- 6 -

seemed to me to be interesting in that sexual license
in this tribe is in no way incompatible with the in-
stitution of marriage, and that the strong and deep atta-
attachment and that a selective attachment, between a
man and a woman. Finally as to the relation between
avunculate and paternity I have devoted at it a con-
sierable amount of space in this book and elsewhere,
and what I was aiming at was to show that these two
do not exclude each other, but definitely compound and
in a way compensate one another.

Thus the maintenance of this book in so far as a
tendency can be expressed through description, was to
do justice to the moderate, balanced, all-embracing
manifoldness of island life. Institutions may be
hypertrophied; the clan system in the Trobriands which
decrees a father as a stranger in the family is a hyper-
trophy; so is the custom extreme brother and sister
taboo which does not allow these two even to speak to
one another in a friendly fashion, though they are
natural friends and though they are bound together with
a community of interests unparalleled in any community
hitherto described. But each over-emphasis carries its
own reaction. The father has against the institution
and avunculate of extreme mother-right, develops what
I have called the surreptitiously practised customary
system of father-love. Brother and sister, kept at

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arms' length by the strictest moral rule and legal
principle, succumb at times to incest, and are very
often personally attracted to each other. In the magic
of love they are the proto-type of the strongest passion
possible.

Thus the more we view the cruder sensationalism
of dwelling on the strangeness of an isolated custom,
the more we find the dramatic, at times even tragic,
strength of real human passions, passions that must
touch the human heart most deeply; a (passionate) striving
at regaining the balance of full human nature and full
human affections, in protest and against the one-sided
system and in conflict with it.

There were one or two reasons why the present
attempt may have failed to a certain extent. One of
them is the fact that I have so far given but isolated
monograph accounts of my field-work. It is only when
*The Argonauts*, the present book, *Crime and Custom*,
and *Myth in Primitive Psychology* are placed within the
full descriptive context of Trobriands facts, that the
functional importance will be fully appreciated. I am
glad to say that at the very moment I am enjoying a
Sabbatical leave and am engaged in working out the full
account of Trobriand culture, which I hope may appear
within a year or two. I feel also that it would be

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necessary to give more adequate statement of the
principles of functional method, which has been announced
several times as a special *shahāl* of anthropology, of
which I was trying to apply the principles on concrete
problems, which never has been yet stated in *ah* abstract
form.

In an extensive article on the subject of *Culture*
to appear soon in the *Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences*
at New York, I have only for the first time laid down
the principles of the functional method in an extensive
form. I hope also to be able to publish soon a book on
the functional analysis of culture, where a statement of
these principles will be more accessible to English readers.