92 SOCIAL SCIENTIST conceptualized. The first excerpt, from Karve's 'Kinship Organization in India', offers a glimpse into her attempt to sketch a morphology of the Indian kinship system. Using kin terms to compare different kinship structures in the north, south and east, she links these differences to the major language families (sanskritic, dravidian, etc) prevalent in the regions. She locates marriage as lying at the tore of a north-south contrast, focusing on differential structures of marital exchange and variations in marital arrangements as seen from the position of the woman. The alliance theory of kinship too centralizes marriage in contrasting north and south Indian kinship structures. Dumont, in 'North India in relation to South India', draws attention to the similarities in the two marriage structures to the extent that the value attached to affinity through marriage is definitive. Rather than analyzing kinship terminologies, he focuses on ritualized gift-giving as indicative of kin relations, especially the relations of asymmetry implicit in them. Trautmann offers, in the selection included here, a historical perspective on the Dravidian kinship system, proposing that the ideological dominance of north over south led to the convergence of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan kinship systems. He suggests that, as a result, one finds a uniform incidence of the ideology of 'kanyadana* throughout India, presenting wife-takers as superior to wife-givers. Section II covers the various descent theories of kinship. The exploration of kinship systems through descent or line of inheritance contrasts with alliance theory, which emphasizes relations established through marriage. Some articles in this section explore the nature, functions of and changes is unilineal descent groups (Shah, Nongbri), a few others correlate this with caste and class structures in the community (Cough). Others seek to interpret how descent ideologies interweave with the cultural practices of specific communities (Das). However, neither a sensitivity to the various rules of lineage and inheritance, nor t6 descent ideologies really appears to make a dent as far as the delineation of domains is concerned. For, across different systems, women continue to be associated with the domestic domain, and excluded from the public, political realm dominated by men. Both descent and alliance theories, indeed the entire family and kinship theory, rest on a distinction between the domestic and public, where the latter is defined in biological/natural terms, juxtaposed against a politico-jural realm defined in cultural terms. At a time when such oppositional frameworks are increasingly coming under criticism from all quarters, especially from feminist theory, it is imperative today to rethink the core concepts and methods it fosters. Unfortunately, this is an imperative which is yet to translate itself into the field of family and kinship studies in India. Section III includes writings on marriage in India. The papers by Gough and Berreman are descriptive accounts, documenting marriage