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ADMINISTRATIVE VALUE OF ANTHROPOLOGY
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DECEMBER, 1913.]
students will find on investigation, for instance, that however childish the reasoning of savages may appear to be on abstract subjects, and however silly some of their customs may seem, they are neither childish nor silly in reality. They are almost always the result of 'correct argument-from a false premiss'-a mental process not unknown to civilised races. The student will also surely find that savages are not fools where their concrete interests are concerned, as they conceive those interests to be. For example, in commerce, beads do not appeal to savages merely because they are pretty things, except for purposes of adornment. They will only part with articles they value for particular sorts of beads which are to them money, in that they can procure in exchange for them, in their own country, something they much desire. They have no other reason for accepting any kind of bead in payment for goods. On few anthropological points can mistakes be made more readily than on this, and when they are made by merchants, financial disaster can well follow, so that what I have already said elsewhere as to this may bear repetition in part here. Savages in their bargains with civilised man never make one that does not, for reasons of their own, satisfy themselves. Each side, in such a case, views the bargain according to its own interest. On his side, the trader buys something of great value to him, when he has taken it elsewhere, with something of little value to him, which he has brought from elsewhere, and then, and only then, can he make what is to him a magnificent bargain. On the other hand the savage is more than satisfied, because with what he has got from the trader he can procure from among his own people something he very much covets, which the article he parted with could not have procured for him. Both sides profit by the bargain from their respective points of view, and traders cannot, as a matter of fact, take undue advantage of savages, who, as a body, part with products of little or no value to themselves for others of vital importance, though these last may be of little or none to the civilised trader. The more one dives into recorded bargains, the more clearly one sees the truth of this view.
I have always advocated personal inquiry into the native currency and money, even of pre-British days, of the people amongst whom a Britisher's lot is cast, for the reason that the study of the mental processes that lead up to commercial relations, internal and external, the customs concerned with daily buying and selling, take one more deeply into aliens' habits of mind and their outlook on practical life than any other branch of research. The student will find himself involuntarily acquiring a knowledge of the whole life of a people, even of superstitions and local politics, inatters that commercial men, as well as administrators, cannot, if they only knew it, ever afford to ignore. The study has also a great intellectual interest, and neither the man of commerce nor the man of affairs should disregard this aide of it if he would attain success in every sense of that term.
Just let me give one instance from personal experience. A few years back a number of ingots of tin, in the form of birds and animals and imitations thereof, hollow tokens of tin ingots, together with a number of rough notes taken on the spot, were handed over to me for investigation and report. They came from the Federated Malay States, and were variously said to have been used as toys and as money in some form. A long and careful investigation unearthed the whole story. They turned out to be surviving specimens of an obsolete and forgotten Malay currency. Bit by bit, by researches into travellers' stories and old records, European and vernacular, it was ascertained that some of the specimens were currency and some money, and that they belonged to two separate series. Their relations to each other were ascertained, and also to the currencies of the European and Oriental nations with whom the Malays of the Peninsula had come in contact. The mint profit in some instances, and in other instances the actual profit European governments and mercantile authorities, and even native traders, had made in recorded transactions of the past, was found out. The origin of the British, Dutch, and Portuguese money,evolved for trading with the Malays, was disclosed, and several interesting historical discoveries were made; as, for instance, the explanation of the coins still
