In the late 1960s I began work on a book about the study of kinship but in 1969 my move to Cambridge entailed giving up the work, at least for the time being. The uncompleted text was published in 19 71, and in the preface I indicated that I had abandoned kinship studies (Barnes 1971m: xxiv). Nevertheless several years later I was invited to contribute to a symposium on kinship systems and somewhat hesitantly accepted. The invitation gave me an opportunity to discuss some aspects of the complex, and sometimes deliberately obscured, relation between the disciplines of social anthropology and sociology. This was, I thought, appropriate for a conference held in India where this relation has taken a distinctive form. As in Chapter 1,1 used Schneider's book on American kinship (1968) as a convenient exemplar of what, in my view, was the wrong specification of this relation.