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acknowledgments I first thank the villagers of Sidhpur Kalan, Punjab, India. I especially thank Netar Singh and the other members of the family of Inder Singh as well as Naranjan Singh and the family of Bhaktavar Singh. Also in India, I continue to be indebted to M. S. Gill, who was the district commissioner of Ambala when I first began fieldwork and who has continued to be a friend and adviser. S. S. Sodhi, former justice of the Punjab High Court and chief justice of the Allahabad High Court, has provided influential guidance in Indian law, the common law tradition generally , and the need to recognize legal theory as social theory. Two other crucial debts are to Dwight Read and Michael Fischer. My ongoing conversations and collaboration with Read for the last thirty-five years and Fischer for the last fifteen or so years are reflected in the overall structure of the theory, the central place given to the notion of instantiation, and the basic parallelism that I am arguing for regarding formal analysis, computer simulation , and experimental demonstration. This is exemplified by my incorporation of Read and Fischer’s computerization of Read’s algebraic analysis of kinship terminologies but is by no means limited to it. Other colleagues whose ideas and conversations are reflected in these pages in ways beyond what I can acknowledge in endnotes include John Adams, Nathan Berg, Anthony Champagne, David Channell, Ted Harpham, Alfonso Morales, David French, Harold Garfinkel, Nicholas S. Hopkins, David Kronenfeld, Kris Lehman, Anne Mayhew, Fred Plog, Walter C. Neale, Kim Romney, David Schneider , Milton Singer, Roy Wagner, and Douglas White. Figure 10 has been previously published in “The Message Is the Medium: Language, Culture and Informatics,” in Mathematical Modeling and Anthropology : Its Rationale, Past Successes and Future Directions, published as a special issue of Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal 36(8) (2005): 903–17, edited by Dwight Read and published by Taylor and Francis. Figure 21, the general model of social process, was first presented in “Cultural Systems and Organizational Processes: Observations on the Conference Papers” in the same volume. Alfonso Morales and Nathan Berg have read and commented extensively on earlier versions of the manuscript, as have Lawrence Kuznar and Martin Ottenheimer on the penultimate version. Michelina Leaf, my wife, has provided patient editorial attention. And finally, I gratefully acknowledge support from the Cecil H. Green Distinguished Chair in Academic Leadership, at the University of Texas, Dallas. x Acknowledgments ...

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