ABSTRACT
Since among the Fulƃe the agnatic principle is of prime significance, the behaviour patterns found among fathers, sons, and brothers are crucial to our analysis. It is our main task in this section to show that the details of behaviour among these categories of kin will vary according to the stage of development of any household. It is, of course, obvious that in the relations between a father and his son a number of factors influence the nature of the behaviour between them. One of the most important of these is their individual temperaments, a phenomenon which cannot easily be explained wholly in structural terms. While most fathers manage to receive devotion and close co-operation from their sons, some are anything but successful in this respect.
