156 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
culture is being studied, and as the result of systematic directed investiga- 
tion. It is true that when we have a somewhat full knowledge of a people 
and of all aspects of their culture, we can form ideas as to the meaning of 
their customs and beliefs. Thus I think that it is possible in the case of 
the Eskimo to be fairly certain that the essential meaning of the Sedna 
myth lies in its relation to the division of the year into two parts, summer 
and winter, and the effects this division has on the social life. But even 
so, the full elaboration of this hypothesis, and still more the actual verifica- 
tion of it, the demonstration that this really is the meaning, could hardly 
be carried out except by further investigation amongst the natives 
themselves. 
It must not be supposed that the meaning of an element of culture can 
be discovered by asking the people themselves what it means. People do 
not think about the meanings of things in their own culture, they take them 
for granted. Unless we are anthropologists we do not think about the 
meaning of even such familiar customs amongst ourselves as shaking hands 
or raising the hat. If by chance the ethnographer comes upon an 
individual who has thought about the meaning of his people’s customs, he 
is likely to give what is his own individual interpretation which, significant 
and interesting though it may be, cannot be taken as a valid statement 
of what the custom really means to the community in general. The 
meaning of any element of culture can only be defined when the culture 
is seen as a whole of interrelated parts, and this can only be accomplished 
by one who is able to take an objective view of it, the ethnographer or 
descriptive sociologist, in fact. 
The field worker, therefore, has to follow a special technique for 
discovering the meanings of the facts of culture that he observes, a 
technique analogous in some ways to, but on the whole more difficult 
than, that used by the lexicographer in recording a spoken language for 
the first time. This technique is now being slowly developed, but its full 
development will only be possible as progress is made in sociological theory. 
From the point of view of the comparative sociologist much of the 
work done in the recording of the cultures of non-European peoples in the 
past is unsatisfactory and cannot be properly utilised. The cases of our 
ethnographical museums are filled with objects the full meanings of which 
we do not know and probably can never discover. Our libraries are full 
of collections of myths obtained from native peoples, and books containing 
detailed and illustrated accounts of ceremonies, without anything to reveal 
to us the meanings of those myths or ceremonies. Such material can, of 
course, be put to some use by the sociologist, but it is of decidedly less 
use than it is to be hoped that field-work of the modern type will be. 
I think that the first movement towards this new kind of field-work 
was made many years ago by Dr. Haddon when he organised the 
Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits. In those days, however, it was 
thought that the proper person to undertake the systematic interpretation 
of a culture would be a psychologist. Dr. Haddon took with him three of 
the foremost psychologists of our times. The experiment had valuable 
results, but that general interpretation of the Torres Straits culture, that 
was to have been included in the volume of the Reports dealing with 
Psychology, will never be written. The psychologist as such is not 
be as 
