When You Fully Realise This Acuteness
On One Hand And This Mechanical Incapacity On The Other Which Exist
In The People You Are Studying, You Can Go Ahead.
Only, I beseech
you, go ahead carefully.
When you have found the easy key that
opens the reason underlying a series of facts, as for example,
these: a Benga spits on your hand as a greeting; you see a man who
has been marching regardless through the broiling sun all the
forenoon, with a heavy load, on entering a village and having put
down his load, elaborately steal round in the shelter of the houses,
instead of crossing the street; you come across a tribe that cuts
its dead up into small pieces and scatters them broadcast, and
another tribe that thinks a white man's eye-ball is a most desirable
thing to be possessed of - do not, when you have found this key, drop
your collecting work, and go home with a shriek of "I know all about
Fetish," because you don't, for the key to the above facts will not
open the reason why it is regarded advisable to kill a person who is
making Ikung; or why you should avoid at night a cotton tree that
has red earth at its roots; or why combings of hair and paring of
nails should be taken care of; or why a speck of blood that may fall
from your flesh should be cut out of wood - if it has fallen on that-
-and destroyed, and if it has fallen on the ground stamped and
rubbed into the soil with great care.
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