Fourteen years have passed since J. A. Barnes published his short article on ‘African models in the New Guinea Highlands’ (1962). In it Barnes raised the question of whether the concepts used to analyse systems of descent in African societies were applicable to descent systems in New Guinea that appeared at first glance to be similar. This article signalled the beginning of a debate over the nature of descent and kinship in New Guinea and the advisability of using concepts and results derived from field research in another continent and in a different context. The very status of social anthropology as a comparative and generalizing science is called into question by the debate initiated by Barnes, for if African research has no relevance for New Guinea research, then neither cross-cultural typologies nor generalizations about social behavior are possible. Hence, the New Guinea literature has more than just an area specialist's significance.

The nature of ethnic interaction has been at the heart of a longstanding debate on the characteristics of Rwanda's precolonial political system. Until recently, the historical referents for such discussion, and in particular the origins of the Rwandan state and its social institutions have been seen as far too remote to base conclusions on empirical data. Consequently the debate has tended to be formulated in terms of logical constructs, rather than in terms of empirical reconstruction of the historical processes involved.

The purpose of this paper is to present evidence of the changes which occur in the behavior of truck and lorry drivers when they are operating their vehicles as opposed to their behavior at other times. Specifically, it is hypothesized that drivers of trucks and lorries in certain West African societies behave in a very time and profit oriented, efficiency conscious manner when they are actually driving, but that this mode of behavior is not carried over into other spheres of their daily interaction. The impression, to use Ferdinand Tonnies' terms (1887), is one of an island of gesellschaft behavior (driving the vehicle) surrounded by an ocean of gemeinschaft behavior (the remainder of daily life).

Whether public policies concerning family planning involve legislative or educational programs, their impact depends upon an analysis of patterns of family formation. But to merely identify the direction and the magnitude of overall aggregate trends in this regard is insufficient. While programs of family planning aim at satisfying the requirements of a national and hence uniform policy, their success depends upon a problematic lack of variability in the relevant behaviours across the various social and ethnic groups located within a particular nation. Accordingly the thrust of the present paper is not only to identify the determinants of child-bearing activities, but also to assess the variability of these determinants along ethnic lines.

Anthropological analyses of cultural symbolism have often benefitted fron the commentary of gifted informants who have provided ethnographers with detailed symbolic exegeses of the rites and ceremonies of their societies. Ethnographers have usually signalled with enthusiasm such received help and offered profound thanks to their philosophically reflective friends, but at the same time few, if any, ethnographers have indicated a willingness to restrict their data to those offered by such exegetes. In part this reticence is perhaps due to the fact that reliance upon the knowledge or philosophical reflexions of ritual or religious virtuosi raises the question of a possible disparity between the explicit ‘theological’ or cosmological knowledge controlled by certain experts and the implicit working knowledge of practical religion as understood by the majority of its practitioners (cf. Leach 1968). Thus there arises the problem of the subject matter of investigation: should anthropological analyses of symbolism be directed toward explicit specialized knowledge or implicit common knowledge? Furthermore, is articulated knowledge part of the solution of symbolic analysis or is it more properly part of the data (Sperber 1975:x, passim)?

Several attempts have been made to understand the development if not the origin of Akan culture in terms of the diffusion of (a) traits from the north which were taken south with the expansion and disintegration of the great savanna trading empires and the southward migration of Mande Dyula merchants and (b) traits which were already present prior to that migration in a large area once populated mainly by Guan in the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Togo, and today populated for the most part by Akan, Adanbe, and Ewe. The mixing of these cultural traits and the point of origin for the Akan expansion appear, to have taken place along a trade route stretching from the Sahara to the Atlantic coast, close to the site of Begho near Wenchi in the Bono Techiman state (Boahen 1966; Goody 1959, 1966, 1968; Wilks 1962).