opposition, but it was solidly based on empirical data. Another way out
was also available, and in this respect too the Hagen data were crucial.
Hagen society depended as much on the elaboration of exchange relation-
ships, based on marriages between exogamous clan groups, as on the rules
for the internal constitution of the groups. Affines as exchange partners
were important, and affinal ties resulted in extensive matrilateral ties. So, if
there was a shortage of people in a group, it was an easy step to incorporate
sister’s children into one’s group. Finally, here, the possibility to recruit in
this way helped leading men to maximize their abilities to command
resources and the allegiances of kin within their group. The most impor-
tant thing was not any rule of descent but the ability to mobilize resources.
Demography and personal ambitions conspired together to produce a
hybrid social structure, compounded out of a descent-based ideology,
the importance of exchange, and recourse tofiliation as a way of getting
people into one’s group. In other words, if we turn from rules to pro-
cesses, we willfind here that a combination of descent at the political level
with affinity at the level of social exchange transformed itself further
through the importance of wealth transfer into the sort of‘big-man’
kind of achieved leadership and network-based prestige that ethnogra-
phers were variously describing.
Cognatic descent is another story. The Hagen case is not made one of
cognatic descent by the mere fact of recruitment into groups via either the
father or the mother (and indeed others are also brought in as orphans or
adoptees). The rule of recruitment isfiliative, not by descent. Children
brought in to their mother’s group belong to it by maternalfiliation. If
they are male, their children in turn are called‘man-bearing’, just as
agnates by descent are, andfiliation is swallowed by descent over two
generations.
There are, however, cases where this does not hold. As we have exam-
ined extensively for Duna-speaking groups in the Aluni area, true cognatic
descent operates where extensive matrilateral as well as patrilateral ties
continuously feed into local group identities,fixed by ideas of home
territory or ground (rindi), and group genealogies record this. Duna
social structure is on the model of Huli structure described early on by
Robert Glasse ( 1968 ). Glasse’s innovative account was incorporated into
the comparative ethnography largely as an outlier, but if we consider social
structure from a generative point of view as Fredrik Barth did, it is evident
that a cognatic structure can emerge out of an extensive application of
bilateral recruitment rules. Cumulativefiliation might as well be bilateral
40 BREAKING THE FRAMES