Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/17

Rh taboos a little less solemnly. At the same time we are acquiring a more scientific spirit in the investigation of the few remaining peoples yet not too completely under the influence of our own civilization, regarding them no longer with either adulation or contempt, but as valuable witnesses to unfamiliar aspects of our common human nature. The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits with its scientifically trained observers, and all that that expedition led to in subsequent observations in other parts of the world by such distinguished workers as Rivers and Seligman, may be regarded as a landmark. But we still pined in vain for a picture of the sexual life of any unspoilt people. One or two investigators, like Roth in Queensland, noted a few precise objective facts of the sex life, and more recently Felix Bryk, in his Neger-Eros, has produced a valuable study of the erotic life in Equatorial Africa, but it has not been easy to find any really comprehensive picture.

Such a task needed, indeed, a rare combination of qualifications; not only a scientific equipment but a familiarity with various new fertilizing ideas, not always considered scientific, which have of late been thrown into the anthropological field; a long and intimate knowledge of the people to be investigated and of their language, for it is not only in civilization that the sexual life tends to be shy and recessive; not least, there was required in the investigator a freedom alike from the traditions of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, however estimable in their own place, and from the almost equally unfortunate reactions to which the revolt against those traditions may lead.

Rh