This study offers an ethnographic portrait of the Atuot-speaking peoples of the Southern Sudan. While placing them in relation to neighboring Nilotic groups, it also provides a general description of Atuot communities. Topics examined include migration, ecology, settlement patterns and modes of production, social and religious values, and the interplay between individual experience and social convention. By focusing on a specific group of social facts, Burton develops a regional framework that includes not only the Atuot-speaking peoples but also the more numerous Nuer and Dinka populations.

This analytical interdisciplinary approach to the study of behaviour in world society attempts to make relatively advanced material intelligible to those without the background of political science which has hitherto been necessary. Dr Burton, viewing world society as a total environment in which the behaviour of individuals, groups, nations and states occurs, describes ethnic, political, economic and ideological systems and discusses all aspects of behaviour: decision-making; roles, non-rational activity, problems of perception, values and conflict. He shows how such behaviour relates to that which we know in all social groups and in more confined areas, and states that any analysis of international society, its problems and conflicts, which explains behaviour at one social level differently from activity at another social level must be misleading. This book provides a stimulating and challenging analysis of world society which will interest a wide range of those studying international relations, sociology and politics in universities, schools and colleges of education.