The purpose of these notes is to record several observations regarding the terminology of relationship found on the eastern Indonesian island of Komodo as described by Father J. A. J. Verheijen in his valuable linguistic and ethnographic monograph (1982). The occasion for doing so is provided by Professor Needham's recent, mostly formal analysis of Verheijen's data (1986), and more particularly by a notable omission from the comparative evidence which Needham adduces in this context. Here I refer to eastern Sumbanese mamu, FZ, FZH, as compared with Komodo mamo, FZ, FZH, HP. After discussing what the evident con nection between these two words might imply for an understanding of the Komodo terminology, I shall consider several more general features of the classification, especially as these bear upon the issues of symmetry/asymmetry and prescription in the comparative analysis of eastern Indonesian relationship terminologies. In an earlier essay, Needham, on the basis of an unpublished version of the Komodo terminology provided by Father Verheijen, character izes the terminology with a 'structural formula' written as 'A(S)A' (1984:226). What this means is, quite simply, that the classification exhibits asymmetric features in the first ascending genealogical level, predominantly symmetric features in ego's level, and asymmetric features again in the first descending level. The purposes of Needham's more recent remarks on the Komodo terminology, as the author himself states, are to justify this 'structural formula' and 'to bring out from the new evidence', by which he refers to the Komodo terminological data published in Verheijen's monograph, 'some of the singular interest of