Series Editor's Note
This latest volume in the CSAC monograph series is devoted to the first
published edition of Andrew Lang¹s last book, Totemism, and the extended
commentary on it by Andrew Duff-Cooper, whose early death in 1991 was such a
loss to social anthropology.
I first met Andrew Duff-Cooper myself in April 1991, when I arrived to take
up an appointment at the University of Tokyo. I had just seen the first of the
CSAC volumes through the press prior to my departure from Kent, and had inserted
a short note about the series in the ASA Newsletter. One of the first people I
met in Tokyo was Andrew who often used our departmental library for his research.
He had seen the note about the series and had already written to me at Kent
about the possibility of the Lang volumes being included. We discussed the
project over lunch, and it became clear that the Lang manuscript fell into one of
the categories I had had in mind in starting the series: historically significant
work by a major figure, of which conventional commercial publication would be
virtually impossible. We also discussed the possibility of publishing
Andrew¹s Lombok PhD dissertation, but at that time he though that the Lang
volumes should have priority. In our subsequent lunchtime discussions after his
visits to the Tokyo University anthropology library, amidst his very funny and
usually wise observations on the Tokyo academic scene, he talked extensively
about his forthcoming travel plans and the research which was either in progress
or which he still hoped to do, including further work on his Lombok material.
The last of these occasions was a wonderful lunch which we shared with
Professor Joy Hendry, a fellow anthropologist and an old friend of Andrew¹s
from Oxford, who was on a research visit to Tokyo. It was a hot summer¹s
day and the restaurant was high up in a tall building with a magnificent view of
the centre of the city. Andrew was about to set off on holiday, and was on top
form, bubbling over with jokes and enthusiasm. He had received a copy of his
Lang volumes from his sister, Louise, in England, and said that he would send
them on to me to read before he left, so that we could discuss the details of
editing and publication when he returned. A bulky parcel arrived at the
university a few days later, and I began to read the manuscript. Before I could
finish it, however, the sad news had arrived from Joy in Oxford that Andrew had
unexpectedly been taken ill on holiday and had died shortly after his arrival
back in the UK.
The text is therefore presented here more or less as he left it, apart from
the correction of obvious errors and some of the more grating inconsistencies in
punctuation, italicisation and capitalisation. Some inconsistencies of
presentation remain, particularly with italics and capitals, as neither
Lang¹s book nor Duff-Cooper¹s commentary had the benefit of the
authors¹ final revisions or of commercial copy-editing. In no case, I
think, do these inconsistencies materially affect the sense. Fortunately the
text of Lang¹s manuscript is in reasonably good order. Just three words in
the original were apparently illegible: in this edition these appear on pages 161
and 169. There is also the curious reference to ³pan² on page 163,
though it is clear from the context that Lang was talking about phratries or
exogamic rules. The most problematic sections appear on pages 164 and 165 where
Lang may have been conflating material from two drafts, but even here the thrust
of the argument is clear from the context. Unfortunately, during the final
preparation for publication and the typesetting, I have had neither access to the
original Lang manuscript, nor to most of the (often extremely obscure) sources on
which both writers draw. The lengthy quotations in the book are therefore best
seen as documenting the two authors¹ readings of these original sources
rather than necessarily accurate transcriptions of them. Finally, I have also
added an index and conflated the two original bibliographies for the two main
parts of the text into one.
The completion of this project has taken longer than I originally hoped, in
part because of my own commitments and movements in Japan. The manuscript was a
rather faint mimeograph which could neither be reproduced directly or scanned
electronically, and which had therefore to be retyped. Most of the typing was
down by Barbara Delaney at the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing at
the University of Kent, where Andrew had studied as an undergraduate, and I am
grateful both to her and to Mike Fischer, the Director of the Centre, for fitting
in the project around other commitments.
In the latter stages, publication has been made possible by the generous
financial support of Andrew¹s sister, Louise Cooper, who has been a source
of encouragement throughout, and of Merton College, Oxford, where Andrew Lang
once held a fellowship , and where Andrew Duff-Cooper was a graduate student.
Without this support, publication in regular book form would have been
impossible, and I would here like to record my gratitude to them.
Thanks are also due to Dr Gerd Baumann, Andrew¹s literary executor, and
of course to Professor Rodney Needham , his former supervisor, and in many ways
the prime mover of this project. I am particularly grateful to Professor Needham
for his typically witty, scholarly, and generous Foreword, which includes an
account of the tortious history of the manuscript since Lang¹s death. In
this he pays tribute to the members of the Folklore Society who had the sagacity
to see the importance of the work, and I would like to end by adding my
appreciation of their foresight to his.
Jerry Eades
Hikone, Japan, June 1994
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