ABSTRACT
T HE main object of this book has been to provide a series of brief but precise studies that may make it possible to appreciate the complex relations between the human habitat and the manifold technical and social devices developed for its exploitation among the peoples who lie outside the sphere of modern civilization. The economies depend for their continuance on certain physical conditions, but a t the same time they select and transmute some of the latent resources into particular values and are the foundations for particular forms of social organization. Geographers, economists and sociologists have all on occasion produced a lay figure, a 'primitive man', stripped of reality and redressed according to need, with which to portray particular theories as to the role of physical circumstances in human affairs, as to the nature of social evolution, or concerning the development of economic relations in human society. Selecting an instance here and a generalization there, it is possible to provide a superficially plausible case for almost any scheme of causation or any theory of development. Almost equally easy is it to produce contrary instances, and to give some substance to contrary generalizations. The reality of human activity escapes through so coarse a mesh. The study of the interrelations between habitat, economy and society among a number of particular peoples is needed to afford the material and the experience for judgment and appreciation of these complex problems. In some of the earlier chapters comparisons between societies in generally similar habitats or in adjacent regions have afforded some comparative basis for discussion, while in the later part of the book an attempt has been made to review the conditions found among the particular peoples against a broader geographical and historical background,
The particular peoples studied in the earlier sections were for convenience grouped in three broad categories, as food gatherers, cultivators and pastoralists. The great differences of economic pattern and social organization to be found within each of these provisional groupings have been indicated. I t
is obvious that while there is little homogeneity within them, there is also no abrupt transition from one to another.
