the outset that they will find nothing suggestive or alluring in the following chapters.
I want to make it quite clear that the comparisons between native and European conditions scattered here and there, especially in the later chapters, are not meant to serve as a sociological parallel — for that they are far too slight. Still less are the native-European parallels of the present book meant to provide a homily on our own failings or a pæan on our virtues. They are given simply because, in order to explain strange facts, it is necessary to hark back to familiar ones. The Anthropologist in his observations has to understand the native through his own psychology, and he must form the picture of a foreign culture from the elements of his own and of others practically and theoretically known to him. The whole difficulty and art of field-work consists of starting from those elements which are familiar in the foreign culture and gradually working the strange and diverse into a comprehensible scheme. In this the learning of a foreign culture is like the learning of a foreign tongue: at first mere assimilation and crude translation, at the end a complete detachment from the original medium and a mastery of the new one. And since an adequate ethnographic description must reproduce in miniature the gradual, lengthy, and painful processes of field-work, the references to the familiar, the parallels between Europe and the Trobriands have to serve as starting points.
After all, to reach the reader I have to rely upon his personal experiences which are built up in our own society. Exactly as I have to write in English, and translate native terms or texts into English, so also I have, in order
