Société baule précoloniale et modèle segmentaire. Le cas de la région de Kokumbo

J.-P. Chauveau—Precolonial Baule Society and the Seg-mentary Model. Most authors have described Baule social structure as segmentary and hardly hierarchized. This interpretation leads to the inclusion as primary data of facts which are rather a logical consequence of the model itself. An analysis of the actual working of the kinship system and of social unequality reveals phenomena at a deviance from the segmentary model, such as status groups and protoclasses, reproducing themselves according to a statistical pattern characteristic of complex, unequalitarian societies. Hence a new interpretation of Baule social structure starting from a well defined historical and economic context rather than from an attempt to explain the deviance of sortie segmentary ideology from the actual precolonial socio-economic situation. This may well lead to question the heuristic validity of the segmentary model, or of some of its implications.