ABSTRACT
A crucial, saving feature about human action—a quality of human behavior that allows description at least a good start— is this: the actors themselves imagine one event to be like another. Description requires prodigious selection. Of the observable goings-on in a community, some fraction gets through when a Western man confronts the goings-on in his familiar Western surroundings. Probably some other fraction gets through when he looks at some culturally alien people. Some descriptions by Western men of non-Western others are merely self delusions—nondescriptions—and these can quickly be dispatched. "Ambition" is an item from some unexamined list of behavior familiar to one group of Western man; it covers very diverse attions and is seen as a single category of behavior because the cultural tradition of that group has so defined it. White man, this writer, looked at the Indians and came to descriptive thoughts about them: the Fox were generous, circumspect, harmonious.
