Method of Presentation

This is the third publication in a series on the culture of the Mountain Arapesh, originally designed to be issued as a single monograph. The most relevant geographical considerations and methods of work for each particular section have been described in those sections to which the reader is referred for such details. These papers represent an experiment in method of presentation, an attempt to solve a number of presentation problems: how to present the material so that students wishing to use it at different levels of abstraction and generalization may do so without impediment; how to satisfy this first demand and yet keep the illustrative detail close enough to the discussion so that its particular relevance to any point is not lost; what orders of materials should be presented together; what type of presentation best represents the peculiar form and emphases of Arapesh culture. No one of these problems has been permitted to dominate the others, but the clarity of the arrangement has been considerably obscured by the conditions which necessitated breaking the monograph up into a series of separate publications. According to the original plan, the order was to have been as follows: the culture area, the place of the Mountain Arapesh as an importing culture in that area, their domestic material culture and everyday life, followed by a section devoted to the details of the material culture. (This plan was carried out except for a shift in the order, so that the discussion of the place of the Mountain Arapesh in this culture area became a conclusion for the first paper.) The sections following were then to be: the supernaturalism of the Mountain Arapesh; a general discussion of the main emphases, and a set of supporting materials, dealing with particular forms, rituals, and myths. Then, leaving the statement on super-naturalism and omitting details of actual events or individual variations in behavior, I planned a general discussion of the socio-economic structure, to be followed by the details of socioeconomic forms, kinship terminology, property rights, etc., in their formal aspects and by the bulk of the illustrative material on the functioning of the culture, and finally, by a diary of events in the village of Alitoa from January 28, 1932, to August 16, 1932, and an analysis and summary treatment of them. This plan was necessitated partly by considerations of economy and partly by the forms of Arapesh culture. It would have been possible to follow the more conventional usage and illustrate the discussions of sorcery with examples of sorcery, of kinship, with instances of individual kinship behavior, and of feasts, with the details of a feast. But this method has two great disadvantages. As complicated an event as a quarrel between kindred in which sorcery is invoked after a feast is in progress has many facets: the time, its position in a sequence of other quarrels, sorcerizings, and feasts, and the actors’ personalities are all significant. All the details classifiable, for purposes of analysis, as economic or religious behavior are part of a unit to which any illustrative use of an event does violence. Secondly, any partial use of an event to illustrate first one type of discussion, then another, necessarily makes for much repetition. The Diary presentation is designed to obviate all these difficulties. Every event on which I have detailed material is presented in its proper sequence and context only once, and specific theoretical discussions may be referred to it.