ABSTRACT
Every family is connected closely in everyday affairs with a small group of surrounding households. Land, shortage is tending to lessen the territorial unity of these matrilineal groups. Where a line has been very productive of daughters, and they have not left the village with wage-earning husbands, crowding has sometimes forced families to occupy new sites. The purchase of house sites is not yet common, although the increasing difficulty for some groups of finding suitable sites on their ancestral plots while neighbouring land stands idle, suggests that it soon must. Villagers are used to the idea of buying land which yields an income, but house sites have been scarce for a comparatively short time. Many men express a desire to purchase their own homestead land and build a house on it, rather than continue to live on their wives’ tanahpusaka. The matrilineal extended, family is almost the complete social milieu of the women and younger children of the group.
