Marriage ceremonies in Morocco / by Edward Westermarck.

  • Westermarck, Edward, 1862-1939.
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Marriage ceremonies in Morocco / by Edward Westermarck. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of their white colour, or to facilitate sexual intercourse on account of the fragility of their shells. And if similar ceremonies may thus have sprung from different motives in different cases, it is obvious that also the same ceremony in a given case may be intended to serve more than one purpose ; nay, there is no reason to deny the possibility of mixed motives from the beginning. At the same time it is well known that new interpretations are often given of old customs by the people who practise them, and that all ceremonies are apt to survive the ideas in which they have originated. This should not make the field-ethnologist less eager to find out the present meaning attached to the facts he records ; whether or no it be the original meaning, it gives us in any case some insight into the ideas of exist- ing people, and these are by themselves no less important subjects of inquiry than those of past generations. But I think that the aim of the field-ethnologist should not be only to observe and describe. Where the meaning of a custom is obscure or lost, his general knowledge of the native mind and its ways of thinking and feeling ought to enable him to make conjectures of much greater value than those suggested by “ ethnologists of the study.” I thoroughly disagree with the principle which I once heard expressed by the reader of a paper on some savage tribes at a meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute, that the field-anthropologist should aim only at collecting facts and leave it to the anthropologists at home to explain them. But he must, of course, take the utmost care to avoid mixing up his