The institutional system of Gotra, which emerged definitively during the Later Vedic period, primarily served which socio-legal function in the structural organization of society?

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The word Gotra originally meant a cow-pen or the place where cattle belonging to a collective clan were sheltered. In Later Vedic times, it evolved into an ideological lineage marker tracing descent from common legendary seers. Gotra exogamy prohibited marriages within the same Gotra to preserve paternal kinship parameters and control family inheritance lines.

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