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. Another matrilocal society is the
!Kung San of Southern Africa. They practice uxorilocality for the bride service period, which lasts until the couple has produced three children or they have been together for more than ten years. At the end of the bride service period, the couple has a choice of which clan they want to live with. (Technically, uxorilocality differs from matrilocality; uxorilocality means the couple settles with the wife's family, while matrilocality means the couple settles with the wife's lineage. Because the !Kung do not live in lineages, they cannot be matrilocal; they are uxorilocal.) Early theories explaining the determinants of postmarital residence (by, for example,
Lewis Henry Morgan,
Edward Tylor, and
George Peter Murdock) connected it with the sexual division of labor. However, for many years cross-cultural tests of this
hypothesis using worldwide samples failed to find any significant relationship between these two variables. On the other hand,
Korotayev's tests have shown that the female contribution to subsistence does correlate significantly with matrilocal residence in general; however, this correlation is masked by a general
polygyny factor. Although an increase in the female contribution to subsistence tends to lead to matrilocal residence, it also tends simultaneously to lead to general non-sororal
polygyny which effectively destroys matrilocality. If this polygyny factor is controlled (e.g., through a multiple
regression model), division of labor turns out to be a significant predictor of postmarital residence. Thus, Murdock's hypotheses regarding the relationships between the sexual division of labor and postmarital residence were basically correct, though, as has been shown by Korotayev, the actual relationships between those two groups of variables are more complicated than he expected. Matrilocality in the Arikari culture in the 17th–18th centuries was studied anew within
feminist archaeology by Christi Mitchell, in a critique of a previous study, the critique challenging whether men were virtually the sole agents of societal change while women were only passive. In
sociobiology, matrilocality refers to
animal societies in which a
pair bond is formed between animals born or hatched in different areas or different social groups, and the pair becomes resident in the female's home area or group. In present-day
mainland China, matrilocal residence has been encouraged by the
government. == List of matrilocal societies ==