. .

For, when all is said and done, our resemblances to the savage are still far more
numerous than our differences from him; what we have in common with him and
deliberately retain as true and useful, we owe to our savage forefathers who slowly
acquired by experience and transmitted to us by inheritance those seemingly fundamental
ideas which we are apt to regard as original and intuitive. . . . Reflection and enquiry
should satisfy us that to our predecessors we are indebted for much of what we thought
most of our own, and that their errors were not wilful extravangances or the ravings of
insanity, but simply hypotheses justifiable as such at the time when they were propounded,
but which fuller experience has proved to be inadequate. . . . Therefore in reviewing the
opinions and practices of ruder ages and races we will do well to look with leniency upon
their errors and inevitable slips made in the search for truth, and give them the benefit
of that indulgence which we ourselves may one day stand in need of."
SI R JAMES G. FRAZER, The Golden Bough
"Social anthropologists do not claim to understand the complexities of the wide-range
price system of the Western World. . . . But they can investigate the practice of exchange
and their significance in simpler smaller-scale communities, and their findings may be
more relevant than might appear to the understanding of some of the more sophisticated
types of exchanges found in Western societies."
JOHN BEATTIE, Other CulturesAims,
Methods and Achievements in Social
Anthropology