This monograph provides an account of sociality in a Dayak community in southwest Borneo, demonstrating the importance of both rice and ritualized hearths in the formation and maintenance of social relations there.  It is the first detailed ethnography to be published of a Dayak people from the southern part of Kalimantan Barat (Indonesian West Borneo), a region about which academics currently know very little.  It offers a further major contribution in three rather different areas of the literature.  Firstly, it suggests that the conventional stress in anthropological studies of Borneo societies on the household, both as the basis of social organization and as an independent unit, needs to be re-examined.  In this society, at least, not only is the household not a significant grouping, but it also would be quite erroneous to describe those groupings which are significant as independent from wider social networks. 

Secondly, the monograph challenges a number of more conventional anthropological approaches to the study of social organization -- including both the 'descent theory' model and Lévi-Strauss's "house society" model -- and, like the "new Melanesian ethnography," draws out the fundamental ethnocentrism of a focus on discrete social groups when analyzing social relations among peoples for whom individual, group and community may not be clearly demarcated.  Finally, it critiques aspects of the classical ethnographic method, and particularly its privileging of visual data, arguing that this predisposes us to understand social relations in certain limited terms.