adic tribes can be supported in large numbers in a single camp; while during the winter, camps are setup in smaller groups. The Basseri reckon descent patrilineally where inheritance is usually from father to son. A woman bestows membership rights to her own tribe or her offspring. The Basseri consider themselves one unified tribe because they are all subsumed under the authority of a single leader, the chief of all the Basseri. The chief is of noble lineage and is set apart from the other Basseri being removed from nomadic life. The Nuer have no centralized political organization, instead their society is kin-based. This kin-based society of the Nuer is the best known example of the segmentary lineage organization consisting of twenty patrilineal clans divided into maximal lineages, then into major lineages and on into minimal and minor lineages. The unique alliance forming properties of the segmentary lineage system of organization allows its members to raid nearby territories held by groups without the ability to mobilize forces. The Nuer are an aggressive people, where disputes frequently end in death; the disputes can stem from something as little as an insult and the Nuer are described as taking offense very easily. The only way the Nuer have to stop a dispute from shedding any more blood is for the one whom started the dispute, usually by murder, to go to the leopard-skin chief, a neutral outsider to the lineage network, and a ritual is performed to cleanse the killer and a reasonable compensation must be made to the family whose member was murdered.With the environment they live in, the Basseri and the Nuer have adapted to the limitations imposed on them by their environment. The Nuer live in southern Sudan on sides of the Nile river where jungles and swamps line the river and also live on out past the flood plains with a total of roughly thirty-five thousand acres in which the Nuer inhabit. Alternating floods and dro...
