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For nearly a year Marshall D. Sahlins lived in villages on the Fijian island of Moala, learning the "way of the land," as the Moalans call their customs. From this experience he has written a book that is at once an intensive field study and a new approach to the methods of studying primitive communities. It marks an important departure from the standard trait-listing form of anthropological reports, for Sahlins does not isolate such factors as economics, kinship, and political organization. Rather he shows how closely they are interwoven in a primitive culture and why they must be interpreted with reference to the organic whole.This book, frankly evolutionary in its approach, views Moalan culture as an adaptive organization, a human means of dealing with nature so as to ensure survival. Proceeding from the smallest kinship groups, families, to the larger organization of village and island, Sahlins shows how kinship structure can organize the polity and economy. In a culture such as Moalan, kinship behavior is economics and often politics as well. By fully appreciating this fact, the author claims, we are made aware of the wide evolutionary gap between primitive societies and the impersonal structure of modern civilization.

Sahlins argues that human behavior cannot be reduced to mere biological imperatives because culture interposes itself as a unique, symbolic meaning system between human genetics and social practice. He takes aim at "vulgar sociobiology," demonstrating through vast cross-cultural examples that fundamental social structures—especially human kinship systems—are constructed on variable cultural rules rather than calculated genetic or evolutionary self-interest. Furthermore, Sahlins provides an ideological critique, revealing that sociobiological models often reflect Western capitalist frameworks mistakenly projected onto nature. Ultimately, this foundational text remains an indispensable defense of the autonomy of cultural anthropology, asserting that while biology sets physical limits, it is the symbolic faculty of culture that dictates human society.