244 AFRICAN POLITICAL SYSTEMS
relatively autonomous genealogically, ritually and jurally, ye closely united by bonds of the same kind. The expansion of maximal lineage through the course of generations, involvin often territorial dispersion, enhances the centrifugal force that promote the relative autonomy of its segments; but th centripetal forces of clanship, common religious cult, and ofte: political interdependence continue to hold it together. In it temporal extension, every lineage represents a balance of thes contrary forces. At a given time, it is a system of mutuall balancing segments in which are vested the rights and dutie through which the structural equilibrium is sustained. Thi tendency towards an equilibrium is characteristic of every phas of the social structure.
Descent being patrilineal and marriage patrilocal, the cor tinuity of the lineage depends on its male members. Only the inherit property like land or cattle, succeed to office, and transm the ritual and moral observances (totemic avoidances, &c.) dis tinctive of that unit.
Clanship has a further extension of political important Maximal lineages belonging to different, usually adjacent clans ai asymmetrically linked by ties of clanship identical with those thi unite constituent maximal lineages of the same clan, and ci across the latter ties.1 Between such units, as within the clai war was impossible.
This ramification of clanship ties corresponds closely to tt local distribution of clans. Its greatest elaboration occurs amon the 'real Talis*. Numbering about 10,000, they have some twentj five territorially adjacent, composite clans interlinked by a netwoi of clanship ties that embraces some clans of Goris as well. Thi
1 Thus, for instance, three adjacent clans, A, B, and C, are interlinked follows: A has three maximal lineages, Ai, Az, AS; B has four, Bi, B2, B 64; C has two, Ci and Cz. Lineage Ai has ties of clanship with lineages I and Ci, but not with the other B or C lineages, nor have Bi and Ci ties clanship with Az and AS- Members of Ai, Bi, and Ci may not intermarr they may inherit one another's widows and have the reciprocal ceremoni obligations of clansmen. Members of Ai marry into the other B or C lineag* and Bi and Ci intermarry with Aa and AS. Similarly, Aa has ties of clansh with 64, but not with the other B or C lineages, and AS has ties of clanship wi 63. Maximal lineages linked in this way have the same relationship towar one another as the constituent units of a single clan, but the rights and duti pertaining to it are less rigorously effective than within the clan. Clan C h similar criss-crossing linkages with clan D, D with E, and so on.