hand, a better knowledge of and acquaintance with the means of linguistic expression makes the language itself much more significant to one who not only knows how it is used but uses it himself. After all, if natives could furnish us with correct, explicit and consistent accounts of their tribal organisation, customs and ideas, there would be no difficulty in ethnographic work. Unfortunately, the native can neither get outside his tribal atmospheres and see it objectively, nor if he could, would he have intellectual and linguistic means sufficient to express it. And so the Ethnographer has to collect objective data, such as maps, plans, genealogies, lists of possessions, accounts of inheritance, censuses of village communities. He has to study the behaviour of the native, to talk with him under all sorts of conditions, and to write down his words. And then, from all these diverse data, to construct his synthesis, the picture of a community and of the individuals in it. But I have dwelt on these aspects of method already in the Introduction and here I want only to exemplify them with regard to the linguistic material directly representing some of the natives’ thoughts on ethnographic subjects.
XV
I shall give here first a text on the subject of the priority in sailing, which as described in Chapter IX, is the privilege of a certain sub-clan in Sinaketa. I was discussing with a very good informant, Toybayoba of Sinaketa, the customs of launching the canoes, and I tried, as usually, to keep my interlocutor as