This volume in honour of Professor Mair reflects the range of her interests, and those of the Department in which she taught, in many areas of social anthropology, for it reports on research in Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean, on the tensions between tradition and modernity, between the individual and society, deviance and conformity, stability and conflict. The ambiguities of social change and the choices thus presented to individuals are examined in all the essays and issues of modem politics and development dominate most of them.