A valley, a first visit in 1911, a last in 2004

The anthropologist arrived in autumn and stayed eleven months and published in 1914. The monograph is careful, affectionate and, by the standards of its decade, unusually free of contempt. Its centre is the spring festival: the procession, the two masks, the burnt bread, the song with the line nobody could translate.

The village had held the festival for as long as anyone could say. It varied. Some years there were three masks. Some years the bread was not burnt because the weather had been poor and nobody would waste it. The song had four or five versions depending on which family was leading, and the untranslatable line was untranslatable partly because two of the versions disagreed about what the word was.

The second anthropologist came in 1958 with the monograph in her bag. She found the festival exactly as described. Two masks. Burnt bread. The line sung as printed.

She noted this as a remarkable case of cultural continuity, and said so in her paper, which is also good.

The third visit, in 2004, established what had happened, and it took about a day, because nobody was hiding it. The village had acquired a copy of the 1914 monograph in the nineteen-twenties, from a schoolmaster. They had been consulting it since. When a dispute arose about the correct number of masks — and disputes had always arisen — there was now a book, and the book was in print, and the book had been written by a man who had actually been there, and no one alive had.

A woman of about eighty explained it without any embarrassment at all. She said: he wrote down what we did, so now we know what we do. She was asked whether it troubled her that the book might have caught a bad year. She said that it had never occurred to her, and then, after a while, that it would not change anything, because it was the only year anyone had.