My first impression of Kenyan Badeng society, based on the unfamiliar experience of living in a longhouse where actions could not be easily hidden, was of social freedom and economic equality. Ease and informality is one of the most striking features of Badeng life, not only in terms of the spatial dimensions of the longhouse and the unobstructed movement between households, but in the very nature of sociality itself. In a typical gathering on a longhouse verandah, people come and go at will without salutations or leave-taking, children interrupt incessantly, and the very old are often ignored The Badeng do not speak softly with eyes averted or downcast but talk and laugh noisily. ' We have big mouths and make big sounds' , one man told me, when describing their language. Daily social relations are not marked by the kind of linguistic or behavioural etiquette which often accompany hierarchies of age, gender or rank. Men and women struck me as forthright, down-to-earth, energetic and opinionated, embodying completely different values to, say, the Balinese for Badeng certainly did not appear to 'play down their existence as persons' (Geertz 1973:409). These initial perceptions were not dulled by familiarity, nor diminished by subsequent knowledge gained during fieldwork; two years later the Badeng loomed as large, extroverted, and purposeful as they had seemed in the first moments after I arrived This characterisation however, does not coincide with conventional representations of the Keny ah group. It is now commonplace in Borneo studies to contrast the ' egalitarian' Iban with the 'stratified' societies of the Kay an, Keny ah and smaller Kajang groups such as the Sekapan, Kejaman and Lahanan (Leach 1970:71; King 1978:27; Rousseau 1979; Freeman 1981; Nicolaisen 1906:77, 81-4). This distinction, drawn by colonial and contemporary observers alike, is based on perceived differences in general social behaviour, in the enactment of rank, and in leadership. The Kay an, and some of the Kenyan, have been labelled as ' stratified' because leadership is hereditary, and because rank is inherited and maintained through prestigious symbols and exclusive rituals (Whittier 1972; Rousseau 1979). The Iban, on the other hand, are described as an egalitarian society because of their 'aggressive individualism' and an absence of rank and hereditary leadership (Leach 1970:72; Freeman 1970, 1981; Sutlive 1978:3; Uchibori 1978). This kind of classification is indicative of a general tendency in anthropological thinking to perceive societies as essential 'types' ; a static as well as a misleading representation. It is static because it denies the possibility of historical transformation. It is misleading because sweeping inferences concerning cultural values are drawn on the basis of political characterisations: the loud, individualistic (egalitarian) Iban are compared to the quieter, more restrained (hierarchical) Keny ah. Dismantling essentialist thinking is not, however, an easy task because such classifications, created almost forty years ago, have become so entrenched