Equality is a recurrent theme in discussions of Euro-American societies. It is both an aspiration and an impossibility which stands in contradistinction to Euro-American notions of pow-er ( Dumont 1986; Robbins 1994 ) . As an aspira-tion, it goes in tandem with the idea of liberty, both linked to the value of individualism, which prevails in these societies. In his comparative works on ideologies, Louis Dumont opposed equal-ity to hierarchy through analysis of the Indian caste system. He discussed the relationship between hierar-chy and equality in nearly all his texts, beginning with Homo hierarchicus (1980a). In his introduc-tion to From Mandeville to Marx, he contrasts hier-archy, as the paramount value of the caste system with equalitarianism as one of the main values in“modern” societies ( Dumont 1977:3 ) . He clas-sifies these two systems as individualism and ho-lism. “Holism,” he explains, “entails hierarchy while individualism entails equality,” but this does not indicate that“all holistic societies stress hierar-chy to the same degree, nor do all individualistic societies stress equality to the same degree”( ibid.:4 ) . Furthermore, Dumont explains, “e-quality and hierarchy must combine in some man-ner in any social system” ( ibid.:5 ) . He claims that “it is possible for equality to be valued…with-out its being an entailment of individualism”(ibid.:5). This essay grapples with this uncertain defini-tion of equality. Is equality opposed to power, or to hierarchy? If, up to a certain point, equality is opposed to power, is it the same notion of equality which can sometimes be present in a hierarchical ideology? And in the latter case, what is the mean-ing of this type of equality? The surprising discov-ery of elements of equality within the hierarchal ideology of the caste system, in Dumont’s study of Dravidian kinship terminology, prompts closer ex-amination. Dumont’s contribution to kinship studies is substantially less known than his work on ideology or caste hierarchy in India. This, however, has not always been the case. His first published piece on kinship, in 1953, the provocative article “The Dravidian kinship terminology as an expression of marriage,” elicited vivid comments from A. R. Radcliffe-Brown ( Dumont 1983:18–35 ) . Since then, numerous authors have engaged with Dumont’s ideas on South Indian kinship. His ap-proach to kinship sparked significant debate among specialists of India and Indian kinship regarding the nature and terminology of Dravidian kinship ( see Trautmann 1981; Rudner 1990; Parkin 1992;Pfeffer 1993;Busby 1997;Viveiros de Cas-tro 1998). In the piece Affinity as a value, pub-lished in English in 1983 , Dumont responded to his critics and put forth his principal arguments on“affinity” in an effort to end years of contentious debate on the topic ( see Madan 1986 for a re-view) . Over the past twenty years, Dumont’s ideas on kinship have resurfaced in Amazonian anthropolo-gy. In the 1970s, Joanna Overing (1973, 1975) introduced Dumont’s Dravidian model of kinship to scholars researching Amazonia. Three decades lat-er, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2001) argued for the relevance of Dumont’s arguments on equality between consanguinity and affinity in Amazonia, drawing on Dumont’s notion of affinity as a value to develop his theory of “perspectivism.” His analy-sis diverges, however, from Dumont’s model, in that Dumont argued that equality between consan-guinity and affinity gained its relevance within the hierarchy of the caste system. Recent scholars ( e. g. , Gregory 2010, 2013) have again turned their attention to the “value question” in India, rene-wing the debates on affinity by approaching the val-ue of other kin relations. In this article, I examine a question largely o-verlooked in debates on “affinity as a value”:that of the equality of the sexes in South Indian terminol-ogy, which underlies Dumont’s argument of the e-quivalent ( equal) value of affinity and consanguin-ity. Dumont defined the notion of equality in oppo-sition to the encompassing hierarchy of the caste system. I will examine this argument relative to his later considerations of Western gender equality and kinship, which are relevant to current debates on gender. Following closely Dumont’s analyses, in this text, I will make use of his own written terms: e-quality between the sexes and sex distinction. In line with arguments in the field of gender studies, it is first important to point out, however, that the terms“sex” and“gender” always point to a social construct which is culturally defined. While the notion of gender allows for the examination of di-verse social representations, symbols, social rela-tionships, and so on, when used in the context of kinship terminology, it is restricted to a category of classification, such that “sex” is a more apt de-scriptor than “gender.” In this respect, the ex-pression “sex distinction,” like generation, affini-ty, collaterality distinctions, and so on, are used as criteria of kinship terminological analysis. These criteria or distinctions do not attribute any intrinsic value to kinship terms. Thus, the notion of equali-ty of the sexes in kinship terminology does not im-ply equal relations between the genders. Following Dumont, I approach the question of equality from the narrow perspective of kinship terminology and, as he does, deal almost exclusively with kinship terminology rather than the kinship practices fun-damental to gender studies ( Busby 1997; Collier and Yanagisako 1987 a ) . I employ the term “sex distinction,” as opposed to “gender difference,”to refer to relations between the sexes on a strictly terminological level. Debates in gender studies focused on kinship have yet to specifically examine kinship terminolo-gy, although the relationship between gender and kinship, both dichotomous analytical domains, has been widely discussed and criticized ( MacCormack and Strathern 1980; Ortner and Whitehead 1981;Strathern 1987 , 1988;Moore 1988;1999;Atkin-son and Errington 1990;del Valle 1993 ) . Neither gender nor kinship was capable of imposing the i-dea that all facts are cultural facts and not natural or precultural givens. At the heart of kinship di-chotomies is the analytical division between “do-mestic” and“politico-jural” domains, which leads us back to twentieth-century kinship theories, fre-quently discussed by early scholars of gender stud-ies. One of the notions that these scholars ques-tioned is the “biological difference in male and fe-male roles in sexual reproduction” presumed to be“at the core of men’s and women’s relationships everywhere” ( Collier and Yanagisako 1987 b:7 ) , such as Meyer Fortes’ (1949) discussion of procre-ation and child rearing as “ natural facts”( Yanagisako and Collier 1987: 31 ) As a social construct, the notion of gender replaced the notion of sex and it became clear that what is meant by“gender” did not refer to the biological difference between men and women. In gender studies,“sex” is finally approached as one aspect of“difference” which includes other types of differ-ences such as class, ethnicity, race, and religion. As “natural” biases and differences were progres-sively rejected, they have been replaced by the study of“culturally constructed social inequalities”(ibid.:15), leading to the hypothesis that all so-cial systems are systems of inequalities, kinship in-cluded. In this context, it is all the more surpris-ing that the analysis of terminologies was not fully included in the effort to understand inequalities or differences between men and women. Attributing a term to different types of social relationships, kin-ship terminologies inevitably mark differences be-tween relatives, more or less numerous according to terminological systems, but at minimum distin-guishing generation, age, and sex. What then, is the significance of these differences which are not accounted for? Do they constitute inequalities? As modes of classification, kinship terminologies inev-itably inform the ways people are classified as rela-tives, without distinguishing their roles or func-tions. The examination of Dumont’s works, both on equality and on kinship terminologies, is located at the interface of these questions. The first part of this article considers Dumont’s notion of equality, as presented in his comments on Tocqueville’s thoughts on egalitarian ideology and in his own writings on gender. Having clarified the terms of the discussion, the central part of the article exam-ines the intersection of caste hierarchy and kinship terminology. I analyze the status of affinity and consanguinity, as well as the equality of the sexes in South Indian kinship terminology. I then present my own ethnographic material from eastern Indone-sia to further explore Dumont’s analysis of kinship terminology. Finally, I briefly address Dumont’s comparison of kinship terminologies in North India and Western societies, relative to ideology. In con-clusion, I suggest some research directions con-cerning the status of consanguinity and affinity in contemporary societies.