Word: clan
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...their family ties. For much of the Third World, the idea of the nation-state has not evolved too far from the idea of kingdoms; rulers are still heads of extended tribes or vast families, rather than chief executives of the machinery of government. Politics very often pits clan against clan, all the way from Machiavellian patriarchs to the wives and daughters, whose chief duty is still procreation and the maintenance of the tribe's hearth. When chaos and violence rob a family of vigorous male representation, its senior women then pursue the clan's goals, much as queen regents...
...have tried harder than Jean Auel, the Oregon chronicler of Ice Age romance, to fathom the mysteries of Cro-Magnon life. From her 1980 best seller, The Clan of the Cave Bear, through three popular sequels, including the just-published The Plains of Passage, Auel has fleshed out the stone-and- bone discoveries of archaeology to create a fully realized world for her prehistoric heroine, Ayla. In the latest 757-page volume, Ayla sets forth from her home among the Mammoth Hunters of the Eurasian steppes and, braving blizzards, a locust swarm and a fall into a glacier crevasse, reaches...
While keeping the lid on personal liberties, the House of Saud has also held on tightly to its monopoly on power. Within the Saud clan, which includes 5,000 princes, there is considerable consultation. Still, government is a closed shop. There is not a single elected official and not a single political party...
Barnard's concern is what makes people "nice," and he homes in on the distinctions between virtue and conformity. His central characters are the Phelans, a scruffy clan of hoodlums, vandals, welfare cheats and general layabouts who are burned out of their home in a fatal arson. Not even this makes them sympathetic. They remain a bitter if invigorating tonic, to be taken in carefully measured doses. But they are mean-spirited fun. Barnard, an acute and merciless chronicler of Britain's middle classes, is at his fiercest in showing how the proper bourgeoisie reacts to, and is repeatedly bested...
BUSINESS: Why the Genovese clan is so powerful...