n "Sound Structure as Social Structure" Feld (1984) issued a compelling call for qualitative comparison in ethnomusicology. His article on the Kaluli and Roseman's (1984) on the Temiar demonstrate the complexities and internal diversity of particular musical traditions and the great difficulty of finding a comparative language that neither caricatures nor obscures those traditions. In suggesting a framework for comparative sociomusicology, Feld stresses the importance of drawing extensively upon local theories of self, society, aesthetics and the natural world. How those with whom we work conceptualize and enact their lives-both musical and social-necessarily informs how we come to share in their understandings, although this recognition is often lost in the scholarly drive to move from specifics to the universal. The Kaluli and Temiar are fortunate in their chroniclers. The richness and particularity of each musical tradition are striking; we are forced, as we should be, to take them on their own terms. That the musical issues at stake are so complex should not, however, lead us to assume that questions of social characterization are any less problematic. Feld points to one of the major dangers, that of relying upon notions of "objectified social structures" (405). A subtler but potentially more consequential difficulty lies in the interplay between those two societies, which were represented in a recent symposium,' and the theoretical position argued by at least one of the respondents. Keil (1984) quotes Diamond: "In primitive societies the superstructure is not reducible to the economic base; that reductive process begins with the exploitative economic relations of civilization" (1984:446). The Temiar and Kaluli cases are cited as proof of this argument, and they indeed demonstrate elegantly complex patterns of economic, social and esthetic integration. The danger lies in the possible assumption, suggested by the quote from Diamond, that the Temiar and Kaluli as "primitive" societies represent a pre-civilized egalitarianism and that subsequent types of social formation-necessarily inegalitarian-cannot encompass an analogous interpenetration of economic, social and esthetic institutions.