Author Description

This volume by students and colleagues of Ward Goodenough honors his theoretical approach (that culture is whatever you have to know to behave "in a manner acceptable to its members"). These original contributions include questions of informant reliability andethnographic validity, the complexities of culture change, and the ways in whichetic concepts obscure emic conceptualizations. Contributors address these issuesvia analyses of semantic categories and rules, gender, kinship and other aspects ofsocial organization, describing and illustrating them with detailed ethnographicdata from Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.