Psychology with an Anthropological Background

Abstract

IN these days of specialisation, when a specialist has been defined as a person who knows some-thing about his own subject and nothing about any other, a book such as this, which successfully combines two methods of approach to the problem in hand, is of exceptional interest and importance. Its author, primarily a psychologist, is also an ex-perienced field anthropologist, who knows how to make friends with primitive folk, and how to take full advantage of opportunities for personal contact with them in their natural surroundings. Consequently, he realises the importance of certain aspects of the problem he has set himself which are too often overlooked by writers on racial intelligence. As one out of many instances may be cited the emphasis here laid on recognition of the fact that intelligence is manifested not only by capacity to meet new situations (which is, on the whole, the quality brought out by mental tests) but also by the ability “to deal with the age-long problems of the race, the struggle for survival and the recon-ciliation of man's individual and social needs”.

The Psychology of a Primitive People: a Study of the Australian Aborigine.

By Prof. Stanley D. Porteus. Pp. xvi + 438 + 48 plates. (London: Edward Arnold and Co., 1931.) 30s. net.