Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/261

Rh many there are, how much land they own, what is the history of their class and their relations with Poland as a whole, what is the difference between Polish and other European peasants and what hopes they raise for the future,—he will not find it in any of these five volumes.

He will find very little of what can be called social anthropology, i.e. the structure of their society and the chief events—"rites de passage"—of their life, and perhaps a little more about the "church" and "folklore" religious beliefs. All these most interesting details are scattered here and there in the first 200 pages of the Introduction, which contains a valuable collection of facts, whilst about 800 pages of the first two volumes are occupied by letters between the peasants who emigrated to America and their kin at home. Possibly three or four of such documents would not be out of place, but to give so much space to monotonous and far from reliable data (the Polish peasant seldom creates his letters, but brings such information as he wishes to convey into the conventional scheme of letter-writing) proves that the authors were unaware of more valuable sources of information. Yet whether we call the work ethnological, or sociological, or place it under the head of folklore, we might have expected to have at least some of the most important social or religious ceremonies described in full with all their crude and symbolic details, instead of being given them à discretion of the authors.

However interesting Messrs. Thomas and Znaniecki's personal methodological note may be (pp. 1-86), it obscures in its erudition the methods of thought and habit of the Polish peasant, to whom after all these five beautifully printed volumes profess to be devoted.