to ramifying segmented groups that maintained claims to resources, and
kept extended ties of kinship and descent to enable them to do so. Their
tribes were political blocs within which there was some recognition of
payment for killings infighting. Age-set organization held together wider
sets of youths and adults across segmentary divisions. With both Tallensi
and Nuer, however, the segmentary organization of groups was
important.
When anthropologist trained to be acquainted with the Tallensi and
Nuer cases (regardless of their highly significant differences) encountered
the New Guinea Highlands social groups, theirfirst attempt was tofit
them into a unilineal model of descent. Discrepancies soon appeared, on
two fronts. First, if there was a unilineal rule, why was it often enough not
followed? Second, what were analysts to make of at least one case, the
Huli, who appeared to have cognatic or ambilineal descent?
An important clue to this situation might have been found in the Nuer
case, where it was obvious that a unilineal ideology permeated the seg-
mentary political structure of groups, but at the level of residence and local
affiliation people might belong with their mother’s people, or they might
be in origin members of another set of persons, the Dinka, drawn into the
Nuer groups through conquest and assimilation (an ironic point given the
contemporary state-wide struggles in South Sudan between Nuer and
Dinka factions). Unilineal at one level and not at another, then? Because
descent was sometimes taken as a total system typology, it had to stand or
fall as a descriptive device on whether it was consistently followed. This,
however, was a mistake. Equally, it was a mistake to suppose that if it did
not operate in this way, it was somehow a mirage, as John Barnes sug-
gested (Barnes 1962 ).
A way out of the descriptive impasse had to be found. Two ways were
available. One pertained to the idea of descent itself, or to the dogma of
descent, as Barnes ( 1962 ) put it. What is a dogma for? It is to maintain a
certain valued ideology. In some New Guinea Highlands cases there was
indeed such an ideology applying across the board of social groups, but
whereas it was applied unequivocally to relations between political seg-
ments of groups and ensured their solidarity it was not applied to the
actual level of recruitment to these groups. As one of us (AJS)first worked
out in 1965, the rule of recruitment in the Hagen groups of the Dei
Council area at this time in history was byfiliation, not by descent
(Strathern 1972 ). This was a major turn of analysis, made possible only
by breaking the frame of descent as a total model. Naturally, it raised
4 INDIVIDUALS 39