Rodney Needham

Descent, Category, and Alliance in Sirionó Society

T HE SIRION6 are a most interesting society, and have attracted repeated attention in recent anthropological writings, including two articles in this Journal (Needham 1954; 1961). Their interest has now been enhanced by a brief note by Eyde and Postal (1963) which raises useful and resoluble questions concerning the interpretation of ethnographic facts and the aptness of current terms and notions in the analysis of descent systems. In the present article I wish to examine certain empirical issues in the Sirion6 ethnography, and then discuss their theoretical significance in the particular context of prescriptive alliance.

Mamboru : history and structure in a domain of northwestern Sumba

The island of Sumba, in Eastern Indonesia, has in the past two centuries become well known, for two quite contrasted reasons: first as a sources of slaves, and then for the practice of asymmetric prescriptive alliance. Needhams study of Mamboru first marshalls the historical evidence on the domain, dating in the main from 1845 onwards, and then devotes the greater part of the exposition to the results of his own ethnographic research there. The description covers in detail the villages and their dependencies, with particular reference to their historical proliferation, the clans and their segmentation, rank, relationship terminology, marriage, and affinal alliance. A theoretical epilogue concentrates on the special interest of Mamboru as an instance of the second simplest type of social structure conceivable. Readership: social anthropologists, in particular those concerned with structural analysis and with the reconstruction of social evolution in Indonesia.

Colour symbolism in the lower Congo — A review article

Red‐White‐Black as a Mode of Thought: A Study of Triadic Classification by Colours in the Ritual Symbolism and Cognitive Thought of the Peoples of the Lower Congo. Anita Jacobson‐Widding. (Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology, 1.) Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, distributed by Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1979. 396 pp., bibliography, index; 8 plates, map.

Rethinking Kinship and Marriage

This volume is concerned with two of the fundamental topics of social anthropology, kinship and marriage, approached from a variety of viewpoints by an international group of contributors of diverse experience and background. The wide range of subjects examined includes: Incest, epistemology, linguistics, prescriptive alliance and methodology. Fieldwork from the following countries is drawn on: Burma, Sri Lanka, New Guinea, Australia, Africa and South America.