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The article focuses on social integration of a society and deviance. Remarkably little interest has attached to whether high levels of social integration beget deviance. The idea of reciprocity in role-playing provides a useful way of giving greater meaning to the concept of social integration. The view here is that the more do roles in given types of situation mutually facilitate the playing of each other, that is, the more is reciprocity built into role relationships, the greater will be social integration. A group may be well integrated internally and little integrated with the larger society of which it is a part. Again, a whole society may be characterized by overall social integration of any degree. Tension in a social structure depends on the degree of reciprocity in role relationships. The less is reciprocity, the greater is tension. Thus if role reciprocity in a social structure is very low, tension in that structure is very great.

Very broadly, the term structure serves to mark off questions about constituents of the object under study from questions about its workings. In sociology (or anthropology or history), therefore, questions about structure can be answered in as many ways as there are held to be kinds of constituents of societies. The old-fashioned answer would be to say that societies are made up of institutions, the fashionable answer would be to say that they are made up of messages. But they can equally well be held to be made up of groups, or relationships, or classes, or roles, or exchanges, or norms and sanctions, or even shared concepts and symbols. Structuralism should not be claimed to constitute a novel, coherent and comprehensive paradigm for sociological and anthropological theory. Whether viewed as a doctrine or a method, structuralism as such does not, on examination, stand for a more distinctive standpoint than a belief in the applicability of rigorous models to social behavior; and this is equally true whether it is taken to apply to societies as a whole, or only to their rituals and beliefs.

In this article, the author presents his views on anthropological studies. He proposes the inclusion of approach of anthropology to higher cultures, notably to modern societies, in school teaching. Though social anthropologists and sociologists group themselves by their interest in special subject areas, they also divide up in their allegiance to particular schools of thought. Though the work of social anthropologists may have lifted the discussion of social institutions on to a more general plane, today it is sociology which is the aggressor subject. Anthropologists are called upon by nationalist governments and scholars alike to justify the study of disappearing cultures. The article then discusses anthropology in respect of community studies. The community studies have drawn implicitly upon a model of the perfectly integrated society, the parts of which are interdependent. Another feature of this approach is its stress upon social patterns as standardized forms of behaviour and its neglect of individual idiosyncrasies. The article then talks about the study of inter-personal relations. The shift in emphasis from institutions and groups to norms and networks brings social anthropology closer to problems and theories of the social psychologist. The article concludes that it is not possible to discuss the relations between social anthropology and sociology without imparting a false factitiousness to the two terms.