ABSTRACT
Social anthropologists working in an unfamiliar society are rarely in a position to select in advance, with any degree of accuracy, the problems with which they eventually deal. These problems arise out of a conjunction of the theoretical interests of the field worker and the particular situation in which he finds himself, a situation that may turn out very differently from what the sketchy reports of missionaries, traders, and administrators had led him to expect. I therefore want to begin by saying something about the people among whom I worked in Northern Ghana and explain how the choice of the problems and institutions treated in this book arose in the course of the field work itself.
