ABSTRACT

The Taxes devoted their first field season to establishing suitable living arrangements and exploring possible locations for their work. Dur ing this first field season they identified some of the aspects of Guatemalan social life that were to become of primary importance during their later research. I n addition to his interests in kinshipan area on which he had worked under A . R. Radcliffe-Brown's tutelage and on which he had wri t ten his dissertation-Sol noted dur ing this field season aspects of ethnic relations and world view that would later become his main foci. From the beginning, Tax sought indigenous researchers to train in ethnological methods, as Redfield had done in his work in Yucatan. Some of their correspondence dur ing this season,

therefore, discusses the value of having data collected by researchers with native knowledge of the society.