It is not easy for someone who is not a professional anthropologist to read a work of social anthropology. The difficulty is of a quite special kind: it is not merely the difficulty someone who is not a botanist may find in reading a study of plant morphology, or someone who is not a theologian in reading a discussion of the instrumental causality of the sacraments. The difficulty is the problem of human relevance. These people about whom the anthropologist is writing are human beings: the detail of their activities should be humanly intelligible; and yet, on the one hand these activities in their detail are often meaningless and sometimcs disgusting, and on the other, without a sympathetic grasp of the detail the whole work of interpretation and synthesis offered by the anthropologist would become meaningless in its turn. And the anthropologist has nothing to refer to but the information he himself gives us in his book: he has usually no imaginative literature, for instance, no common body of experience to which to appeal.