Kin ties between women are affected by another factor. Women do not in the day-to-day life move easily round the village, let alone between villages. They are tied by household duties, by small children or grandchildren, and by modesty, to their home. At the same time, they are extremely gregarious. No woman ever remains alone if she can manage to avoid it, and loneliness is constantly spoken of as a great evil. House doors are never shut to other women and children, who come and go without ceremony or greeting. Expeditions to fetch water, or to the fields to work, are normally undertaken in company.
For a girl set down by her marriage in a strange village, her new daily circle may include no previous kin at all. New intimacies must be forged among neighbours and affines. In practice, in almost any village close to her own a woman will have some kin; she is often marrying into an already allied household. But even then her new circle is still bound to include many strangers. Even a girl who marries her father's brother's son in the next house in her own village will find in her circle some strangers who have moved into it by their own marriage.
Thus any set of women who meet daily and share their tasks, their child-minding, and their gossip will include some who are neither kin nor childhood neighbours to each other. Such a set will change its composition fairly steadily over time, by