African societies

the long version

This book, is intended to illustrate from different African societies what a British anthropologist sees as the most important aspects of a social system from a structural-functional point of view. Social anthropologists study the societies of those parts of the world that have not yet experienced the full consequences of the industrial revolution - societies in which people still get a large part of their living from the food they grow themselves and the animals they herd, in which most of them expect the place where they were born to be their permanent home, and rely for co-operation on their kin and neighbours and not on contracts to do jobs for a money wage. There are a number of reasons for making such studies. Perhaps the most general is the argument that one cannot look critically - or even perhaps understand - one's own society until one has seen something very different.