Mamboru

The island of Sumba, in Eastern Indonesia, has in the past two centuries become well known, for two quite contrasted reasons: first as a sources of slaves, and then for the practice of asymmetric prescriptive alliance. Needham's study of Mamboru first marshalls the historical evidence on the domain, dating in the main from 1845 onwards, and then devotes the greater part of the exposition to the results of his own ethnographic research there. The description covers in detail the villages and their dependencies, with particular reference to their historical proliferation, the clans and their segmentation, rank, relationship terminology, marriage, and affinal alliance. A theoretical epilogue concentrates on the special interest of Mamboru as an instance of the second simplest type of social structure conceivable. Readership: social anthropologists, in particular those concerned with structural analysis and with the reconstruction of social evolution in Indonesia.