Jacobs shows, in his concern with the accurate text as representative of the cultural inventory, and his failure to examine style, the situational context of story-telling, or the psychological meaning of the tale to the teller and his listeners. Boas' methods of work could not handle these concerns, which is to say that they were not part of the scene to which Boas' anthropology addressed itself.

When we are in the field, I am sure that most of us wonder how it feels to be a participant in the culture we are studying--to have multiple wives, say, or to undergo initiation. One feels that such emotions were rarely evoked in Boas: he would address himself to the reasons for giving a potlatch, but would not have wondered how he himself would have felt about giving one. To Boas, anthropology was not concerned with the individual qua individual; with man's loves and hates, with his endeavors and frustrations. Being unconcerned with the individual, he did not see society as an interaction among individuals, loving and hating, manipulating and conniving. To Boas, anthropology was the study of the rules of the game, not of the game itself.

In no sense is this a criticism--no man of stature can be all things, and certainly Boas was many. Rather, it is set forth here because in this too Boas placed his personal stamp on the discipline. Anthropology--in its ethnological aspects--started out as the science of custom, despite its claim to being the science of man. In America it is still very much that. The traditional ethnography sets forth customary procedures, and even today it is not easy to find examples of the distinction between what informants say is standard practice and the actual practices of everyday life in the tribe. This perhaps is a major distinction between American and British ethnographic techniques. It is functionally relevant to such trans-Atlantic disagreements as the use of selected informants, the learning of the tribal vernacular, the uses of direct observation, and the necessary duration of a field trip. More importantly, it lies behind the essential distinction between the historical or cultural point of view and the functional or sociological.

As anthropology in America was so largely shaped in the image of Boas, so this monument to Boas offers us a mirror of that anthropology. To know ourselves is to know our past, and the papers here show us the form of that past.

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