Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

GAMES WITH SEX AND DEATH 161
Anthropologists are fond of making diagrams to represent preferential
marriage patterns. Sometimes, these diagrams can be quite beautiful:94
Ideal pattern of bilateral cross-cousin marriage
Sometimes they merely have a certain elegant simplicity, as in this
diagram on an instance of Tiv sister exhange:95
KUNAV
MBAGBERA
MBADUKU
I
I
I I I
O D a c *B .6. A O M a N
I
: ........... 1 --1
I
I
Human beings, left to follow their own desires, rarely arrange
themselves in symmetrical patterns. Such symmetry tends to be bought
at a terrible human price. In the Tiv case, Akiga is actually willing to
describe it:
Under the old system an elder who had a ward could always
marry a young girl, however senile he might be, even if he