- published: 27 Jan 2016
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In social anthropology, matrilocal residence or matrilocality (also uxorilocal residence or uxorilocality) is a term referring to the societal system in which a married couple resides with or near the wife's parents, thus the female offspring of a mother remain living in (or near) the mother's house, thereby forming large clan-families, typically consisting of three or four generations living in the same place.
Frequently, visiting marriage is being practiced, meaning that husband and wife are living apart in their separate families, 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 a significant role in the upbringing of his own children; he does, however, in that of his sisters' children (nieces/nephews). In direct consequence, property is inherited from generation to generation, and over all, remains largely undivided.
Matrilocal residence is found most often in horticultural societies.
Examples of matrilocal societies include the people of Ngazidja, the Ancient Pueblo Peoples 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. In native Amazonia, this residence pattern is often associated with the customary practice of brideservice, as seen among the Urarina of northeastern Peru. In contemporary mainland China, uxorilocal marriage has been encouraged by the government (Wolf 1985) in an attempt to counter the problem of unbalanced male-majority sex ratios caused by abortion and infanticide and abandonment of girls. Because girls traditionally marry out in virilocal marriage they have been seen as "mouths from another family" or as a waste of resources to raise. During the Song Dynasty in medieval China, matrilocal marriage became common for wealthy, non-aristocratic families.