Anthropology cannot be distinguished from other social and human sciences by its own particular object of study. Apparently concerned with the so-called “primitive” peoples, or peoples “without writing,” it developed into a science at the same time that these peoples were declining, or at least losing their distinctive characteristics. For the last ten years or so, some anthropologists have turned to studying the so-called civilized societies. Clearly, then, anthropology issues less from the existence of a specific object of study than from an original way of formulating problems which are shared by all the sciences of man. Anthropology acquired its importance by studying social phenomena which, because of their strangeness and difference from those of the observer's own society—and not because they were any simpler—afforded an insight into certain properties which are at once general and basic to all social life. We could compare the anthropologist's position in the social sciences to that of the astronomer in the natural sciences: man is apprehended through his remotest manifestations, over a distance which acquires temporal, spatial, and moral value. The distance which separates the anthropologist from his object of study reduces the complexity of what he can see, but, making a virtue out of this constraint, it forces him to perceive only those phenomena which may be considered essential.