No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back. You can get rid of it if you live in an enclave and keep everybody else o… - Margaret Mead

Historically our own culture has relied for the creation of rich and contrasting values upon many artificial distinctions, the most striking of which is sex. It will not be by the mere abolition of these distinctions that society will develop patterns in which individual gifts are given place instead of being forced into an ill-fitting mould. If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over.

General systems theory, in a sense, is no news at all, as Von Foerster found out when he attempted to organize a conference of general systems people and anthropologists. In a sense, the situation is comparable to that found by the Committee for the Study of Mankind, in which a committee that included Robert Redfidd tried to get each discipline to consider its relationship to the concept of Mankind. An­thropologists replied, "we are related already," and so they were. Something similar may be said of attempts to date in mathematical anthropology. The kind of information that a computer program can finally provide, on a level of a particular culture, is simply a reflection of how detailed field work has been done, and to the careful field worker, on kinship, for example, it provides no illumination.