The kind of research that anthropologists do sometimes seems to amount to parachuting themselves into another group of human beings and finding out as much as they can about their way of life. Undoubtedly, as with bird-watching, there is a lot of underrated ethnographic work of that kind, which has its uses in getting a general picture of a particular people. But needless to say, every observer goes to the field with some framework for his observations. In the case of Malinowski's students this was especially marked, partly because as experienced scholars they came in with their own foci of interest (Fortes, the family; Nadel, music; Hofstra, individuality). So I thought it would be of interest to present the research projects they submitted before going to the field, which increasingly bear the strong marks of Malinowski's influence on them. In Fortes' case he presented three versions of his project at different times and I have included all three in order to give some idea of the way he shaped his project under Malinowski's influence so that it moved from a general psychological enquiry to a more specific anthropological one. But it still retained a psychological component which when he later presented the results of his research under the influence of Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown and Durkheim had largely disappeared. Only in his account of Tallensi education did he retain an explicit orientation in that direction, although later in life he returned strongly to the theme of the interpretation of sociological and psychological (even psychoanalytic) frames.

There are three versions of Meyer Fortes' plans for research of a psychological nature in an anthropological setting.