ABSTRACT
We have arrived at the point where it becomes relevant to examine a social system in which the concept of descent is precisely worked out and systematically applied in all domains of the social structure. With the Lozi, membership of a village depends on kinship, but its boundaries as a corporate unit arise from the conjunction of its external territorial and its politico-jural relations. I now turn to examine a system in which we find discrete and exclusive corporate groups demarcated not by such extrinsic boundaries, but strictly by rules intrinsic to the domain of kinship and descent.
