H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 155 
of the culture of a non-European people must be based on the careful work 
of a thoroughly trained observer. 
During the last forty years there has been a considerable quantity of 
work carried out in this way, particularly in America. Under the influence 
of Dr. Haddon in England and Prof. Boas in America, a good deal has 
been done in developing a technique of ethnographical field-work. 
It is true that we still meet with persons who regard themselves as 
competent to carry out such work of observation without the preliminary 
training. One also still finds writers who quote from accounts of mis- 
sionaries and travellers, as if their records were as reliable as those of 
trained specialists. 
As ethnographical field-work has become in recent years more syste- 
matic, observation has tended to become more extended and more 
penetrating. Earlier ethnographical descriptions were mostly confined to 
the more accessible aspects of a culture, its formalised elements. The 
result was normally a very incomplete picture of the life of a people. 
Recent work, such as that of Prof. Malinowski or Dr. Margaret Mead, 
gives us, as the result of more extended and methodical observation, 
valuable information about what may be called the unformalised aspects 
of the life of a people such as the Samoans, the Trobriand Islanders, and 
the Admiralty Islanders. Without information of this kind we can never 
hope to make full comparative use of any description of a culture. 
Comparative sociology involves another and perhaps even more 
important change in the conception of the nature of field research. On 
the older view the task of the field-worker was simply to observe the 
facts and record them as precisely as possible with the help of such concrete 
material as photographs, texts in the native language, and so on. It was 
not his business, at any rate as a field-worker, to attempt any interpretation 
of the data he collected. This he could leave to others who would make 
it their business. 
| The conception of the newer anthropology is the opposite of this, and 
is that only the field-worker, the one actually in contact with the people, 
can discover the meaning of the various elements of the culture, and that 
it is necessary for him to do this if he is to provide material to be fully 
utilised for the purposes of science. 
When I speak of the ‘meaning’ of an element of culture, I use the 
_ word very much as we do when we speak of the meanings of words. If we 
consider an individual, the meaning of a word that he hears or uses is the 
set of associations that it has with other things in his mind, and therefore 
the place it occupies in his total thinking, his mental life as a whole. If 
we take a community at a given time the meaning of a word in the language 
they use is constituted by the associations normally clustering around the 
word within that community. Therefore the maker of dictionaries collects 
examples of the usage of a word and tries to classify and, as far as possible 
define, the different varieties of usage. 
Now the meaning of an element of culture is to be found in its inter- 
relation with other elements and in the place it occupies in the whole life 
of the people, z.e. not merely in their visible activities, but also in their 
thought and feeling. The discovery of this with any certainty is obviously 
only possible for one who is living in actual contact with the people whose 
