ABSTRACT
The Jie word ekal primarily means the fenced, enclosed ‘yard‘ belonging to each wife inside a homestead. This yard is provided for her when she comes to live at her husband's homestead. She is thereafter responsible for its upkeep. It contains her huts, her granary-baskets and all her other possessions and stores. There she lives, cooks, eats, sleeps and carries on much of her normal work; there she looks after and brings up her young children and caters for her husband. It is essentially her private domain. As a full-wife she has the right to her own yard. ekal, by extension, means also the group of people who live in the yard—the wife herself, and her children. If the husband has no other wife he also normally belongs there; if he has several wives his allegiance is divided, giving him a kind of ex officio membership of each ekal. These two uses of the word are very similar, being the physical and social aspects of the same thing. From the first, it may be noted, a child lives in and belongs to a different yard from that of its half-sibling, though both have the same father.
