THE SHARING OF SUBSTANCE VERSUS THE SHARING OF ACTIVITY AMONG THE BUID ∗ Thomas Gibson, University of Rochester This article has several related objectives. At the most elementary level it is intended as a contribution to the ethnography of Philippine highland societies, and as such it will be of interest to students of highland Southeast Asia in general. But in order to provide an adequate ethnographic description of Buid social organisation, a revision of the analytical tools elaborated to deal with tribal societies possessing descent groups is necessary. It is hoped, then, that some fo the analytical concepts developed in this article, such as that of shared activity, or “companionship”, may be applied to the description and eventual comparison of other so-called “bilateral” societies in the Austronesian culture area. The need to put Buid concepts of companionship on the same level of analysis as their concepts of kinship raises more fundamental questions about the primacy accorded to kinship principles in the social organisation of tribal societies. Such questions have long been implicit in the work of anthropologists studying “bilateral social systems” but have been inadequately theorised. Writers have instead resorted to concepts such as “loosely structured social systems” to account for social realities resistant to traditional structural-functionalist analysis (cf. Embree 1950). The Buid material also rasies questions concerning the universal association of kinship relations with positive moral values, variously termed “diffuse, enduring solidarity” (Schnieder 1968) or “the axiom of ∗ Published as “The sharing of substance versus the sharing of activity among the Buid.” Man 20 (3): 391-411, 1985.