A STUDY OF THE PROCESS OF VILLAGE FORMATION IN YE’CUANA SOCIETY

In Ye’cuana society the village is the structural unit of the political system. For the individual the village embodies all meaningful sociopolitical relations. Hence it is important to discern under what conditions villages come to life, disappear, and give way to new villages. Furthermore, villages are the institutionalization of a stage, the last one, in the overall process of group formation. To understand this final stage and its development, one has to delve into the preceding stages and elucidate their ruling principles. In this paper, emphasis is placed upon internal migration (a recurrent event in Ye’cuana sociopolitical life) because it