Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/422



far we have studied the psychology of sex as it is embodied in stereotyped behaviour; that is, in customs, institutions, and in magic. In short, in order to gauge his attitude towards sex, we have studied how a Trobriander acts. Now we must turn to such manifestations of sexual ideas and feelings as are to be found in dreams, day-dreams, and folk-tales; that is, in his free and set fantasies about the past, about the future, about distant countries, and above all about his life in the next world.

This chapter will be simply a record of collected data, but even such records are inevitably made with certain problems in view and are influenced by the mental attitude of the recorder. Some academic pedants are apt to contemn any signs of a wider knowledge or of intelligence on the part of an observer of fact. Theory should be eliminated from field-work, so they say; but to my mind this is mere intellectual hypocrisy, under the cloak of purism. The observations which I have made were not recorded by some mechanical device or apparatus, but were made with my own eyes and ears, and controlled by my own brain. The trick of relevant observation consists, in fact, in this very control. It is quite inevitable that my field-work should have been affected by my ideas, Rh