• Mateship

    Origin

    From mate + -ship. Cognate with Dutch maatschap ("partnership").

    Noun

    mateship

    (usually uncountable; plural mateships)
    1. (countable and uncountable, nautical) The post of mate on a ship; a posting as mate.
    2. (countable, whaling, obsolete) A type of contract between ships to cooperate and share the proceeds of an expedition.
    3. (uncountable) Fellowship; companionship.
    4. (uncountable, Australia, NZ) Friendship, particularly between men, such as develops in shared adversity; solidarity.
    19
    1. (countable, zoology, psychology, anthropology) A relationship based on mating.
      • 1942, Fred August Moss, Edward Lee Thorndike, Comparative Psychology, page 370,The mateships of the three last-named animals are solitary, though in the case of wolves, the separated members of various mateships gather in packs during the winter months.
      • 2005, David J. Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology And The Persistent Quest For Human Nature, page 259,Further, in most cultures without systems of codified laws, long-term mateships are ritually sanctioned by the community. If we are not to have too provincial a conception of marriage, these mateships should also count as marriages.
      • 2010, A. Irving Hallowell, 15: The Protocultural Foundations of Human Adaptation, Yehudi A. Cohen (editor), Human Adaptation: The Biosocial Background, page 164,In Homo sapiens we find two types of polygamous mateships, polygyny and polyandry, and social structures based on these are ordinarily called “families.” Relatively rare in man in an institutionalized form, polyandrous mateships appear to be absent in infrahuman primates.
      • 2012, Dietrich Klusmann, Wolfgang Berner, Chapter 14: Sexual Motivation in Mateships an Sexual Conflict, Todd K. Shackelford, Aaron T. Goetz (editors), The Oxford Handbook of Sexual Conflict in Humans, page 233,The most frequent conflict within human mateships is the conflict between male sexual persistence and female sexual resistance.
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