that their sisters are either married and out of the household, or else very young, puts the adult brothers in a strong position. They can and do frequently ignore their sisters' rights. I suspect that at least in part the expressed sentiment about the impropriety of taking up women's claims simply reflects the very great difficulty in forcing the brothers to disgorge what they have already taken over. Nevertheless, unenforced claims are not always allowed to die, and may be revived when a death, a quarrel, or some other change in the situation presents a favourable opportunity.
A number of land disputes from Sakaltutan illustrate my point that brothers divide the land between them, and then are almost immovable. Two old men had survived their third brother and his adult son. Their brother's son's widow and her two boys formed one of the poorest households in the village. The widow rightly claimed a third of the patrimonial land for her sons. This had been divided off once, and then taken over again by the elder brother, who thus worked two-thirds of his father's land. The dispute rankled, and once flared up into an open quarrel at my very door. But the widow could do nothing. No one would support her to the point of violence against her husband's father's brother, and her sex, her poverty and her total lack of sophistication made it practically impossible for her to enlist official or legal support.
In another case, two of the better off lineages of Sakaltutan had intermarried. Abdullah (M), an elderly man in 1950, with a married adult son and several daughters, had married his father's sister's daughter; she was also father's sister to the four brothers of P lineage - Ali, Haydar, Ahmet and Bilal.
Abdullah had given no land to his sisters. The four brothers of P lineage had divided between them all the land of their father's father. Bilal (P) died, and his share, together with his wife and daughter, went to his brother, Ahmet. As I understood it, it was proposed by both sides to redivide the land, so that Abdullah's wife would receive a share of P land, and Haydar and Ahmet would receive for their wives a share of M land. Ali was expected to give up his father's sister's share of the land without getting any compensation, while Kadir of F lineage would benefit through his mother. Ali and Ahmet quarrelled when Ahmet attempted to move boundary marks. In the heat