Excursions in Siouan Sociology

Excursions in Siouan Sociology David Reed Miller Two Crows Denies It: A History of Controversy in Omaha Sociology. By R. H. Barnes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. 272 pp. $24.95 Cloth. The categorization of the social organization of unilineal societies is often indicated by tribal typifications representing "Omaha" for patrilineal descent, or "Crow" for the opposite principle in societies with matrilineal descent. R. H. Barnes offers his historical interpretations of the scholarship about Omaha-like peoples and contrasts the extant descriptions with theoretical insights generated from the ethnological studies of the Omaha people. Because there has been so much discussion throughout the rise of the discipline of anthropology about unilineal societies, the debate about the functions and nature of patrilineal descent has resulted in many subsequent interpretations of Omaha ethnography. Barnes attempts to write a history of specifically Omaha sociology and the developing sociologies of knowledge. Trained as a social anthropologist, Barnes takes a particularly critical stance, advocating an almost Boasian historical particularist view of Omaha society. He suggests throughout this work that the generally accepted ethnological representation of "Omaha" as a term for societies encompassing patrilineal descent groups is more atypical than typical, and simply no longer warranted in anthropological parlance. Barnes comes to this discussion with a background in the analysis of unilineal societies in other cultural areas. In the opening paragraphs to an article that he wrote in 1976, Barnes notes Claude Levi-Strauss's call in The Savage Mind (1966) for an understanding of the regulatory prohibitions operating in Crow-Omaha kinship and his suggestion that, once these elementary or intermediate forms are better understood, progress could be made in answering questions about more complex societies. Accepting this intellectual call to arms, Barnes has focused his interest upon unilineal societies in North America, particularly on the Plains-an extension of his work in Indonesia investigating the descent systems of the Kedang