ABSTRACT
When elders are involved in a blessing for women or in some other community issue, it is as a body without regard for age-set affiliation. Yet significantly in the traditional system, the only control that a local community has over any individual elder is through his age-set, represented by those living in the area. The ritual delegation (olamal) provides a more conventional method of age-set coercion, stressing the bond that unites an age-set. Its members are unarmed and similar in some ways to ritual dependants. Moran also are obliged to mount ritual delegations in their routine preparations for eunoto, and this is a distinct step towards elderhood. The range of women's fertility rituals may be viewed along a scale from the extreme of a mob fury from which all men flee to an increasing involvement of elders in restoring normal relations. It is the development of self-interest in elderhood that appears to be projected in the belief in sorcery.
