22 ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH OUTSIDE AMERICA. 



There is little to choose between Africa and Oceania in the matter of 

 urgency, and the choice between these two fields must turn on other factors 

 and especially on the degree of their scientific interest. In order to deal 

 with this suliject of scientific interest it is necessary to say something about 

 the present condition of the science of anthropology; and since in both of 

 the regions which seem most favorable for work the interest is ethnological 

 rather than archaeological, I propose to deal chiefly with the ethnological 

 aspect of anthropology. 



Ethnology is a very young science and is at present in the stage at which 

 it is seeking for principles and methods by means of which to obtain a firm 

 footing amidst the vast complex of facts with which it has to deal. At the 

 present moment there exists the widest divergence of opinion among students 

 of the subject. According to some the course of man's history has been a 

 simple and direct evolution in which the various cultures of the world are 

 the outcome of diverging processes of development starting from some com- 

 mon source. According to this view some of the existing cultures of the 

 world represent stages in the process whereby western civilization has reached 

 its present height, while others are the outcome of lines of development which 

 have failed to develop into civilizations fit to compete with those which have 

 become dominant in the world's history. 



Other students of human culture reject the view that any peoples now 

 existing on the earth are to be regarded as simple representatives of stages 

 of human development, but beUeve the course of this development to have 

 been highly compUcated— every existing culture, even when it is apparently 

 most simple, being the result of the blending of cultures which have been 

 carried over the earth's surface by the movements of migrating peoples. To 

 them the primary task before the ethnologist is the analysis of the complexes 

 presented by existing examples of human culture. 



The settlement of the dispute between these two opposed schools of 

 thought will turn largely on how far the process of ethnological analysis will be 

 found possible. This must first be attempted in places where the conditions 

 are relatively simple and favorable, and there is much reason to beheye that 

 such favorable conditions are to be found in insular rather than in continental 

 areas. An insular area prevents or limits those secondary movements of 

 people which are apt to obscure the main results of the blending of peoples, 

 and thus gives a simpler product for the process of analysis. An insular 

 region, especially one so vast and diversified as that of the islands of Oceania, 

 allows different parts to be affected in very difl"erent degrees by any immigrant 

 culture, while the fact that certain islands or groups of islands may wholly 

 escape an incoming influence allows the application of the method of difference 

 in a way which is most exceptional, if it ever occurs, in a continental area. 

 Further, there is another way in which an insular region has a special 

 interest. If the task of ethnological analysis is to have any chance of success, 

 a number of prehminary problems will have to be settled. There will have 



