Son of Old Man Hat [antikvár]

FOREWORDIT is one of the consequences of the gradually deepening consciousness of modern man that curiosity arises about the daily life of communities which are of utterly different race and culture from our own. The systematic ethnologist has done a great deal to map for us the essential cultural outlines of primitive societies and has given us more than a hint of the astounding variability of the forms which man creates and conserves in the course of his struggles with nature and feUowman. There is no dearth of information about primitive houses, artifacts, cooking methods, kinship systems, rituals, and folk-tales. The reader who is not something of an anthropologist, however, comes away from most of this material a little fatigued and confused. He is not schooled to analyze the details of cultural patterning into their tiniest elements, nor to trace out historic lines of development and ethnic interchange of custom running through these patterns and sub-patterns of socialized behavior. He finds it hard to think of custom as a severely objectified network of historically determined patterns, for custom to the average man is merely what you and I do and think because of the un-plumbed necessities of our common human nature, and such variations from custom as are not immediately accepted as immaterial embroideries on understood themes are anxiously questioned as to their reasonableness. The ethnologist proudly withholds all value judgments, leaving his more naiveor shall we say, his less completely revised?reader in the grip