Among the various ways in which structural age is used as a principle of social organization, a unique place is held by those societies that employ age in the organization of residential settlements. Reference here is not to the temporary residential segregation that is often part of initiation rites and that, for example, characterizes the young warriors grade in the initiation model, but to settlements such as villages.

The Nyakyusa of Tanzania, studied by Wilson (1951), have become renowned in the anthropological literature for their so-called age villages. Wilson's interpretation has substantially withstood the heavy criticism directed at it, criticism that we will take into account in our analysis. But the Nyakyusa age villages are only one of the forms, and perhaps the least significant, of the use of structural age for residential organization.

Other forms specifically directed to residential organization and the maintenance of order of communal life display more complex structural and functional characteristics. The best-known cases, at least with respect to the available ethnographic information, are the Afikpo villages of Nigeria and the ethnic groups of the Lagoon Peoples of the Ivory Coast.

The existence of residential systems that make use of structural age as an organizing principle is documented among a number of other populations as well, such as the Yakö of Nigeria (Forde 1950: 267–89), the Ndembu of Zambia (Turner 1955: 121–37), and the Lele of the Kasai in Zaire (Douglas 1963: 68–84).