ABSTRACT
When the invitation came to give the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures for 1973, we were at the end of the 1960s. The universities had known a long period of turmoil: most of the traditional rules had been questioned, many ideas of hierarchy and structure had been under attack, and many students and some faculty had demanded that academic life be based upon contractual agreements rather than implicit assumptions. We had also heard much about a generation disillusioned with the old order, both within and outside the universities, and about why that order should be replaced by the creation of free-form associations based upon consensus arrived at through constant negotiations. Some were already experimenting with alternative communities; these for the most part dissolved almost as quickly as they formed even though they were based upon ideals of consensus and negotiation and the belief that people should be free to do as they would. Behind many of the experiments seemed to be a vision of some kind of extended family unit or small face-to-face community lacking formal offices. Their advocates2seemed to have given little or no thought either to the context within which the different units or their members could find means of arbitrating differences or to devices for controlling expectations or activities that promised to disrupt the general community.
