1430 American Anthropologisf [66,19641

Ceylon: A Divided Nation. B . H. FARMER. (Issued under the auspices of the Institute of
Race Relations, London.) London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.
xiv, 74 pp., bibliography, 2 maps, $1.75.
Reviewed by MICHAELM. AYES, University of British Columbia
This is another in the series of booklets on inter-group relations published for the
Institute of Race Relations in London. Dr. Farmer, a geographer with research experi-
ence in Ceylon, reviews the social, economic, and political forces bearing upon commu-
nal tensions in that troubled island. Although he refers to various current disputes
(Low-country vs. Kandyan or Up-country Sinhalese, Buddhists vs. Christians, caste vs.
caste), he is primarily concerned with the long-standing feud between Sinhalese Budd-
hists (65 percent of a population of 11 million) and the Tamil Hindu minorities (23
percent).
The determinants of Sinhalese-Tamil conflict, an instance of which was the bloody
rioting in 1958, are multiple and extend over 2000 years: from an ancient Buddhist
legend claiming a Sinhalese divine right to the island, through the variegated impact of
Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial rule, to the difficulties of independence and
economic development. Dr. Farmer, possibly to conserve space, focuses on events influ-
encing the Sinhalese and gives only minimal information about the Tamil minorities
(the native “Ceylon Tamils,” who have lived in Ceylon practically as long as the Sinha-
lese, and the immigrant “Indian Tamils,” who work the tea plantations), Only the
Cinhalese version of ancient history is cited. Little is said about Tamil aspirations or
about their religiously-inspired claims to the island. This booklet will be useful to those
who want a brief (and inexpensive) summary of Ceylon’s communal problems. It, how-
ever, adds little to the more comprehensive discussion by W. Howard Wriggens in his
Ceylon: Dilemmas of a New Nation (Princeton University Press, 1960) except that
Farmer, perhaps justifiably, is rather more pessimistic about Ceylon’s future as a uni-
fied nation.

Social Organization of the Mongol-Turkic Pastoral Nomads. LAWRENCE KRADER(Indi-

ana University Publications, Uralic and Altaic Series, Vol. 20.) The Hague: Mouton
& Co., 1963.x, 412 pp., bibliography, tables, maps, index $13.25.
Reviewed by MILLICENT
R. AYOUB,Fels Research Institute
With the publication of this book, Dr. Krader has sought to accomplish a number of
tasks, most of them fully realized in its pages, some only partially done. I n total, it is an
important volume and one from which the fields of social organization first, and of
Central Asiatic scholarship second should benefit greatly.
The book is composed of six parts: one section each on five nomadic tribes of thc
Central Asian steppes: the Ordos Mongols; the Buryats; the Volga Kalmuks; the Ka-
zakhs; and the Monguor of the Kansu-Tibetan Frontier; and a sixth section which to
my mind is part of both the introduction and the final conclusion. Individually, any
section could have made a separate volume. Presented within one cover, as this book
does, they give the reader a strong sense of the geographic and cultural uniformity of an
area in which the constancy of social organization is a prime factor.
Features in the environment with which these people are faced and which Krader
thinks important are the rainfall inadequate for farming, the land types which range
from forest-steppe t o true desert, and an internal drainage pattern. In other words, it is
an arid environment and one suitable for only one kind of subsistence pattern, the one
 Book Reviews 1431
they have, pastoral economy, and apparently for only the one kind of social organiza-
tion, segmented patriliny.
However, to say merely that the kinship systems of these tribes are patrilineal would
be understating the case. Krader seeks to say more than that. He shows how the fact of
androcentrim is the lever which directs the moving of the social existence. It is the
thread which is celebrated in marriage and family action systems, in inheritance rules,
in kinship terminology, and the components of political structure, and in the tribes-
men’s awareness of the great cultural tradition in which all share. The five tribes may
differ on minor variations in structure, for example, in referents of kin terms or in inter-
pretations of ancestral genealogy, but these differences are slight and in large measure
only minor detail rather than crucial divergence in kinship ideology,
In general, the population under study have traditionally lived on the products of
their herds and have moved in relatively fixed annual rounds between winter and sum-
mer pastures for a millennium. To make the large moves such as they make, their so-
cial organization has had to be one which is rigidly ordered with authority clearly
demarcated. Their respect for hierarchy is appreciably in evidence in matters such as
what one can only call the punctilious denotation of age and seniority in kinship terms
for males in the paternal line and in their famous military prowess.
In these pages, Krader has tried to raise several issues very interesting to students of
kinship theory. I shall comment on several, first on one I cannot accept and per-
haps do not fully understand. The Ordos Mongols are said to have a kinship lexicon
which is devoid of a term for father’s sister’s children (either specific or classificatory),
but which does have one for mother’s brother’s offspring. The reason for this phe-
nomenon, or so Krader seems to be saying, is bluntly that the father’s sister’s off-
spring are not considered kin. “Patrilineal exogamy and patrilocal residence takes the
father’s sister away from her natal home and removes her children from kinship rela-
tions with her brother’s children” (p. 361). She is related to her brother, and he to her
son, surely (the avunculate is important), but their children are said not to have a
mutual relationship and the foreshortened terminology reflects this. It is an instance of
non-reciprocity. To be without designation for patri-cross cousin and yet have one for
the matri-cross cousin variety is difficult to comprehend. It presents one with a logical
impossibility, I would think. To call an X “mother’s brother’s son” implies that the
caller stands to X in the relation of father’s sister’s child and would expect to be ad-
dressed as that in return. But Krader does not allow the reader the only plausible way
out: namely, to say that the term in question is a classificatory one applicable to any
patri-cousin. What makes this item especially puzzling is that we are told that mar-
riages between cross-cousins, children of brothers and sisters, are very frequent (p. 37).
Second, Krader proposes the addition of two new classifying terms. They are for
concepts perhaps known to us already but so far without accepted sobriquet. He seeks
to end the ambiguity in English speech in having one kinship term with two different
possible referents: the constructions of terms for affines, such as the word “brother-in-
law” which may mean either wife’s brother or sister’s husband. To remedy this deplor-
able confusion, he suggests we adopt the phrases: “spousal kin’’ for affines one acquires
through his own efforts, e.g., “wife’s brother”; and “phratrogamic kin” for those ac-
quired “second-hand,” that is to say, by the efforts of one’s consanguines, e.g., “broth-
er’s wife.” (Phratrogamic being kin to the marriage [gam-]of a consanguine [fihratr-].)
My only regret would be that Krader had not coined a perhaps more mellifluous term
than the latter and one not so likely to be confused with the more familiar “phratry.”
His other recommendation is that of the category “Buryat” for a terminology type
1432 American Anthropologist [66,19641
not classifiable under one of Murdock’s headings. The Buryat system extends the term
for patri-parallel cousin to include the patri-cross cousin, and accordingly the term for
matri-parallel cousin to include the matri-cross cousin. (The Buryat further differen-
tiates patri-cousins by sex and seniority, whereas matri-cousins are not so particular-
ized [androcentrisrn again].)
One great value of the book may lie in its usefulness in presenting the student with a
classic model of patriliny. (It could perhaps be used in pair with Schneider and Gough’s
work, Mahilineal Kinship [Univ. of Calif. Press, 19611, although the former of course
is more concentrated in its dose.) To underline this, we may look a t their strikingly
desperate desire for a male heir. This is shown in the many kinds of replacements which
are held ready if a man does not have a son. They include: polygyny, should the first-
married wife not produce any live sons; the junior levirate, when a man dies without
male issue; adoption; the naturalization of the daughter’s husband who agrees to for-
sake his natal line in favor of his wife’s father’s; and a curious variation on the practice
of ghost marriage: the Ordos Mongols and Monguor will allow a rug or a belt to serve as
stand-in for a human groom should a girl’s family be too poor to provide a dowry or
should her child be in need of a father.
Two final complaints only: throughout the book, Krader repeats the word “cog-
nate” as a synonym for matrilineal kin, although he tells us that his usage is derived
from Maine’s (Ancient Law, London, 1917:87-88) definition of cognates “as all those
persons who can trace their descent from a single ancestor or ancestress . . . and agnates
are the cognates who trace their consanguinity exclusively through the male line”
(p. 320). I n other words, in Maine’s view agnates are the patrilineal form of cognates;
one is a subcategory of the other. The two concepts are not antithetical as Krader
makes them. I am aware that his usage is an older one; hopefully we will not continue it.
Finally, the index is disappointingly incomplete and important items such as
“father’s sister” are omitted.

The Role of the Entrepreneur in Social Change i n Northern Norway. FREDRIK

BARTH(ed.)
(Arbok for Universitetet I Bergen-Humanistisk Serie 1963 No. 3.) Oslo: Norwe-
gian Universities Press, 1963. 83 pp., appendix, references. n.p.
Reviewed by MANNINGNASH,University of Chicago
This collection consists of four essays on entrepreneurship in Northern Norway and
a theoretical introduction. The theoretical introduction by Fredrik Barth is exciting
and imaginative. Barth further develops his “game theory” approach to social decision
making, and concepts like niche, assets, restrictiofis, channels of conversion, and enterprise
as a time sequence are woven together to give a perspective for analyzing entrepreneu-
rial (and other) behavior. But even Barth is forced to admit that no rigid deductive
framework can be based on these concepts or a similar theory of games ideas, nor are
they much good for a prospective as against a retrospective analysis of decision strategy,
Anthropological data apparently still need 8 host of particulars, and such a large host,
that highly abstract models lose their elegance and power in proportion as they confront
facts.
The employment of Barth’s framework in the four substantial essays only underlines
how large a gap still exists between the forming of analytic categories and the processing
of data through them. The essays uniformly have the traditional narrative, nearly
anecdotal reporting style of field anthropology and lie much closer to the usual docu-
mentary analysis than to a formal sort of interpretation. Ottar Brox describes varia-