Note 6 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTION

By far my most valuable instrument of inquiry was that provided by the genealogical method.6 The Todas preserve in their memories the names of all their ancestors and relatives extending back for several generations. In the tables given at the end of this book, I have recorded the pedigrees of seventy-two families, including the whole of the Toda community. Whenever the name of a man was mentioned in connexion with ceremony or social custom, his name was found in the genealogical record and the relation was ascertained in which he stood towards others participating in the ceremony or custom. By this means a concrete element was brought into the work which greatly facilitated inquiry. Customs and rites were investigated by means of concrete examples in which the people taking part were real people to me as well as to my informants. In a later chapter I shall consider more fully the rôle of the genealogies in anthropological investigation. I mention them here to give a preliminary indication of the extensive part they played in my investigations. In order to give my readers the opportunity of following my method in some measure for themselves, I have given after the name of any individual mentioned in the book the number of the genealogical table in which his name occurs; thus “Kòdrner (7)” means that Kòdrner is a member of the family of which the pedigree is recorded in Table 7.