Excerpt from The History of Melanesian Society, Vol. 1 of 2
An earlier book of mine, The Todas, was intended to be a sample of scientific method as applied to the collection and recording of ethnographical facts. The present book is a demonstration of ethnological, rather than of ethnographical, method.
When The Todas was written, I had fully realised the insufficiency of current methods of collecting the facts of ethnography, but I was then under the sway of the crude evolutionary doctrine of the time, and did not see that the need for sound method was equally great in the theoretical treatment of these facts. It was only in the act of writing this book that I came gradually to realise the unsatisfactory character of current ethnological methods. From that time, method again became my chief interest, and it is primarily as a study in method that this book is put forward.
The methods I have used have led to the formulation of a scheme of Melanesian history so complicated that it may seem at first sight to go far beyond the conclusions warranted by the facts now at our disposal. I may say at once that I do not anticipate that this scheme will be fully confirmed by future research; it may even have to suffer radical change as new facts come to our knowledge, but it is my hope that such modification, or even destruction if it come, will be due, not to faults of method, but to the insufficiency of the facts to which these methods have been applied.
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