The family in historical and psychological aspects

The patrilineum ("paternal line") is the father of a person and additional ancestors that can be traced only through the male line. Thus, a person's patrilineality is a record of descent from a man, in which individuals in all subsequent generations are men. In cultural anthropology, patrilineality is a blood group of kinship between a man and a woman, each of whose members descends from a common ancestor through male ancestors.

Matrilineality is a form of kinship system in which a person's family affiliation stems from and is traced through his or her mother's ancestry.

An ethnographic example of a large family that had not yet lost the beginnings of primitive communal democracy was represented by the friends of the Southern Slavs, in which the supreme power belonged to the council of all adult men and women, who elected the housekeeper.

"Paired marriage is a form of marriage that existed under the primitive communal system, associated with the development of matriarchy. As society developed, marriage changed in the direction of narrowing the circle of those marrying; cohabitation in couples, which in the early stages of the primitive communal system, with group marriage was only very brief, during the heyday of the primitive communal system becomes the main form of marriage. Being already monogamous, the family in a couple marriage, however, was not an economic unit of society. Each member of the married couple continued to be strongly connected with their ancestral community. The married couple did not run a separate household, had no property. In this regard, this marriage was not stable, marital cohabitation was easily dissolved. The children were connected to the mother's ancestral community and remained in it in case of divorce. This was a pair marriage among the Australians, as well as among the Iroquois and many other Indian tribes back in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since pair marriage originated in a matriarchal tribal community in which women played a large role in production, the wife was equal to her husband and held a high position. The transition from paired marriage to monogamy with an intermediate form of patriarchal family is due to the beginning of the decomposition of the primitive community, the emergence of private property, which led to the separation of the family from the genus and the transformation of the family into an independent unit with the authority of the father of the family – the owner" (Tikhomirov A.E., The concept of matriarchy. "LitRes", Moscow, 2023, p. 2).

It can also relate to a social system in which each person is identified with their matrilineality – their mother's ancestry – and which may include inheritance of property and titles. A matriline is a line of descent from a female ancestor to a descendant in which individuals in all subsequent generations are mothers – in other words, the "maternal line".

In the matrilineal descent system, an individual is considered to belong to the same group of origin as he or her mother. This model of matrilineal descent differs from the more common model of patrilineal descent.

Bilateral descent is a form of kinship system in which a person's belonging to a family stems from both paternal and maternal lines. Maternal and paternal relatives are equally important for emotional connections or the transfer of property or wealth. This is a family agreement in which descent and inheritance are transmitted equally through both parents. Families that use this system track the lineage of both parents at the same time and recognize several ancestors, but unlike cognitive descent, it is not used to form groups of origin.