Book Reviews

Drawing on economie theory, game theory, and Goffman's concept of impression management, Barth starts with the idea that interpersonal relations are mainly transactional in nature (involving prestations and reciprocity), and to a lesser exitent incorporational (involving joint rather than complementary interest). The model 'takes account of individual interests and actual behavior on the one hand and of cultural 160 BOEKBESPREKINGEN. norms on the other, seeing each as significantly a product of the other in a feed-back system of causation. [...]entrepreneural activity has the effect through repeated transactions of effecting the irategration whose absence it seeks to exploilt. [...]integration need not be asserted, as with most anthropological analyses, but is accounted for, along with disintegration, as a product or artefact of social processes. Comparative analysis thus can profitably proceed "not by a direct comparison of forms, buit from the view that there are determinants of form, and that valid comparison presupposes an understanding of the processes whereby forms are generated from such determinants" (p.31).