DAVID HICKS

My intention in collecting together the ten essays that make up the substance of this book is to demonstrate an approach to the understanding of human societies known as structural analysis by examining the social features and intellectual character of four societies found in two widely separated regions of the world, Southeast Asia and South America. For the former region I use as my case studies a pair of societies from East Timor, the Tetum and the Mambai; and for Brazil I discuss the Kaingang and the Aweikoma, who reside in the southern portion of Brazil. Although the Timorese societies and those from Brazil different in many fundamental cultural ways, such as in language, and the form in which they express their ideas and reveal their institutions, the methods of structural analysis reveal similarities that may perhaps prove to be of universal distribution.