Preface to the English edition

Summary

The educated reader is apt to criticize social anthropology for its excessive abstruseness – and not always without good cause. Yet we must realize that every scientific discipline must express itself through its own vocabulary, its own rules and specific methodology. Admittedly, however, the human sciences in general have needlessly indulged in the excessive use of jargon. Perhaps it is time now to think of improving clarity without sacrificing rigor: Ethnology is often quite needlessly forbidding and opaque, increasingly restricted to specialists and discouraging to the uninitiated.

Such a situation is regrettable. At a time when the last primitives are in danger of extinction – some even say, somewhat prematurely, that there are no longer any primitive societies, and in Brazil the government has made provisions for the deportation and concentration of the Yanomami – an ethnologist should become, temporarily if need be, a spokesperson for and defender of the peoples among whom he or she sojourns; it should be the ethnologist's duty to educate and inform the members of his or her own society and to show in an accessible vocabulary what priceless values are being destroyed forever. Yes, “savages” live worthy lives – neither more nor less worthy than ours. To learn from “primitives” does not mean that we want to imitate them at all costs, nor that we want to go back to a style of life that perhaps we can no longer accept; it means learning respect and deriving lessons that could prove salutary at a time when our own civilization – Civilization, as we like to call it – is beset by difficulties that may ultimately be fatal.