The main body of the book is concerned with the theme that empirical political behaviour among the Kachin is a compromise response to the polarised political doctrines of gumsa and gumlao.. Nearly one-third of this book consists of Chapter V entitiled 'The Structural Categories of Kachin Gumsa Society'. It is concerned with the interpretation of a series of verbal concepts and their interconnections. This long chapter is placed between a relatively short account of a particular Kachin community directly observed (Chapter IV) and a series of chapters (VI, VII, VIII) containing secondhand ethnographic and historical evidence.

Drawing on long term fieldwork and research in communities from Assam through to Laos, this book offers a unique level of reappraisal of the work of Edmund Leach and is a significant contribution to the development of a new regional anthropology of Southeast Asia.