GENS,

plural Gentes, ancient Roman kinship grouping whose members claimed descent from a common male ancestor. The descendants revered this ancestor and identified themselves by using his name as their second name (or nomen)e.g., Caius Valerius Catullus. The gens was exogamousmarriage with another member of the gens was discouraged. The term gens was introduced into anthropology in 1877 by the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan to refer to an exogamous body of blood relations descended from the same common male ancestor. Morgan intended gens to replace the term clan, which was held to describe matrilineal descent groups only. The word clan, however, is increasingly used, except in the United States, as the general term for an exogamous unilineal descent group claiming common ancestry, and further distinctions are usually expressed by the words patrilineal clan, or patriclan, and matrilineal clan, or matriclan. See also clan.