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This essay by a distinguished anthropologist interprets America's ";cultural crisis" (a given) "as a response to the growth of bureaucracy and oligopoly, and to changes in the nature of work, and in the composition of the labor force. " The author is a rationalist, an objectivist, and a holist: that is, he is committed to "the reasoned search for an objective understanding of nature and culture," and he is certain that a great variety of disparate phenomena can be understood as parts of an interdependent whole. He is also an economic determinist in the sense that he constantly returns to aspects of political economy as his basis for explanation. Whereas ideas and ideology are epiphenomenal, economic structures are primary causal agencies. Yet Harris is not exactly a Marxist. Class struggle interests him not at all, and class consciousness only in a certain sense: we, the middle class, are oppressed by oligopoly.

No doubt my story [concerning the origins of cultures] would be more inspirational if I could set aside [a] cost/benefit approach to cannibalism and return to the old theory of moral progress. Most of us would prefer to believe that the Aztecs remained cannibals simply because their morals were mined in primitive impulses while the Old World states tabooed human flesh because their morals had risen in the great onwards-and-upwards movement of civilization. But I'm afraid this preference arises from provincial if not hypocritical misconceptions. Neither the prohibition of cannibalism nor the decline of human sacrifice in the Old World had the slightest effect on the rate at which the Old World states and empires killed each other's citizens. As everyone knows, the scale of warfare has increased steadily from prehistoric times to the present, and record numbers of casualties due to armed conflict have been produced precisely by those states in which Christianity has been the major religion. Heaps of corpses left to rot on the battlefield are no less dead than corpses dismembered for a feast. Today, hovering on the brink of a third world war, we are scarcely in a position to look down on the Aztecs. In our nuclear age the world survives only because each side is convinced that the moral standards of the other are low enough to sanction the annihilation of hundreds of millions of people in retaliation for a first strike. Thanks to radioactivity the survivors will not even be able to bury the dead, let alone eat them.

TEXAs ENGLISH is known to have developed essentially from Southern and Midland dialects, with some Spanish and German influence mainly in central and south Texas.' Settlers from the Deep South pushed westward, making their homes in east Texas for the most part, while South Midland speakers from Tennessee and Kentucky moved down across Arkansas into northeast, central, and west Texas. Hence, heteroglosses of both Southern and Midland speech patterns would be expected to appear in central Texas, but the proportion of each is yet to be determined. PURPOSE OF THE STUDY. A preliminary study observing the speech of employees in various downtown and suburban stores in Austin, in central Texas, revealed, among other phonological characteristics, a variance in the quality of postvocalic /r/. A careful study of this feature was therefore planned and conducted to determine the degree of retroflexion of /r/ and to ascertain whether social, stylistic, occupational, racial, sex, and age differentiations correlate with differences in the production of this phoneme. Since a glide or slight retroflexion indicates Southern influence2 and since heavy retroflexion is characteristic of Midland speech, the study consequently proposed to measure the degree to which the Midland dialect, in the form of heavily retroflexed postvocalic /r/, appears in Austin. Further, it sought to determine (1) whether retroflexion of /r/ is socially, racially, stylistically, occupationally, or otherwise controlled and, if so, to what extent and in which direction and (2) whether a trend in the degree of retroflexion could be discovered. METHOD OF INVESTIGATION. William Labov demonstrated the social