Pima-Papago - Kinship

Kin Groups and Descent. There were pan-Pima-Papago patrimoieties whose totems were the Coyote and Buzzard. There were five pan-Pima-Papago patrilineal sibs, three Buzzard, and two Coyote. Neither moiety nor sib membership had much effect on marriage, material property, or religious or political office. Sib membership did determine one form of intimate behavior: the word a child used to address his or her father. People without a Pima-Papago father lacked a socially proper way to say "my daddy." In effect this was a pan-Pima-Papago endogamy enforcer. The important economic grouping was the bilateral kindred. A person's kindred extended outside the local community. A prohibition against marrying close relatives (up to second cousins) encouraged this tendency and resulted in households with far-reaching bilateral ties.

Kinship Terminology. Pima-Papago parental generation kin terms were of the lineal type, which uses a distinct term for each relative. For one's own generation two distinct terms were used, which is characteristic of the Eskimo and Iroquois types, but the logic of the Pima-Papago deployment conforms to neither type. The Pima-Papago logic pertains to the relative age either of a sister (by English reckoning) or female cousin to oneself or of a female cousin's parent relative to one's own parent. One term means "younger sister, or child of my parent's younger brother or sister," and the other term means "older sister, or child of my parent's older brother or sister." It is a relative age-sensitive version of the Hawaiian type of same-generation terminology.