ABSTRACT
The restructuring of relations involved in family parasitism and the growing independence of women can be treated as a response to changed material circumstances, but this is only a beginning. The elaboration of a conceptual framework for studying social change is perhaps the most important — and certainly one of the most difficult — of the tasks confronting contemporary social anthropology. Social anthropologists have chiefly concerned themselves with that aspect of behaviour which can be related to the rights and obligations of parties to structured relationships. Norms of conduct in a particular relationship may remain unchanged over long periods but modifications in other relationships are bound to affect them in some degree. Existing research material provides little systematic information upon the working out of social change within particular relationships, but some understanding of the emergence and spread of new norms may be gained from the study of new institutions.
