Methodological Introduction

As cooperation between psychiatrists an anthropologists increases, various types of textual materials and life histories have become of increasing interest in anthropology. Further, we recognize more and more that verbatim data are of an order of immediacy differing profoundly from any material collected in ratio obliqua. For methodological reasons and because these two kinds of incentive to the collection of autobiographical materials involve quite different premises, I believe it is important to distinguish between them.