The Journal of California Anthropology

Kunkel's (1974) article on "Pomo kin groups" and Kronenfeld's response, in this issue (Kronenfeld 1975), bring to the fore once more the interesting problem of the ethnohistory of social structure. Kronenfeld is quite apt in his comparison with the Nuer whose residential groupings and seasonal movements do not exactly reflect the fact that the Nuer use the metaphor of unilineal kinship to describe and understand their own socio-political organization. Kunkel seems to have confused social organization for social structure and while he has much of the former type of data in hand the latter only seems to have existed in the minds of long deceased Pomo for it was not recorded by ethnographers or other reporters.