Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Side 280

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Dr. Rivers and Sir Elliot-Smith in England. Westermarck found
that neither method excluded the other, and that they could be
utilized side by side. This has undoubtedly contributed to that
lack of monotony in the handling of his ethnological material
which is a pleasing feature of The History of Human Marriage.
Westermarck, by the way, once made a sarcastic dig at Dr.
Rivers, who declared that he had arrived independently at the
same conclusions as the Vienna school: it is worth noting, re-
marked Westermarck, that precisely this theory, which adopts
a negative attitude towards the idea of autochthonous origin,
should be declared by its authors to have originated independently
in two countries, the inhabitants of which are of the same race
and have, especially in recent times, maintained lively cultural
relations with each other. Prof. Malinowski once brought Sir El-
liot-Smith to make almost the same remark in The Sociological So-
ciety in London. As regards the comparative method, Wester-
marck became later more and more convinced that this method
too suffered from deficiencies in that it assembled phenomena
of similar nature met with among different peoples in one and
the same group, as a naturalist groups similar zoological and
botanical individuals under one and the same species. Yet when
cultural phenomena are detached in this fashion from their
organic connection they are liable to appear in an incomplete
or false light; social manifestations are not isolated phenomena,
but are influenced to a high degree by local conditions, by the
physical milieu, by the circumstances in which people live, by
their habits and mental characters. All these factors can naturally
be much better taken into account if an investigation is confined
to a specific population unit than if it is made to comprise pheno-
mena common to widely different peoples or to mankind as a
whole. It was for this reason that Westermarck embarked at an
early stage on field research work intended to yield monographs
devoted to specific peoples and tribes.
In 1897 Westermarck travelled for the first time to Morocco
to procure first-hand information about the manners and customs,
the moral and religious ideas of a primitive people. It was ori-
ginally his idea to extend this field-work to other savage peoples
as well, but Morocco turned out to be a treasure house of such
richness as to provide more than sufficient work for any indi-
vidual research worker. Westermarck has described in lively