plants to make some needed goods. The men conduct hunting of game with shotguns; they also do most of the fishing as well. Men have long devoted a large portion of their adult years to earning money in work in coastal Suriname or French Guiana. This allows them to buy the Western goods considered essential to life in their home villages, such as shotguns and powder, tools, pots, cloth, hammocks, soap, kerosene, and rum. During the second half of the 20th century, small stores were established in many villages, making more goods available. Outboard motors, transistor radios, and tape recorders became common consumer items. Today, cell phones are ubiquitous; both men and women have greatly increased communication with Paramaribo. New economic opportunities in the gold industry – mining for men, prostitution for women – are being exploited. Social organization Saramaka society is firmly based on a matrilineal kinship system. A clan (lo) – often several thousand individuals – consists of the matrilineal descendants of an original band of escaped slaves. Children are considered born into this clan. It is subdivided into lineages (bee) – usually 50 to 150 people – descended from a more recent ancestress. Several lineages from a single clan constitute the core of every village. The matrilineal clans (lo) own land, based on claims staked out in the early 18th century as the original Maroons fled southward to freedom. Hunting and gathering rights belong to clan members collectively. Within the clan, temporary rights to land use for farming are negotiated by village headmen. The establishment of transmigration villages in the 1960s led to land shortages in certain regions. The success of the Saramakas in their lawsuit against the government of Suriname will now permit them to manage their lands with less outside interference. Complex marriage prohibitions (including bee exogamy) and preferences are negotiated through divination. Demographic imbalance, owing to labor migration, permits widespread polygyny. Although co-wives hold equal status, relations between them are expected to be adversarial. The Saramaka treat marriage as an ongoing courtship, with frequent exchanges of gifts such as men's woodcarving and women's decorative sewing. Although many women live primarily in their husband's village, men never spend more than a few days at a time in the matrilineal (home) village of a wife. Each house belongs to an individual man or woman, but most social interaction occurs outdoors. The men in each cluster of