ABSTRACT
Traditionally, most anthropologists have studied small-scale societies, or relatively small groups of people within a wider society. They have usually aimed at a holistic view of a particular culture or community, including how its different aspects are connected with one another – to understand, as Mars1 puts it, ‘the articulation of family and kinship organization with grass-root political power and authority, the relation of these to religious beliefs and practices, and the place taken in all these affairs by the way goods and services are produced and distributed’.
