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386

American AnthropoZogisl

stuffs after the agricultural lands have been covered


with highways (p. 387), chills me. Surely unmentioned biological engineers will not let these things
come to pass, even if cultural engineers make them
possible.
At any rate the book is both solid and imaginative,
and many so-called laymen are bound to enjoy it a t
least as much as the students to whom it will be assigned.

Models of Social Organization. FREDRIK


BARTH.(Occasional Paper No. 23.) London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland,
1966. vi, 32 pp., references. $2.20,15s (paper).
Rriewed by GEORGEC. HOMANS,
Harvard University
This is a theoretical paper. The author argues that
much work in anthropology has been devoted to
describing and analyzing social structures or, as he
calls them (following Radcliffe-Brown) social jorms.
But he is not interested just in describing the forms.
He wants to explain them, and he rightly says: To
explain form one needs to discover and describe the
processes that generate the form (p. v).
He proposes what he calls a model that, under
given circumstances, will explain the ways in which
the forms are generated. I n fact the model consists of
a single, general proposition. I n transactions between two or more actors, each party consistently
tries to assure that the value gained is greater than
the value lost (p. 13). The value lost by an actor
has elsewhere been called the cost of his action.
This is hardly a new proposition. I n fact it is, in
one formulation or another, one of the oldest propositions used to explain human behavior. I t is also a
psychological proposition in the sense that the
things for which it holds good are not societies but
men. In recent decades its explanatory power has
gone almost unrecognized in anthropological theory,
but it is now coming back into its own.
The author then goes on to show how men behaving in accordance with this proposition, in interaction with other men in given circumstances,
create what may be relatively enduring social forms.
Above all, he shows how, if the circumstances
change, the behavior of the men in question will
create new forms. I n this way, he undertakes to explain such concrete social forms as the pattern of
relationships in the crews of Norwegian fishingboats, the relationships between followers and
chiefs among Swat Pathans, and differences between
Basseri and Kurds in inheritance rights. The explanations are necessarily sketchy but usually convincing.
This is the most intelligent theoretical paper to
come out of the British school of social anthropology
in years. One had thought the school sunk in a
wholly nonexplanatory structuralism. One can only
hope that this present dharchc is followed up. Indeed the central intellectual problem of anthropol-

[69, 19671

ogy and sociology is that of showing how the choices


of men, made in accordance with the proposition
that the author puts forward, but also with other
propositions of psychology, create social institutions.

Closed Systems and Open Minds: The Limits of


Na3vety in Social Anthropology. MAXGLUCKMAN,
ed. Chicago: Aldine Puhlishing Company,
1964. x, 274 pp., bibliography, index, 1 table.
$7.95.

Rmewed by

JOHN

MIDDLETON,

New York University


This is an important book. The writers are all
British social anthropologists, with one exception,
the economist Eli Devons, who contributed the introduction and conclusion in collaboration with the
editor. They have written a series of essays on an
important problem, that of the limits of the field of
competence of the social anthropologist. The purpose of the book is to show that to carry out his
analysis the investigator must close his system, but
he must a t the same time keep his mind open to the
possibility that in doing so he has excluded significant events and relations between them (p. 185).
The editor remarks that this dictum applies to all
social investigators, but here he and his colleagues
are concerned primarily with social anthropologists.
The argument of the book is based upon field research in different areas and on different topics; it is
not based on methodological abstraction.
The central discussion concerns ways to mark out
the field of social relations and the factors of social
relevance in any particular study. These are five:
circumscribing a Geld; incorporating complex facts
without analysis; abridging the conclusions of other
disciplines; making naive or artless assumptions about complexes of events that lie a t the boundaries of or beyond his own field; and simplifying
events within the field being studied. The closing of
the field is, of course, done by the anthropologist
mainly as a function of his particular competence
and interests. As Gluckman and Devon point out,
the researcher has a duty of abstinence, which involves a rule of disciplined refusal to trespass on the
fields of others @. 168). The bulk of the book consists of ethnographic essays that provide examples of
how to observe this duty.
The first essay, by Victor Turner, is on the study
of ritual symbolism among the Ndembu of Zambia.
He shows that the dominant symbols used, the
smallest units of ritual analysis, have two poles. One
is ideological and refers to forms of social relation;
the other is sensory and refers to individual physiological experience. The ideological pole lies particularly within the realm of the anthropologist to investigate, since he has the competence to analyze
the social relations associated with the symbols.
But he is not properly competent to deal with the
sensory pole, which is rather in the realm of the
psychoanalyst. The houndary of anthropological

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