262 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
through attention to the meaning of our own activities. The fallacy of the disgust theory lies, in fact, in the attempt to sepa- rate the copies for imitation derived from our own activities from those derived from our observation of the activities of others.'
William I. Thomas.
The University of Chicago.
'The ethnological example cited by Ellis in confirmation of the disgust view of modesty — that of the embarrassment of the Brazilians when von den Steinen ate in their presence — cannot be regarded as fortunate. I quote his explanation of the custom : " Whenever there is any pressure on the means of subsistence, as among savages at some time or another there nearly always is, it must necessarily arouse a profound emotion of anger and disgust to see another person putting into his stomach what one might as well have put into one's own." (Ellis, loc. cit., p. 138.) Crawley, on the other hand, says that this custom is due to the primitive idea " that the attributes assigned to the individual who is feared, loathed, or despised are mate- rially transmissible by contact of any sort. It is, perhaps, connected in origin with a physiological aversion to contact with that which is unusual or harmful. This trans- mission of properties can be effected by any method of contagion or infection, and through any detached portion of the organism. In the particular connection of com- mensality the virus, if it may be so called, is transmitted to food by the touch, and especially by the saliva." (A. E. Crawley, "Taboos of CommensaXity," Folk- Lore, Vol. VI, p. 130.) In this view it \s dangerous to eat with others in public. "In Tanna no food is accepted if offered with the bare hands, 'as such contact might give the food potency for evil.' In New Zealand one can be ' bewitched ' by eating
or drinking from the calabash of an ill-wisher, or by smoking his pipe When
a man is sick, he is invariably questioned by the doctor, for example, whose pipe he smoked last." (Crawley, ibid., p. 137.) Without questioning that fear of contagion is the obvious basis of the habit of eating apart as found in all parts of the world, I am inclined to think that, if we could get back far enough, we should find as a minimum basis of eating apart the mere avoidance of rivals for food, as we see it in animals. But, at any rate, it seems clear that fear, whether in this simple sense or in the more special sense claimed by Crawley, is the immediate basis of the habit, rather than gastric disgust.
