386 American AnthropoZogisl [69, 19671 stuffs after the agricultural lands have been covered with highways (p. 387), chills me. Surely unmen- tioned 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 i t a t least as much as the students to whom i t will be as- signed.

Models of Social Organization. FREDRIK BARTH. (Oc- casional Paper No. 23.) London: Royal Anthro- pological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1966. vi, 32 pp., references. $2.20,15s (paper).

Rriewed by GEORGE C. 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. In fact the model consists of a single, general proposition. In transactions be- tween 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. In fact it is, in one formulation or another, one of the oldest propo- sitions used to explain human behavior. I t is also a psychological proposition in the sense that the things for which i t 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 be- having in accordance with this proposition, in inter- action 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. In this way, he undertakes to ex- plain such concrete social forms as the pattern of relationships in the crews of Norwegian fishing- boats, the relationships between followers and chiefs among Swat Pathans, and differences between Basseri and Kurds in inheritance rights. The ex- planations are necessarily sketchy but usually con- vincing.

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. In- deed the central intellectual problem of anthropol-

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. MAX GLUCKMAN, 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 in- troduction 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 pur- pose 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 signifi- cant 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 re- search 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 assump- tions about complexes of events that lie a t the boun- daries 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 in- volves a rule of disciplined refusal to trespass on the fields of others @. 168). The bulk of the book con- sists 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 physio- logical experience. The ideological pole lies particu- larly within the realm of the anthropologist to in- vestigate, 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