In this section I shall delimit my field.

As you can see from its title, the essay which I have listed in the bibliography under Mary Douglas (1972) bears directly on my theme. In comment on a famous paper concerning the seasonal life of the Eskimo published at the beginning of the century (Mauss and Beuchat (1906)) Douglas writes as follows:

Thus described, the Eskimo paper may be considered a prototype for what every British social anthropologist would like to do with the ethnographic data which fill his notebooks. In practice the monographs which anthropologists write seldom preserve this kind of balance. According to the predilections of the author we find that special stress is laid either on the structure of ideas, or on the structure of society, or on the mode of gaining a livelihood, and the principle that we are all the time dealing with ‘a single interacting whole’ is easily forgotten.

It is also easy to forget that contrasted predilections of individual authors are themselves part of a single interacting whole.

All social anthropologists take as their subject matter the variety of human culture and society, and they all assume that their task is not only to describe what the varieties are but to explain why they exist.