ABSTRACT
The inner lineage is the smaller group of agnates who comprise an operationally effective social group. The Arusha refer to it as engang, and as ‘the kin who are near’. Both the expressed norm and the simplest form of this group is that its principal members, heads of their own autonomous families, are the sons of one father who is now dead. When the father dies the bonds, which hitherto tied brothers together, now disappear as compulsory factors; but they are transmuted into mutually advantageous, cooperative relations. They become relations between autonomous equals, and their justification lies in their practical usefulness allied with sentiments arising out of common upbringing and common interests. Brothers no longer demand rights against one another, nor accede to obligations, through a superordinate authority; but rather they seek privileges and offer their own assistance in return. Reciprocal aid and the value of corporate action are, however, reinforced by the image of the dead father, which provides both a conceptualisation of lineage unity and, through the ancestor cult, a positive force which cannot be ignored without danger.
