It is both a hazard and a delight of anthropological fieldwork that the more completely one becomes immersed in a society and culture totally different from one's own, the more similar people seem to kin and friends at home. Despite the manifest, subtle and profound differences there is a level on which people seem to feel and act in basically similar ways. The dynamics of this dialectic between socio-cultural uniqueness and common humanity lie in part at the intersection between cultural forms and inter-personal interaction. This is an area I first explored in papers on the links between greeting, giving and constraining (1972) and on questioning (1978a). However these two problems raised more general issues concerning the inferring of intentions in interaction, and thus the significance of social roles for making interaction more predictable (1978b). Ethologists are now suggesting that primate intelligence was directly linked to the challenges of social interdependence. This insight places the problems of greeting, questioning and inferring intentions in an even wider context. What can we learn about the nature of human society by taking seriously the possibility that human intelligence is in this fundamental sense social intelligence?

It is difficult to know where to begin with such a general problem, particularly if there is a commitment to a firm empirical base. The Working Papers were essays directed at particular aspects: the implications for primate social intelligence of an emerging spoken language; the new potentiality of language for meeting the challenges of social interdependence; language and the emergence of institutionalized gender roles; language and the emergence of rules.