tend to arrive at that type of the relevant in which, apart from any elaboration whatever, material is merely accepted at once as being fitting or satisfactory. All of the stories used in these experiments were developed in relatively primitive communities. The type of connexion between incident and incident was in the main merely temporal. It is not, of course, that the tales had no centre of emphasis, but that the latter was, from the point of view of a modern reader, often obscured, and that events appeared to be strung together haphazard, just as they happened to suggest themselves to the mind of the narrator. These stories were reproduced by subjects who were either students or teachers at a University. Gradually the tales came to acquire some central character, which occupied the focus of attention, and everything not rationally leading up to this point was omitted. In a story entitled The War of the Ghosts,[1] for example, ghosts appear as a mere temporal incident in a somewhat inconsecutive original narration, and are beyond doubt meant to occupy a central position in the story. But the point of emphasis was by no means apparent to my readers. In every one of the series of reproductions all mention of ghosts drops out almost immediately, and this in spite of the fact that ghosts appear in the original title. To my subjects they afforded an illustration of an incident not capable of being regarded as explaining itself, and at the same time not explicitly connected by any assigned reason with the main thread of the story. Consequently they disappeared.
Clearly it is a matter of no small importance to be able, taking any given level of social development, to state what are the main influences which determine the rejection of transmitted material as irrelevant, and how such influences work. But the study is of too great complexity to be entered upon here.
- ↑ This story was slightly adapted from a translation by Franz Boas, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 26, pp. 182-4.
