Matrilateral Association and Affection

Several informants have said that both men and women are closer to their mother's kin than to their father's as a consequence of closer emotional ties to the mother and of going with her to visit her kin when they were young. My observations (as well as the data in the survey reported in chap. 5) tend to bear this out. Nevertheless, beyond the confines of the nuclear family, common interests and personal affections are the most powerful determinants of which kin associate often and closely with one another and which have more distant relations.

In accord with this, group members consistently affirm that there is no general difference in one's relations with father's brother's children, mother's brother's children, father's sister's children, and mother's sister's children. All own generation kin can be referred to as ndugu (the same term, in fact, is used for all kin regardless of generation or nature of relationship), but there are terms that distinguish between brothers (kaka and mdogo are fairly common) and sisters (dada or the more Arabized ukhti ).

There are limited terminological differences found in alternate terms which distinguish the children of one sort of parents' sibling from another and from own siblings, but there is little basis for believing that these differences have much sociological or psychological significance. They seem mostly to be used to clarify a relationship for the benefit of visitors or anthropologists. The alternate terms are used only in reference and clarification and mean, literally, "child of mother's brother," "child of father's brother," and so on.

Cousin marriage is quite common, and more than a third of all the marriages about which I could collect genealogical information were between kin.^[6] I have been told that it does not matter if the cousin you marry is related to you through your father or through your mother (although a number of informants are quite emphatic about how important the difference is to "Arabs"), but that it is slightly better to marry someone who is not the child of an actual sibling of either parent. In fact, two marriages about which I have relatively full data involved the child of a parent's true sibling, and neither of these caused any observable comment.