Peer-reviewed
Clans and Moieties in North America
This review of the ethnographic data on North American clans and moieties suggests that they did not develop as a device to maintain knowledge of genealogical connections between lineages, but rather were a device to establish and maintain relationships with non-kin through the fiction of kinship. Certain features of these groups further suggest that they originally served to facilitate trade over the North American continent and were intimately bound up with a religious organization and ideology introduced from and maintained in pre-Columbian times with Mexico
Article, 1971