An admirable work in field anthropology which deals with the ceremonial of Naven of the Iatmul Tribe, which is used as a basis to illustrate the theoretical analysis which the author makes. The Iatmul Tribe, by the way, is constituted of a people in New Guinea. The outstanding characteristic of the book is a reliance upon factual material to the exclusion of spinning theories upon inadequate observations, and many of the observations that were made while the author was in the field he did not see the significance of at the time and later he feels inadequate to discuss in any detail because he has not followed them up with observations that would further enlighten them.

Although the author is not a psychiatrist, he has had the advantage of the advice and discussion of his manuscript with a psychiatrist and