ABSTRACT
Functional exemplars identified the main problem of the politics of kinship as the political dimensions of unilineal descent associations, especially the segmentary lineage. Levi Strauss identified features of marriage alliances in the paradigm of structural anthropology that also had implications for political anthropology. Polygyny is a marriage strategy by which a leader may maximize the resource return from marriage alliances. The fundamental marriage rules to establish a political alliance were first elucidated by Sir Edward Tylor in his work on the significance of exogamy and by Morgan in his important study of cross- and parallel-cousins. The concern with the political aspects of kinship emerged in African Political Systems. Meyer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard emphasized that even though the segmentary lineage was largely devoid of a centralized government, it was a territorial unit that regulated political relations within and between related lineages and with external political communities to whom they were not related.
