Guy Lanouethat are discursively situated in terms of territory but not in terms of
time. Nomadic hunters constitute themselves and their social orga-
nization as users and owners of territories, not as inheritors of a tra-
dition. These people, however, situate themselves in local hierarchies
and networks on the basis of who was living (and therefore working)
with their parents in the previous generation.
Briefly, the Sekani have primary and secondary brotherhoods very
similar to those described by Turner and Wertman ( 1977 ) for the Cree,
in which children of people who worked closely together are consid-
ered close kin who should collaborate closely, especially in the early
stages of a person’s life. “In-laws” (the secondary brotherhood) are
the network from which partnerships (usually, wife’s brother or wife’s
sister’s husband) are formed during adulthood. In both cases, part-
nerships are always hierarchical (a junior and a senior partner define
a hunting group). In the final stages of a person’s working life, junior
partners are selected from the senior’s hunting group of origin (usu-
ally, sister’s husband or sister’s son), even though this has long ceased
to function as a unit. In fact, the offspring of parent’s secondary broth-
erhood are a child’s primary brotherhood, which roughly defines a
circle of collaboration and incest that provides an initial point of ref-
erence for defining other potential bonds, marriage, and partnerships
acquired through marriage.
Time, in the sense of history, is meaningless since it is not politi-
cized as a meaningful category that structures the present. The past,
in other words, is very much in the present since parents are still ac-
tive when younger children begin hunting and trapping, transform-
ing the potential partnerships of the primary brotherhood into social
capital to develop a secondary brotherhood. Although there is no his-
tory in our Western sense in these societies, time is everywhere em-
bedded in space, even though individual memories cannot be easily
grafted onto a larger semiotic dynamic defining time as an ontologi-
cally independent category (Lanoue 1992 ).
Place, however, is highly politicized. First, the physical limits of the
homeland are defined by the sum of the extent of the displacement of
individual hunting groups. Second, even hierarchy is linked to space,