ABSTRACT
Blood debts could be pursued by either villages or clans. For a village, this was but one of many other fields of corporate action. For a clan it was the one important context in which the corporate local clan sections were transcended by the idea of the unity of the dispersed clan. This is a paradox, since local clan sections were most active, most corporate, in blood debt negotiations. But certain principles involved potentially the whole clan. The latter admittedly never acted as a unit, but its member sections could not claim blood debts against one another, and any member of the clan had a potential right to accept blood compensation for any other. Thus clanship overrode residence as the essential criterion of rights and obligations, and the rights were sufficiently valued for clanship to be very much a live principle of alignment.
