Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/28

 18 performed. Our business, then, is to complete what our predecessors began. We must sift and test their provisional findings: partly by the discovery of fresh evidence, together with a more accurate presentation of what is already to hand; and partly by a search for middle principles, such as are not to be obtained without intensive study of the details taken group by group instead of in the lump. Now the only natural groups are afforded by the various culture-areas of the world wherein specific developments have occurred in relative isolation. Hence the prime concern of students of savage culture at the present day is to determine how, within such natural provinces, cultural change has in each case proceeded under the joint stress of internal and external influences. But this plainly implies a closer correspondence with the actual ebb and flow of human development—in a word, a more dynamic treatment. As a sheer effect of intellectual perspective, the history of man takes on life and movement by being focussed in the history of a given people.

For the rest, it is plain that, as regards method, no essential difference exists between this branch of the science of culture and our own. Folklore is but social anthropology as applied within the home-circle. Thus there is no reason why some of those who to-day count as savages should not in course of time become well enough educated to study their own institutions in a scientific spirit. Were this to happen, the outcome would be folklore. Moreover, the chances presumably are that the native would carry out the enquiry with more sympathy and insight than the most intelligent of strangers. Meanwhile, whether future folklorists are likely to arise out of present "primitives" or not, the bare notion of such a possibility will serve to illustrate our own position in regard to folklore research. We are ex-savages with customs bearing visible traces of our ancient condition; and, further, being indigenous to the culture-area that we study, we are sympathetically