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The Science of Custom 
ANTHROPOLOGY is the study of human beings as creatures 
of society. It fastens its attention upon those physical 
characteristics and industrial techniques, those conven- 
tions and values, which distinguish one community from 
all others that belong to a different tradition. 
The distinguishing mark of anthropology among the . 
social sciences is that it includes for serious study other 
societies than our own. For its purposes any social regula- 
tion of mating and reproduction is as significant as our 
own, though it may be that of the Sea Dyaks, and have no 
possiblé historical relation to that of our civilization. To the 
anthropologist, our customs and those of a New Guinea 
tribe.are two possible social schemes for dealing with 
a common problem, and in so far as he remains an anthro- 
pologist he is bound to avoid any weighting of one in 
favour of the other. He is interested in human behaviour, 
not as it is shaped by one tradition, our own, but as it has 
been shaped by any tradition whatsoever. He is interested 
in the great gamut of custom that is found in various 
cultures, and his object is to understand the way in which 
these cultures change and differentiate, the different forms 
through which they express themselves, and the manner 
in which the customs of any peoples function in the lives 
of the individuals who compose them. 
Now custom has not been commonly regarded as a sub- 
ject of any great moment. The inner workings of our own 
brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but 
custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its 
most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other 
way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is 
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