South fore politics

Abstract

This paper considers the South Fore political system with specific reference to the structure of local groups and their internal and external relations, focusing on warfare, sorcery and types of leadership. The ‘parish’, the widest political unit, is a volatile coalition of smaller units: the ‘section’, as the effective political body responsible for war and political alliances; and the ‘line’, as a complex of ties, the basis for interparish social networks. Big Men, of limited power, depend for support more on interpersonal networks than on solidary groups. Common descent nominally symbolizes parish unity, but the parish is actually a residential unit with a high personnel turnover and open recruitment.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.