Richard Thurnwald’s Review of Sorcerers of Dobu (1932)

Richard Thurnwald’s journal book review assesses R. F. Fortune’s ethnography of the Dobu Islanders as a contribution to empirical sociology and psychology. It moves from an overview of the book’s subjects to a sustained interpretation of beliefs about procreation, then considers matrilineal kinship and the explanatory value of concrete examples. Its governing judgment is that Fortune makes social arrangements intelligible through observed conduct rather than abstract speculation:

This is a book from which the sociologist will draw much information—sociologists, of course, who value research and are not lost in speculation.

Thurnwald places Fortune’s study alongside Malinowski’s research on the neighboring Trobriand Islanders, stressing both its complementary value and the peculiarities of Dobu. He singles out economic life and the individual’s position within the social pattern, while also noting the treatment of sorcery, social organization, marriage, and sexuality. His review thus presents the book’s importance as extending beyond its titular subject: magical practices belong within an account of everyday social relations.

The most substantial interpretive intervention concerns the Trobrianders’ theory of procreation. Fortune reports the Dobuans’ rejection of that theory and their indignation when he discussed it with Trobrianders in their presence. Thurnwald proposes that the disputed belief should be understood as a socially sanctioned dogma rather than deficient knowledge. His evidence is Fortune’s conjunction of sexual freedom, the rarity of births to unmarried girls, and the disgrace attached to childbirth outside marriage:

This shows that control of sexual behavior is required, which implies a knowledge of physical causes, in spite of the dogma which deliberately scorns such knowledge.

For Thurnwald, practical regulation of sexuality implies causal knowledge that an explicitly professed doctrine can nevertheless disavow. He therefore distinguishes collective assent from ignorance and challenges an interpretation of the belief as an archaic intellectual survival:

We are not dealing, therefore, with a survival of primitive thought, but with a later sophisticated interpretation of philosophical speculators, incited by certain isolated social conditions.

This is the reviewer’s explanatory proposal, not simply a report of Fortune’s findings. It treats apparently elementary belief as a potentially elaborate social interpretation, although the brief review does not develop the particular conditions responsible for it.

Thurnwald next describes the susu, or “milk,” as a purely matrilineal familial unit comprising a man, his sister, her children, and her daughter’s children, but excluding her son’s children. Membership does not entail an exclusively shared house: women and men have houses in their respective villages. The communal burial place emphasizes connection with the dead. These details distinguish kinship continuity from residential unity.

The closing assessment returns to Fortune’s examples, especially his treatment of property and stealing. They reveal indigenous reasoning through its concepts and biases and give the institutional outlines lived specificity:

This concreteness is the merit of Mr. Fortune's book.

Thurnwald likewise values Fortune’s account of magic as sentiment, action, and art permeating marriage, death, and other domains of life. His qualification—that mystical and natural aspects of magical observances must be distinguished—leaves a task for further analysis. The review’s relevance lies in this combination of empirical appreciation and conceptual discrimination: ethnographic particulars can challenge assumptions about ignorance, clarify the organization of kinship, and show how belief operates within social conduct.