The seven chapters in the first part of this collection present models of the real social world outside the academic ivory tower, while in the second part the chapters discuss ideas and processes that belong mainly to the relatively specialized arena of social inquiry. Given this initial focus on reality, we may as well plunge in at the deep end. Of all the varieties of social interaction there is nothing more closely tied to the material world than the relations of kinship. Copulation and birth, the two activities which sustain even the most culturally elaborated or attenuated kinship systems, are the processes above all others where the similarity of human beings to other mammals is unmistakable. There are innumerable accounts of religion and even politics that are cast entirely in transcendental or ideational terms, and which ignore completely human membership of the animal kingdom. Throughout the ages these accounts have enjoyed widespread acceptance. Even in the study of kinship, particularly when this is reduced merely to the study of kinship terminologies, the fact of human physicality is often ignored or silently taken for granted, though it is seldom deliberately excluded on methodological grounds. Meyer Fortes, in whose honour the present paper was written, took the material world well into account in his analysis of tribal societies in West Africa. Yet even he, in the eyes of some of his critics (cf. Worsley 1956), sometimes tended unjustifiably to favour transcendental explanations for human actions. […]