Note 2 — PREFACE

Chapters V and VI of the present work contain an attempt at an interpretation of the Andamanese customs and beliefs, which I regard as the most important and hope will be the most valuable part of the book. It is some years since they were written and although they have undergone some revision they now seem to me so inadequately to express my thought that I could wish to rewrite them entirely. At the time they were written (1910) they exhibited an attempt to develop a new method in the interpretation of the institutions of a primitive people. That method will not perhaps seem so novel now as it would have done then. However, I hope that the two chapters will still have value as an example of the method which I believe to be fundamental in the science that has lately come to be known as social anthropology2.