ABSTRACT
The Tio neighbourhood was a tightly integrated whole based on kinship groupings whose dominant mode of economic production was the economics of subsistence, even though certain essential items such as salt, iron, guns, powder, and pottery were unobtainable locally and had to be exchanged for other goods produced in the neighbourhood. Religion and rituals dovetailed neatly with the social and economic structures of the small society. It is not possible to view the small-scale society as a world closed unto itself. At one level the little society was an integrated whole. At another level the little society was not a whole at all. For the political structure was the outgrowth of the social organization, the economics could not be understood without taking the commercial economy into account and to every Tio religion and ideologies represented both the smaller sub-system and the whole. The larger society was as integral a part of every segment of society as the neighbourhood itself was.
