Article outline

• 4.1Introduction
  • 4.1.1The social context of inter-personal cooperation and communication
  • 4.1.2Rational choice vs. implicit conventions
• 4.2The Society of Intimates
  • 4.2.1Preliminaries
  • 4.2.2General characteristics
• 4.3Kinship-based cooperation: The Trobriand case
  • 4.3.1Land ownership, land-use and residence
  • 4.3.2Kinship and marriage
  • 4.3.3The life-cycle of cooperation
  • 4.3.4Kinship and reciprocity
  • 4.3.5The adaptive logic of the Trobriand yam exchange
  • 4.4Reciprocity and kinship hierarchies: Ute
• 4.5Dealing with strangers
  • 4.5.1Estrangement and de-alienation: The Western Apache
  • 4.5.2Other contexts of de-alienation
• 4.6Mitigating the hazards of communication
  • 4.6.1Preamble
  • 4.6.2Private discourse and the costs of new information
• 4.7Culture a mechanism for automated social action
• 4.8The persistent relevance of the Society of Intimates
• 4.9Closure
  • a.Cultural coherence
  • b.Public intimacy
  • c.Residual spheres of intimacy
• Acknowledgements
• Notes