The transformation of social structures, east to west in the highlands, coincides and interrelates with the distinct pattern of warfare and leadership. The rigidly isolated, territorially and conceptually bounded societies of the eastern highlands profess dogmas of relatedness exclusively through males which yield groups nearest in form and content to patrilineal descent groups, once thought to exist uniformly across the highlands. Marriage and kinship, and a host of other structural variables, vary along the continuum in a related fashion. The more intriguing question perhaps is ‘not whether [a society] is patrilineal or matrilineal or both or neither, but what the notion of patrilineality stands for and why it is there’ (Leach 1961:11). The clear answers here are male aggressiveness, a masculine ethos and, as this chapter documents, extreme and utter dominance of women by men, and a truncation of social relations traced through women.

Behind these patterned elements of highland social systems we must constantly reiterate the crucial, if not determining, significance of productive means and their differential growth, employment and evolution from earliest known prehistory.