ABSTRACT
Socialization in its broadest sense was once considered to be an integral part of the ethnographer’s field of study. During the first part of this century tribal monographs commonly contained chapters entitled ‘The life-cycle of the individual’, ‘From birth to puberty’, or ‘From marriage to death’. In societies in which there is little variety of occupation and life-experience, and in which the biological and social stages of the individual’s life tend to be ritually marked, the birth – growth – puberty – marriage – death – cycle forms a useful method of presenting a large section of the ethnographer’s field data. It was certainly a practise very uniformly followed, as anyone who runs his hand along his collection of classical anthropological monographs will agree. The life-cycles presented in this fashion gave only general descriptive material of course. I cannot call to mind any individual case histories illustrating growth and maturation in British field studies of the first quarter of the century; nor do I believe that any empirical studies of the process of socialization were carried out at this time. The birth to death method was merely a way of presenting data on ritual, and on what would now be called ‘role assumption’.
