A view from 1950s and 1960s Britain suggests that the public culture of temporality in the United States has shifted from a consequential focus on reasoning toward the near future to a combination of response to immediate situations and orientation to a very long‐term horizon. This temporal perspective is most marked in the public rhetoric of macroeconomics, but it also corresponds in remarkable ways to evangelicals' views of time. In this article, I trace the optionality and consonance of this shift toward the relative evacuation of the near future in religion and economics by examining different theoretical positions within each domain. In conclusion, I suggest that the near future is being reinhabited by forms of punctuated time, such as the dated schedules of debt and other specific event‐driven temporal frames.

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Issues relating to household and community are of central importance in social scientific research on contemporary Africa and the experience of its peoples in the twentieth century. Early anthropological theory categorized African social organization, for comparative purposes, with that of indigenous America, New Guinea, and other classless and early state systems. Most of these other peoples are now minority populations in colonized states, politically and economically marginal. Only in Africa have advancing capitalism and non-peasant, relatively weakly stratified, highly flexible forms of social organization been forced into a long-term working relationship with one another over such a vast area and such a wide variety of conditions. Most recent scholarship—and the scholarship I will limit myself to in this paper—is not only concerned with substantive questions of what has happened as a result of this confrontation, but also with the methodological problems of describing and explaining it in a comparative framework. Over the last twenty years, this has resulted in two major shifts of approach, which cut across all the divisions amongst the classic theoretical schools of thought. They are, first, a shift from explanation of local forms in terms of local social and ecological conditions to consideration of their position in regional, national, and international structures; and, second, a shift from classification of local forms in typological schema, either synchronic or evolutionary, to understanding in terms of processes of change which are to some degree indeterminate. Taking the first issue, the increasing use of terms like “household” and “community” constitutes a relatively new departure. They are classic analytical concepts in the study of peasant societies and carry with them the implications of a local social structure and tradition of life within a wider stratified political and economic system under a state form of government.

The paper re-examines principles of social organization in pre-colonial Equatorial Africa, suggesting that the imagery of ‘accumulation’ of ‘wealth in people’ is not wrong, but not flexible enough to encompass the centrality of knowledge in these societies. People were singularized repositories of a differentiated and expanding repertoire of knowledge, as well as being structured kin (as in the kinship model) and generic dependents and followers (as in the wealth-in-people model). We argue that social mobilization was in part based on the mobilization of different bodies of knowledge, and leadership was the capacity to bring them together effectively, even if for a short time and specific purpose. We refer to this process as composition and distinguish it from accumulation.The paper has three parts. The first substitutes an oral epic from southern Cameroon for an ethnography of the principles by which people pursued agendas and mobilized followings in their own political worlds. Colonial rule may have institutionalized pre-colonial political hierarchies, but it completely altered the terms for political mobilization. Hence the historical record is very limited for making inferences about how ‘wealth-in-people’ operated in action, under pre-colonial conditions. The second critiques the evolutionary assumptions about simple societies that still color the models of Equatorial societies. The third revisits the ethnography to illuminate the principles of composition. The conclusion makes inferences and suggestions with respect to aspects of pre-colonial social history.

Boas argued that anthropologists should make historical comparisons within well-defined regional contexts. A century later, we have many improvements in the statistical methodologies for comparative research, yet most of our regional constructs remain without a valid empirical basis. We present a new method for developing and testing regions. The method takes into account older anthropological concerns with relationships between culture history and the environment, embodied in the culture-area concept, as well as contemporary concerns with historical linkages of societies into world systems. We develop nine new regions based on social structural data and test them using data on 35 I societies. We compare the new regions with Murdock's regional constructs and find that our regional classification is a strong improvement over Murdock's. In so doiig we obtain evidence for the cross-cultural importance of gender and descent systems, for the importance of constraint relationships upon sociocultural systems, for the historical importance of two precapitalist world systems, and for strikingly different geographical alignments of cultural systems in the Old World and the Americas.