习俗通常并未被视为任何具有重大意义的研究课题。
Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment.
我们内心深处觉得，大脑的内部运作机制是唯一值得探究的对象；然而，我们往往习惯性地认为，习俗不过是人类行为中最稀松平常的东西。
The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its most commonplace.
事实恰恰相反。
As a matter of fact, it is the other way around.
纵观全球，传统习俗是一大堆具体行为的集合，其令人叹为观止的程度，超过了任何一个人在个人行为中所能演化出的一切，无论那个人多么标新立异。
Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions, no matter how aberrant.
然而，那不过是这个问题中相当次要的一个方面。
Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter.
具有头等重要性的事实，是习俗在经验与信仰中所扮演的主导性角色，以及它可能呈现出的极为多样的形态。
The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest.
没有人能用纯净无染的眼睛去看这个世界。
No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes.
他所看到的世界，是经由一套既定的习俗、制度和思维方式编辑过的世界。
He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.
即便在他的哲学探索中，他也无法绕过这些思维定式；他对真假的基本概念，仍然与他特定的传统习俗有所关联。
Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs.
约翰·杜威曾十分郑重地指出：习俗在塑造个体行为方面所起的作用，与个体能够影响传统习俗的任何方式相比，犹如一种语言全部词汇量与婴儿牙牙学语中被家庭日常用语吸收的那几个词之间的比例关系。
John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual, as against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family.
当人们认真研究那些曾有机会自主发展的社会形态时，就会发现这个比喻不过是一个准确而朴素的陈述。
When one seriously studies the social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation.
个体的人生历程，首先也是最重要的，是对其所在社群中代代相传的模式与标准的一种适应。
The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.
从他出生的那一刻起，他降生其中的那些习俗便开始塑造他的经历与行为。
From the moment of his birth, the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour.
到他开口说话的时候，他已经是文化的小小造物；等他长大成人、能够参与文化活动时，文化的习惯就是他的习惯，文化的信仰就是他的信仰，文化认为不可能的，他也认为不可能。
By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.
凡是出生在同一社群的孩子都会与他共享这一切；而出生在地球另一端某个社群中的孩子，则永远无法获得其中的千分之一。
Every child that is born into his group will share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part.
没有哪个社会问题比理解习俗的作用更值得我们去深入把握。
There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom.
只要我们对习俗的规律与多样形态还缺乏透彻的认识，人类生活中那些最令人困惑的核心事实就必然无从理解。
Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
对习俗的研究只有在某些初步命题被接受之后才能富有成效，而这些命题中有一些曾遭到激烈的反对。
The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently opposed.
首先，任何科学研究都要求对其所选定研究序列中的各项目不作任何偏向性的权重处理。
In the first place, any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration.
在所有争议较少的研究领域，如仙人掌、白蚁或星云性质的研究，必要的研究方法是将相关材料加以分组，并记录所有可能的变体形式与条件。
In all the less controversial fields, like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions.
正是通过这种方式，我们掌握了所有关于天文规律的知识，或者说，关于社会性昆虫习性的知识。
In this way, we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say.
恰恰是在对人类自身的研究中，主要社会科学以对一种地方性变体——西方文明的研究——取代了（对所有变体的全面研究）。
It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.
从定义上看，只要"我们与原始人"、"我们与野蛮人"、"我们与异教徒"这类区分还主导着人们的思想，人类学就根本不可能诞生。
Anthropology was by definition impossible, as long as these distinctions between ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people's minds.
首先必须达到那样一种文明程度，在那种程度下，我们不再将自己的信仰与邻人的迷信对立起来。
It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief against our neighbour's superstition.
有必要认识到：凡是基于相同前提——比如说超自然信仰——的制度，都必须被一并考量，我们自己的制度也包含其中。
It was necessary to recognize that these institutions which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be considered together, our own among the rest.