Examines the Crow-Omaha problem from a variety of perspectives - historical, linguistic, formalist, structuralist, culturalist, evolutionary, and phylogenetic. It focuses on the regions where Crow-Omaha systems occur: Native North America, Amazonia, West Africa, Northeast and East Africa, aboriginal Australia, northeast India, and the Tibeto-Burman area.

Thomas R. Trautmann is an emeritus professor of history and anthropology at the University of Michigan. He has published numerous books and was co-editor of the pioneering Transformations of Kinship. Peter M. Whiteley is Curator of North American Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, an adjunct professor of anthropology at Columbia University, and an affiliated professor in the PhD program in anthropology at the City University of New York. He is the author of several books, including Rethinking Hopi Ethnography.