Note 10 — Chapter I · THE SOCIAL ORGANISATION

The constitution of the local group is illustrated by the arrangement of the village. The whole village consists of a number of separate huts, each hut occupied by a family. A family consists of a man and his wife and such of their children own or adopted as are not of an age to be independent. Besides the families each group necessarily contains a small number of unmarried men and widowers and some unmarried girls and widows. The unmarried men and widowers without children occupy a separate hut (or huts) which we may speak of as the bachelors’ hut. Mr Man states that the spinsters (i.e., the unmarried women who are of marriageable age) and widows occupy a hut of their own similarly to the bachelors10. In the camps that I visited I did not find any such spinsters’ hut. What unmarried females there were, I found attached to one or other of the families of the village, each one living in the hut of some married relative, generally the parent or foster-parent.