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Many ethics review bureaucracies present signed, written forms administered at a single point in time as the default, best‐practice method for obtaining and documenting consent to participate in research. The demand is emblematic of ethics review committees’ insistence on form over function, their failure to understand the cultural contexts of field research, and erroneous assumptions about research methods. Ethnographers responding to an international survey argued that written consent may not protect participants, may mask unethical research, and may often be inappropriate for legal, cultural, political or historical reasons. We suggest the dominance of written consent reflects culturally specific views of paper, writing, signatures, and contracts grounded in particular historical imaginations of the authenticity of the signature and the power of writing and forms. Construed by ethics review institutions as culturally universal, the signed consent form has come to take on the qualities of a fetish. [research ethics, informed consent, signatures, forms, research ethics committees, institutional review boards]

WHAT IF THEY built an asylum and nobody showed up? By asking this question, I mean to forefront the problem of what sort of a structure it is to which people are committed or present themselves. In the extensive literature on asylums that has developed over the course of the last three decades, most authors assume a needy or dominated population to exist around such buildings who eventually give over their unfortunates to fill them up. Few theorists, moreover, look seriously at those who staff these structures, who are, at least in the rank-and-filejobs, generally locals. Thus, while we can find an ample literature about asylums as tokens of a type, we find much less on the actual local existence of any particular institution. 1 This essay developed out of a project investigating the cultural and historical relationships between a (recently) large mental hospital, St. Columba's Hospital in Sligo town, serving the counties of Sligo and Leitrim in the northwest of Ireland, and a market town and its environs, containing about 1,600 people, that for the purposes of this study I am calling Kilronan. In this paper I am interested in the local presence of a bureaucratic structure, examining how this institution is locally constituted as well as looking at some of the historical changes that it has effected at this locality. By proceeding in this fashion, the argument both echoes and reinforces recent calls in the discipline to treat together local, colonial, and national histories, insisting that understanding historical change in culture and understanding how culture conditions historical change are equally necessary parts of a comprehensive anthropological analysis

Cinematographic Theory and New Dimensions in Ethnographic Film. Paul Hockings and Yasuhiro Omori, eds. Anthropological Filmmaking: Anthropological Perspectives on the Production of Film and Video for General Public Audiences. Jack R. Rollwagen, ed. Disappearing World. Andre Singer and Leslie Woodhead. Visual Explorations of the World: Selected Papers from the International Conference on Visual Communication. Martin Taureg and Jay Ruby, eds.

Commons + Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability and the Flow of Knowledge. Marilyn Strathern. Wantage, Oxfordshire: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2004. 102 pp.

AT A SPECIAL WORKSHOP held in the fall of 1994, we gathered to discuss the rapid growth of interest in European ethnography and ethnology, especially since the foundation of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe in 1986, and its implications for the larger development of anthropological theory. 1 After the deliberations, each of us developed the position paper originally formulated for that initial encounter. The texts that follow are the result. They claim neither thematic nor theoretical unity, but they do suggest that the refocusing of anthropological interest on one of the discipline's cultural contexts of emergence, coupled with the geopolitical shifts of the past decade, may have contributed to a reconsideration of the role of social and cultural anthropology in the formulation of a social theory. In one sense the "anthropologizing" of Europe was a necessary methodological counterpart to the dethronement of Europe as the fount of all wisdom. But what, for those who still (or for the first time) claim it as their identity and home, is Europe? We offer these brief ruminations

The issue of cultural universals versus linguistic relativity is currently one of the most intensely debated topics in sociocultural anthropology. Emotion terms have long served as a contested area and we provide a brief review. The primary aim of the paper is to introduce methods that facilitate the objective analysis of empirical findings on the extent to which semantic structure is shared among different languages. The main finding of this paper is that Chinese-, English-, and Japanesespeaking subjects assign basically similar meanings to 15 common emotion terms. The differences among the three languages are genuine and statistically significant but small. One of the particularly impressive aspects of the present findings is the extent to which they are consistent with previous research traditions that posit cultural and semantic universals. Differences also exist in the performance of Chinese and Japanese bilingual subjects when performing tasks in English compared to performing the same tasks in their native language, [emotions, inter-cultural and intra-cultural variability, cultural universals, linguistic relativity, Chinese, Japanese]

This paper examines how different patterns of kinship and inheritance affect intergenerational relationships and the ramifications of gender inequality. Peasant societies of pre-industria l Northern Europe are contrasted with those of contemporary South Asia to illuminate some of these relationships. While Northern European kinship and inheritance systems made for high status in youth and a loss of power and status as people aged, South Asian systems make for lower power and status in youth and a rise as people age. From this follow more conflict-ridden relationships between the generations and a stronger conjugal bond in Northern Europe, while in South Asia intergenerational ties are strong and the conjugal bond is weak. This in turn leads to a greater potential for marginalizing women in South Asia, although gender inequality exists in both settings. The convergence of low autonomy due to youth as well as sex amongst young married women in South Asia means that women are at the lowest point in their life cycle in terms of autonomy during their peak childbearing years. As shown in this paper, this has considerable implications for demographic and health outcomes: in terms of poorer child survival, slower fertility decline, and poorer reproductive health.

Victor Barnouw was born May 25, 1915, in The Hague, Netherlands, son of Adriaan Jacob and Anne E. (Midgley) Barnouw. Upon Adriaan Barnouw's appointment as Queen Wilhelmina Professor of Dutch Language and Literature at Columbia University, the family moved in 1919 to New York City. Victor became a U.S. citizen in 1924, and attended Horace Mann School for Boys from 1927 to 1933. After two years (1933-35) at Princeton, he studied at the National Academy of Design from 1935 to 1937. He then completed his undergraduate studies at Columbia College, receiving the A.B., with honors, in 1940. He received the Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1948, and did postdoctoral study in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of South Asia Regional Studies from 1951 to 1952. It is fitting that the Linton-Kardiner seminars at Columbia, so seminal to the whole field of culture-and-personality, were central in setting Barnouw's anthropological course. It is significant, too, that a crucial paper was by a psychoanalyst (Kardiner) in commemoration of Freud. Barnouw always believed Freud's work to be of great value; indeed, no one is more cited, in Culture and Personality, than Freud. Moreover, one of that book's enduring contributions is its thorough refutation of the notion that Malinowski "disproved" the universality of the Oedipus complex. (Barnouw's analysis concludes that Malinowski's "handling of the central question concerning the Oedipus complex is unsatisfactory and leaves the problem still unsettled" [Barnouw 1985:84].) Ruth Benedict served as Barnouw's doctoral adviser at Columbia. (He remembered her in a wonderful paper entitled simply "Ruth Benedict" [Barnouw 1981].) Informed by her distinction between atomistic and corporate societies, his dissertation (Barnouw 1950) on Chippewa acculturation argued that Chippewa personality patterns-less than admirable in some respects, by our standards-had remained quite stable despite acculturation, and that this was because their atomistic social structure had been intrinsically more resistant to disruption, by reservation life, than had been the more corporate societies on the Plains. These claims drew criticism; the ensuing discussion and debate raised important methodological issues, and also fundamental-and sensitive-questions about the relationship between anthropology and political ideology. Bernard J. James offered criticisms basically empirical in nature; Harold Hickerson, however, in addition to insinuating racist motives, rather bluntly charged work such as Barnouw's with helping justify exploitation of native peoples by Whites. That Barnouw answered his critics substantively is a tribute to the agility of his mind; that he did so with graceful restraint, to the quality of his character. The whole exchange is reviewed, with references, in Barnouw 1978; George Spindler

of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, the Rusk Center at the University of Georgia, and the University Research Committee of Baylor University. We would particularly like to thank Arq.Jose Ma. Gutierrez, Ing.Jose Luis Aceves, Ignacio Ruiz Love, Bill Glade, Albert Saulniers, Laura Finsten, Virginia Murphy, and Jeanie Fitzpatrick, all of whom contributed materially to this paper. Eric Chetwynd and Bill Miner at the USAID have helped previous efforts, and their comments have improved this paper as well.

Dravidien et Kariera: l'alliance de marriage dans l'Inde du Sud, et en Australie. Louis Dumont. Textes de sciences sociales 14. Paris & The Hague: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Mouton, 1975. 148 pp. 38 F (paper). The Adnjamathanha Personal Pronoun and the “Wailpi Kinship System.” R. Schebeck. Perception of Kinship Structure Reflected in the Adnjamathanha Pronouns. Luise A. Hercus and Isobel M. White. Papers in Australian Linguistics No. 6, Pacific Linguistics, Series A, No. 36. Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra, 1973. 74 pp. n.p. Texts on The Social System of the Adnjamathanha People With Grammatical Notes. B. Schebeck. Pacific Linguistics, Series D, No. 21. Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra, 1974. xviii + 278 pp. n.p.

Recent work on oral narrative has emphasized differences in textual and performative approaches, which in turn has tended to widen the distinction between two fundamental categories of anthropological thought: structure and process. This paper argues that, at least for the interpretation of South American myth, an integrated approach is essential. After reviewing the epistemological basis of current problems in myth studies, the paper attempts a structural analysis of myths with the theme of a metamorphic conjugal union between human and nonhuman. Processual considerations are introduced in the form of syncretic myth, and the argument is advanced that there exist syncretic transformations of a structural nature. Identifying these provides the beginnings of a bridge between structure and process, and leads to an examination of the performative context of the subject myth. Other narrative genres, dealing with explicitly ethnic concepts, are implicated in the processual sequence of the telling and interpretation of the tale. The attempted synthesis of structure and process in narrative analysis leads to an engagement with two difficult problems: the relationship between ethnicity and kinship; and the transition from myth to history. [myth, structure, process, ethnicity, kinship]

This paper examines law in the New Guinea Highlands through a cross-cultural, case-study approach. Because of low levels of variation in ecology and infrastructure, the Highlands become a natural laboratory for testing theoretically derived hypotheses relating legal complexity and the evolution of law to population density, agriculture, and property ownership. The predicted variation in legal process fails to emerge and thus the hypotheses are not supported. The uniformity of process will be encouraging topolicymakers involved with developing a national legal system based on customary law. HIS PAPER EMPLOYS THE NEW GUINEA HIGHLANDS as a "natural laboratory" to address questions of theoretical interest concerning legal complexity and the emergence of formal legal structures as a reflection of demographic and structural conditions. The pragmatic origin of this study, for me, lies in the constitutional mandate to develop a national legal system based on customary law in Papua New Guinea. This mandate presumes, despite the absence ofcross-cultural research, that there is sufficient uniformity to provide a foundation (Scaglion 1981:28). Certain lines of thought relating law to population density or property ownership would predict variation rather than uniform

The Management of Myths: The Politics of Legitimation in a Newfoundland Community. Anthony P. Cohen. Newfoundland Social and Economic Studies, 14. St. John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1975. viii + 146 pp. n.p. (cloth). Saint Pascal: Changing Leadership and Social Organization in a Quebec Town. Gerald L. Gold. Cultures and Communities: A Series of Monographs, Community Studies. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada, 1975. viii + 215 pp. n.p. (paper). Natives without a Home. Mark Nagler. Canadian Social Problems Series. Don Mills, Ontario: Longman Canada, 1975. xvii + 85 pp. $2.95 (paper). Crime in Canadian Society. Robert A. Silverman and James J. Teevan, Jr., comps. Toronto: Butterworth, 1975. xi + 455 pp. $7.95 (paper).

What knowledge do cultural anthropologists have to contribute to public policy? What problems have they encountered and what roles should they assume? After reviewing several positions, this paper suggests that anthropologists consider contributing to public policy through other branches of government in addition to the executive. Emphasis is given to the legislative branch in a representative democracy. Although the paper discusses the United States, the approach ought to be applicable to other representative systems as well. [public policy, political anthropology, applied anthropology, ethics]

This paper analyzes the meanings of Vietnamese kinship terms on the basis of the rules that regulate their referential and nonreferential uses. These rules are not completely consistent with one another. They constitute contradictory models of and for sociocultural reality at a certain level. The structural contradictions among these models render 'fuzzy" even the definitions of the prototypical uses of Vietnamese kin terms. The coexistence of alternative models makes the use of a linguistic form both a goal-directed action and the representation of an order. THE ISSUE COMMON TO CLASSICAL SOCIAL THEORISTS AND contemporary social scientists alike is the dynamics of human action. The diverse approaches to the problem pivot on a basic polarity in Western thought: human action either as representation of a supraindividual, monolithic, and self-regulating order or as goal-directed behavior of self-interested, manipulative, and unique individuals. Minor variations notwithstanding, in contemporary social and anthropological theory it is the difference between Durkheim's and Spencer's frameworks, between Levi-Strauss's and Malinowski's theories. In the literature on language, this contrast is nicely summarized by Saussure, who works within the Durkheimian framework. To Saussure, it is the difference between langue as a homogeneous entity of abstract linguistic forms that exists independently of human actions and parole as a heterogeneous mass of speech utterances that vary freely with the "will" of individual actors (1959:9ff.). Language in the Saussurean heritage is assumed to correspond perfectly to another order, either of inner "thought" (sense) or of outer "reality" (reference). Its function is essentially referential and predicational. At the other extreme is Malinowski's atomistic theory of meaning, which emphasizes the context-dependent uses of linguistic forms basically as alternative tactics to achieve desired end states (1935). In this paper, I examine the context-specific and rule-regulated uses of Vietnamese kinship terms in relation to the theoretical polarity between representation and choice, between order and action. These linguistic forms constitute the most important subset in the Vietnamese system of person reference. This system comprises dozens of lexical alternates (kinship terms, proper nouns, personal pronouns, and other nonkinship role terms) that are used to refer to the addressor, the addressees, and third parties in social interactions. My analysis focuses mainly on the general sociocultural parameters within which kinship terms are used and within which their meanings are defined. It is, in other words, an analysis of the native models in terms of which Vietnamese actors use these lexical

FOR many years, interest in social structure has been directed towards unilinear systems, while bilateral structures have been allowed to remain an unstudied residual category for everything that is not unilinear. Some writers (e.g. Fortes 1953:33) have stressed the universality of certain bilateral features, while others (e.g. Radcliffe Brown 1935:302) have considered the absence of a unilinear principle of some kind to be unusual or rare. Even the most cursory glance at the now voluminous literature on societies with bilateral structures reveals the great variation among them and suggests the need, not only for a better understanding of what these variations are, but also of what structural principles are being varied. Murdock (1949:56-58), Pehrson (1954), and Spoehr (1950:3) have stressed the need for studies of bilateral social structure, and in his study of the Konkama Lapps, Pehrson (1957) set forth and defined the concept of "bilateralism." Also aware of the inadequacies in the current bilateral concept, Freeman (1955:7) has offered the term "utrolateral filiation" to describe some features of Iban social structure. Others have run into special problems in describing and classifying societies where the ordinary bilateral-unilinear distinctions are either inappropriate or inadequate. Most notable of these have been Boas (1920) with the Kwakiutl, Firth (1929:98) with the Maori, Gifford (1929:2933) with the Tongans, Mcllwraith (1948 1:117-162) with the Bella Coola, Gluckman (1951:71-76) with the Lozi, and Goodenough (1955:73-75) with the Gilbertese. The plan of this paper is first to survey a number of selected examples of what Goodenough (1955: 72) has called nonunilinear descent groups, and then to compare these with the well-known unilinear types and with variations in the so-called kindred type of structure. In comparing these systems, however, one does not get far before it also becomes clear that a new look at the concept of descent itself, as well as the related concepts of inheritance and succession, might be rewarding. The purpose of this paper is not just to set up a series of types or to study bilaterality as a special type, but to offer at least tentatively three structural features which seem to operate in all systems, and which in their various combinations produce the rich variety of kin groupings we find described. Let us look briefly at the concept of descent. This has been variously defined, depending upon the interests of the investigator and the unit of analysis with which he starts. The most common American usage seems to begin with the existence of a kin group; descent is then defined as the manner in which persons affiliate with this group by birth (see Murdock 1949:15). A similar

SOCIAL STATUS, WEALTH AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AMONG THE YORUBA 1 By WILLIAM R. BASCOM VIEW the sociological and I Nproblems of of culture current personality, it should anthropological to concern with and be of interest consider the manner in which individual differences, particularly those associated with status, are viewed in another culture, in this case that of the Yoruba of the kingdom of Ife. Intentionally, no attempt has been made to reconcile the categories in terms of which the West African Yoruba classify individuals with the current concepts of psycho-ethnography, which were still unrefined in 1937-38 1 when these data were collected. The Yoruba categories, rather, are presented as they were recorded in the belief that it may be profitable to examine a different point of view, in this case that of the Yoruba themselves toward members of their own society. Secondly, this paper concerns the effect of wealth on social position in a pecuniary African society. As will be seen, the classifications of individual differences reflect social and economic status as much as, or perhaps even more than, differences in individual personality. The analysis of these cate­ gories leads immediately to a consideration of the important factor of wealth, as well as that of hereditary or ascribed status. Birth into one of the patrilineal clans (idile)2 in itself gives an individual a certain status, while it may also make him eligible to hold one of the hereditary political or religious offices. Hereditary offices, as the term applies among the Yoruba, do not pass directly from father to son, but are generally open to any member of the clan, at least in theory, since there may be requirements as to sex, age or seniority, wealth, character, or other qualifications. Individual differences and wealth are only two of many factors which effect social position; that of seniority has been considered elsewhere,3 while others require a more complete discussion than can be devoted to them here. The major objective of this paper is to analyze the relationship of individual differences and wealth to social status ascribed on the basis of birth. The Yoruba people number some 3,500,000 and inhabit the southwestern 1 Field work in He and Igana, Nigeria, in 1937-38, was made possible by a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council of New York City, under the sponsorship of the Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University. Acknowledgement is also made to The Viking Fund of New York City and the Committee on Research of the Graduate School of Northwestern Uni­ versity for assistance in the preparation of this manuscript. S In the established orthography of Yoruba, used in this paper, ~ represents f, Q represents J, 1 represents sh or S, p represents kp and n represents nazalization except where it occurs between I Bascom, 1942a. two vowels.

T HIS paper represents an attempt to discuss some aspects of the interrelationships between social structure, forms of speech, and the subsequent regulation of behavior. The practical context of the enquiry is the differential response to educational opportunity made by children from different social classes (Reissman 1963; Passow 1963). It has become abundantly clear that the determinants of this response are complex and that the response encapsulates the effects of socialization. The problem requires specification of the sociological processes which control the way the developing child relates himself to his environment. It requires an understanding of how certain areas of experience are differentiated, made specific and stabilized, so that which is relevant to the functioning of the social structure becomes relevant for the child. What seems to be needed is the development of a theory of social learning which would indicate what in the environment is available for learning, the conditions of learning, the constraints on subsequent learning, and the major reinforcing process. The behavioral implications of the physical and social environment are transmitted in some way to the child. What is the major channel for such transmissions? What are the principles which regulate such transmissions? What are the psychological consequences and how are these stabilized in the developing child? What factors are responsible for variations in the principles which regulate the transmissions? The socio-linguistic approach used here is a limited attempt to provide some kind of answer to these questions. The general framework of the argument will be given first. This will be followed by a detailed analysis of two general linguistic codes. Towards the end of the paper, some variants of the codes will be very crudely associated with social class.

This paper is, first, a structural analysis demonstrating that in Hindu sacred "law" death rites reflect a conception of kinship wherein intimacy is affected not only by such matters as genealogical distance, but also by differences in spiritual purity among kinsmen. Second, the paper shows that structural analysis of particular civilizations have more than intrinsic value, that they are also a necessary adjunct to highly generalfunctional theories. [India; religion; kinship; structural analysis; functionalism ].

IT IS the purpose of this paper to discuss some consequences which the growing movement for unity and cooperation among the social sciences has for anthropology. It is believed that participation in this movement has produced certain stresses in the intellectual relationships of anthropologists,' as well as changes in the conceptual tools anthropologists must use in their work. Cultural anthropology alone is considered; a study of possible effects upon the other fields of modern anthropology is a task requiring separate treatment. Most of the observations in this paper are based on the writer's own experiences in interdisciplinary research and teaching;2 consequently the essay is in some respects a personal testament. However this may be, the purpose of the paper is not to advocate anthropology's participation in interdisciplinary studies, or to suggest that all the difficulties of our science may be cleared away by such participation. The whole question of the relationship of any one of the several sciences of man to a unified approach is a very difficult one which cannot be handled in a brief paper, and which must await further treatment.s FEDERATION vs. INTEGRATION

ON THE STUDY OF NATIONAL CHARACTER By DAVID G. MANDELBAUM IKE other human institutions, scientific meetings serve a variety of func­ tions and the ostensible reason for their existence is not always nor for everyone the prime purpose for attending. But it cannot be gainsaid that ideas may be exchanged, modified, developed at such occasions, especially at so notable an occasion for anthropologists as the International Symposium of 1952 arranged under the auspices of the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This paper is one example of such interchange of ideas. It was the author's assignment to comment at one of the Symposium sessions on the inventory paper written by Dr. Margaret Mead on the subject of national character studies. Much of Mead's survey was found straightway to be useful, stimulat­ ing and unexceptionable. But on three points of practical and theoretical moment, I took exception. They had to do with the relation of national char­ acter studies to applied anthropology, to psychological theory and to sampling techniques and theory. These three matters were discussed by Mead and myself briefly before the relevant session of the Symposium and again at the session. Since they seemed of some importance, I drafted an amplification of my comments at the Sym­ posium and sent it to Mead. Our discussion and correspondence, together with Mead's revision of the wording of several statements in her original paper (1953), clarified my understanding of these statements. This clarification on the subjects of applied anthropology and psychological theory made unnecessary some parts of my previous comment, although other parts' are included here to present certain emphases which I believe are necessary. On the subject of sam­ pling, divergence of opinion apparently still exists and my original observations stand much as first given. Since these three subjects are dealt with in various parts of the inventory paper, interspersed among others, it is well for purposes of clarity to sketch first those aspects of national character studies on which there is agreement and then discuss the three topics on which there has been something less than agreement. I L The people studied in national character analyses are socially demarcated as members of a political grouping, a state or nation. They are thus subject to at least some common institutional influence which justifies the common cultural implications of the term nation, and by any test, a modern state is a real, a viable, social unit, not to say a crucial one at times. People do act as members of a particular nation, not necessarily in the whole round of their lives, not always consistently, but frequently and consistently enough to make

This paper endeavors to do two things. The first section describes how co-husband relationships enjoyed by the traditional Irigwe system of secondary marriage helped in former days to keep the tribe's twenty-five ritual units at peace with one another. The second section examines an instance of legislated social change clearly related to the development of an Irigwe tribal administration in recent decades, and to its continuing effectiveness today. In 1968 both the traditionalist “pagan” majority and the change oriented Christian minority on the Irigwe Tribal Council voted to outlaw all future secondary marriages. The paper considers both political and underlying structural factors which may have led to this action.

In this paper the decision-making processes which surround the Nuer's leopard-skin chief are examined. While E. E. Evans-Pritchard views the leopard-skin chief as a powerless, religious official, this paper presents the thesis that he builds and leads a political coalition—and that coalition is the basis for his power.

ANTHROPOLOGISTS whose interests lie in community studies apparently are becoming increasingly concerned with the rationale for such research and have commented on the paucity of reports which attempt to deal with the interrelations of the community with its social-cultural environment (Steward 1950; Arensberg 1954; Redfield 1956). There are, of course, a number of researchers who have recognized the problem, and some community studies which do consider it (Embree 1939; Lewis 1951; Sanders 1949), but for the most part community interrelations have been neglected or dealt with summarily. In a recent paper, Morris Edward Opler (1956) has pointed out that for India, at least, the mistaken tendency to view the traditional village as a self-sufficient and isolated entity leads naturally to the erroneous conclusion that a major feature of modernization has been the breakdown of this alleged isolation by a flood of outside influences and values. In support of this contention, he outlines the ways in which a village in north central India has been in complex and intensive contact with the outside world for at least the past two hundred years, and suggests that it is "the pattern of outside contact rather than the fact of outside contact which is altered" (1956:9). In concluding his argument, he writes, "An attempt has been made in this paper to see an Indian village in terms of its extensions, and as a part of larger units organized on social organizational, political, caste, or religious grounds. The involvement of Senapur villagers with organizations, places, and events outside the village is considerable and it seems that this has been the case for a very long time. Yet it has not interfered with the separate identity and cohesiveness of the community, which in some respects is more marked than before. Like any unit in a segmentary social system, the Indian village has to be examined to determine in what respects it stands alone and parallels for its members the advantages and purposes of similar units, and in what respects it combines in various ways with other units to serve wider purposes" (1956:10). It is true, of course, that the reluctance of the lone anthropologist in the field to undertake any serious study of the regional or national context of his community is not necessarily due to any lack of interest in the problem, but rather to a recognition of the inadequacy of his techniques for such an investigation and the demands of such research on his time. Regional studies, such as those called for by Redfield (1956:37), are probably beyond one man's capacities, but it should be possible to focus on a single community while tracing out its crucial interconnections with the outside world.

DURING the past five years, the implications of cultural relativism have been considered at length in at least two books by philosophers and two by anthropologists; some of its specific points have been analyzed in papers by psychologists, economists, and semanticists; it has been the subject of one of the Huxley Lectures of the Royal Anthropological Institute; it has received formal discussion by the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and by the Humanities Panel of Oberlin College. This is not the place to analyze the reasons for this interest, since to do so would take more time than is available here and would necessitate moving far beyond the terms of reference of this paper. It is enough, for the moment, to recognize that an important factor in its development is the increasingly felt need to expand the base of formal philosophical thought so as to include the entire range of human culture, rather than to continue its focus on the GraecoRoman tradition which, from the point of view of the total cultural inventory of mankind, has limited its resources and its findings. One is tempted, also, to assess these responses to relativism in terms of ethnopsychology and cultural dynamics. Like the analysis of anthropological reactions I made a few years ago (Herskovits 1951), this could be drawn in terms of "tough-minded" and "tender-minded" orientations. Because whether we consider the metaphysical and axiological implications of relativism, or its relation to perception, cognition, and motivation as manifest in ethical systems, many of these analyses are to be thought of as representing honest but tortuous attempts to surmount deeply inculcated, even subliminal, ethnocentrisms. They represent, in terms of a far-reaching reexamination of preexisting commitments, a very real struggle between the intellectual and emotional components in attitudes long accepted and convictions long held. One manifestation of this conflict is found in the attempts that are made to separate the fact of relativism and its philosophical implications. Thus Schmidt (1955:782), in his critique, says, "I wish to assert now and reaffirm later that I think the fact of cultural relativism is a well established empirical truth. ...." Or Hartung, insisting that a "sharp distinction must be maintained" between cultural variation and cultural relativity-though just where these two have been confused is not stated-explains that "cultural variation refers simply to the differences.. . in the cultural patterns serving the same or similar ends.... The form and degree of this variation are almost endless, and need no further documentation here" (1954:120). In this context, certain satisfactions seem to be gained from pointing out that relativism is nothing new. Schmidt, for example, ends the sentence just quoted by adding "... although I can't resist remarking that it was known by the Sophists of the fifth century

THE purpose of this paper is to illustrate the proposition, through the analysis of a single sociocultural system, that personality processes manifest in the bearers of a culture at any given point in time are functions of the history of that culture, and that, similarly, these processes are indispensable to an understanding of the relationships existing between contemporary cultural form and antecedent historical conditions. In previous publications (1955a, 1955c) I described the culture of a Jamaican community, one of the outstanding characteristics of which is an intense economic and status rivalry centering about individual amassment and retention of wealth. Competition is between individuals rather than between nuclear families, for the ubiquitous individuating forces within the community in general also affect familial ties. The community is further marked by lack of a "sense of community," by a general absence of leadership and authority arising from within the group, by repetitive resort to sorcery ("obeah"), and by perennial accusations and suspicions of sorcery. There is a marked lack of kin-group or other solidarity, and ties are extremely weak and diffuse throughout. These are cultural and structural phenomena, but they are equally psychological and characterological processes which are acquired in the course of socialization. This paper will attempt to demonstrate that many of the significant areas of socialization for behavior in this community are functions of its historically determined structure of family organization. It has long been recognized that the varieties of family organization in contemporary New World Negro cultures represent the end-products of one of the most dramatic acculturative situations in recorded history. Most investigators agree that these family organizations have their primary historical antecedents in the experience of slavery, specifically, in the impermanence of family life during slavery (Frazier 1951:8-32; Henriques 1949:30-31; Leyburn 1949:177-78; Simey 1946:48-49). Herskovits' opposing views (1941: 167-72; 1948:553-55) need no recapitulation at this point. The most striking feature arising from this unique historical process is the fact that "it is undoubtedly the woman who is the linchpin in the organization of the Negro family in the New World in general and in the Caribbean in particular" (Simey 1946:43). The traditional centrality of the mother's position in the New World Negro family is best understood when viewed alongside the loss during slavery of the family institution as the context of procreation; both can be seen as the outgrowths of mutally reinforcing social and economic forces. "No matter how far

THE following paper I believe to be novel in its approach to dealing with problems of cultural evolution in an empirical way. An evolutionary sequence of two ideal types of society is presented. Given the characteristics of each, models of the consequences of acculturation between the two are deduced and are asserted to comprise generic models of social structure in so-called "underdeveloped" societies. These models, formulated as hypotheses, indicate what sorts of structures one should expect to find in a specified field situation. I was particularly concerned with the personal links, critical to the total societal web of relationships of "underdeveloped" societies, which tie positions and social bodies together in situations where contractual links are not yet normative. Field material gathered in Brazil in the summer of 1962 is compared with the expected results. In general, the hypotheses are confirmed. The social-structural data, synoptically reported here, were elicited by case studies of the careers of individuals moving through the social network. In essence, the paper attempts, on one hand, to unify evolutionary, structural, and functional understandings in a single analysis, and, on the other, to deal at once with the microcosmic elements of structure and the societal macro

The formal analyses are based on sets of nominal definitions. As such, these definitions have no truth value in reference to empirical phenomena. The validity of any definition can be judged solely in terms of its logical relation to other definitions. If the logic is correct, the definition is valid. Nominal definitions are provided for "status" and "role" and related concepts, for ambilineal and unilineal subsets and their derivative concepts, and for genealogical space. These definitions may be thought of as "ideal-typical" models. The usefulness of the models should be judged by their power to predict to empirical systems. No empirical system will fit any model exactly but any empirical system will be explicable in terms of the models to the degree that it has elements similar to the elements of the models. Although this paper is directed primarily toward an elucidation of ambilineal descent, the concepts developed here are, I believe, applicable to the analysis of any type of social system. The more general concepts (e.g., status and role) underlie the more particular ones (e.g., ambilineal subset, kin-type, unilineal descent group), and I believe that the latter cannot be understood without a good grasp of the former. The analysis of ambilineal descent is merely an application of the general principles to a particular phenomenon. In the latter half of this paper I do not always make explicit reference to the correspondences between the particular phenomena I discuss therein and the general principles developed in the first half of the paper, but I assume that by the time the reader has reached that point, he will be aware of the relations between the general and the particular. I do this for ease of exposition and to avoid unnecessary jargon. Analyses of "social structure" are frequently carried out in terms of status and role concepts. As with many other such concepts their definitions are assumed to be fairly well delineated, while in fact there is still a great deal of ambiguity involved in their use. This confusion stems, primarily, from the tendency since Linton (1936) to define status and role in terms of one another. Linton, for example, held that a status was a position in a "social structure" and that a role was the dynamic aspect of a status. Since by these definitions status and role have no existence independently of one another, it follows that they are in fact only a single concept and should be used as such. To name a status is to imply a role and vice versa. Biddle (1961), among others, has noted