acephalous

Acephalous lines are usually deliberate variations in scansion, but this is not always obvious.

The social structure changed from being an acephalous or tribal society to a more chiefdom-oriented society.

A lineage-bonded society is, by population, the smallest classification of acephalous society.

They also became fictionalized as a legendary race of acephalous (headless) monsters who had eyes and mouths on their chest.

Village Bonded Societies are the largest classification of acephalous societies.

Most foraging or hunter-gatherer societies are acephalous.

They were formerly classed with acephalous mollusks.

Records of the Turkana, an acephalous African pastoral group, demonstrate strong reciprocity behavior.

A lineage-bonded society is a type of acephalous society predicated on claims of a common ancestor.

The Igbo Nation in West Africa is alleged to be an acephalous or egalitarian society.

An acephalous or headless line is a line in a poem which does not conform to its accepted metre, due to the first syllable's omission.

Because this music was catered for by acephalous societies, kulintang repertory was unfettered by an indigenous notation system.

Non-stratified egalitarian or acephalous ("headless") societies exist which have little or no concept of social hierarchy, political or economic status, class, or even permanent leadership.

Land-Bonded Societies are acephalous societies that fall in between lineage-bonded societies and village-bonded societies.

In the earlier days the area of present day Burkina Faso and most parts of the northern region of Ghana was inhabited by acephalous tribes.

She felt a searing pain along her left arm and spun away as the acephalous body swung again reflexively, the ranged globe dark in the torrential downpour.

In prehistoric South-West Asia, alternatives to chiefdoms were the non-hierarchical systems of complex acephalous communities, with a pronounced autonomy of single-family households.

In 2002, an acephalous basalt statue was found in an in a Late Bronze Age I rubbish pit (1600-1400 BC).

The poem also may be read to consist of straightforward iambic verse that relies on common metrical devices such as elision, acephalous lines, promotion, and metrical inversion.

Beneath them, as they spun, slithered the being at the center of the world, perhaps acephalous, indeed an endless landscape, turning and glistening and undulating, never the same, eternally constant.

Instead, the network is completely decentralized, "allowing for local initiative and autonomy" in an organization that may at times appear "acephalous (headless), and at other times polycephalous (hydra-headed)."

Tryon, G.W. 1862 : Synopsis of the Recent species of Gastrochaenidae, a family of acephalous Mollusca.

All of which meant, of course, that for the next several days I'd be running around like acephalous poultry, trying to catch up on those projects and whatever else landed on me in the interim.

There were bodies from which almost everything had been removed, and they seemed sculptures of nerves alone; on the stumps of necks, now acephalous, they waved what once had clung to brains.

Robert Wallace argues in his Meter in English that the term acephalous line seems "pejorative", as if criticising the poet's violation of scansion, but this view is not widely held among critics.