The policy of adapting ‘for the purposes of local government the tribal institutions which the native people have evolved themselves, so that the latter may develop in a constitutional manner from their own past’ depends for success on more than a general grasp of the outlines of native social organisation. Native standards of value as expressed in individual and collective behaviour, the operation of balances and checks in the social system, current trends which are tending to cause some institutions and customs to lose strength at the expense of others, and the economic forces that have been or are in the future likely to be operative in the society, must all be analysed and assessed in their mutual relations as interrelated elements in a complex process.

Governmental intervention in the sphere of marketing has become a feature of increasing frequency in the post-war economic policy of many countries, particularly during and since the economic depression of 1930 to 1932. In general, raw materials and foodstuffs have been made the object of regulations by authorities and statutory bodies more than manufactured articles, since the producers of the latter are usually able to come to voluntary agreements in relation to prices, limitation of production, &c., without the help of the Government. The general factors and ideologies which have brought about this considerable public intervention into a sphere which was left predominantly to private enterprise in pre-war days, are more or less common to all countries, but the particular difficulties and problems which have prompted statutory measures differ from country to country.

All Europeans who have lived among the Nuer have, I suppose, found difficulty in discussing with them any matter involving an estimate of time. I do not refer to such a simple arrangement as meeting a Nuer at a certain hour on a certain day. The idiomatic technique necessary to effect a meeting is soon learnt, after a few disasters have taught one not to translate European time-reckoning too literally. I refer to conceptual differences more fundamental than those that give rise to such minor misunderstandings, for the Nuer have a different sense of time to ours.

Das Problem der sogenannten klassifikatorischen Verwandtschaft ist, seitdem Lewis H. Morgan 1871 zum ersten Mal auf die vergleichsweise sehr umfänglichen Verwandtschaftssysteme der Naturvölker aufmerksam machte, immer wieder von den Ethnologen der Alten und der Neuen Welt angegangen worden. Vor allem durch die Forschungen von Rivers und Thurnwald und durch die Untersuchungen von Kroeber und Malinowski erwies sich die Beantwortung der Frage nach Entstehung, Bedeutung und Funktion des klassifikatorischen Systems als ungemein schwieriges Problem. Nicht nur eine Fülle von Sonderfragen tauchte infolge der scharfsinnigen Betrachtung einer grossen Anzahl von primitiven Verwandtschaftsordnungen seitens der zuständigen Fachkenner auf, sondern mehrfach wurde auch direkte Kritik an der von Morgan aufgewiesenen und dann besonders von Rivers weiter entwickelten Problemstellung über die Erscheinung des klassifikatorischen Systems überhaupt geübt.

Readers of the accounts by the great naturalist explorers of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are often impressed by the acuteness of observation displayed, and even more often by the variety of the phenomena described. Since the day of these pioneers every one of the aspects of Nature and of Man about which they wrote has become the field of a separate branch of science, and each decade sees new shoots emerge with the accelerated specialization of science and its researches. With the rapidly increasing means of publication all these extensions of knowledge contribute to a literature so vast that no individual can follow it over the domain of even one of the major divisions, whether of Earth lore or the social sciences. The appearance, then, of any form of authoritative book which provides a conspectus of existing knowledge in a given field is welcome. When the field is a continent, or any geographical unit, we are generally better off than usual in this respect, since the function of geography is both analytic and synthetic and above all is correlative; for Africa, indeed, excellent general geographical treatises exist in at least three languages.