94 SOCIAL SCIENTIST significant since family and kinship 'may ... retain or create important new functions relating to class societies as a whole . . . mediating and stabilising relationships of domination between different classes' (Medik and Sabean). In Asia, kinship forms an organising principle and articulates entitlement and access to property, inheritance, motivation, health, education, authority and decision-making. The household emerges as the basic unit of family ideology, and the explicit and implicit assumptions of interests that form the structure of interpersonal behaviour between the sexes. The papers study a range of kinship systems to provide the necessary cultural and social contexts, and come up with a significant direction: that patrilineality and patrilocality do not have a single meaning. This has different implications for women in terms of support structures and choices. The studies in this volume go beyond the confines of family and kinship to macro-economic and political processes, to emerge with certain analytic features: the rural economy and work organisation and their relation to the urban and industrial economy and the relation of colonialism industrialisation and development to class differentiation. Both the impact of colonisation and capitalist development have varied, and the nature of change and development has been mediated by processes within the developing economies which have been linked to the world market. Consequently the household as a unit of production has been variously reinforced, supplemented or eliminated. Such differentiation has polarised not only classes but the life opportunity of women in terms of gender, work and community. Strategies must relate to structures, argue the editors, even if changes are not at the same pace. It is here that the 'action of agents in the making and being made', that is, the impact of conscious activity and its consequences on the reproduction or disruption of institutions and structures can be seen. These studies question the dominant analysis of gender relations: Is it always an issue of power/subordination? Is this issue to be seen in terms of particular structures, definite processes in inter-personal relations, in particular strategies or in the conjuction of structures? There has been a tendency to reduce thes.e analytic categories to 'patriarchy' and 'class* as underlying structures. Palriwala takes up these issues for discussion in the introduction. The volume covers a wide canvas, even though slightly dated. It raises interesting and valid questions on women, the household and work which should encourage the growth of women's studies in diverse disciplines. Patriarchy as a blanket term is rightly cautioned against since in this from it limits the understanding of gender. As a form of ideological control in the capitalist framework, it is used by some researchers in this volume. What is important is to understand why patriarchy enters into the discussion on subordination which is most clearly seen in the domestic sphere. We should not stop here, but go deeper to seek an explanation. It is under capitalism .that we see a separation of the productive means and the produce, the separation of