The concept of complementary filiation which was such an important and seminal feature of Meyer Fortes' writing and teaching during the 1950s was developed out of Fortes' own field experience among the Tallensi. As a result, both his followers and his critics, and perhaps Meyer Fortes' himself, have tended to assume that complementary filiation only has analytical value within the general framework of a unilineal descent system. It is I think a moot point whether this is really so.

Bilateral kinship structures are incompatible with the empirical existence of true unilineal descent groups but, where such structures are associated with well developed notions of individual property, it is not uncommon to find that the practice of marriage and the rules of inheritance among the property owning sector of the community have been so contrived as to create notionally permanent property owning corporations which are conceived of as patrilineal descent groups even though, in detail, they are nothing of the sort. Two examples of this are the ‘landed gentry’ class of eighteenth and nineteenth-century England and the Radala, the ruling class upper elite of the goyigama caste in Kandyan Ceylon at much the same period.