Perspective Requires Two Points of Vision

Extract

AS hard as I try, I cannot comfortably arrive at the conclusion that Manning Nash's concept of “multiple society” is really in conflict with Boeke's and Furnivall's notion of the “dual society.” The two concepts deal with somewhat different problems and thus they tend to highlight different phenomena. I must quickly add, however, that if either or both concepts are treated in a diffuse and fuzzy manner—and I believe that this has frequently been the fate of the “dual society” concept—then they may seem to overlap and conflict. And in the spirit of the Editor's search for controversy and drama, I will cooperate to the extent of saying that between Manning Nash's formula and the vague, general, and almost sentimentalized way in which the dual society concept has been used, I would put my support fully behind Nash. In short, if both are to be loosely used, I suspect that Nash's concept will prove to cover a broader range of reality and yield more rewarding insights than imprecise use of the dual society concept; and in this sense it is to be hoped that a valuable secondary consequence of Nash's effort will be to expose the weak and irrelevant ways in which the dual society concept has been used.