Who lives with whom and why, both in fact and thought, and the implications of this, are questions central to the remaining chapters of this study. This chapter forms little more than an introduction to the topic of village composition and deals with the network of social relationships internal to settlements. In Chapters 6 and 7 we will consider the economic, political, and ritual aspects of the subject. This separation into conventional spheres of human social existence is done for expository purposes, and it is appreciated that such a division is often purely arbitrary. Throughout the region decisions on where – or better with whom – to live are informed by social, political, economic, and ritual factors for the simple reason that all these aspects are embedded in a single relationship. Because we have no terms in which to treat such multiplex relationships as though they were single entities, it is necessary to unpack them and deal with them feature by feature. An attempt has been made to alleviate this inevitable dismemberment by gradually reconstituting the parts as the description proceeds. As a result the reader will find some repetition in the following chapters, but this fault seems less than that of leaving unrepaired the fundamental coherence of the relationships involved.

However, even if we choose to ignore the complexity of the relationships that we wish to examine and concentrate solely on a single aspect, in this case that we will refer to loosely as kinship, difficulties remain. In particular, there is the problem of the value of any comparative investigation into the network of existing relationships within villages, even so far as the available data allow this to be undertaken.