Husband/wife or brother/sister as the key relationship in Lio Kinship and Sociosymbolic relations

Societies that adhere to a patrilineal ideology of asymmetric prescriptive cross‐cousin marriage are usually analysed in terms of the affinal relationship. Women are interpreted in their roles as wives. Taking the Lio of eastern Indonesia as an ethnographic example, it is argued that consanguinity may represent a higher ideal than affinity, that wife‐givers stand for the whole, and that the brother‐sister relationship is the most important cross‐sex relationship. By symbolically transforming wives into sisters, the Lio, just like many stratified cognatic societies, manage to maintain a cultural marking of sisters rather than wives.