Books in the Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology series

These essays raise fundamental questions about the ways in which interrogative and politeness forms are used in day-to-day social interaction.

In these insightful papers, first published in 1973, two leading authorities make a wide-ranging review of ideas and materials on bridewealth and dowry. The authors analyse the two institutions in the contexts of Africa, with its preponderance of bridewealth, and South Asia, where dowry is the commoner institution.

Strathern's illuminating study of the inequalities amongst the Highland societies of Papua New Guinea is now reissued with a new preface. The five papers in this volume seek to set these inequalities into a context of long-term and recent social changes that aim to develop schemes of analysis which will permit discussion of the societies over extended periods of time.

This 1958 book demonstrates how the changing structure of the domestic group may be seen to explain otherwise obscure elements of the particular society.

This 1979 volume provides a general and theoretical analysis of succession in different traditional African societies. Jack Goody's introduction spells out the main ways in which systems of succession to office differ, and assesses the problem each system solves and the dilemmas it creates. This is followed by four case studies.

The essays in this volume focus on two themes: the centrality of the production of and trade in cloth in the emergence of market activity; and the nature of the industrialization process. The core of the book is formed by four detailed ethnographic studies of the development and current organization of cloth production for the market, in different parts of the world.

Continuing a policy of devoting a whole issue to a single topic, the third volume of the series Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology deals with aspects of marriage in tribal societies.

When this book was originally published in paperback in 1971, one of the most debated themes in Indian sociology was the meaning of the term caste. At one extreme was the argument that caste cannot be isolated from its religious matrix; on the other, that it is a rigid form of social class hierarchy. This book tested these two hypotheses against the data.

A collection of seven papers by social anthropologists on the processes of decision-making in councils.