ABSTRACT
Conceptualizing society, the anthropologist confronts a paradoxical problem. Ever since Malinowski, a strong tradition, embodied in influential monographs, has encouraged ethnographers to describe small-scale and territorially circumscribed pre-literate groups as if they were perfectly coherent totalities, each endowed with a particular cultural logic which, properly decoded, offers a key for interpreting the observations recorded day after day. Yet many ethnographers would admit that the members of the societies they study do not spontaneously picture their cultures as systematic wholes. Rather, they haphazardly combine partial points of view and elicited intuitions, scraps of knowledge and appeals to tradition, to produce-unknowingly and collectively-something approximating to the global image mirrored by the monograph. True, some native exegetes have been known to produce systematic syntheses, but they are so few that most anthropology students know their names. Furthermore, the knowledge imparted by these exceptional informants often stems from a very personal vision of the world or from highly esoteric teachings which are by no means generally known or appreciated.
