THE TALLENSI 243
clan, or a group of clans. Such, a local clan is conceived by the natives as an expanded agnatic lineage, all the members of which are 'kinsmen by consanguinity' (dyyam) to one another. Actually, the composite clan comprising two or more maximal lineages,1 each occupying roughly its own section of the settlement, is the commonest type. Co-members of a maximal lineage are bound by the rule of exogamy. The correlative of this rule is the right of male members to inherit one another's widows, if kinship rules are not transgressed thereby.2 These, the basic norms of clanship, are extended to other maximal lineages with which ties of clanship exist, whether of the same clan or not. The constituent maximal lineages of a composite clan, though relatively autonomous in relation to one another, are bound by clearly defined reciprocal duties and privileges, obligations and rights which emerge in ceremonial situations, economic and legal affairs and in the religious institutions.
A clan is referred to by outsiders as 'the people of such and such a place', e.g. Torjdzm. From the graves of their ancestors it can be inferred that the older settlements have been inhabited by the present local clans for at least three centuries. According to native theory, bonds of consanguinity, and therefore lineage membership, can never lapse. New maximal lineages cannot arise through fission of those in existence.
Like the constituent maximal lineages of a composite clan, though less so, the major segments of a maximal lineage are
1 By a maximal lineage, I mean the most extensive group of individuals tracing agnatic descent from a single common ancestor. It comprises, therefore, all the agnatic descendants, male and female, of the remotest ancestor (eight to eleven generations back) known to members of the group. A maximal lineage has an hierarchical structure. It consists of two or more major segments, each a lineage of lesser span than the (inclusive) maximal lineage, whose members have a common ancestor one degree less remote than the founder of the maximal lineage. Each major segment comprises lesser segments constituted on the same principle; and so on down to the minimal lineage consisting of the children of one man. A composite clan therefore has no single common ancestor. The natives speak of a lineage as the 'house' (yir) or the 'children*
biis) or the 'room' (dug) of So-and-So. There is no term for what I call a 'clan*. The lineage system operates completely independently of numbers. A maximal lineage of two members has the same status as one of 2,000 members in the same clan. I use lineage as the general term for a lineage of any order of segmentation and of any span.
2 A father (son) may not marry the widow of a son (father). The classificatory extension of this rule differs slightly from one maximal lineage to another, according to its structure.