ABSTRACT
Occasionally a good ethnographic report can reveal unsuspected yet elementary aspects of human feelings and behavior. They are elementary in the sense of being psychological and social processes that recur very widely as essential components of more complex human relationships. This chapter reviews the social and psychological processes revealed by these observations of an Eskimo community in such a manner that it will be possible to assess and extend them with evidence from other societies. It describes only one such rite, to my limited knowledge a rather extreme one, that comes from an excellent modern account focusing on the problems of social control and social order among some of the New Guinea highlanders, mentioned above in connection with the feud. The role of socially controlled curiosity or discretion under a tyrannical government—and nearly all governments have some tyrannical tendencies—is perhaps more interesting because it's more complex.
