BOOK REVIEWS
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tist of having sets of inter-related data, none of them complete in themselves, is that similar problems of human organization in varying environments can be examined in order to reveal broader based generalizations about the human condition than can ever be the case with individualistic ethnographic efforts. But if this is to occur, certain problems must first be recognized and re-solved.
In this reviewer's opinion the first and most significant problem, whatever the branch of social science involved, is that adherence to the canons of scientific methodology is going to have to be more rigid than has been true of most field studies in the past. Perhaps more important, methodological information is going to have to be presented when results are published in order to allow the user of those results ample information for their assessment. This probably implies that duller books are going to have to be written, books which will be cluttered with bewildering arrays of questionnaires, tabular data, and statements about the adequacies and inadequacies of sampling techniques, for example. The educated reading public with interest (but not scholarly interest) in the materials is likely to be offended by these practices and eventually social scientists may have to prepare field reports in two editions, one for the scientist and the other for the layman. Regardless, methodological specifications are the sine qua non of cumulative social research.
Furthermore, to begin this process of cumulation, social scientists working in this field are going to have to examine in more depth the findings of other investigators and try to relate these findings to the substantive issues uncovered in the field. Too much of the field work done in the New Territories has failed to use relevant materials in a creative way but has left it to others to make more general compilations of data and theoretical analyses. This would seem to be an avoidance of the basic responsibility of the scholar to search for relevance and relationship, rather than to just provide description. Baker's book is far more responsible in this sense than many others. This kind of scholarly work is also going to have to be more broadly based than it usually is at present. One must grant that every village is always different from every other village, but it would be unwise to conclude from that that Chinese villages are necessarily very different in their social structural arrangements than other Southeast Asian villages,