Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/18

Rh All these qualifications are in a rare degree combined in Dr. Malinowski: the scientific outfit, the sensitive intelligence, the patience in observation, the sympathetic insight. He is known by numerous monographs on various sociological aspects of savage culture, mostly based on his research among the Trobriand Islanders off the east coast of New Guinea, among whom he lived in close touch for two years. His Argonauts of the Western Pacific — the original and elaborate analysis of the peculiar kula exchange system of the Trobriands — is recognized as a brilliant achievement of ethnographic research. It is, indeed, more than merely ethnographic, and as Sir James Frazer, who introduced the book, pointed out, it is characteristic of Dr. Malinowski's method that he takes full account of the complexity of human nature. An institution that, at the first glance, might seem to be merely economic, is found in his searching hands to be not merely commercial, but bound up with magic and ministering to the emotional and æsthetic needs of the people who exercise it.

In the field of sex, as I have remarked, it is only to-day that investigation has become possible. And this not simply because our sex taboos have at last lost something of their stringency. It is only to-day that it has here become possible to ask those right questions which, as Bacon said, are the half of knowledge. A quarter of a century ago the study of sex was merely the study of extravagant aberrations, and, outside this, just sentimental rhapsody. It has now become — accordingly as we approach it — either a field of natural history, to be studied in the ordinary spirit of the field naturalist, or else a department of Rh