ABSTRACT
The tribe, village community, clan, and household, or family, are the most important social divisions among the majority of native peoples, and consequently they must be described in connection with Mailu sociology. Among the natives of that district the village community, the clan, and the family are all extremely important units, and it would be impossible to give an account of the customs of the Mailu, or of their social life, without having drawn a clear outline of these social groupings. The ‘tribe’, on the other hand, is a term which could scarcely be used when dealing with the social institutions of one district. The Mailu people, as a whole, possess a distinct cultural unity, but they by no means form one great social group bound by ties of solidarity; thus the term ‘tribe’ may be applied to them to express the fact that they form one class in the ethnological sense, but not that they are a unit in the same sense. The formation of smaller groups within the ‘tribe’ – confederacies of several villages – is, and was in olden days, of a much greater social importance than the cultural uniformity of the whole district.
