We are so accustomed to our own marriage and family customs that we tend to think of them as norms of human behaviour. But systems of kinship are not immutable; other cultures-both primitive and modern-have operated modes of determining kinship and controloing marriage and inheritance significance different from ours. This volume in the Pelican Anthropology Library is the first introduction to these alternative systems of social engineering, many of them of a fascinating elegance and complexity. By analysing the pressures wich mould each of them, Robin Fox gives us a fresh insight into the working of our own customs. He also suggests a tentative solution to the problem of the incest taboo. This is the first time that all the theories of kinship and marriage have been analysed within a single framework of argument in terms intelligible to the layman.