Descent Terminolgy Avunculate / Levirate Avoidance
The patriclan is the central unit of social, economic, and political organization. Patriclans claim ties to ancestral territories through folktales and stories about totemic ancestors.
Kinship terminology of the Korowai follows the Lounsburian Omaha I pattern, which is also found in Kombai and Mandobo societies. The central opposition between cross and parallel relationships is morphologically expressed in the morpheme sa-
* Cf. lal, "parallel female child", versus salal, "crossfemale child".
Kinshiprelated similarities are also found with neighbouring Awyu groups, with the strongest of it being related to the avunculate. The mother's brother (mom) and with him the class of his potential legal and social successors are actively involved in the marriage arrangements for his sisters' children.
The terms khaimon ('husband's brother') and khamokh ('brother's wife') function in the context of an institutional levirate, to express the fact that a man is his brother's legal successor as husband to his widow if his brother dies.
A kind of affinal avoidance relationship exists between a man and his wife's mother. When a man violates the avoidance taboos with his mother-in-law, his children are believed to become ill.
This type of avoidance relationship can be explained, as Stasch proposed in his Figures of Alterity among Korowai of Irian Jaya (2001), "by a 'dyad-centric' model of subjectivity and social life, according to which individuals are foundationally constituted through their bonds with strange others."
In the affinal kinship terminology there is a general term for the wife's parents (WP) (ban) with a wide range of reference, in contrast to a specific term that identifies the wife's mother or her sister (WM or WMS) (bandakhol).
