This book consists of the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, which were delivered during March 1990 at the University of Rochester, and substantially revised and expanded during the subsequent two years. Having honored me by the invitation to deliver the lectures, members of the Department of Anthropology increased my debt beyond measure by their hospitality during the two weeks of my visit. I owe special gratitude to Professor Al Harris, who ably organized the Morgan Lectures for many years, and to Professor Tony Carter, who has now taken on that responsibility. To the faculty, graduate students, and others in the University community who were my hosts and engaged me in discussion, I offer my sincere thanks.

This book represents an effort to work through a set of ideas with which I have struggled for more than twenty years. During 1964–65, I spent a year as an undergraduate student at the University of Nigeria. I returned with a sense of the profound inadequacy of describing the world of my Ibo and Yoruba classmates in a manner that gave privilege to my own views of reality. It was that experience that led me to the comparative study of religion, and then to the study of anthropology. It was also that experience that provided the intuitive grounding for my intellectual engagement with symbolic anthropology at the University of Chicago.