Avunculated

The avunculate (from the Latin avunculus, maternal uncle) is a custom that appears in societies where the mother's brother occupies a privileged place in the kinship system or in raising children. In inheritance legislation, it would consist of the transfer of assets from maternal uncles to male nephews and from these to the male children of their sisters, but it is a more complex phenomenon in which other cultural aspects would also have to be taken into account. It is usually associated with matriarchal or matrilineal societies, although it has also appeared in others, as mentioned by Claude Lévi-Strauss, for whom avunculate could not be defined as the relationship with a single uncle, but would also limit the mother, the father, the nephews and children in a series of relationships that would be balanced. The avunculate serves as a key example for Lévi-Strauss to expose his vision of structural analysis in Structural Anthropology.