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Comanche Society: Before the Reservation. By Gerald Betty. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. xi + 239 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $39.95.
While the merging of historical and anthropological outlooks has been a productive trend in Plains Indian studies, there are pitfalls. For one, the authority inherent in an accurate chronology or lively narrative can mask basic errors in social analysis. Sometimes historians have difficulty in properly employing the terms and principles of social organization so carefully wrought in the neighbor discipline. Readers get an epic infused with mistaken ethnology, resulting in a setback rather than advance in understanding.
So it is with Gerald Betty's Comanche Society. The work attempts to recast the history of Comanche expansion...