Raymond Firth - Essays on Social Organisation and Values

First published 1964 by The Athlone Press

Republished 2004 by Berg Publishers

Published 2020 by Routledge
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Copyright Raymond Firth 1964

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ISBN13: 978-1-8597-3894-8 (hbk)

The essays in this volume were assembled in response to a request from my colleagues on the Editorial Board of this Monograph series. Except for ).

Though the essays vary considerably in date and in scope, each was written with some theoretical issue in mind. I have divided them broadly into two main sets to illustrate some of my views on social operations and on social ideas. But I make no attempt to present them as a complete theoretical system - and I would be sceptical of the validity of any such unitary holistic framework. I hope, however, that they may still provide useful sectors of an analytical approach to significant problems.

Most of the essays draw on my field material from Tikopia, a small Polynesian community in the Western Pacific. Chapters IV, V and VI embody some of the results of field research conducted in 1928-9 under the auspices of the Australian National Research Council, whose assistance I wish here to acknowledge as I have done in the earlier publications. Chapter VI also contains material obtained on my second field expedition to Tikopia in 1952, andChapter VIII is based largely on data obtained during a brief exploratory visit to New Guinea in 1951. Both of these expeditions were made under the auspices of the Australian National University where, for a year, I was Acting-Director of the Research School of Pacific Studies. I am much indebted to the Australian National University for many facilities during this period. I had been a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the University since its inception, and in part for this reason was invited to contribute to a symposium at the Sixth Commonwealth Universities Congress at Oxford in 1948 (see Chapter VII). The original drafts of Chapters VI and X were prepared in 1959 when I was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto. I was much helped by the facilities available to me at the Center, and by the scholarly atmosphere of discussion with my colleagues there.

For stimulating exchange of ideas during the years in which these essays were written I owe much to my colleagues and to my students in graduate seminars in London. I am particularly indebted to Dr. L. P. Mair for helpful comment on the introductory chapter, which has not been printed before. The preparation of several chapters of this book in their original form as articles, and of this collected version of them all, has been helped greatly by use of a part of personal grants-in-aid from the Behavioral Sciences Division of the Ford Foundation, to which I express my very grateful thanks. For much careful assistance in the preparation of these and other materials for publication I am grateful to Mrs. D. H. Alfandary.

For permission to publish these essays I am indebted to the President and Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute (for Chapters II, III, IV, IX, X and XI); to Professor Meyer Fortes as Editor, and the Clarendon Press (for Chapter V); to Professor A. P. Elkin, the Editor of Oceania (for Chapter VI); to the Officers of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (for Chapter VII); to the President and Council of the Royal Society of Arts (for Chapter VIII); and to the Rationalist Press Association (for Chapter XII).

London, 1962

R.F.