kin and their father s kin relatively equally kindred. Thus while members ofunilineal societies rely exclusively on agnatic or uterine kin in certain formal situations they alsomaintain both structured and informal relationships with other relatives and form bilateralkindreds for a variety of purposes.
In the past most bilateral societies were found in the ancient pacific. Cognatic descentis also referred to as non unilineal descent and there are two types of cognatic descent. Not needing to explain it much further it s the reason that most of us go to family.