Kinship is not only a matter of relations between households. Each adult member of a household has his or her personal links and preferences. Between the men of a single household, who share their agnatic ties, the differences are not usually conspicuous, but adult women, who have been imported as adult strangers with ready-made fields of relationships, normally differ sharply from their husbands and from each other in their choice of intimacies. The more or less universal tendency for husband and wife to draw each other into their own fields of social intimacy is less marked here than in many societies because of the social segregation between the sexes. Of course, ,where a woman marries a close kinsman, the divergence is less; and also where she marries at a great distance from home, it may again be less, because she makes her new relationships with her husband's female kin.
To contract out of some of one's kinship duties does not normally disturb other people in the community, and leads at the very worst to criticism and gossip. The one major exception to this lack of specificity is the duty of agnates to defend each other in quarrels, and to avenge homicide. But even this duty, as I shall explain, is in practice optional - people can and do contract out of it.
The general lack of specificity and the optional and variable character of kinship ties make the kinship system amorphous, without making it unimportant. The amorphousness renders description difficult, and my statements about rights and duties of kin in this chapter and the next may at times be misleadingly definite. I am well aware that not only people's behaviour, but their statements about what behaviour ought to be, will vary from situation to situation, from individual to individual and even from hour to hour.