ABSTRACT
Perhaps it is owing to associations attached to the place (for most o f my schoolmastering was done in Ifugaoknd)—at all events the urge is upon me to conduct an examination.
One o f Ngidulu’s memoirs follows. The material that precedes is, in its implications at least, sufficient to serve as a basis for analysing this story’s motivations and for predicting its course. Our examination will permit the reader to test his ability to think, understand, and feel as an Ifugao, that is, to put it in a more general statement, his ability, on the basis o f a certain primitive society, to imagine the attitudes, motivations, and behaviour o f an individual born and bred in that society. I hasten to admit that the typical never exists, that no two individuals in Ifugao society or any other behave in the same way, that much depends on inherited traits. Still a typical does exist and this story falls well within the frame o f it for Ifugao society: it contains none o f the devices o f the sophisticated story-teller whereby he conceals or postpones vital facts and tricks us into wrong conjectures about how it will come out in order to surprise us and produce the semblance o f a lively story. At no stage o f it is there any surprise-to an Ifugao.
