The contributors, representing leading European anthropologists today, share the view that ethnography and theoretically informed comparisons constitute a single, plausible enterprise. They reject both the post-modernist criticism of ethnography as epistemologically problematic and the opposing view that no theory could possibly do justice to the insights and complex descriptions of ethnography. In this, the first of six collections of papers taken from the first conference of the newly-formed European Association of Social Anthropologists, the contributors discuss the various models at the disposal of the modern ethnographer. Their concerns range through structuralism, post-modernism and world systems theory, and the volume as a whole offers a lively account of the state of general theory in social anthropology today.