Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/573

 Reviews. 509

not unfruitful, since he has succeeded in restoring to the world the famous fables of Pilpay in their oldest and most authentic form.

Charles H. Tawney.

Les Rites de Passage. Etude systematique des Rites de la Porte et du Seuil, de I'Hospitalite, de I'Adoption, de la Grossesse et de TAccouchement, de la Naissance, de I'Enfance, de la Puberte, de I'lnitiation, de I'Ordination, du Couronnement, des Fiancailles et du Mariage, des Funerailles, des Saisons, etc. By Arnold van Gennep. Paris : Emile Nourry, 1909. 8vo, pp. 288.

The principal object of this book, the author tells us, is to react against the "folklorist" or "anthropological" procedure, which consists in extracting certain rites from a sequence, be they positive or negative rites, and considering them inde- pendently and in isolation, thus depriving them of their chief raison d'etre and their logical situation in the entire mechanism of which they form a part. In other words, he wishes to bring us back to the consideration of these sequences as organic wholes, to awaken us to the recognition of the value and intention of the sequence as having in itself an important meaning and a relation to the life and beliefs of the people practising the rites in question, which we cannot otherwise understand.

It was quite time that the attention of anthropologists should be recalled to this aspect of ritual. Many continental scholars have long regarded as a vice of what they please to call the English school of anthropologists the very procedure against which this book is directed. They have often protested against the practice of picking out a custom here and there for the purpose of comparison, regardless of its surroundings, as liable to mislead, and have declared that the results of such a com- parison are not to be depended on. I think it must be admitted that comparison on those lines is a garbling of the text, often very intricate and difficult to interpret, that we have to read. The difficulty of the text may be an excuse. The student pounces on a passage that seems to him clear, and neglects the rest.