The London School of Economics has now established itself as the patron of ethnology, the youngest of the humanistic studies, and the one hardest pressed by time—in the sense that the object of the study, the savage in his natural environment—is rapidly dying out. Dr. Malinowski, the Polish ethnologist, has recently spent some years in British New Guinea, camping among the natives learning their language and studying their customs and beliefs. He is now in this country, and will give a series of lectures at the London School of Economics on the result of his researches. The lectures will be 18 in number, and will be given from five to six every Monday and Thursday afternoon, beginning April 24.
Dr. Malinowski, and the ethnologists of his school! approach their work with the conviction that the study of certain problems simply expressed among savages may throw light upon the same features, more complicated, with ourselves. us, we are so often told that war is a biological necessity for the race, and we would expect to find it among savages invariably in its simplest and most bloodthirsty form. On the contrary, the natives of the Trobriand islands, where Dr. Malinowski studied, practised a very mild sporting kind of warfare, where definite rules were laid down and strictly adhered to, with messengers of peace, symbols of truce, and big ceremonials of reconciliation. This is the more re markable as some of their nearest neighbours were cannibals and head-hunters, and used to devastate whole districts in the course of their raids.
Another interesting outcome of the study of these tribes and their beliefs and elaborate ritual of magic is the light thrown on the origins of religion, There was.first the theory that the primitive creed of man consisted in the idea that everything is moved by a spirit. Animism, therefore, as this belief was called, derived from dreams, trances, and similar phenomena, was held to contain the germ of all future religious development. The results of Dr.- Malinowski's study confirm Sir James Frazer's views that magic, the direct claim of man to control nature and destiny, is at the bottom of most primitive beliefs.
Especially important for them is black magic. They conceive of disease and death as caused exclusively through the agency of sorcerers and witches. These latter most remarkably resemble their European colleagues whom we used to burn up to quite a late period,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.