Peter M. Gardnersonal diversity, how marked were their differences? Were they greater
in some subject areas than in others and, if so, what might account for
that? Unfortunately, I began thinking about all this toward the end of
the study. By then, I did not think I had either the professional tools
or the time to test all my hunches before I left the field; only further
formal study could reveal the nature, extent, and causes of such vari-
ation. But, I must confess that I had a growing curiosity as to whether
there were differences across the world’s societies in the extent to which
people exhibited individualized concepts and beliefs. Perhaps it could
even be quite marked (see, especially, Gardner 1966 , 2000 ).
Émile Durkheim told us almost a century ago, in Les Formes Élé-
mentaires de la Vie Religieuse ( 1912 ), that the sharing of concepts
was necessary in a human society, and most of my fellows in anthro-
pology had no apparent disagreement with him. They spoke comfort-
ably about Navajo beliefs, or about Ainu concepts, as if these were
standardized from one human head to another within each society.
The general public did this too. Yet, only four years after Durkheim’s
theoretical pronouncement, the young Bronislaw Malinowski, a fact-
oriented fieldworker, painted a wholly different portrait of people in
his paper Baloma: The Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands
( 1916 ). He reported that personal opinion varied from person to per-
son within communities in the New Guinea area, and it was only pub-
lic belief, as expressed in formalized myth and ritual, that was stan-
dardized. Some early-twentieth-century pioneer scholars in sociology
and folklore talked in the same vein.
It you stop to think about it, the nervous systems in which we take
care of all our perceiving and thinking are inherently private. We also
have entirely different histories and experiences from one another even
within a small community. A lot of our knowledge simply has to be
idiosyncratic. Let me turn the picture around: how could one ever ex-
plain any of us having knowledge, concepts, or beliefs that are iden-
tical or closely similar to those of our neighbors?
As a result of discussion I had with the late June Helm, we had cho-
sen Northern Dene as a people with whom we could take up these
questions. My interest in the north began when June heard me describe