To pause for a moment before a quaint and singular fact; to be amused at it, and see its outward strangeness; to look at it as a curio and collect it into the museum of one’s memory or into one’s store of anecdotes — this attitude of mind has always been foreign and repugnant to me. Some people are unable to grasp the inner meaning and the psychological reality of all that is outwardly strange, at first sight incomprehensible, in a different culture. These people are not born to be ethnologists. It is in the love of the final synthesis, achieved by the assimilation and comprehension of all the items of a culture and still more in the love of the variety and independence of the various cultures that lies the test of the real worker in the true Science of Man.
There is, however, one point of view deeper yet and more important than the love of tasting of the variety of human modes of life, and that is the desire to turn such knowledge into wisdom. Though it may be given to us for a moment to enter into the soul of a savage and through his eyes to look at the outer world and feel ourselves what it must feel to him to be himself — yet our final goal is to enrich and deepen our own world’s vision, to understand our own nature and to make it finer, intellectually and artistically. In grasping the essential outlook of others, with the reverence and real understanding, due even to savages, we cannot but help widening our own. We cannot possibly reach the final Socratic wisdom of knowing ourselves if we never leave the narrow confinement of the customs, beliefs and prejudices into which every man is born. Nothing can teach us a better lesson in this matter of ultimate importance than the habit of mind which allows us to treat the beliefs and values of another man from his point of view. Nor has civilised humanity ever needed such tolerance more than now, when prejudice, ill will and vindictiveness are dividing each European nation from another, when all the ideals, cherished and proclaimed as the highest achievements of civilisation, science and religion, have been thrown to the winds. The Science of Man, in its most refined and deepest version should lead us to such knowledge and to tolerance and generosity, based on the understanding of other men’s point of view.
The study of Ethnology — so often mistaken by its very votaries for an idle hunting after curios, for a ramble among the savage and fantastic shapes of „barbarous customs and crude superstitions” — might become one of the most deeply philosophic, enlightening and elevating disciplines of scientific research. Alas! the time is short for Ethnology, and will this truth of its real meaning and importance dawn before it is too late?
Przypisy:
1. treatise on the family among the aborigines of Australia — The Family among the Australian Aborigines: A Sociological Study. London University of London Press, 1913. [przypis edytorski]
2. account of the natives of Mailu in New Guinea — The Natives of Mailu Preliminary Results of the Robert Mond Research Work in British New Guinea. „Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia”, vol. xxxix., 1915. [przypis edytorski]
3. The hiri, as these expeditions are called in Motuan, have been described with a great wealth of detail and clearness of outline by Captain F. Barton, in C. G. Seligman’s The Melanesians of British New Guinea, Cambridge, 1910, Chapter VIII. [przypis autorski]
4. Cf. The Mailu, by B. Malinowski, in „Transactions of the R. Society f S. Australia”, 1915; Chapter iv. 4, pp. 612 to 629. [przypis autorski]
5. Op. cit. Chapter XI. [przypis autorski]
6. On this point of method again, we are indebted to the Cambridge School of Anthropology for having introduced the really scientific way of dealing with he question. More especially in the writings of Haddon, Rivers and Seligman, he distinction between inference and observation is always clearly drawn, and we can visualise with perfect precision the conditions under which the work was done. [przypis autorski]