agnates, and not look to inherit through mother or wife.
Decreasing village autonomy, the decline in the power and importance of lineages, and the increase of administrative control and interference have increased the chances of establishing and enforcing a claim to female inheritance. At the same time, the universal recognition in the village that sisters ought to receive a share seems to reflect growing urban influence and perhaps the slow acceptance of the new Civil Code of the country. Moreover, the motives for claiming female inheritance grow stronger as land grows scarcer. While therefore female inheritance in special cases has always occurred, inheritance by daughters when there are living adult sons is probably fairly new, and increasing.
The rule is clear. On the death of a household head, his sons are expected within a reasonable period to divide up the property between them and establish separate independent households.
Separation is accepted rather than approved. It is a subject for comment and joking; it is as though people felt that families ought to be able to live together in peace, even though they do not expect them to do so. For those who stay together longer than usual, there is no adverse comment or joking.
In fact, the separation of brothers is sometimes delayed for long periods, even, in rare cases, for their lifetime. In such cases, the elder brother is usually a dominant personality. One household, in a neighbouring village which I visited early in my field work, was shared by two old brothers. In some of the rare apparently stable shared households of this type, one brother farmed, while the other worked as a craftsman, usually a migrant (p. 38). In one village I was told of a stable houseold shared by three brothers - twenty souls in all.
If a father dies prematurely, leaving unmarried sons, all the sons normally remain together until all are married, the elder shouldering the father's responsibility. But they are apt to separate as soon as this operation is complete. Haci Omer and his two brothers told me that they had remained together eight years after their father's death, and had been separated sixteen. They must therefore have separated when the youngest brother