The final goal ... is to grasp the native's point of view, _x000D_ his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.
Interpretation
Understanding a different culture involves seeing the world through its people's eyes and appreciating their perspective.
This quote by Bronislaw Malinowski emphasizes the importance of empathy and cultural relativism in anthropology. It suggests that to truly understand another culture, one must adopt their viewpoint, comprehend their relationship with life, and recognize how they interpret their world, which can lead to greater insight and respect for diversity.
In practice
In a discussion about cultural anthropology, this quote highlights the need for cultural understanding.
Coastal sailing as long as it is perfectly safe and easy commands no magic. Overseas expeditions are invariably bound up with ceremonies and ritual. Man resorts to magic only where chance and circumstances are not fully controlled by knowledge.
Magic enables man to carry out with confidence his important tasks, to maintain his poise and his mental integrity in fits of anger, in the throes of hate, of unrequited love, of despair and anxiety. The function of magic is to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism.
The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter's bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants.... He must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes.
There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic. Nor are there, it must be added at one, any savage races lacking in either the scientific attitude, or in science, though this lack has been frequently attributed to them.
A steady patriot of the world alone, The friend of every country but his own.
Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.
In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.
Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process──which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.
We don't have to expect everything from those who govern us; that would be juvenile.
It is almost irrestible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning.
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