John Barnes' collection of essays, published over the past forty years, covers a variety of topics in sociology and anthropology, including lineage systems, social networks, colonialism, underlying assumptions of social science, and the significance of time in social analysis. Together they identify the author's particular view of social science as being primarily about what really happens. Rather than revamp articles written with a distinctive set of assumptions to bring them into line with current intellectual fashions, Professor Barnes has chosen to let them stand as they are, products of...