The Anthropologist Respects History, But He Does

Not Only Does A Journey Transport Us Over Enormous Distances, It Also Causes Us To Move A Few Degrees Up Or Down In The Social Scale. It Displaces Us Physically And Also For Better Or For Worse Takes Us Out Of Our Class Context, So That The Colour And Flavour Of Certain Places Cannot Be Dissociated From The Always Unexpected Social Level On Which We Find Ourselves In Experiencing Them.

The Order And Harmony Of The Western World, Its Most Famous Achievement, And A Laboratory In Which Structures Of A Complexity As Yet Unknown Are Being Fashioned, Demand The Elimination Of A Prodigious Mass Of Noxious By-products Which Now Contaminate The Globe. The First Thing We See As We Travel Round The World Is Our Own Filth, Thrown Into The Face Of Mankind.

In The Old Days, People Used To Risk Their Lives In India Or In The Americas In Order To Bring Back Products Which Now Seem To Us To Have Been Of Comically Little Worth, Such As Brazilwood And Pepper, Which Added A New Range Of Sense Experience To A Civilization Which Had Never Suspected Its Own Insipidity... From These Same Lands Our Modern Marco Polos Now Bring Back The Moral Spices Of Which Our Society Feels An Increasing Need As It Is Conscious Of Sinking Further Into Boredom, But That This Time They Take The Form Of Photographs, Books, And Travelers Tales.

I Can't Help Thinking That Science Would Be More Appealing If It Had No Practical Use.

The Anthropologist Respects History, But He Does Not Accord It A Special Value. He Conceives It As A Study Complementary To His Own: One Of Them Unfurls The Range Of Human Societies In Time, The Other In Space.