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The Science of Custom
ANTHROPOLOGY is the study of human beings as creatures
of society. It fastens its attention upon those physical
characteristics and industrial techniques, those conven-
tions and values, which distinguish one community from
all others that belong to a different tradition.
The distinguishing mark of anthropology among the .
social sciences is that it includes for serious study other
societies than our own. For its purposes any social regula-
tion of mating and reproduction is as significant as our
own, though it may be that of the Sea Dyaks, and have no
possiblé historical relation to that of our civilization. To the
anthropologist, our customs and those of a New Guinea
tribe.are two possible social schemes for dealing with
a common problem, and in so far as he remains an anthro-
pologist he is bound to avoid any weighting of one in
favour of the other. He is interested in human behaviour,
not as it is shaped by one tradition, our own, but as it has
been shaped by any tradition whatsoever. He is interested
in the great gamut of custom that is found in various
cultures, and his object is to understand the way in which
these cultures change and differentiate, the different forms
through which they express themselves, and the manner
in which the customs of any peoples function in the lives
of the individuals who compose them.
Now custom has not been commonly regarded as a sub-
ject of any great moment. The inner workings of our own
brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but
custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its
most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other
way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is
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