ABSTRACT
When Philip Gulliver describes disputes and negotiations in rural Africa, he provides succinct accounts, selective distillations of what must often have been long interchanges. Those compressed narratives nevertheless have a remarkable immediacy. They stand as classic examples of a selective, matter-of-fact style of ethnographic summary composed during a much less self-conscious period of anthropological writing. 'It is characteristic of the development of modern states that they change over from the sacred foundation of legitimation to foundation on a common will, communicatively shaped and discursively clarified in the political public sphere'. The ideal speech situation and the ideal speech communication community can then go into a tool-kit of paradigms of perfect systems to be used to understand the imperfect world. In that sense it belongs in the company of the perfect market and other such constructs.
